Psalm 68:6-7 and the God of Many Names

Suzanne McCarthy, Lingamish, Bob MacDonald, and J. K. Gayle are blogging up an excellent storm on psalm 68. I’m happy to throw ideas of my own into the pot. I’ve blogged once already on Psalm 68:6-7. Here is another go at these verses.

Muslims associate 99 names with Allah. Muslims often know them by heart. For an introduction, go here.

How many names do Jews and Christians have for God? How many are vouchsafed to them in the Bible? Does anyone learn them by heart?

 

I have in mind the short descriptions of God in the Hebrew Bible. They often consist of an adjective, noun, or participle, without or without a complement.

The names for Allah in the Quran are similar in type, and sometimes even identical to names for God found in the Hebrew Bible. Islam, after all, is a development from Jewish and Christian matrices.

When a psalmist wants to sing God’s praises or appeal to God for help, he will often let loose with a string of participles and adjectives describing who God is.

No, Lingamish, ‘ogre’ is not one of them, but thanks for raising the issue, spoken or unspoken, on most people’s minds when reading a psalm like 68. But thanks to Shrek, ogres are making a comeback. Maybe it's not so bad to call God an ‘ogre’ after all. It's fun to think of God (Shrek) and us (donkey) having this conversation:

Shrek: Ogres... are... like onions.

Donkey: [sniffs onion] They stink?

Shrek: Yes...NO!

Donkey: Or they make you cry.

Shrek: No!

Donkey: Oh, you leave them out in the sun and they turn brown and start sproutin' little white hairs.

Shrek: NO! LAYERS! Onions have layers. OGRES have layers. Onions have layers... you get it. We both have layers.

Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. [pause] You know, not everybody likes onions. [pause] CAKES! Everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers!

Shrek: [restraining temper] I don't care... what everyone likes. Ogres. Are not. Like cakes!

Another donkey quote explains in plain English why the God of the Bible is more likable to me than the warm fuzzy many people look for in God: "no one likes a kiss-ass."

Here are some examples of short descriptions of God in the psalms:

יהוה סַלְעִי וּמְצוּדָתִי

וּמְפַלְטִי אֵלִי 

 

צוּרִי אֶחֱסֶה־בֹּו מָגִנִּי

וְקֶרֶן־יִשְׁעִי מִשְׂגַּבִּי 

 

יהוה פֹּקֵחַ עִוְרִים

יהוה זֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים

יהוה אֹהֵב צַדִּיקִים

 

יהוה שֹׁמֵר אֶת־גֵּרִים

יָתוֹם וְאַלְמָנָה יְעוֹדֵד

וְדֶרֶךְ רְשָׁעִים יְעַוֵּת

The Lord is my crag and my fortress,

my God is my rescuer;

 

My rock in whom I take refuge, my shield,

the horn of my salvation, my haven.

                                                    Psalm 18:3

 

The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

The Lord lifts up the bowed down.

The Lord is partial to the innocent.

 

The Lord watches over the stranger;

he upholds the fatherless and the widow,

and subverts the way of evildoers.

Psalm 146:8-9

The author of Psalm 68 also lets loose with a string of phrases that describe God in clear and unmistakable language:

 

6אֲבִי יְתוֹמִים

וְדַיַּן אַלְמָנוֹת

אֱלֹהִים בִּמְעוֹן קָדְשֹׁו

4

 7אֱלֹהִים מוֹשִׁיב

 יְחִידִים בַּיְתָה

 

מוֹצִיא אֲסִירִים בַּכּוֹשָׁרוֹת

אַךְ סוֹרֲרִים שָׁכְנוּ צְחִיחָה

Father of the fatherless,

champion of widows,

is God in his holy habitation.

 

God, who resettles

the homeless to homes,

 

who releases prisoners-of-war to fertile places,

and opponents settle a parched land.

 

Suzanne renders somewhat differently:

Father of orphans,

And defender of widows,

God in his holy habitation

 

God, who gives

To the childless children

 

Who leads captives out to rich land

While rebels inhabit scorched earth.

 As she notes, Luther translates, der den Einsamen das Haus voll Kinder gibt - "who gives to the single a house full of children." Keil and Delitzsch, whose knowledge of Hebrew was top-shelf, thought likewise: “Dachselt correctly renders it, in domum, h.e. familiam numerosam durabilemque eos ut patres-familias plantabit.”[1] Who is right here?

Suzanne’s interpretation has a lot going for it. The thought would be analogous to Psalm 113:9. “Who settles the barren woman in her house, as a mother of children, joyful” is the translation Suzanne offers, but I think NRSV is closer to the meaning she sees here: “He gives the barren woman a home [=household], making her the joyous mother of children.”

1 Samuel 2:5 also comes to mind. When God gets in the act, “the barren woman bears seven times over.” Part of the Song of Hannah, the example is telling, since the larger context (2:4-8) covers a lot of bases: the battlefield, food and economics, the blessing of a numerous brood, death and life, economics again, and change in status. Hannah’s own situation of need is not so multi-faceted, but she cites examples of God’s way that go beyond her own case.

So, even if the context of Psalm 68 is war and preparation for war, as I argue, Psalm 68:5 may depict who God is in terms that far outstrip the immediate occasion.

