Ps 128 (bread of toil)

How fortunate is everyone / who reveres Yhwh

                Who walks / in his ways

You will certainly eat / what your toiling hands produce

                How fortunate you are! / you will get on well

Your wife will be like / a fruitful vine

                Inside your house

Your sons / will be like olive shoots

                Around your table

Take note / this is how a man / is blessed

                Who fears Yhwh

May Yhwh bless you / from Zion

                So that you see / Jerusalem fairing well

                All your life long

So that you see / your grandsons

                May peace rest / upon Israel.

The bread of toil—when Adam is removed from the Garden he is not cursed but the ground is. Yhwh says that because Adam listened to Eve, then the ground is cursed because of him and only through “painful toil” will he eat foot from it all of his days. It is notable that this cursing of the ground, and the consequent toil, is a result of Adam’s folly, of his failing to revere Yhwh and walk in his ways. Adam is a fool. By contrast, in this psalm, those who revere Yhwh and walk in his ways experience a very different relationship with the earth. For them, they are permitted to enjoy the “fruit of their labor”. The curse placed upon the earth, for them, is lifted and it responds to them the way it was intended. It is as if we see here a prelapsarian land, that there are ‘pockets of blessing’ where the righteous receive from the land without the painful and futile effort of Adam. Just as in Genesis, this psalmist sees a deep and intimate connection between man’s reverence and faithfulness to Yhwh and the earth’s “faithfulness” and response to man’s hands. For Genesis, the intransigence and futility of creation is a mirror and enactment of man’s intransigence to Yhwh. For the psalmist, the earth’s potential for abundance is a mirror and enactment of man’s devotion to Yhwh. In both, man stands as the mediator of the earth’s possibilities, for one, into futility, for the other, into blessing and fortune.

This same connection extends to the wife. Just as the ground is responsive to the righteous man’s hands, so too is the wife’s womb fruitful to the man. Again, in Genesis, just as Adam and Eve are on the verge of being expelled from the Garden, Yhwh tells Eve that will “toil” in childbirth, and only in pain will she now have children. It is notable, moreover, that Genesis contains a number of stories of women for whom childbearing is difficult; their wombs are barren for a long period of time until Yhwh “opens their womb”. In Genesis, this “curse of toil and pain” of the woman in childbirth is followed with what we looked at above—the toil of man’s hands with the ground. There is, clearly, a deep connection between these, as in this psalm. And here, it is important to see how the seeming reversal of those curses are so closely tied together—the woman is now brought into the agricultural image of fruitfulness. Her womb will participate in the same blessing of the ground, to such an extent that she is compared to a “fruitful vine in your house”.

Within both the curse on the ground and the pain of the woman is the idea that in both—in farming and in childbearing—there will be difficulty. And it seems clear that this difficulty is not something simply limited to the moment of “harvest” (either of the ground or of the child’s birth). For the ground, it will “produce thorns and thistles”. For the woman, not only will she have pain in childbearing but she will also experience “desire for your husband and he will rule over you.” What is clearly implied in these is that the human relationships will now be fraught with the same “painful toil”. That is immediately apparent when Adam and Eve give birth to their sons Cain and Abel. These two sons will now “display” the pain associated with the curse(s) and living outside the garden. Cain kills Abel in a type of concluding act of his father—Adam—blaming his bride—Eve—for his disobedience.

And yet, again, in this psalm, this seems to be reversed. Just as the ground responds to the righteous, and just as the woman’s womb is a fruitful vine, so too do the sons participate in this blessing—they are not like Cain and Abel. They are like “olive shoots around your table.”

There is surrounding all of this a sense of profound peace and abundance—both things taken from Adam and Eve when they were removed from the Garden. Yet here we see the psalmist portraying the righteous man as inhabiting this realm, that it still pervades creation and can be lived within. And that occurs when someone “reveres Yhwh and walks in his ways”. This way of wisdom is something still accessible. Wisdom is not something that is merely followed in the face of the intransigence of the Cosmos. Rather, Wisdom is a type of gateway back through and into the Garden. 

And this leads to the second half of the psalm. If Wisdom provides this gateway back to the Garden then it is no surprise that we see the blessing flowing from Zion. The construction of the Temple and the Garden itself mirror each other. The Temple was to be a new Eden, a place where heaven and earth met in holiness and where Yhwh “dwelled” and “rested”. That is why, in the redemption of the Cosmos, the Temple is always ground zero. The waters of life always flow from the Temple, inundating the earth. And that is why, here, blessing “comes from Zion.” Wisdom and Temple—the Garden restored. What we see here, then, is very important for purposes of understanding the power of Wisdom—which is Yhwh’s blessing.

Along these lines it is important to note Solomon’s role as the man of Wisdom in the Scriptures. His influence over the wisdom literature is massive. Four of the wisdom books are attributed to him, as well as psalms either from him or about him. In addition, and crucially, he is also the Temple-builder. Although the covenant with David included the building of a house of Yhwh, David did not build the Temple. Solomon did. So he stands as this Wise-King who builds the Temple—and, thus, an Adam of the Garden.

But with Christ we have “someone greater than Solomon”. Here, we have Wisdom incarnate. His very being is the enactment of Wisdom. Moreover, we have the final Temple-builder.