You have known / my being through and through
My bone
structure / was not concealed from you
When I
was being made / in secret
Worked
in motley fashion / deep down in the earth
Your eyes / saw my embryo
And in
your book / are all written down
Days that were planned
Before
any of them occurred.
How difficult / I find your thoughts of me / god
How
vast they are in their totality
If I tried to count them / they would be more than grains of
sand
If I came
to the end / I would not have finished with you
The psalmist now continues his mediation on Yhwh’s creation
of him. Every detail from his origin in the earth and his mother’s womb to the
end of his life is known to Yhwh. His very structure, his bones themselves, are
known to Yhwh. From this known-beginning the psalmist turns to Yhwh’s book in
which all of his days are written down. Yhwh does not know him from his
creation and then leave him; Yhwh’s knowing presence continues through every
day of his life. Just like the words that Yhwh knows before the psalmist speaks
them, so too are his days known to Yhwh before they occur.
The psalmist declares that the amount of Yhwh’s thoughts of
him are more than the grains of sand. It is an important statement—his own
thoughts of himself pale in comparison to the vastness of Yhwh’s thoughts. Yhwh
knows him to a degree that he will never obtain to. Again, there is this
tremendous sense of being overtaken and encased within Yhwh’s thoughts.
I wish you would kill the wicked / god
And
that bloodthirsty men / would leave me
Men who mention you maliciously
Who
talk falsely / your foes
Do I not hate those / who hate you / Yhwh
Don’t I
loathe / those who attack you?
I do hate them / hate them utterly
I
regard them / as enemies of mine.
We now come to the crux of psalm—what the entire psalm has
been leading up—which is that the psalmist wishes that Yhwh would “kill the
wicked”. The depth of Yhwh’s knowledge of the psalmist is now turned on the
“bloodthirsty men” and those who “mention you maliciously”. Yhwh, through his
almost “wonderfully transcendent” knowledge of the psalmist, knows that he
“hates those who hate you”; that he “loathes those who attack you.” Those who
are enemies of Yhwh are enemies of his.
As we have seen, though, Yhhw’s knowledge is not one that
simply “sees what stands within the light”. For the psalmist, as for many,
wickedness and evil operate in a hidden fashion, a type of darkness. That is
something of its nature. It does not operate on the surface of things but,
instead, hides in the grasses, like snake; or, it moves at midnight, shrouded
in darkness. Evil men are night-creatures who stand hidden from every form of
sun-god. For Yhwh, though, this hidden nature of evil Is not hidden. It stands
within the light of his gaze and is as clear to Yhwh as the psalmist’s own
words and motives. More crucially still is that Yhwh “examines” them just as he
“examines” the psalmist. As we saw above, this examination is not observation,
but a weighing and judging. Yhwh haunts the darkness, always already behind and
before it, patiently waiting for a time push back the curtain of darkness and
reveal his own light-that-transcends-darkness in judgment.
This is where we see, concretely, that this type of almost
philosophical approach to Yhwh’s knowledge is put in service of a destruction
of evil. Or, we might say, philosophy is put in the service of petition and
prayer. This is something we have seen throughout many psalms—that the
psalmists are not so much concerned with understanding as with drawing Yhwh
into action in order to end evil. They can delve deeply into the mystery of
Yhwh’s providential insight, but that is penultimate to their main concern for
justice and the establishment of right order.
Examine me / God / and know my mind
Probe me / and know how anxious I
am
See if I have been behaving / as an idolator
And
guide me / in the ancient path.
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