searching for God in Psalm 37...

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. As soon as I saw that the Psalm for today was 37, I went to Robert Alter's excellent commentary, The Book of Psalms, to review his take on one of my favorites. And right out of the gate he changes the standard opening from "Do not fret because of the wicked" to "Do not be incensed by evildoers, do not envy those who do wrong." I could not help but wonder: what didn't I know?

You see, as one chronically challenged by fretting and vexed by anxiety, I have long savored the invitation of ancient Israel's Wisdom tradition to trust God and be still as I wait upon the Lord. This is at the core of the contemplative practice of Centering Prayer. It guides the meditation of mindfulness. And resonates with the non-dualistic intimacy God promises by holding all things together in grace. This call to contemplation evokes the teaching of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, too:

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious...

That's why Alter's rendering through me a curve. Imagine my surprise to read in Alter's commentary: "The distinctive note in all this is a plea for equanimity. The good person is enjoined not to get stirred up by the seeming success of the wicked. The verb used at the beginning (and repeated later in the psalm) is one that derives etymologically from a root that means 'to heat up.'" (Alter, p. 129) Clearly, I was missing something so the time had come to hit the Interlinear Bible. After a few hours, here's what I came up with.

+ Psalm 37 begins with the verb charah (from the primitive root charar) meaning to heat up, scorch, or seethe with such anger that others feel burned. It appears 90 times in the Hebrew Bible and anger is its essence. Not anxiety, as I wrongly believed, but fury. Becoming incensed, as the poet Alter suggests, rings true. Why then do our English translations of Psalm 37 regularly say: Fret not?

+ The Septuagint version of Psalm 37, the Hebrew Bible in Greek, offers a clue by translating charah as parazéloó meaning "to provoke into jealousy." That echoed the burning frenzy of the Hebrew text but bore no resemblance to the passive obsession of the English. And when I finally found a resource to help me translate the Greek Old Testamentinto English, guess what? Fret is the preferred verb of choice. Hmmmm...?

+ So where in God's name did the word fret come from? Its etymology starts with the Old English fretan meaning to eat or devour. It was used to describe the eating frenzies of both monsters and Vikings. By 1200 CE a more figurative use occurred for emotions, sins or vices that consumed a soul or heart. By the 1550s CE, it was also used to describe the "gnawing away" of tranquility caused by "wrongdoing, fear, etc." (https:// www.etymonline.com /word/fret)

Poetically I could now see the connection between an obsessive, jealous rage and a scorching, devouring anger. There is indeed a parallelism between the Hebrew and Greek texts. Once upon a time, the English made sense, too. But given the ever-shifting nature of living languages, what once was appropriate in English, fret, no longer conveyed the Scripture's original intent - especially in the 21st century when popular usage regularly treats worry, fret and anxious as synonymous. By why stop there?

+ What I eventually discerned is that the way we currently understand fret in 2018 is more like the ancient Hebrew word daag. That word is used seven times in the Old Testament and always means anxiety, worry or dread. So now I knew what the ancient Hebrew word for my inner jitters meant; and, it was clear that the admonition is Psalm 37 is something different.

+ The comparable New Testament Greek word that Jesus and Paul use is, merimnaó, that literally means not being pulled in opposite directions. A much closer description to my sense of what it means to be trapped in fretting. 

Which led me to one thing more: the invitation to be still and wait on the Lord. The wisdom tradition was grounded on observing the long term consequences of nature's cycles as well as the repeated behaviors human beings exhibited in real life. Some call this Mother Wit, others common sense, and still others speak of fables and aphorisms from the folk tradition. Whatever you call it, it is a way of making sense of ordinary experience through the filter of creation's rhythms. I sense that the late Eugene Peterson tapped into this wisdom while working on his restatement of Psalm 37 in The Message:

Don’t bother your head with braggarts
or wish you could succeed like the wicked.
In no time they’ll shrivel like grass clippings
and wilt like cut flowers in the sun.

Get insurance with God and do a good deed,
settle down and stick to your last.
Keep company with God,
get in on the best.

Open up before God, keep nothing back;
he’ll do whatever needs to be done:
He’ll validate your life in the clear light of day
and stamp you with approval at high noon.

Quiet down before God,
be prayerful before him.
Don’t bother with those who climb the ladder,
who elbow their way to the top.

Bridle your anger, trash your wrath,
cool your pipes—it only makes things worse.
Before long the crooks will be bankrupt;
God-investors will soon own the store.

Before you know it, the wicked will have had it;
you’ll stare at his once famous place and—nothing!
Down-to-earth people will move in and take over,
relishing a huge bonanza.

Ruth Moody of The Wailin' Jennys once said in a concert: "Worrying is like

praying to God for things you don't want to happen." The 12 Step movement put it like this in the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

Clearly my old understanding of the opening of Psalm 37 no longer holds water. The totality of the psalm, however, reverberates with the practice of letting go, trusting God and accepting what is mine while all that is beyond me is mystery. I'm willing to leave it at that as I try out a new bread recipe tonight.

credits
+ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mulberry_Tree_by_Vincent_van_Gogh.jpg
+ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/283304632792891662/
+ https://www.bl.uk/events/old-english-masterclass-november-2018