A Faith that Includes Doubt – Psalm 27

The psalm of the High Holiday season begins with the words “God is my light and my salvation,” moves to expressions of distress about God’s absence, and ends with a statement of hope. The psalm’s unexpected direction models the maturing of an authentic relationship with God.

Prof.

Benjamin D. Sommer

Prof.

Benjamin D. Sommer

Categories:

Rosh Hashanah

תהלים Psalms

Psalm 27 (ה' אורי וישׁעי) is one of the most familiar psalms in Jewish liturgy. Ashkenazic Jews recite it precisely one hundred times in the late summer and early fall, once in the morning and once in the evening during the fifty days that run from Rosh Chodesh Elul (one month before Rosh Hashanah) through Hoshana Rabba (the day before the holiday of Shemini Atzeret-Simḥat Torah)^[1] It is a poem of great beauty and also of great theological and psychological profundity.

From Confidence to Need: The 3-Part Structure of the Psalm

A striking element of Psalm 27 is its movement from confidence to need, from believing in God’s reliability to worrying about God’s absence. In conveying the movement, Psalm 27 divides itself into three stanzas, each with its own mood, and the relationship among them provides a key to the meaning of this poem.

The stanzas are stylistically distinct as well: in the first stanza, the worshiper speaks of God in the third person; in the second, the worshiper addresses God in the second person; in the third, God is again described in the third person.

In the first stanza (vv. 1–6) the worshiper is confident:

Ps 27:1

יְ־הוָ֤ה ׀ אוֹרִ֣י וְ֭יִשְׁעִי
מִמִּ֣י אִירָ֑א
יְ־הוָ֥ה מָֽעוֹז־חַ֜יַּ֗י
מִמִּ֥י אֶפְחָֽד:

YHWH is my light and my salvation —
Whom should I fear?
YHWH is the sure haven of my life —
Whom could I dread?

. . .

Ps 27:3

אִם־תַּחֲנֶ֬ה עָלַ֙י׀ מַחֲנֶה֘
לֹֽא־יִירָ֪א לִ֫בִּ֥י
אִם־תָּק֣וּם עָ֭לַי מִלְחָמָ֑ה
בְּ֜זֹ֗את אֲנִ֣י בוֹטֵֽחַ:

Should an army encamp against me,
My mind will know no fear.
Should war break out around me,
I will trust in this.

But in the second stanza (7–12), the worshiper is distressed about God’s absence:

Ps 27:9

אַל־תַּסְתֵּ֬ר פָּנֶ֙יךָ׀ מִמֶּנִּי֘
אַֽל־תַּט־בְּאַ֗ף עַ֫בְדֶּ֥ךָ
עֶזְרָתִ֥י הָיִ֑יתָ
אַֽל־תִּטְּשֵׁ֥נִי וְאַל־תַּֽ֜עַזְבֵ֗נִי
אֱ־לֹהֵ֥י יִשְׁעִֽי:

Don’t hide yourself from me!
Don’t thrust Your servant away in anger!
You were my helper
Don’t leave me, don’t abandon me
O God of my salvation!

. . .

Ps 27:12

אַֽל־תִּ֭תְּנֵנִי בְּנֶ֣פֶשׁ צָרָ֑י
כִּ֥י קָֽמוּ־בִ֥י עֵֽדֵי־שֶׁ֗֜קֶר
וִיפֵ֥חַ חָמָֽס:

Don’t feed me to my enemies!
Yes, lying witnesses are rising against me,
With unfair, violent testimony.

The third stanza (13–14) expresses hope along with an implicit acknowledgment that certainty of salvation is not possible.

Ps 27:13

לוּלֵ֗א הֶ֭אֱמַנְתִּי
לִרְא֥וֹת בְּֽטוּב־יְ־הוָ֗ה
בְּאֶ֣רֶץ חַיִּֽים:

If not for the fact that I believe
That I will see YHWH’s own virtue
While still alive —

Ps 27:14

קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְ־ה֫וָ֥ה
חֲ֭זַק וְיַאֲמֵ֣ץ לִבֶּ֑ךָ
וְ֜קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְ־הוָֽה:

Hope that YHWH will come!^[2]Courage! Let your mind be strong!
And hope that YHWH will come.

