Psalm 32—Rendition, Poem, and Notes
"Blessed is the one whose broken trusts are mended..."
Listen to the Psalm and the poem set to music.
Rendition of Psalm 32
Blessed is the one whose broken trusts are mended,
Who obtains a covering for his failures.
Blessed is the one in whom God finds no guilt,
And in whose spirit there is no falsehood.
When I kept silent, my body wasted away;
My groans wracked me all day.
Day and night your hand pressed down upon me;
I sizzled and blackened inside your heat.
I revealed my sin to you,
And I did not hide my wrongs;
I said, “I will cast my guilt down before the Lord.”
And you took up and bore
The marks of my misbegotten pleasures.
Therefore, let all who would keep faith with you,
Lift prayers to you while you may be found;
Surely the flood will not reach him.
You are a shelter for me, a hiding place;
You watch over me in my distress;
You encircle me with your deliverance.
You say, “I will teach you to walk in my way;
I will be your counselor and will always watch over you.
Do not be like a horse or mule who have no understanding,
But must be brought about with bit or bridle.”
The sorrows of the wicked multiply,
But God’s unfailing commitment surrounds the one who trusts in him.
Be glad, people of God!
Shout for joy, you whom God has saved.
Notes on the Rendition
Note #1: More Bad Words
In the post on Psalm 51, I wrote a note about how the psalmist uses three words for bad: transgressions (pesha), iniquity (avon), and sin (khata). They appear again in Psalm 32 in the same place—right at the start.
For more on what is going on with these three words for evil, check out Psalm 51.
Note #2: My Juicy Bits Were Overturned
ESV 32:4 “For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”
Guess what, folks. Translation is often messy work. No two languages are the same and so translation inevitably involves the creative bridging of gaps. The NIV, ESV and NASB basically translate verse 4 in the same way. However, if you look at what the words actually mean in themselves, the second half of verse 4 says something like “my juicy bits were overturned.”
So what do you do?
You hold the various translations and scholarship in one hand, after all, they were made by men and women who probably know more than you do about ancient Hebrew. Perhaps they are picking up a contemporary idiom in the Hebrew? Perhaps they are following a tradition in the history of translation?
You could also turn to scholars like Robert Alter, who translated verse 4 as:
“For day and night your hand was heavy upon me.
May sap turned to summer dust.”
And, once you have done some homework, you go hunting.
Stepbible.com is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to scratch beneath the surface of the English translations to see what the Hebrew turns up.
If you type Psalm 32 into the search bar and click on the words in verse 4, you learn some interesting things.
“Strength” is the Hebrew word lashad. It occurs only two times in the Bible. The other time is in Numbers 11, when lashad is used to refer to the taste of cakes baked with oil. The more times a word is used, the more insight into its meaning we can gain from reading the context of the other passages it appears in. The fact that there are only two instances means that this word (at least in terms of biblical references) is a bit mysterious.
“Dried up” is the Hebrew word haphakh. It occurs 92 times in the Bible and literally means “to overthrow, to overturn, to transform, or to change.” It is first used in Genesis 3 to describe the movements of the cherubim with the flaming sword who guarded the way to the tree of life after Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden of Eden. When cities in the Old Testament are conquered, they are often haphakh-ed. Moses’ staff haphakhs into a serpent. The Pharaoh even haphakhs his mind. The psalmist’s mourning in Psalm 30 is haphakh-ed into dancing. Jonah was sent to Nineveh to tell them that the city would be haphakh-ed if they did not repent.
The way the Bible uses words can shed light on the meanings of the words it uses.
The Bible is its own best reference. When you survey the breadth of the way a word is used, you can begin to get a sense of what it means. Then you come back to the passage you are trying to translate, carrying your newly-found sense of the words with you and see what you can make of it (in dialogue with the other major translations).
When I put together this rendition of Psalm 32, I rendered verse 4 this way:
Day and night your hand pressed down upon me;
I sizzled and blackened inside your heat.
Is it the best translation possible? No. Nor is it intended to be.
Throughout this project, I have been calling these translations “renditions” as much as possible because in places (including this one) I am taking a lot of poetic license with the Hebrew in order to convey certain meanings. I am making a new creation that grows like a seed out of the soil of the original Hebrew. It bears a resemblance to the source out of which it grew, but also has striking differences—and it is, hopefully, beautiful in its own right.
Note #3: Jesus in Psalm 32?
