Ps. 97.4-5 (writhing and melting)

His lightning flashes / lit up the world
the earth saw / and writhed.
The mountains / melted away / like wax
from before / Yhwh
from before / the Lord / of all the earth. 

As Yhwh approaches the psalmist turns his focus from his foes and toward the world/earth. The vision is tremendous and carries forward several of the notes already struck. We saw in the previous verse the surrounding, and consuming, Yhwh-flame. Here, instead, there is “lightning”. In addition, whereas the Yhwh-flame ‘burned up’ his foes, here Yhwh’s presence causes the earth to “writhe” and the mountains to “melt like wax”. What we are witnessing in these verses is something that we actually intimated in Yhwh’s first “appearance” in darkness and smoke—that the presence of Yhwh is and effects a type of reversal. What I mean is this—when Yhwh ‘appeared’ it was by way of darkness (which seems to be anything but ‘appearing’). Then, Yhwh was seen as being encircled by a divine Flame. Now, the two most stable elements of creation—the earth and the mountains—become entirely unstable: they ‘writhe’ and ‘melt’. These are not, I think, random descriptions but meant to precisely convey the image of an ‘undoing’ or a ‘being undone’. The earth is not water, formless and movable. Yet, it now ‘writhes’. The mountains are rock and stable, yet now they ‘melt’. In Yhwh’s presence, nothing is left unchanged. Everything withers, and is overpowered, under the absolute and all-encompassing ‘glare’ of his Presence. 

Further, the scope of the earth’s reaction is total—it spans the lowest (the earth) to the highest (mountains). This is not ‘mere geography’. The ‘mountains’ are the realms where gods visit/dwell. In other words, the penetration of Yhwh’s presence is “deep”; it consumes, overcomes and overwhelms all of creation (we might say, ‘visible and invisible’). It is all, terrifyingly, subjected to him. 

Finally, this response of creation to Yhwh’s presence is something, in human realm, that happens to every person in Yhwh’s presence—they ‘fall down (as if dead)’, ‘writhe’ and ‘recoil’ from him. His presence is overpowering and immediate. His presence ‘drowns’ those before him. This is also the response of Israel at Sinai. It recoils from his ‘coming’ (in imagery very reminiscent of this psalm). The fact that Moses is, in a sense, ‘pushed forward into the Presence’ is, I think, more of a reflection on who Moses is rather than a condemnation of Israel; in other words, recoiling appears to be not only the reasonable response but the unavoidable one.