Incomplete Confidence in God: The Third Stanza

In this final stanza, we can sense an attempt to return to the serene confidence of the first stanza. But the attempt remains less than complete. The first poetic line^[3] of this stanza begins with an “If,” but we never get the “then” – the line is a sentence fragment.^[4] To be sure, the intention of the implied then-clause is clear: what the speaker was thinking was something to the effect of, “If not for my faith that I will see God’s goodness, I would be completely lost.”

The absence of the then-clause gives the impression that the speaker cannot bring himself to finish his sentence; his utterance brings him perilously close to an emotional place too dangerous to approach. The verse intends to make a statement of confidence, but the speaker cannot quite get the whole thing out. We have in a single line, then, the whole back-and-forth of the psalm: the confidence of the first stanza and the anxiety of the second are both manifest in this incomplete expression of faith.

A Levitical Reassurance or the Psalmist Reassuring Himself?

The second, and last, line of the third stanza (i.e., all of v. 14) may have been spoken to the worshiper by a Levite or a prophet working in the Temple where the psalm was recited in biblical times.^[5] If this is the case, the psalm ends with a new speaker’s voice, which urges the worshiper to keep faith. In other words, it ends with an implicit acknowledgement that the robust faith of the opening verses has been replaced with questioning, hope, and courage, but not pure confidence.

Alternatively, some have suggested that the worshiper recites this line. In fact, it is typical for the person reciting a psalm to turn toward an audience in the temple to urge them to believe in God’s saving power. But in such cases, the audience, a group of people, are addressed using plural imperatives (see, e.g., Ps 30:5; Ps 100:1–4). In Ps 27:14, however, the imperative verbs are all in the singular, which suggests that if the psalmist utters this verse, he is speaking to himself.^[6] In that case, it is significant that the worshiper feels the need — and has the strength — to reassure himself. He is not completely confident, but urges himself to hope for God’s salvation. This line, then, presents “an apt summary of the psychology that informs this psalm,”^[7] because it is “another statement standing between plea and trust.”^[8]

Two Separate Psalms?

How can we account for the stark contrast between the first stanza, in which the worshiper joyously proclaims trust in God, and the second and third stanzas, in which the worshiper betrays a fear that God might be far off?^[9]

The great German Psalms scholar Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) provides a simple answer to this question by asserting that this chapter contains two separate psalms that have been joined together, the first (vv. 1–6) a song of confidence and the second (vv. 7–14) a classic psalm of complaint and plea.^[10]

It is possible that a single chapter in the Book of Psalms might contain more than one composition. After all, there are cases in which a single psalm takes up more than one chapter: an alphabetic acrostic poem is spread over Psalms 9–10; Psalms 42–43 are also a single composition with a repeated refrain at 42:6, 42:12, and 43:5. Thus the converse — that two separate songs appear in one chapter — is certainly conceivable.

Signs of Unity

Nevertheless, several scholars have successfully defended the unity of Psalm 27. Peter Craigie and Marvin Tate point out shared vocabulary that draws together what Gunkel regards as separate poems: ישעי (vv. 1, 9), צרי (vv. 2, 12), לבי/לבך (vv. 3, 8, 14), ק.ו.מ (vv. 3, 12), ב.ק.ש (vv. 4,8), and חיי/חיים (vv. 4, 13), in addition to the theme of seeing God’s pleasantness or goodness (vv. 4, 13).^[11]

Further, it is not the case that the first stanza is entirely confident while the second and third completely lack elements of faith.^[12] The first stanza contains intimations of the darker themes that appear later in the poem. Jacob Blidstein notes,