To a certain extent, it’s possible that Suzanne and I are both right. Let me explain. When I read this verse, other texts come to mind, such as:

הָעִיר הַיֹּצֵאת אֶלֶף

תַּשְׁאִיר מֵאָה
 

וְהַיּוֹצֵאת מֵאָה

תַּשְׁאִיר עֲשָׂרָה

לְבֵית יִשְׂרָאֵל

The town that marches out a thousand strong

will have a hundred left.

 

And the one that marches out a hundred strong

will have ten left

of the house of Israel.

                Amos 5:3

To judge from the rest of Psalm 68, its occasion may have been a precedent loss of territory and men. Towns of a thousand strong may have marched out, and only one hundred returned. That’s a lot of widows and orphans.

In my view, God is described in Psalm 68 as ‘father of the fatherless, champion of widows’ for that reason, but the language is traditional, and in and of itself has the broader scope of which Suzanne speaks. The use in context depends on the language’s broader frame of reference, and both senses of the phrases would have been present to those who heard the Psalm from the beginning.

On the other hand, I think it is probable that אֱלֹהִים מוֹשִׁיב יְחִידִים בַּיְתָה   means about what I have already proposed. The syntagmeme Hiphil ישב +accusative of person + locative often has the sense of resettlement from one locality to another. Cf. Genesis 47:6, 11; 1 Samuel 12:8; and 2 Kings 17:6.

Hiphil ישב +accusative of person w/o locative is attested in the sense of ‘providing a house for.’ But the accusative of person is always a woman or women (Psalm 113:9; Ezra 10:2, 10, 14, 17, 18; Nehemiah 13:23, 27). If women were in mind here, the feminine plural, יְחִידוֹת, would have been used, not יְחִידִים.

Psalm 68:7 and 113:9 sound alike, but differ from each other syntactically. The first is Hiphil ישב +accusative of person + locative. The second is Hiphil ישב +accusative of person + accusative of thing inhabited (cf. Ezek 36:33; Isa 54:3).

Why all this attention to syntactic and paradigmatic detail? Because the meaning words have depends on syntactic and paradigmatic context. Syntactic context is about the prepositional phrase a verb co-occurs with, the verb that governs the noun in question, and so on. Paradigmatic context is about the specific contents of the prepositional phrase a verb co-occurs with, the specific verb that governs the noun one is looking at, etc.

יָחִיד, according to BDB, has three distinct senses: only one, as in an only son (יָחִיד) or an only daughter (יְחִידָה); feminine יְחִידָתִי as my only one, poetic for my life, in each case parallel to נַפְשִׁי ‘my life’; solitary, as in our verse and Psalm 25:7. In our verse, BDB thinks ‘friendless wanderers’ or ‘exiles’ are in mind, and notes that יְחִידִים is in parallelism with אֲסִירִים ‘prisoners-of-war.’ I concur. ָLike the latter, the former also refers to those affected by war. The ‘hundred left over’ from a village of one thousand, now solitary and probably displaced, is the probable concrete reference of יְחִידִים.

Resettling of displaced persons is frequently described as a task YHVH undertakes for his people. See in particular Hosea 11:11; Ps 107:36; Jer 32:37, and Ezek 36:11, quoted and discussed by Suzanne. As for prisoners-of-war, they are elsewhere marked out for God’s special consideration. See Psalm 79:10-11 in particular.

Put another way, the question is whether Psalm 68:7 is a subunit with a certain inner cohesiveness, and 68:6 a like unit with its own inner cohesiveness, or not. The Masoretic division into verses supports the construal of 68:7 as a cohesive subunit on a par with 68:6.

On another matter, I might explain why I translate יתומים as ‘fatherless’ and not ‘orphans.’ That’s because one doesn’t have to lose both parents in order to be classed as a יתום. It was sufficient to lose one’s father. My guess is that it was also sufficient to lose one’s mother to be so classed, though I don’t know of any evidence to that effect. Translation is tricky, isn’t it? REB and NAB translate ‘fatherless’ as I do. So does KJV, NASB, ESV, and NCSB. But other translations render ‘orphans’ as Suzanne does (NRSV, NJB, and CEV).

The names of God in the Psalms are marvelously concrete: ‘My crag,’ ‘my fortress,’ ‘the one who watches over strangers,’ ‘the father of the fatherless,’ ‘the one who trains my arm for battle.’ It saddens me that they are little-known today. In a future post, I will one-up the Muslims and list 144 names for God in the Hebrew Bible. I would love to hear a conversation along these lines at a future point in time: “My God has more names than your God.” “Oh yeah? Let’s hear it.”

“God of Many Names” is the title of a hymn by Brian Wren. On the same theme, I like “God of the Sparrow, God of the Whale.” The words of that hymn were penned by Jaroslav Vadja. “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” with words by Walter Chalmers Smith, is decent, too.

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[1] Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2002) 5:446. The Latin means: “establishes, in the role of pater-familias, in a house, that is, makes them a numerous and enduring family.”

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

I received (divine passive) my intro to Shrek (Shrek III) on my flight home last week. I don't usually watch in-flight movies - but this one was a bit of a hoot. I am so glad I now know who you are talking about :)

[Bob MacDonald]

"Resettling of displaced persons is frequently described as a task YHVH undertakes for his people." This may be a short time but is often generations after the initial trouble (e.g. the impact of colonization in North America - very long-term consequences for both Africa and American First Nations, not to mention the hardening of the soul of the Caucasians).

144=(2*2*3)**2 is a better number than 99=3**2*11 or 10*10-1 ;)