ESV 32:5— “I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave (nasa) the iniquity (avon) of my sin (khata).”
Here again my rendition is a creative stretching of the Hebrew that is nevertheless based in the Hebrew. I rendered this verse as:
I said, “I will cast my guilt down before the Lord.”
And you took up and bore
The marks of my misbegotten pleasures.
The word translated as “confess” is yadah. It is used 110 times in the Bible and most often means “give thanks” but can also mean “to shoot, throw, or cast.”
“Forgave” is the Hebrew word nasa, which also means “to lift up, carry, bear, or take.”
“Iniquity” is the word avon, which means something that is marred, bent, or crooked.
“Sin” is the Hebrew word khata, meaning “to fail or miss the goal.”
Seeing all of these words next to each other, it was difficult not to read them in light of the New Testament.
The life and person of Jesus often appears in silhouette behind the words of the Psalms. It is clear from the way the gospel writers quote the Psalms in the gospels that they saw many of them as applying to, alluding to (or being fulfilled by) Jesus. Psalm 32 is not quoted in the gospels, but it easily could have been.
So I highlighted the connection to Jesus—the one who forgave sins by nasa-ing them, taking them up and bearing them himself—in my rendition. He also took up the marring, the bent-ness (avon) that sin brings, bearing those marks in the wounds on his own body.
Notes on the Poem
As Psalm 32 is about God’s grace in the face of human sin and confession, so the poem I have paired with it is also about grace.
This poem mirror’s another well-known poem, George Herbert’s Prayer (1).
I have lifted the first and last lines of Prayer (1) and plopped them down at the beginning and end of this poem. Each line in between hews close to the rhythm and sounds of Herbert’s lines, but the topic is switched from prayer to grace.
Like Herbert’s poem, this one is a dense collection of images that aren’t self-explanatory but reward careful thought. I’ll get your thinking started with a few notes on where the images are coming from. (Also, I have included Prayer (1) at the bottom of this post.)
“Rib-raising wind, noonday darkness,”
These two images, like the rest, are allusions to the Bible. In Genesis 2, God makes a man of clay and breathes into his nostrils, hence, “rib-raising wind.” Later in the gospels, Jesus reenacts this by breathing on his disciples to give them the Spirit. The noonday darkness is a reference to the sudden darkness in Jerusalem after Jesus was crucified.
“Deep heaven’s diagonal plumb,”
In C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, each planet in the solar system is ruled by an angelic being. Because the human mind can’t comprehend what these beings truly look like, they sometimes appear as pillars of light. In one scene, the main character is talking with one of these pillars of light, only it is not exactly vertical—it is tilted at an angle. Only, the more he looks at it, the more he realizes that it is actually HE that is tilted, whereas the angle is exactly in line with the plumb line of deep heaven. It appeared crooked to the human, but it was only because he himself was crooked, but the angel was perfectly upright.
“The air of a distant planet,”
This line appears often in my poetry. There is an apocryphal story that the composer Schönberg used to lean close to his piano for hours only to play a single key over and over again. When asked what he was doing, he answered, “I am feeling the air of a distant planet.” Wow. I don’t know what that means, but it sure is evocative.
For me, bringing in that line is an attempt to capture something of the transcendent in the immanent, the spiritual in the physical.
“Long watch at the wayward way, ring and robe,
Far way round and the first home,”
This is an allusion to the parable of the prodigal son, which I find to be one of the most poignant and compelling pictures of God’s care for us in the Bible. In the parable, the father sees his rebellious son coming from a long way off, indicating that he was looking for him, standing a “long watch at the wayward way.” Then the father runs to his son, embraces him, gives him his ring and robe. The son is finally home, and, perhaps, he is more fully home than he could have ever been had he not gone on his “far way round.” Compared to his older brother, certainly, he is the first home for having first left it.
Poem—Deep Heaven’s Diagonal Plumb
Grace, the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
Rib-raising wind, noonday darkness,
Raven’s food and feather and fall,
Deep heaven’s diagonal plumb,
Hound in field and fox in flight,
Storm’s summons and rebuke,
The air of a distant planet, priceless, costless,
A kind of crossing all things feel and fear
Relief, release, consolation, wonder
Farther than eye can see, heart hope, tongue tell.
Long watch at the wayward way, ring and robe,
Far way round and the first home,
Light’s long walk between stars come,
Land of spices; something understood.
Prayer (I) by George Herbert
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
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