[T]he progressive deterioration of the roof overhead from ‘stronghold (Ma-oz)’ to ‘hut (sukkah)’ and finally ‘tent’ - a glimpse into the crisis that is as yet in the distance.^[13]

And as John Goldingay astutely notes regarding v. 1, the worshiper’s statement that he has no reason to fear draws attention to the fact that he apparently is worrying about something.^[14]

Harris Birkeland also argues for the unity of the psalm, pointing to the presence of elements of confidence in the second and third stanzas.^[15] In the first versets^[16] of the two poetic lines in v. 9, the worshiper begs God not to abandon the worshiper, but the final versets of both lines confirm that God is the worshiper’s help and salvation.

Finally, the third stanza (in v. 13) at least attempts to restate the confidence of the first stanza, albeit in a sentence that never reaches completion.^[17] These elements of unity demonstrate that Psalm 27 is a literary unity that has to be interpreted as a whole.^[18]

Reading the Psalm as a Whole

We have seen that the first stanza hints at the source of fear even as it speaks of trust in God, while the second betrays worry over the possibility of God’s distance while also asserting that God is a source of salvation. Then the third stanza’s unfinished opening sentence acknowledges the possibility of life without trust in God while proclaiming that the psalmist indeed has this life-giving trust.

The psalm closes with imperatives that call on the worshiper (and us) to wait hopefully for God. The fact that these imperatives are deemed necessary points to the existence of doubts that must be overcome. In this one psalm we have a beautiful and brief distillation of the entire Psalter as a book of doubt and faith. As the psalm moves back and forth between belief and distress, it “manifests powerful psychological verisimilitude,” Robert Alter points out, because its emphasis on trust “does not preclude a feeling of fearful urgency in the speaker’s plea to God.”^[19]

An Unexpected Move from Faith to Doubt

The movement from faith to doubt is the opposite of what many readers might have expected of a religious text. Our worshiper does not grow into a more conventional piety over the course of the psalm, casting aside doubts to take up the armor of faith. Rather, the worshiper sets aside a seemingly ideal faith to take on a more realistic one.

Blidstein argues that the psalm criticizes the simplistic faith of the first stanza, whose God he labels “an ersatz divinity, a facile projection of [the worshiper] himself.”^[20] Similarly, Ellen Charry, maintains that in the first stanza, the worshiper thinks that “he has God in his pocket.”^[21] While the faith of that section seems on the surface to be stronger, the truth is that in that section, the worshiper speaks of God — always in the third person — as something he knows about, but not someone whom he knows.

In the second stanza, the worshiper moves to second person in order to address God directly, and only then does the worshiper achieve the experiential contact with God that he yearned for in verse 4:

אַחַ֤ת׀ שָׁאַ֣לְתִּי מֵֽאֵת־יְ-הוָה֘
אוֹתָ֪הּ אֲבַ֫קֵּ֥שׁ
שִׁבְתִּ֣י בְּבֵית־יְ֭-הוָה
כָּל־יְמֵ֣י חַיַּ֑י
לַחֲז֥וֹת בְּנֹֽעַם־יְ֜-הוָ֗ה
וּלְבַקֵּ֥ר בְּהֵיכָלֽוֹ׃

One thing I ask of YHWH
Only that do I seek
To dwell in His house
All the days of my life
To gaze on YHWH’s beauty
And to serve^[22] in His palace.

It is precisely when the worshiper first speaks directly to God that doubt becomes prominent. God is no longer something the worshiper claims to know all about; now God is a partner (though of course the senior partner) in a relationship, and relationships are slippery and unknowable in a way that does not conform to the simplistic faith of the first stanza.

