Ps. 102.11 (wrath and shadows)

My life / is like a lengthening shadow
I am shriveled up / like grass. 

At this point in the psalm we have reached the first ‘conclusion’ of the psalmist’s complaint. The next verse will mark the beginning of his reason to hope. As such, it would seem that this final image is, of all the troubling images thus far, meant to convey the psalmist’s plight in its most poignant form. In order to fully grasp this, however, we must recall that the previous verse ended with the psalmist ‘in flight’ away from Yhwh, after being picked up and ‘thrown away’. He lives in the ‘momentum of exile’, in a type of ever-growing distance from Yhwh. This is where the image of a lengthening shadow needs to be felt—the psalmist’s depleting life is one in a lived, and growing, distance from Yhwh. He lives in an ever-growing divide between himself and Yhwh. He is in exile, with the ‘destination’, presumably, being death and Sheol and darkness. The image, too, of a lengthening shadow also signals the ‘end of the day’, the falling sun, and the beginning of night. As such, the psalmist’s exile from Yhwh is likened to the uncontrollable momentum of the rising darkness of night. He is being ‘thrown’ into night with the same inevitability as the falling sun. Yhwh is likened to the sun that is ‘departing’. The fact that this ‘night’ is not merely a daily cycle but a quantitative event leading to the psalmist’s death is found in the second line: “I am shriveled up like grass”. Notably, this image has already appeared but in the context of an overpowering and destroying light/fire. Here, however, the grass/psalmist dies because of this approaching ‘night’. What is happening is very similar to what we saw with the ‘light’ image. This is a ‘divine’ night just as the previous light/fire was a divine flame. This is the ‘night of divine absence’ (death and Sheol; Psalm 6). The shadow. The reality of the ‘night’ is deepened when we contemplate the fact that the psalmist regards himself as only a ‘shadow’. He is no longer the ‘real thing’ but merely a reflection of his former self dwelling in Yhwh’s presence. This is but another instance of what we have witnessed through the psalm—the longer the psalmist lives in the wrath of Yhwh the more he ‘dissolves’ into nothingness (whether through destruction in fire, through self-consumption in ash-eating, or now in his ‘shadow existence’). In this we see how Yhwh’s presence constitutes the reversal—it establishes everything he has lost. His ‘well-being’, his ‘livelihood’ and the ‘substance of his existence’. Moreover, if we reflect on this image closely we come to see this dynamic played out. Yhwh is the ‘light’ that shines on his existence. His former self is the shadow-caster. He is the shadow. This the ‘pain of memory’. He lives with the conscious acknowledgment that he once was a ‘shadow-caster’; that he once lived in the radiance of Yhwh’s face. But now, he only dwells in the darkness of that memory, severed from that life. All he is, is memory.