When the Face of God Fills the Horizon: Psalm 68:2-4

Suzanne McCarthy is discussing Psalm 68; go here, here, and here. Lingamish asked if I might blog on the same psalm. He plans to, as well. So does Bob MacDonald. The more bloggers take up the same text at the same time, the merrier.

In this post, I discuss general problems of interpretation before commenting on translation issues and the poetry and prosody of the first three verses of the Psalm.

Psalm 68 is a rich text from many points of view. A student of ancient Near Eastern literature beyond the Hebrew Bible cannot help but read this text and be struck by the degree to which it instantiates what Morton Smith called the “common theology of the ancient Near East.”[1]

The psalm also bears the distinctive stamp of the faith of ancient Israel. But the truth it contains, to the extent that we look to it to be a light unto our path, cannot be equated with what distinguishes its outlook from that of its “pagan” environment. That would be too easy.

I daresay that if we are unable to see the truth in e.g. the Assyro-Babylonian polytheistic worldview, we will not see the particular truth of the alternative view of Israel’s faith as presented in the Bible either.[2] We will simply impose on the Iron Age Israelite text the values and concerns of Greco-Roman Jewish antiquity, or those of the church Fathers, or those of our own time.

A psalm like this one will baffle us unless we allow ourselves to be drawn into its world. In that world, God intervenes in the history of nations, sides with the orphan and the widow, and is subject to no will but his own. In that world, God accepts the prayer of the faithful, but responds to that prayer in utterly unpredictable fashion.

 

2 יָקוּם אֱלֹהִים

יָפוּצוּ אוֹיְבָיו

וְיָנוּסוּ מְשַׂנְאָיו מִפָּנָיו

 

3 כְּהִנָּדֵף עָשָׁן תִּנְדֹּף

כְּהִמֵּס דּוֹנַג מִפְּנֵי־אֵשׁ 

 

יֹאבְדוּ רְשָׁעִים

מִפְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים

 

  4וְצַדִּיקִים יִשְׂמְחוּ

יַעַלְצוּ לִפְנֵי אֱלֹהִים

וְיָשִׂישׂוּ בְשִׂמְחָה

Let God arise,

his enemies scatter,

his despisers flee before his face.

 

As smoke is dispersed, so disperse them,

as wax melts before fire

 
may evildoers perish

before the face of God

 

while the faithful rejoice;

may they exult before the face of God,

and jubilate with joy.

 Have you ever wished misfortune on someone else? I have many times, but I can’t remember the details (in the end, forgive and forget is a good policy). One instance, however, I can’t forget, because of what happened following.

Paola and I were just settling into life this side of the pond after serving churches in Friuli and Sicily. I was teaching first year Hebrew and pursuing an MA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Poor as church mice, we had one child and another on the way, but we needed a car. So I bought one a mechanic put up for sale at what seemed a good price, with every spare dollar to my name.

He sold me a lemon. It was a car brought up from Missouri which had been flood-damaged. The mechanic put it back into working order just enough to fool someone like me, in order to make a pretty penny.

When the car broke down a couple of weeks later, I stormed into the gas-station and demanded they fix the car or give me my money back. The gas-station owner looked at me like the fool that I was, and told me with laughing eyes that them were the breaks.

I pedaled away on my bicycle and uttered a heart-felt imprecation (lots of good ones in ancient Near Eastern literature, one of the perks of the trade). I wanted that gas-station to go out of business, and I let God know that in no uncertain terms.

The reason I remember the episode is that, ten months later, the gas-station did go out of business. It was transformed into a pickup point for goods donated to Goodwill, a charity that helps the poor.

As the psalm says,

Let God arise,

his enemies scatter,

his despisers flee before his face.

 We don’t usually bring God into our petty affairs, and it’s a good thing we don’t. Psalm 68 moves within the horizon of the national history of Israel. Given the references to the Bashan region in verses 16 and 23, if I had to guess the historical occasion behind its composition, a skirmish between Israel and a neighboring people in the process of expanding its control and occupation of an area with the Golan Heights at its epicenter would fit the bill.

In our day, it is not politically correct to appeal to God to defend one’s nation. Of course we do so anyway, especially in the United States. This is nothing new.

A particularly famous example of political song infused with the language of divine wrath and intervention is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by a spirited abolitionist by the name of Julia Ward Howe. She wrote it with the Union soldiers in mind, many of whom, one might suppose, went to their death with her words on their lips. Here are the hymn’s first and last verses:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His day is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free;
While God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on.

And die they did.

Julia Ward Howe knew her Bible very well. The first verse of her hymn is loosely based on the Jeremiah 25:30, 38:

יהוה מִמָּרוֹם יִשְׁאָג

וּמִמְּעוֹן קָדְשֹׁו

יִתֵּן קוֹלֹו

 

שָׁאֹג יִשְׁאַג עַל־נָוֵהוּ

הֵידָד כְּדֹרְכִים יַעֲנֶה

אֶל כָּל־יֹשְׁבֵי הָאָרֶץ

 

עָזַב כַּכְּפִיר סֻכֹּו

כִּי־הָיְתָה אַרְצָם לְשַׁמָּה

 

מִפְּנֵי חֲרוֹן הַיּוֹנָה

וּמִפְּנֵי חֲרוֹן אַפֹּו

YHVH roars from on high;

from his holy habitation

he lets his voice go.