A Maturing Relationship with God

The direction of the psalm’s movement is crucial, because it models the maturing of an authentic relationship with God.^[23] A simple faith that asks no questions and admits no anxieties is not the most religious faith. A relationship that can articulate anxiety about the beloved’s distance is ultimately stronger. As Charry writes, this psalm tells us that,

[U]npleasant emotions are not to be repressed as untoward but to be healed through models that show how to handle them. Here, the psalmist gives permission to his audience to be emotionally conflicted in relation to God. He does not urge his hearers to ‘grin and bear it’ or ‘put on a happy face,’ and he does not disparage honest fear of God-abandonment...^[24]

A faith that allows no doubt is hubris: when it claims to know for sure what God will and will not do, it denies God’s freedom and invests far too much in the believer’s impregnable security. Such a faith is the very opposite of true piety. The wavering faith of Psalm 27 is humbler and more honest. It is neither Pollyannish nor naive; it is realistic about the fact that God seems absent at times.

Ending with Hope: A Quintessentially Jewish Faith

This form of faith is quintessentially Jewish in ending neither with fear nor with complete confidence but with hope (v. 14). The final verse of Psalm 27 recalls the Pentateuch, which does not conclude with entry into the Land of Israel and the fulfillment of God’s promises. Deuteronomy 34 narrates not the victory of the hero, Moses, but his death. But that chapter also leaves us with the expectation that God’s promises to Moses and to the patriarchs before him will nevertheless come to fruition in coming years with the victory of Moses’ assistant, Joshua.

Moses’ life was a success not because he completed his task but because he did not desist from it – that is, because he lived up to the teaching of his latter-day disciple, Rabbi Ṭarfon in m. Avot 2:16:

לא עליך המלאכה לגמור ולא אתה בן חורין ליבטל ממנה.

It is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not free to desist from it.

It is significant for the nature of the Jewish religion that the Torah ends on a note of hope rather than fulfillment.^[25] That tendency made it natural that the anthem of the Zionist movement and later of the State of Israel is התקוה, “The Hope” (rather than, say, a song with the title like הניצחון, “The Victory”).

Hope rather than perfect confidence characterizes the most mature Jewish faith: a readiness to admit one’s fears, to look toward God expectantly while renouncing the claim to predict all God’s actions. This faith is well displayed by Psalm 27’s journey from simple, trusting piety in its first stanza, through doubt in the second, to hope in the third.

TheTorah.com is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
We rely on the support of readers like you. Please support us.

Published

January 4, 2017

Last Updated

November 21, 2024

Previous in the Series

Next in the Series

Before you continue...

TheTorah.com needs your support. A generous friend has offered to match end-of-year donations. Every contribution makes a difference.

Please Donate

Footnotes

View Footnotes

Published

January 4, 2017

Last Updated

November 21, 2024

[1] Psalm 27 was added to the liturgy for the months of Elul and Tishrei in the Middle Ages. Not all rites have it, and variations exist not simply between the five main liturgical rites of the Jewish people (Ashkenazic, Eidot Hamizraḥ/Sephardic, Italian, Yemenite, and Romani) but within these rites. Thus most Ashkenazim recite it every morning and every evening during this period, but in the western Ashkenazic rite it is recited only in the mornings, and it is omitted entirely in the rite of the Vilna Gaon. In the Italian rite it varies: in the Roman sub-rite, it is recited once a day during these months, but in the Milanese sub-rite, it is not recited at all. It is not recited in most versions of the Yemenite rite. In some Eidot Hamizraḥ rites one recites it after Shaḥarit and before Arvit all year long, not just in Elul-Tishrei; but Spanish-Portuguese Jews never recite it as part of their regular liturgy, whether in Elul-Tishrei or the rest of the year. For a much more detailed treatment of the recitation of Psalm 27, see Moshe Hallamish, Studies in Kabbalah and Prayer (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2012), 175–185 [Hebrew].

[2] I translate that way because קוה means “to await expectantly,” “to wait for,” and I worry that English “hope” loses the sense of waiting expectantly for something or someone. In English we often say, “I hope that XYZ.” In biblical Hebrew, the object of קוה is not a clause (and thus an idea of its own) but usually a situation (like ישועה) or person (and that person is usually God). So my freer translation, “Hope that YHWH will come,” tries to recapture that a little.

