Psalm 8—Thistledown The Wind Has Taken
Psalm 8—Thistledown The Wind Has Taken
"How bright and vast is your name in all the earth!"
Rendition
O Lord, our Lord,
How bright and vast is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the sky and stars and heavenly heights.
Out of the mouths of children and infants,
You have made a fortress against those who would lay siege,
To make the enemy and avenger cease.
When I consider your heavens,
The things even your fingers have done,
The moon and the stars which you have set in place,
I wonder: “What are humans that you remember us?
And the son of man that you care for, seek, and watch over him?”
Yet you have made him a little lesser than the beings of the heavenly realm,
And crowned him with glory and splendor.
You have given him rule over the works of your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen
And also the beasts of the field,
The birds of the sky and the fish of the sea,
And all things that pass along the paths of the sea.
O Lord, our Lord,
How bright and vast is your name in all the earth!
Notes on the Rendition
Note #1: “Majestic” or “Bright and Vast”?
ESV 8:1 “O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic (addir) is your name in all the earth!
The Hebrew word addir occurs 25 times in the Bible and means “great, vast, noble, mighty, or excellent.” It is used to refer to the sea (Exo 15:10), foreign gods (1 Sam 4:8), kings (Ps 136:18), giant trees (Eze 17:23), and, as in Psalm 8, God.
The ESV translates the word addir as “majestic,” but that word seemed too archaic to keep. It isn’t a word we often use anymore. I rendered addir as “bright and vast” in order to evoke a greatness that not only refers to physical size (as with a giant tree) but also with a sense of glory and grandeur (as with a king).
Note #2: Why Are There Three Heavens?
ESV 8:2 “You have set your glory above the heavens (shamayim).”
As with reading any ancient literature, we should be careful not to simply import our modern meanings into the text.
When most people think of the word “heaven” they think of where you go when you die, a place like an eternal church service in the sky, but that is very different than the shamayim of the Bible.
In the Bible, the heavens, or shamayim, has three tiers. It is (1) the place where the birds are, the immediate sky (Gen 1:26, Deut 5:8, Job 12:7), (2) the place of the planets and stars (Gen 1:15, 15:5, Ps 8:3), and also (3) the place of God’s abode, an invisible dimension where God dwells and into which we catch glimpses throughout the Bible (Gen 28:12-17, Ps 11:4, 2 Kings 2:11, 2 Cor 2:12).
[Sidenote: Perhaps Paul was drawing on this understanding of the heavens in 2 Corinthians 12:2, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven” when he referred to his own vision of the invisible realm?]
Note #3: More Complex Than “Care”
ESV 8:4 “What is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care (paqad) for him?”
The word translated “care” is paqad, but it means a whole lot more than just “care.” It occurs in the Bible 269 times and is often translated as “to reckon,” but also means:
“To visit,” as in Gen 21:1 “The Lord visited (paqad) Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised.” This is when she is finally able to conceive Isaac.
“To muster or number,” as in the censuses of the tribes in the book of Numbers.
“To commit or give,” as in Psalm 31:5 “Into your hand I commit (paqad) my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord faithful God.” This was also among Jesus’s last words from the cross (Luke 23:46).
Or “To seek,” in prayer as in Isaiah 26:16 “O Lord, in distress they sought (paqad) you; they poured out a whispered prayer…”
I rendered it this way in order to capture more of the full breadth, the intimacy, and the tenacity of God’s care contained in the word paqad:
I wonder: “What are humans that you remember us?
And the son of man that you care for, seek, and watch over him?”
Note #4: Who Are The Elohim?
ESV 8:5 “Yet you have made him a little lower than other heavenly beings (elohim)
and crowned him with glory and honor.”
Elohim appears 2,247 times in the Bible and is a plural word that refers to both the one ruling God, Yahweh, and the divine council of spiritual beings (both good and evil) whom he uses as secondary powers to rule the earth. (For more on this, read Mike Heiser’s The Unseen Realm. Wow.)
Consider this verse from Psalm 82:1
“God (Elohim) has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods (elohim) he holds judgment.”
Clearly, there is something more interesting going on here than just translating elohim as “angels,” as it is most commonly translated in Psalm 8.
Poem—Thistledown The Wind Has Taken
January in England is weeks of rain.
The snowdrops writhe underfoot
And I think about what is real.
O Lord, my Lord,
How bright and vast is your name in all the earth!
When I look at the work of your hands
I see how everything is poised
At the start of its becoming.
Fat mat tongues push up from chill soil
Like a rising from the dead.
Overhead wild and unseen singers in the trees
Chorus and break cover,
As if every leaf became a bird at once.
The wind blows from another land
And the clouds go cartwheeling by.
What am I that you remember me?
Yet you have made me haunted and hallowed,
Branded, bent, and fallow;
Lattice of heartstring and sinew,
A long and weary marionette;
Betrothed of hope
And harlot to the mirror’s glances;
Hawk above, snake below,
Mouse afield and running.
You have given me the terrifying dominion,
Like an ancient king returning from disaster
At night, alone, at cock’s crow
Along the skull’s way, burdened and slipping back,
The sum of things I used things for.
I am thistledown the wind has taken,
Yet the lives of stars are nothing to me.
And you have put all things under my feet forever.
But today is only January in England
Where snowdrops writhe,
And all that is real has come to a point.
O Lord, my Lord,
How bright and vast is your name in all the earth!
Notes on the Poem
I tried to hold on to the format and flow of the Psalm as I wrote the poem. The Psalm moves from a meditation on God’s majesty as revealed in creation to the reality of human dominion over that creation. In the poem, I followed the path of that logic and tried to expand on it.
The first stanza was written years ago as I walked around the grounds at English L’Abri and thought about the snowdrops that come up there every year in January. It was the way they recurred every year, with new flowers rising from old bulbs, that made me think of the way we humans come to know and experience what is real. All our meanings start out thin and grow thicker over time as we grow more into the fullness of God’s thick reality.
The line “snowdrops writhe underfoot” is from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and was also written about this part of England.
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?-T. S. Eliot. The Four Quartets
I brought in images of Jesus in the next lines:
You have given me the terrifying dominion,
Like an ancient king returning from disaster
At night, alone, at cock’s crow
Along the skull’s way, burdened and slipping back,
The sum of things I used things for.
If Jesus is the True Human, (and is often the figure “standing behind” the particulars of many of the Psalms) then Psalm 8 can be rightly tied to him. We are given dominion because we are made in God’s image. Humanity was made to rule creation as God’s viceroys, spreading the peace, order, and flourishing of the Garden across creation. But Jesus is the truest and fullest expression of the image of God and the apogee of what it means to be human. He is really the one who was “given the terrifying dominion,” but in a world gone wrong, it led him to the cross “at night, alone, at cock’s crow/along the skull’s way, burdened, and slipping back”.
I meant there to be a juxtaposition between the “you” in the poem, the “I” in the Psalm, and Jesus. It is this very juxtaposition that poetry is so good at fostering, not to make a neat and tidy picture, but to just let the ideas sit on top of one another and resonate, thickening the meaning of each one the more you read the poem.
Now, before you close the page, read the poem again. If you’ve only read it once, you haven’t read it at all.
[Photo by Bartek Garbowicz on Unsplash]
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