 

He roars aloud against his own fold;

with a shout like tramplers of grape he responds

to all who inhabit the earth.

 

Like a lion he’s abandoned his lair

that the land might become a waste

 

before the oppressing wrath,

before his burning anger.

 Do we really want anything to do with such a God? Probably not. He’s a wild one. Not exactly the cuddly fuzzy most people want God to be, to match their velvet slippers.

The biblical categories served the union well in the dark days of the Civil War. They allowed many, Abraham Lincoln in primis, to understand the war as a judgment upon the nation and a great evil through which the good might triumph nonetheless.

Translation Issues in Psalm 68:2-4

 The preposed verbs are jussive. To realize this, it helps to know that Hebrew is a “subject-first” language, as Paul Joüon knew,[3] and as Rob Holmstedt, who followed me in the apostolic succession of TA’s of biblical Hebrew at the UW-Madison, has convincingly argued.[4]

That the verbs come first in this section of psalm, except in one case (‘while the faithful rejoice’) in which the subject is fronted for reasons of focus, is triggered by their non-indicative mood. NPSV uncharacteristically messes up by translating ‘will arise,’ ‘shall flee,’ etc. The basic sense is hardly changed nonetheless since NJSPV also translates ‘disperse them’ at the appropriate place. The imperative (once again, not a straightforward translation of the Hebrew) cues the reader to the fact that the whole is implorative.

I do not render רשׁעים and צדיקים  by their standard English translation equivalents, ‘wicked’ and ‘righteous,’ respectively. Truth to be told, the traditional translations used today often sound stale and slightly off-base. It is important to note that the ones the psalmist knows to be God’s enemies are those who are, to judge from the psalm’s wording, producing widows and orphans in Israel. Metaphorically, Bashan, also a divine mountain, has taken on the mountain the God of Israel desired as his dwelling (mount Zion). God, according to the psalmist, should have none of it.

In our day, thanks to a speechwriter named Michael Gerson who coined the phrase “axis of evil,” we are used to hearing the sworn enemies of the empire referred to as evil, not wicked. I translate accordingly.

‘Righteous’ in my view also works poorly as a translation in this context. ‘Faithful’ is more to the point. Put another way, the kind of righteousness in mind is that exemplified by the protagonist of Schindler’s List. Schindler, a Nazi after all, was not exactly a guiltless man, but at the appointed time, he did the right thing. That makes him righteous in the biblical sense.

For the same reason, awful human beings like Jephthah are remembered in the Bible for what else they were, instruments of salvation, and referred to as ‘saints’ in the New Testament.

A key recurrent item in Psalm 68:2-4 is the phrase I over-literally translate as ‘before his/God’s face.’ The compound prepositions in question contain the word ‘face’ in the Hebrew, but as a rule ‘face’ has lost its concrete sense entirely, such that the prepositions simply mean ‘from before’ and ‘before.’ A literalizing translation nevertheless serves a purpose. It highlights the repeated recurrence of the prepositional phrases, and emphasizes what is arguably the primary theme of the section. When God arises, his enemies skidaddle. Those who depend on his protection exult.

The technical term for what the psalmist prays for is a theophany. Poetically put, when the face of God fills the horizon, some cower; others rejoice.

Poetry and Prosody

 Psalm 68 is an exceptionally fine poem. It contains striking imagery and sound orchestration and makes use of a jerky camera effect like a number of modern films. Changes of scene occur suddenly. Each scene is nonetheless held together by twice- and thrice-repeated semantic parallelisms and a subtle use of syntactic parallelisms like the one mentioned above involving prepositional phrases (‘before his face,’ ‘before the face of fire,’ and ‘before the face of God’ twice, with a micro-variation in diction determined by usage).

The building blocks of Psalm 68 instantiate the general rule and the length rule. 68:2-19 contains 28 lines; 68:20-28 12 lines; 68:29-36, 12 once more.

Psalm 68:2-4 is comprised of 4 lines. The first and last are tripartite and frame the middle two lines, which are bipartite. At the same time, it is possible to analyze the first two lines as a strophe, and the second two lines as a successive strophe.

---

[1] Morton Smith, “The Common Theology of the Ancient Near East,” JBL 71 (1952) 135-147. Excellent later studies include Bertil Albrektson, History and the Gods (Lund: Gleerup, 1967); Simon B. Parker, Stories in Scripture and Inscriptions: Comparative Studies on Narratives in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[2] On these matters, the following essay is essential reading: J. J. Finkelstein, “The West, the Bible and the Ancient East: Apperceptions and Categorisations,” Man 9 (1974) 591-608.

