Ps 119(3) (Torah as Mediator)

The dust / holds me prostrate

give me the life / promised in your word

My ways / I told you / and you answered me

teach me / your laws.

Give me insight / into the way / taught in your charges

so that I may / meditate on your wonders.

I have collapsed / with intense sorrow:

make me stand upright / as your word promises.

The way / of faithlessness

take far away / from me

and dutifully teach me / your Torah

The way of faithfulness / I have chosen

your rulings / I have taken to heart.

I hold fast / to your terms / Yhwh

do not let me be / humiliated

In the way shown in your commands / do I run

since you enlarge / my understanding. 

The Torah is like a mediator between the psalmist and Yhwh. Importantly, it begins with Yhwh. Yhwh gives the Torah. It is a divine gift, a divine unveiling, a thing chosen by Yhwh. It is Gift. It is this divine giving that makes it radiant to the psalmist, an object of devotion and meditation. For the psalmist, then, Torah is something he ‘chooses’. He is faithful to it. He desires it as his pearl of great price that he creates in him a desire for it alone. And, because it is a divine Gift, it is also a mystery, an invitation. It beckons him. Torah is not simply something given. Yhwh is the Giver and the Guide. He guides his people into the Gift. He brings them into Torah. He ‘grants insight’ into the Gift. Further up and further in. Torah is both before him and in front of him. It is both the source and summit of his desire. 

It also, importantly, makes him more deeply away of another ‘way’, an anti-Torah—the “way of faithlessness”. It ‘awakens in him’ this deep sense of dread and fear that he could choose to turn his heart away from Yhwh and, Adam-like, choose the way of curse. And it is this dread—this sense that another ‘way’ vies for his attention and mediation—that makes him implore Yhwh for help. So, while the psalmist knows that, even in times of peace, Yhwh must be his divine Guide, he also knows that in times of suffering and trials, Yhwh will also be his protector against the way of the curse. Just as Yhwh can Guide him into the way, he can also remove the way of the curse far away from him.