119: Introduction

Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible by any metric you might choose.

In English, it’s 176 verses and approximately 2,445 words long (depending on your translation). The English verse divisions reflect a highly regular underlying structure based on the Hebrew alphabet, with each of its 22 sections made up of eight pairs of ideas. All eight verses in each section begin with the same Hebrew letter, and the letters are in order.

It is probably the most carefully crafted chapter in the entire Bible.

Just a Cotton-Pickin’ Minute Here …

“Wait,” cry our three most-attentive regular readers, “weren’t you going to do Isaiah or Judges on Saturdays once you finished your series on the Minor Prophets?” Yes, I will confess, in those heady days several weeks back as I was coming down the home stretch on a four-year project, to the blissfully naïve enthusiasm of a Goldilocks capering through the woods several acres from any genuinely-informed decision-making, I did indeed make such foolish prognostications. On sober second thought, however, I became the more pragmatic Goldilocks in the bears’ cottage with the clock ticking:

“Isaiah? Too ambitious.”

“Judges? Too depressing.”

“Lamentations? Too short AND too depressing.”

“Psalm 119? Just right!”

We will see if that turns out to be the case. Twenty-four Saturdays should give me a chance to make up my mind about our next long-term Saturday series. In the meantime, I have WiC to thank for this suggestion as to how to bridge the gap between major projects, not to mention his somewhat inspired suggestion of the Minor Prophets as subject matter four years back.

On to the intro, then!

History and Overview

The author of Psalm 119 is unknown. Older commentators attributed the epic to David, which is an easy “out” considering the sheer volume of psalms the great king of Israel composed. Modern commentators believe the psalm may have been post-exilic. The fact is that we don’t know who wrote it or precisely when, which seems appropriate given the content. Psalm 119 is not about its writer, and the few statements he makes about himself in the psalm lead us no closer to an identification. They could as easily reflect the thinking of any of his godly compatriots under the Law of Moses.

Some psalms are prophetic, some are historical, some are hymns of praise and worship, some are laments and others are thanksgiving. Christians reading the Hebrew poets from a distance of millennia enter into some psalms more easily than others. Psalm 119 is a prayer in the form of poetry. It’s the meditation of a devout Israelite believer rejoicing in the greatness and beauty of God’s law, reciting back to the Lord all the varied qualities he appreciates in God’s revelation to his people and, implicitly at least, celebrating the unique position enjoyed by his nation as the earliest corporate recipients of divine revelation.

Don’t mistake me: it’s the furthest thing from a patriotic rant. The words “Israel” or “Judah” do not even appear. Still, the distinctive Jewishness of the psalm is evident at every turn, which means unless you substitute “revelation” for “law”, it’s not really a Christian psalm. We, who have been introduced to the fulfillment of the law in glorious person, cannot get quite as excited about shadows and prefiguring as the average godly Jew looking forward to the one of whom the law spoke.

The Words

If you’re going to talk about the law of God 181 times in 176 verses, you’re going to need a few synonyms to keep from making your readers crazy with all the repetition. By my count, the psalmist uses ten distinct Hebrew words, which translators have rendered twelve different ways in English. Remarkably, both my ESV and the KJV had translation teams that attempted to find a single English equivalent for each Hebrew word in every case but two, which is a remarkable level of consistency for the sheer number of nouns involved. They understood that no two “synonyms” are precisely equivalent, and that using them interchangeably would not respect the care with which the Hebrew writer selected and employed his vocabulary.

English	Hebrew	Meaning
Commandment[s] (22)	miṣvâ	command, direction
Law (25)	tôrâ	body of legal directives
Precepts (21)	piqqûḏîm	appointed thing
Promise (13), Words (6)	'imrâ	utterance, speech
Rules (17), Judgments (1)	mišpāṭ	legal verdicts
Statutes (22)	ḥōq, ḥuqqâ	prescribed limitation
Testimonies (23)	ʿēḏâ, ʿēḏûṯ	witness (ewe lambs, pillar)
Ways (8)	dereḵ, 'ōraḥ	road, journey, course of life
Word (23)	dāḇār	the thing said

It should be immediately evident there’s a difference between, say, a statute and a command. A command may be either positive or negative, “do” or “don’t do”, whereas the Hebrew word translated “statute”, etymologically at least, involves only limitations. In at least some of these instances, I don’t think it’s too much to say the psalmist may actually be praising the restrictions the law puts on him; his words are that carefully chosen. Other times, he is probably using the word more generally. Likewise, the word translated “testimonies” does not mean an eyewitness, as etymology might suggest, but something more like evidence. This again is quite different from the Hebrew word translated “rules” or “judgments”, which refers to a judge’s verdict.

So then, the psalmist is praising the law of God in a multitude of aspects, from its encoding to its practical effect in the world.

The Content

Depending how you divide the text, Psalm 119 is comprised of roughly 230 statements of fact, questions, promises and declared aspirations. Don’t hold me to hard numbers; I just wanted to get a general idea of the relative proportions of each type of statement the psalmist makes. The easiest way to get a sense of this was to graph them:

So then, the psalmist’s prayer to his God breaks down as follows:

Truths (91): Simple declarative statements of fact, whether theological, like “Blessed are those whose way is blameless” or affirmations of personal integrity we have no reason to doubt (since the psalmist is confessing them to God, who knows the heart) such as “I do not turn away from your law”.

Requests (70): Asking the Lord to fill a need, such as “Do not utterly forsake me!” or “Let me not be put to shame”.

Praise (29): Truths about God and his word, such as “The earth is full of your steadfast love” or “Your word is a lamp to my feet”.

Promises (23): Statements of determination to please God, such as “Your servant will meditate on your statutes” or “Teach me and I will keep it”.

Aspirations (7): Usually accompanied by a request, like “Save me [request] that I may obey your testimonies [aspiration]”. (I distinguish these from promises as the words “I will” are absent. The writer is hoping for a particular result but does not attempt to guarantee it.)

Questions (3): Usually rhetorical, with an answer provided, such as “How can a young man keep his way pure?” This relatively small number of actual queries makes sense if you think about it. When we ask a question in prayer, we do not usually expect an immediate, audible response. We are either using the device of questioning in a rhetorical fashion, or else we are leaving a problem with the Lord that we expect to resolve through a new understanding he provides at some future point.