Ps. 103.1-2 (totality)

Bless Yhwh / I tell myself
every part of me / bless his transcendent name
Bless Yhwh / I tell myself
and do not forget / any of his benefits. 

These opening lines are pregnant with meaning, and provide the foundation on which the psalm will be built. In this regard, we should note a few things: the first word of the psalm, and that which will conclude the psalm, is ‘bless(ing)’. This psalm, in other words, begins and ends in blessing, and everything that occurs throughout it is an act of blessing. Importantly, though, the beginning and end are acts of blessing by the psalmist, whereas everything in the middle is Yhwh’s act of blessing the psalmist and Israel. This dynamic of blessing-response to blessing is key; there is a rich communion between Yhwh and his people that is, here, best displayed as that of mutual blessing (for his people: it is liturgical response-blessing, for Yhwh: it is the granting of abundant life). There is nothing static to this; it is a drama, a communion. 

This reality points to a second: the psalmist calls upon “every part of me” to bless “his transcendent name”. What we see here is something that will echo in every line of the psalm—it is that of totality. The psalmist, so to speak, calls upon his entire being to be ‘cast into the fire’ of blessing. Again, though, just as the psalmist’s blessing finds its origin in Yhwh’s primal blessing, so too does the psalmist’s ‘totality’ find its origin in Yhwh’s ‘totality’, his ‘transcendent name’. This ‘name’ was given over to Israel. Moreover, as we will see, the transcendence of the name is not the transcendence of something static—rather, as the psalm will make clear, it is the transcendent power of blessing and goodness. This is why the ‘transcendent name’ is paralleled in the following line with “his benefits”. In other words, Yhwh’s ‘transcendent name’ is perceived and known in and through his acts of overwhelming blessing-power to his people. That is his ‘totality’, his ‘name’. And this is why “every part of me” is caught up into the “transcendent name”—the psalm will make clear that the entirely of the psalmist, and all of Israel, has been ‘purchased’, ‘redeemed’ and brought into the sphere of this transcendent-blessing name. 

A final point to make is the fact that for the psalmist the act of casting ‘every part’ of himself into the blessing-flame of Yhwh involves an act of memory that is both personal and corporate. He ‘remembers’ Yhwh in his personal acts of blessing and salvation in verses 2-5 and his corporate acts toward Israel in the following verses. As such, the psalmist’s memory is not a momentary act, but one that involves the remembrance of a history that is much deeper than himself and one that he finds himself a part of. In other words, ‘every part of him’ involves himself and the history of Israel itself. It is not the case that he only sees himself as individual, inhabiting a moment in time, but, instead, he sees himself as part of a corporate body, a covenant family and nation, that stretches back to the very origin of Israel’s election; when Israel was elected, he, in some fashion, was there. And the momentum of her (salvation) history is gathered up into himself, and is perpetuated in his own life, and then ex-pressed in the form of blessing Yhwh’s name; he speaks back to Yhwh what Yhwh has ‘spoken’ to him and Israel—and that is him, a ‘part of him’. This is ‘history as liturgy’.