[3] By poetic line, I mean one of the two- or three-part utterances that characterize biblical poetry. In my linear presentation of the psalm above, the second part of the line and third (if there is a third) are indented. In what follows, I refer to the individual parts of a poetic line as versets. Most ancient Hebrew poetic lines consist of two versets, but some consist of three versets. In our poem, three-verset lines are used to mark off the ends of the stanzas; we find the same use of three-verset lines in a poem that otherwise consists of two-verset lines at the end of the two stanzas of Psalm 19; see Benjamin Sommer, “Nature, Revelation, and Grace in Psalm 19: Toward a Theological Reading of Scripture,” Harvard Theological Review 108 (2015), 380.

[4] Both Rashi and ibn Ezra see the then-clause as appearing in the middle of the previous verse (vv. 12b-13a):

…כִּ֥י קָֽמוּ־בִ֥י עֵֽדֵי־שֶׁ֗֜קֶר וִיפֵ֥חַ חָמָֽס לוּלֵ֗א הֶ֭אֱמַנְתִּי לִרְא֥וֹת בְּֽטוּב־יְ-הוָ֗ה…

…False witnesses would have risen against me with unfair, violent testimony if I had not been confident that I would see YHWH’s goodness…

But this means that the then-clause would begin with כי, which seems unlikely, since כי can mean “if.” Granted, we could sensibly translate כי here as the adverb “indeed,” a meaning it can have in biblical Hebrew. But beginning a then-clause with a word that typically introduces an if-clause would have invited confusion. Further, the clause at the end of the previous verse is the second verset of one poetic line, while our if-clause in verse 13 is the first verse of a new poetic line. A single compound sentence spread over the last verset of one line and the first verset of another would be highly irregular for biblical poetry, which by and large shuns enjambment and overwhelmingly prefers end-stopping. (On the rarity of enjambment in biblical poetry, see F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, On Biblical Poetry [New York: Oxford University Press, 2015], 44–8, 135–9; Yaakov Kaduri, “Biblical Poetry: How Can It Be?” [in Hebrew] in The Literature of the Hebrew Bible: Introductions and Studies, [ed., Zipora Talshir; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2011], 297–98.)

[5]Sigmund Mowinckel, followed by various commentators such as Peter Craigie and Marvin Tate (in Psalms 1–50, 2d. ed. [N.p.: Thomas Nelson, 2004], 234) , argues that this line was uttered by a prophet, a priest, or a Levite at the Temple. See Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, 2 vols., trans. D.R. Ap-Thomas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 2:59. Both Mowinckel and Joachim Begrich argue that Temple functionaries would regularly issue responses on God’s behalf to the entreaties of worshipers, though in most cases these responses are not preserved in the psalms themselves. See Joachim Begrich, “Das Priesterliche Heilsorakel,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 52 (1934): 81–92. A whole literature has developed around this issue; of particular import for confirming Begrich’s original insight is Jonas Greenfield, “The Zakir Inscription and the Danklied,” in Al Kanfei Yonah: Collected Studies of Jonas C. Greenfield on Semitic Philology, ed. Shalom Paul, Michael Stone, and Avital Pinnick (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2001) 1:75–92. Our verse at the end of this psalm may be one of the rarer cases where a prophetic or priestly oracle is in fact preserved in the biblical text.

[6] For a similar case, see the beginning and ending of Psalms 103 and 104, where the worshiper addresses the worshiper’s own soul.

[7] Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary [New York: W. W. Norton, 2007], 94

[8] John Goldingay, Psalms 1–41 [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006], 400.

[9] On this extreme nature of this contrast at verse 7, see Jacob (Gerald) Blidstein, “T’hillim 27,” Yavneh Review, Spring 1965, 21–23; Ellen Charry, Psalms 1–50 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2015), 139–41.

[10] For this response, see Hermann Gunkel, Die Psalmen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 112–18.

