Different Troubles, One Recurring Cry

The fifth and last book of the Psalter opens with the same words as Psalm 106:1, so the seam between the books hardly shows. Psalm 106 ended with a scattered people asking, “gather us from among the heathen”; the next three verses describe a people who have been gathered.

“The redeemed of the LORD” is Isaiah’s phrase for returning exiles (Isaiah 35:9–10, 62:12). “Say so” tells them to speak up. “The enemy” is tsar, which also means distress, the same word as the “trouble” the refrains will cry out in, so “the hand of the enemy” can be heard as the grip of hardship.

The Hebrew for the last direction is miyyam, “from the sea”, which normally means west. Since west is already listed, the King James renders it “south”. Isaiah 43:5–6 has God call the scattered from east and west and tell the north, “Give up”, and the south, “Keep not back.”

“A solitary way” is literally “a wasteland of a road”, a track through empty country, or country with no track at all. “A city to dwell in” is ir moshav, an inhabited town with water and walls. What they lack is a place where people live.

“Fainted” is from ataf, to grow weak or be wrapped round, the word Jonah uses inside the fish: “When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD” (Jonah 2:7). Hunger and thirst come together, as they do for travellers who have lost the road.

The first of four cries. “Cried” is tsa’aq, the outcry of the oppressed, the verb of Israel at the Red Sea (Exodus 14:10). “Distresses” is metsuqot, narrow places, tight straits, the opposite of the broad open space that deliverance usually means in Hebrew.

“The right way” is derekh yesharah, a straight road instead of the circles of wandering. Ezra fasted by the river Ahava before leading exiles back from Babylon “to seek of him a right way for us” (Ezra 8:21), using the same phrase.

The first praise refrain. The Hebrew is shorter than the King James: “Let them give thanks to the LORD for his chesed”, his loyal love, which the translators render “goodness”. “They” are the rescued travellers themselves, who are to thank him for what he did for the “children of men”, human beings in general.

“Longing” is shoqeqah, restless, parched, running to and fro, the word Isaiah 29:8 uses for a thirsty man who dreams he drinks and wakes up dry. Mary’s song picks up the second half: “He hath filled the hungry with good things” (Luke 1:53).

“Shadow of death” is tsalmavet, deep darkness, the word of Psalm 23:4. Isaiah 42:7 speaks of bringing “out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house”. “Affliction and iron” pairs the suffering with the fetters that cause it.

“Contemned” is na’ats, to spurn. This is the only place in the psalm where God is called “the most High”, Elyon, raising the stakes of what was spurned. 2 Chronicles 36:16 gives the same reason for the exile: they “mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words”.

“Labour” is amal, hard toil, the forced work of prisoners. “None to help” is the lament of Lamentations 1:7 over captured Jerusalem: “her people fell into the hand of the enemy, and none did help her”. They fall where no hand is held out to lift them.

The second cry. “Cried” is spelled za’aq here, a variant form of the tsa’aq of verse 6, with the same meaning. “Saved” is hoshi’a, a different verb from verse 6’s “delivered”, the root of the name Joshua. The prisoners who rebelled get the same hearing as the lost travellers.

Jeremiah 30:8 promises of Jacob’s captivity, “I will break his yoke from off thy neck, and will burst thy bonds.” “In sunder” means apart, in pieces. Darkness and the shadow of death from verse 10 are repeated so the rescue answers the prison point for point.

The second praise refrain, word for word the same as the first. Here chesed is being thanked for by people who, as verse 11 says, rebelled and spurned counsel. The same loyal love is given to the guilty as to the merely lost.

The line is almost identical to God’s promise to Cyrus in Isaiah 45:2: “I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron.” City gates were plated with bronze and barred with iron beams, the strongest locks the ancient world had.

“Fools” is evilim, the morally foolish of Proverbs, who despise instruction (Proverbs 1:7). Some modern versions change one letter to read “sick” instead, which fits the next verse. The Hebrew as it stands ties this sickness to the sufferers’ own sins, though the psalm does not say every illness comes that way.

Elihu describes the same stage of illness in Job 33:20: “his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty meat”, and then speaks of a messenger who brings healing. “Gates of death” is the phrase God uses to Job: “Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?” (Job 38:17).

The third cry. The King James puts this refrain in the present tense, as it does the fourth, though the Hebrew verb form is the same in all four; the variation is the translators’. A man too sick to eat can still cry, and the cry is all that is required.

The word is sent like a messenger, as in Psalm 147:15, “his word runneth very swiftly”. “Destructions” is shechitot, pits, the graves they were sliding toward. No physician and no remedy are mentioned: the word itself heals.

The third praise refrain. Neither the travellers, the prisoners, the sick nor the sailors are ever identified as Israelites; the refrain speaks of “the children of men”, bene adam. The psalm sets the rescues on a human scale, not a national one.

