Psalm 84—The House of Many Rooms

"Lord, my heart is bound to your dwelling place."

Jul 15, 2021

Introduction to Psalm 84

Psalm 84 is about, among many other things, God’s temple, the place where he dwells. Historically, it is about a longing for the temple in Jerusalem. Eschatologically, it is about a longing to dwell with God forever—a wish fulfilled at the end of Revelation.

ESV Revelation 21:3— “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold the dwelling place of God is with man.
He will dwell with them, and they will be his people and God himself will be with
them as their God.’”

Rendition of Psalm 84

Lord, my heart is bound to your dwelling place.
It is where I belong and long for.
When I end, when I am finished, when I am spent,
I will be safe inside the home and holy place of God.
My heart and flesh shout for joy
To the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home
And the swallow a nest for herself,
Where she may lay her young,
At your altar, O Lord of Hosts,
My king and my God.
Everyone who makes their home in your house is blessed;
Like birdsong, their mouths are filled with praise.

Blessed are those for whom you are their only power,
In whose heart are the pathways to Zion.
As they pass through the wasteland,
Fountains burst forth
And the early rain wraps the land in blessing.
They walk from strength to strength,
As each one appears before God in Zion.

O God, hear my prayer!
Listen, O God of Jacob.
You are our shield;
Look on the face of your anointed.

A day in your courts is filled with more goodness,
Than a thousand days elsewhere.
I would rather serve at the doors of the house of God,
Than heap up riches in the wilderness with the wicked.
For the Lord God is a sun and a shield;
He is the one who gives grace and glory.
He withholds no goodness
From those who walk with him.
O God,
Blessed is the one who trusts in you.

Notes on the Rendition

Note #1: The Beloved Home

ESV: 84:1 “How lovely is your dwelling place.”

Lovely is the Hebrew word “yadid.” It is used only 7 times in the Bible and this is the only time it is used to refer to a place, not a person. When yadid refers to a person, it is translated as “beloved one.”

But how should yadid be translated when it is used to refer to a place?

The ESV translates it as “lovely,” but something is missing from that word. Flowers are lovely, but you aren’t in love with them. A cup of coffee in the morning can be lovely, but it can’t be your beloved. However, the house of the Lord can be one’s beloved somehow. This is exactly what the psalmist seems to be saying: that the Lord’s dwelling place is a beloved place, the place of his longing.

In order to capture the sense that the temple is the home of the psalmist’s heart, I rendered it like this:

Lord, my heart is bound to your dwelling place.
It is where I belong and long for.

Note #2: What is a “Soul”?

ESV 84:1 “My soul longs, yes faints
for the courts of the Lord;”

The word that is often translated “soul” is nephesh in Hebrew and it means something very different than what modern people think of when we think of a soul.

Literally, nephesh means “thirst” or “throat.” The meaning of nephesh is “living being” or “life”. The closest modern English comes to the sense of the word is when we use the word “soul” in reference to a group of people aboard a ship or plane, as in, “We have 70 souls on board today.”

Most modern readers have a very different understanding of what a soul is. To modern Westerners, a soul is the incorporeal part of your being, the thing that is still alive after your body dies. We tend to get sucked into the mind/body dualism that pervades the West and we find it hard to escape that false dichotomy—but it is a false one. (For more on this, read Jim Paul’s excellent book What On Earth Is Heaven?)

A “soul” in the Psalms, is not a disembodied person; it is that person’s life.

That is how you can get a clever play on words like in Psalm 63:1:

“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

The psalmist is playing with the multiple sense of the word nephesh as referring to both thirst, throat, and life.

For more on this, watch the “What Is a Soul?” video from BibleProject.

Note #3: The Courts of the Temple

ESV 84:1 “My soul longs, yes faints
for the courts of the Lord;”

Court (Hebrew chatser) is used 120 times in the Bible and it most often refers to the enclosures inside the tabernacle and temple. Remember, the temple and tabernacle were built like concentric rectangles, each layer being enclosed by curtains or walls, forming courtyards. So to long for the court of the Lord is to long to be in his presence inside the walls of the temple.

In order to emphasize that the Psalm has the temple in view, I have taken a bit of liberty with the literal translation and rendered these verses like this:

When I end, when I am finished, when I am spent,
I will be safe inside the home and holy place of God.
My heart and flesh shout for joy
To the living God.

Note #4: Why Are There Birds in the Temple?

ESV 84:3— “Even the sparrow finds a home
And the swallow a nest for herself…”

There is more going on with this verse than meets the eye. In the biblical imagination, there is a direct connection between the temple and the garden of Eden.

The garden was the first “hotspot” of God’s presence on earth and that is why the temple is decked out in garden imagery and carvings and held a “garden-ish” place in the Hebrew cultural imagination. Psalm 92 paints the picture in more detail:

ESV Psalm 92:12-14— “The righteous flourish like the palm tree
and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the Lord;
they flourish in the courts of our God.
They still bear fruit in old age;
they are ever full of sap and green.”

In Psalm 92, the righteous are compared to trees that are planted in the “house of the Lord,” the temple. Why is the temple full of trees? For the same reason that it is full of birds. Because, symbolically, it is the garden of Eden.

Notes on the Poem

This poem is set at the English L’Abri in Greatham.

I remember sitting at a table in the living room at the Manor House one morning as sunlight splashed across the old wood and I wrote these lines that have now landed in this poem:

Matins sung in sunlight on surfaces
And other masks magic wears
As it plays across the ordinary altars you have made.

Magic wears many masks in the Manor and it was the place I learned how great and vast a beauty can be found in the tiny, the ordinary, and the everyday. The house isn’t the temple, but it is a temple in the sense that God can be found everywhere in his creation if you have eyes to see—and many have had their eyes opened to that reality at the Manor.

In the Spring, the house martins return and circle around the house all day all Summer long. In the Winter, they fly hundreds of miles South—as far as Africa—only to return by some unknown instinctive pull to the same nest beneath the same eaves in the same corner of the Manor year after year.

I combined the lines from the Psalm about the birds in the temple with the birds in the Manor:

Even the sparrow finds a home,
And the house martin a nest
As she follows the long path inside herself
Back to the place she belongs and longs for.

The poem ends with an allusion to Luke 24 when the two disciples meet the resurrected Jesus on their walk to Emmaus but do not recognize him at first. He asks them coy and ironic questions during their walk and then completely overturns their categories by showing them how all of the Bible points to himself. Revelation can be like that. It can start with questions that, like the light at dawn, slowly marching across the floor until the whole room is illuminated.

I wrote these lines thinking of that reality:

There are questions that come like light
Across the floor at dawn
When you realize you already know
The stranger walking next to you.

Enough explanation. Here is the poem.

Poem—The House of Many Rooms

Let me show you our customs here.
There is tea at 11:00 and 4:30,
There are the spines of books and milk in coffee,
Voices heard from other rooms,
Cool cotton sheets and birds at all hours,
Old wood without memory,
Matins sung in sunlight on surfaces
And other masks magic wears
As it plays across the ordinary altars you have made.
There is a welcome, again—
Even the sparrow finds a home,
And the house martin a nest
As she follows the long path inside herself
Back to the place she belongs and longs for.
There is the temple, which was always only
Your two cupped hands.
There are gossamer flung prayers
That flash to the vast invisible.
There is the wind from before time
That makes flesh of fleshless.
There are questions that come like light
Across the floor at dawn
When you realize you already know
The stranger walking next to you.
There is the slim wafer of the present
Open your mouth
Body of christ
Amen

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