[3] Paul Joüon, Grammaire de l'hébreu biblique (Rome: Institut biblique pontifical, 1947).

[4] Robert Holmstedt, “Word Order in the Book of Proverbs,” in Seeking out the Wisdom of the Ancients: Essays Offered to Honor Michael V. Fox on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (ed. R.L. Troxel, K.G. Friebel, and D.R. Magary; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005) 135-54; “Word Order and Information Structure in Ruth and Jonah: A Generative-Typological Analysis,” JSS (forthcoming).

Comments

[Lingamish]

Wow! I haven't even digested the Psalm 19 study and now you've given me all these goodies in Psalm 68. At some point I need to admit that I'm out of my depth and go back to blogging about tattoos and kissing. ;-)

Thanks for helping me get into ancient sandals and also understand a little about Bashan vs. Sinai. Thanks also for affirming the organization of this Psalm of which someone said, "There is no way to show any progression of thought, and no outline is possible."

[Bob MacDonald]

John, I am having trouble with the justification of jussives. Many Hebrew verbs seem to occur before the subject - these in the first section seem to be straight Qal imperfect. I could use some lessons in those verb forms though ...

[JohnFH]

Hi Bob,

Despite the fact that Hebrew is a SVO language, verbs come first more often than not. There are many reasons for this. For example, the vav-consecutive construction, the workhorse of Hebrew narrative, is vav + V + non-obligatory specified subject. Often the subject of a clause carries over from a preceding clause, in which the case the verb may occur in head position.

A verb's default position is nevertheless after an explicit subject if there is one. Compare Psalm 19:2-3 which we just looked at.

Many weak verbs have special jussive forms. That is not the case with the jussives in Ps 68:2-4. You might compare the ancient versions. The Old Greek, for example, translates the mood of the verbs consistently as jussive.

[Bob MacDonald]

Re the prosodic structure, your division into 3 agrees with the placement of the word Bless - beginning the second section and bracketing the third. I will try a prosodic analysis next (and I am going to scour the UVIC library for comments). The rider is critical to the structure also linking beginning middle and end - I corrected my misspoken paragraph in my first post. So the emendation of desert to clouds (glory?) needs to deal/agree with its mirror at the end.

[CGross]

Have you ever wished misfortune on someone else?
Oh yes. Sometimes to my shame. Once, a lost love drove me to repeated curses and requests for judgment in "loving prayer." Some years later I heard that his first child died as an infant to spinal meningitis. Forgiveness and charity was quick to follow in my heart.

Another time, I joined a friend in praying the "whatever it takes" prayer for her brother and his family who were trying hard to hide from God (like Jonah). Six months later he was killed on the job, and his wife developed cancer. One son ran to drugs and enlisted in the a military service. It took us years (nearly a decade) to trust God enough to even think about praying that way again. But both of her nephews are strong young Christians, one is a pastor of a church in a difficult area.

We don’t usually bring God into our petty affairs
But perhaps we should. If all our pettiness were subject to the scrutiny of the Spirit, wouldn't most of it fall by the wayside as chaff?

A psalm like this one will baffle us unless we allow ourselves to be drawn into its world. In that world, God intervenes in the history of nations, sides with the orphan and the widow, and is subject to no will but his own.
I suppose that is why I like Ps. 68 so much. I need this kind of God in my daily life. Living on the ragged edge of poverty in a distressed armpit of the otherwise beautiful "pacific northwest" makes me keenly aware of how much the widow, orphan, single, poor, unemployed, elderly, disabled, abandoned, downtrodden, etc. suffer at the hands of the successful capitalist in America. Boy do we need a God who can "rise up," no one else does on our behalf.

In that world, God accepts the prayer of the faithful, but responds to that prayer in utterly unpredictable fashion.
Unpredictable is probably an understatement. What if the destruction of God's enemies produced an influx of new family members? When you turn "if you are not for me, you are against me" on its head.... Wouldn't turning an enemy into a friend be an interpretation of "destroying an enemy?"
And what about the Job experience? Wasn't his faith proved and strengthened by the things he endured? Who are we to curb our prayers and deny the wicked their chance at redemption? When God smites, does he not also lift up? And how I long for God to smite, while at the same time I pray for God to save (especially to save the smitten).

No, I don't have a problem with a God who is strong, who heals and who hurts, who metes out judgment and defends with justice. Just because I cannot enjoy the thought of God acting in wrath, or judgment, or violence doesn't put any constraints on Him whatsoever.

But more often than not, I rejoice in a God who will one day shout "It is Finished" once again. I like Ps 68 for its expression of such a view of God -- even if it is constrained by the events and culture of early Israel.

[JohnFH]

Thank you for a thoughtful comment, CGross.

As soon as Ps 68 is related somehow to the book of Jonah, for example - and this is what Jews and Christians do when they read an entire corpus of literature as the expression of a single voice refracted through a plurality of voices - layers of complexity are added to our understanding of it. As it should be.

It's a strenuous exercise, but it also makes sense to hear Ps 68 in its singularity. If I'm not mistaken, you agree.