Psalm 1:3-4: Exegetical Notes

He will be like a tree planted by channels of water where he will yield his fruit in season; whose foliage will not fade, and all he does will thrive. He is spoken of, not she, as elsewhere in this Psalm, per the usual in ancient literature, and in modern literature until recently. The use of the third masculine pronoun foregrounds but does not limit the application of the psalm to those of masculine gender. The tree and the individual who is faithful to יהוה merge in the course of the simile. My translation seeks to bring that out. In a parallel passage, the tenor-vehicle distinction is likewise blurred. The tree is personified:

בָּרוּךְ הַגֶּבֶר אֲשֶׁר
יִבְטַח בַּיהוָה
וְהָיָה יְהוָה מִבְטַחוֹ׃

וְהָיָה כְּעֵץ  שָׁתוּל עַל־מַיִם
וְעַל־יוּבַל יְשַׁלַּח שָׁרָשָׁיו

וְלֹא־יִרְאֶה כִּי־יָבֹא חֹם
וְהָיָה עָלֵהוּ רַעֲנָן

וּבִשְׁנַת בַּצֹּרֶת לֹא־יִדְאָג
וְלֹא־יָמִישׁ מֵעֲשׂוֹת פֶּרִי׃

Blessed is the man
who will trust in יהוה,
whose source of trust is יהוה.

He shall be like a tree transplanted by water,
by a stream he shall send forth his roots.

He will not notice when heat comes,
his foliage will be verdant.

In a year of stress he will not pine,
and will not be deterred from producing fruit.

(Jer 17:7-8)

Not so the wicked. On the contrary, they are like chaff that the wind drives away. The fates of the wanton and the innocent are intertwined. The wicked are so called because they take advantage of the innocent. There is no way that the innocent can stand (persist, survive) unless the malevolent are driven away from their feasting on them. It is because יהוה takes note of the way of the righteous that the way of the wicked - those who prey on the righteous – will perish.

Job asks how often the wicked receive their just reward. He desires that they receive it, because as long as they don’t, the innocent are at their mercy. The imagery employed is remarkably similar:

כַּמָּה נֵר־רְשָׁעִים יִדְעָךְ
וְיָבֹא עָלֵימוֹ אֵידָם
חֲבָלִים יְחַלֵּק בְּאַפּוֹ׃

יִהְיוּ כְּתֶבֶן לִפְנֵי־רוּחַ
וּכְמֹץ גְּנָבַתּוּ סוּפָה׃

How often is the lamp of the wicked extinguished,
and their doom come upon them?
(How often) does he apportion lots in anger?

Let them be like straw before wind,
like chaff a storm stole away!

Job 21:17-18

Comments

[Terry Finley]

What a great blog. thank you

[Terry Finley]

Where can I find some great online material on Psa 51? thanks

[David E. S. Stein]

John:
Regarding your translation of Jer. 17:8:

“He shall be like a tree transplanted by water,
by a stream he shall send forth his roots.”

I wonder why you chose to render shatul as “transplanted,” which suggests human involvement in the placement of the tree.

And I wonder why you render yuval as “stream” rather than “watercourse.” Here I think I would argue with your rendering. It seems to me that the verbal root more likely refers to intermittent water. In addition, the poet’s simile would be more potent if we construe it as alluding not to a (perennial) stream but to a wadi or gulch. For human religious faith (the subject of the preceding verse) is not tested when water (that is, spiritual nourishment) is always available on the surface, but rather when it is only occasionally present, or where one must dig underground to find it.

The hydrologist Benjamin Ross has made a good case that Jeremiah is referring to deep-rooted trees such as willows, which can thrive because they tap the water table. See his article “Phreatophytes in the Bible,” Ground Water (Sep-Oct 2007);45(5):652-4. He can be reached at [email protected].

[David E. S. Stein]

John:
I do like how you translated so as to convey the merger of person and tree in Jeremiah’s simile. Well done!

In Jeremiah 17:7, arguably the mention of a gever is significantly male. That term elsewhere refers to the vigorous type of man who possesses a household, family, wealth, weapons, and a sense of direction. Given that he had such unusual capabilities, perhaps such a fellow was understood as relatively unlikely to trust in God.

Regarding Psalm 1, you wrote: “The use of the third masculine pronoun foregrounds but does not limit the application of the psalm to those of masculine gender.” As you know, I think the biblical evidence better supports the claim that when referring to a category of persons, the Hebrew masculine formulation does not specify the gender of its human referent. The masculine is employed as a matter of linguistic convention. Other factors might then “foreground” a male, but not the grammar itself.

[JohnFH]

David,

Thank you for your questions.

I translate shatul as I do because I think it is the verb that would be used if transplanting was envisaged. The better attested cognates in Akkadian and Arabic are the verbs of choice when transplanting is the reference. Shitlu in Akkadian is a seedling, as opposed to a seed; in the latter case, nata' would seem to be the verb of choice.

On this view, God is being compared to a gardener who stocks his plantation with seedlings. But maybe not. Maybe we are to imagine that God plants in a perfect place the one who is faithful to God as a gardener would a seed, not a seedling. But I think that in best-case scenarios, fruit trees were transplanted, not planted, in antiquity.

As for yuval, based on its occurrences in the Qumran literature, I would say that its range of meaning is not limited to intermittent streams. The simile can be understood in more than one way. I like the idea of a tree sending down deep roots so as to flourish even when the wadi is dry, but I don't think Jer 17 makes use of vocabulary that clearly points to that, though it could have.

The distribution of gever, 'adam, and 'ish in macarisms in the Psalms, Proverbs, etc. makes me think the terms are in that context virtually interchangeable. But I would love to be proven wrong based on a close reading of the relevant passages.