[11]See Craigie and Tate, Psalms 1–50, pp. 230-31.

[12] Rolf Jacobson captures something crucial about the alleged gulf between the two parts of the psalm when he writes that the psalm “speaks words of fear. And words of trust. The two are not as far removed from one another as one might imagine.” See Nancy deClaissé-Walford, Rolf Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Book of Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 242.

[13] Blidstein, “T’hillim 27,” 22.

[14] Goldingay, Psalms 1–41, 392. He further points out (391) that the first stanza’s “appearance of confidence is compromised by the fact that most of its lines have the short second cola more characteristic of a lament.” Indeed, the second verset of the first five lines of the poem are all quite negative.

[15] Harris Birkeland, “Die Einheitlichkeit von Ps 27,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 51 (1933): 218.

[16] On this term, see endnote 3.

[17] Gunkel further points out that v. 6 contains a vow, which is a standard way of ending a complaint song, while v. 7 begins like a classic psalm of complaint and plea. All this, he argues, shows that one poem ends in 6 while another begins in 7; see Gunkel, Psalmen, 114 and 116, and cf. Hermann Gunkel, Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel, completed by Joachim Begrich, trans. James D. Nogalski (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998), 177, 184. But Birkeland, “Einheitlichkeit,” 219, points out that to define v. 6 as an ending and v. 7 as a beginning on the basis of this formal criterion puts the cart before the horse. We can agree that v. 7 must be a new beginning and cannot be a middle, or that 6 must be an ending, only if we put the psalm into a procrustean form-critical bed. Indeed, Birkeland points out (220), this is not the only psalm where vows or pleas appear in unexpected places: in Ps 9:15 we have a vow in the middle of a psalm, while in Psalm 42–43 (a song) the plea begins at 43:1, well into the poem. (Indeed, Gunkel himself noted that the vocative and plea that typically begin a complaint/plea do occur, albeit “far less frequently in other positions,” a circumstance that vitiates his claim in his commentary, p. 116; see Gunkel, Introduction, 152, and see esp. n. 13 there, in which Gunkel himself refers to Psalm 42–43.) Sigmund Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien (Amsterdam: P. Schippers, 1966), 1:148, points out that the first we can simply regard Psalm 27 as an individual complaint/plea that has an unusually long statement of trust in its first six verses. Such an overdevelopment of statement of trust is atypical of biblical psalms but hardly impossible, as the similar case of Psalm 42–43 shows. Such a development is quite typical of Akkadian psalms of plea: they often begin with invocations and statements of trust that could have been psalms of praise on their own. Thus the first nine lines (out of a total of eighteen) of the plea to Shamash in Alan Lenzi, ed., Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 197–216, read like a hymn to Shamash, but this does not mean that they are a different prayer from what follows; the hymn is a lengthy first element of the plea, at once acting as an extended vocative and an explanation for why the worshiper turns to Shamash. Similarly, the first nine lines (out of twenty-five) in the prayer to Marduk found in Lenzi, 313-25, are a well-structured hymn to Marduk (as demonstrated by Tzvi Abusch, “The Form and Meaning of a Babylonian Prayer to Marduk,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 103 [1983]), but that hymn is but a section of the longer plea psalm into which it is (Abusch shows) very well integrated at a literary-rhetorical level.

[18] It is not outside the realm of possibility that each of the two sections once existed on its own, and that an editor, noticing the elements that link them, deliberately put them together to form the single composition that is now Psalm 27. Even in that case, however, it behooves us to ask what the editor was attempting to accomplish by putting them together, and especially by putting them together in the order they now have.

[19] Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, 91.

[20] Blidstein, “T’hillim 27,” 23.

[21] Charry, Psalms 1–50, 139.