The thank offering, zevach todah, had to be eaten on the day it was offered (Leviticus 7:15), which meant inviting family and neighbours to share the meat. Thanksgiving was a meal as well as a sacrifice, with the healed person telling the table what had happened.

In the Hebrew text scribes set inverted letters nun around this section of the psalm, a mark the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 17b) discusses and whose purpose is still debated. Ships go “down” to the sea because the shore lies below the land. Israel’s few seagoing ventures included Solomon’s fleet from Ezion-geber (1 Kings 9:26).

“The deep” is metsulah, the deep sea, the word Jonah uses in his prayer: “thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas” (Jonah 2:3). Sailors see what landsmen never do, including the wonders that could drown them.

“Commandeth” is literally “he said”: God speaks and the wind stands up. Jonah 1:4 has the same order of events: “the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest.” “Stormy wind” is ruach se’arah, a gale.

“Melted” is the verb of Exodus 15:15, “all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away”, used for courage dissolving. The ship climbs “to the heaven” and falls to the tehomot, the depths, and the stomach goes with it.

“At their wits’ end” is literally “all their wisdom is swallowed up”. Chokhmah, wisdom, is also the word for a craftsman’s skill (Exodus 28:3), and Ezekiel 27:8 calls the pilots of Tyre its “wise men”. The storm has swallowed their seamanship.

The fourth cry. The rescue verb this time is hotsi, to bring out, the exodus verb: “I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt.” The rescue verbs shift from refrain to refrain: delivered, saved, saved, and now brought out.

“Calm” is demamah, a whispering stillness, the word in “a still small voice”, qol demamah daqqah, at Horeb (1 Kings 19:12). The waves are “still”, hushed, as if the sea had been told to be quiet.

“Haven” is machoz, a word found only here, related to an Akkadian word for a harbour town or trading place. Sailors who went to sea on business are brought to the port they were aiming for. “Quiet” describes the water as much as the men.

The fourth and last praise refrain. The sailors are the only group of the four given no fault at all; their danger comes from their work, not their wrongdoing. After this verse the refrains stop and the psalm changes form.

“The assembly of the elders” is the council that sat at the city gate, as the elders of Bethlehem sat when Boaz redeemed Ruth (Ruth 4:1–2). A sailor’s rescue is to be reported not only in worship but before the town’s governing men.

Isaiah 50:2 uses the same reversal as a threat: “I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness.” Isaiah 42:15 has, “I will make the rivers islands, and I will dry up the pools.” The God who rescues from water can also take it away.

“Barrenness” is melechah, salt land. The plain of Sodom was “well watered every where... even as the garden of the LORD” (Genesis 13:10) before it was overthrown, and Deuteronomy 29:23 describes such a land as “brimstone, and salt, and burning”.

Isaiah 41:18 is nearly identical: “I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.” “Standing water” is agam, a pool or pond, the reverse of verse 33 set in the same words.

In Psalm 105:44 Israel inherited “the labour of the people”, cities they did not build. Here the hungry are settled on reclaimed ground and prepare the city themselves. “Maketh... to dwell” is the root of moshav, so the dwelling the wanderers of verse 4 lacked is now built by hand.

Isaiah 65:21 promises exactly this: “they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.” Jeremiah told the exiles in Babylon to do the same (Jeremiah 29:5). “Fruits of increase” is the yield of a harvest brought in.

“Multiplied greatly” is the blessing of Genesis 1:28 and the growth of Israel in Egypt (Exodus 1:7). Deuteronomy 7:14 promised that there would be no barrenness “among you, or among your cattle”. Livestock was wealth, and a herd that did not shrink was security.

“Minished” is an old form of diminished. The subject is unclear: it may be the same settlers falling on hard times, or, as many modern translations take it, the oppressors whose fall verse 40 then describes. Three nouns pile up: restraint, evil and grief.

The verse is made of two lines from Job 12: “He poureth contempt upon princes” (12:21) and “causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way” (12:24). Princes end up in the same pathless waste the lost travellers of verse 4 were rescued from.

Hannah sang that God “raiseth up the poor out of the dust... to set them among princes” (1 Samuel 2:8). “Setteth... on high” means lifts out of reach of harm. Job 21:11 speaks of households whose children run out “like a flock”, a picture of a crowded family.

Two lines of Job again: “The righteous see it, and are glad” (Job 22:19) and “iniquity stoppeth her mouth” (Job 5:16). Wickedness is pictured as a woman silenced mid-boast, with nothing more to say.

The book of Hosea ends almost the same way: “Who is wise, and he shall understand these things?” (Hosea 14:9). “Lovingkindness” is plural in Hebrew, chasdei, the mercies, one for each of the rescues just described. “Observe” is shamar, to watch carefully and keep.