[22] In ancient Hebrew, the verb ב.ק.ר does not mean to visit or to come regularly to a particular place; that meaning of the verb develops only in modern Hebrew. Rather, in biblical, Qumran, and rabbinic Hebrew, this verb has a range of meanings relating to “carrying out important tasks.” It can mean “to examine, to check,” especially to examine sacrificial offerings so as to ensure that they are ritually appropriate. It can also mean “to be in charge, to take care of.” Thus in the Dead Sea Scrolls the מבקר is the official in charge of the community. In rabbinic Hebrew, the sense of “take care of” appears in reference to the sick in the well-known phrase, ביקור חולים. In modern Jewish parlance, this phrase is used to refer to visiting the sick, an ethically commendable action that generally involves dropping by to cheer up a sick person. But in ancient times, when there were no hospitals and few physicians, ביקור חולים had a different meaning: it denoted examining and taking of sick people, attending to their needs in the ways that medical professionals (especially nurses) and hospital staff members do today. Neighbors and relatives who performed the act of ביקור חולים in antiquity were not just coming over to chat. They fed and bathed the patient, applied ointments and salves to their sores, or prepared medicinal herbs for them. In modern Hebrew, the meaning of the verb לבקר extends much further, to include social visits, tourism, and vacations (one can מבקר Disney World, for example, without providing medicine for Micky Mouse or drugs for Donald Duck). This broader sense of the verb developed out of the much more specific meaning of the phrase in older forms of Hebrew. Thus, contrary to the NJPS translation (which renders our phrase, “to frequent His temple”), the worshiper in our verse is not asking to be able to stop in at the temple on frequent occasions. The worshiper wants to some responsibility that will keep him there permanently.

[23] Editor’s note: For an exploration of a similar theme in Jeremiah, see Andrea Weiss, “Jeremiah’s Teaching of the Trees,” TheTorah.com (2018).

[24] Charry, Psalms 1–50, 141.

[25]On the importance of this theme, see James Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 50-51, 91-92.

[4] Both Rashi and ibn Ezra see the then-clause as appearing in the middle of the previous verse (vv. 12b-13a):

…כִּ֥י קָֽמוּ־בִ֥י עֵֽדֵי־שֶׁ֗֜קֶר וִיפֵ֥חַ חָמָֽס לוּלֵ֗א הֶ֭אֱמַנְתִּי לִרְא֥וֹת בְּֽטוּב־יְ-הוָ֗ה…

…False witnesses would have risen against me with unfair, violent testimony if I had not been confident that I would see YHWH’s goodness…

[6] For a similar case, see the beginning and ending of Psalms 103 and 104, where the worshiper addresses the worshiper’s own soul.

[7] Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary [New York: W. W. Norton, 2007], 94

[8] John Goldingay, Psalms 1–41 [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006], 400.

[10] For this response, see Hermann Gunkel, Die Psalmen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 112–18.

[11]See Craigie and Tate, Psalms 1–50, pp. 230-31.

[13] Blidstein, “T’hillim 27,” 22.

[15] Harris Birkeland, “Die Einheitlichkeit von Ps 27,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 51 (1933): 218.

[16] On this term, see endnote 3.

[19] Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, 91.

[20] Blidstein, “T’hillim 27,” 23.

[21] Charry, Psalms 1–50, 139.

[23] Editor’s note: For an exploration of a similar theme in Jeremiah, see Andrea Weiss, “Jeremiah’s Teaching of the Trees,” TheTorah.com (2018).

[24] Charry, Psalms 1–50, 141.

[25]On the importance of this theme, see James Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 50-51, 91-92.

Prof. Benjamin Sommer is Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Senior Fellow at the Kogod Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought of the Shalom Hartman Institute. He holds an M.A. in Bible and Ancient Near East from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Religion/Biblical Studies from the University of Chicago. Sommer is the author of Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (Yale, 2015), The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, 2009), and A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40–66 (Stanford, 1998). The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz described Sommer as “a traditionalist and yet an iconoclast – he shatters idols and prejudices in order to nurture Jewish tradition and its applicability today.”

Essays on Related Topics:

Symposium:More Responses