An Invitation to Blame God
An Exegesis of Psalm 13
1. Introduction
Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once wrote, “I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.” In Psalm 13, we encounter a similar approach to the divine. With raw candor, the psalmist expresses anger and despair to God, who is held responsible for the psalmist’s desperate situation. Instead of being punished for putting God on trial, the psalmist ends up experiencing God’s salvation. Like Wiesel, the psalmist appears to grow closer to God as a result of lament and protest. In delving into Psalm 13, we will consider the importance of recovering lament in Christian prayer and how such an approach to the divine may be affirmed and even accentuated by Christ and the Cross.
2. Translation
1 To the music director: a Davidic Psalm
2 How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me completely?
How long will you hide your face from me?
3 How long must I keep having arguments with myself?
Must I carry such a heavy heart all day?
How long will my enemy rise against me?
4 Notice – Answer me, Yahweh! My God!
Shed light on my dying eyes
Or else I will slip into death,
5 And my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I am dropped.
6 But I, in your covenant love, I have trusted,
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing to Yahweh for he is good to me.
3. Comments on Translation
Verse 1[1]: Occurring 72 times throughout the Psalter, the term l’ David) includes the preposition l, which can mean “to” (thus, implying ownership) or “by” (implying authorship), and the name dwd, which can mean King David or any king of the line of David.[2] In translating the word as “Davidic” I refer to what Anderson calls “the most likely explanation”: most of the Psalms including the term dwdl should be understood as part of a collection of Davidic songs. Although this collection may have included songs written by David himself, we cannot ascertain which ones.[3] The term l’ David fails to imply David’s authorship since David clearly did not compose some Psalms that bear the term.[4] So we cannot know for sure the identity or the gender of the composer of Psalm 13. Goldingay suggests that some psalmists were female, declaring, “Outside the Psalms many of the main prayer-composers of the Old Testament are women (e.g. Exodus 15:21, Judges 5:1, 1 Samuel 2:1), so maybe inside the psalms, too.”[5] Yet whenever a psalmist uses a first person participle, it is always masculine. Therefore, I will refer to the author of Psalm 13 in a general sense using a masculine pronoun.
Verse 2a: Although the RSV translates the term jxn as “forever” and BDB translates it as “perpetuity,” A. A. Anderson suggests the word “probably means ‘utterly,’”[6] thus implying a more severe rejection as opposed to a longstanding forgetfulness. Kraus says the word “designates the impatience of waiting and of lamenting.”[7] I prefer “completely” because then the question becomes, “Will you let me die?” since God’s complete absence is death. How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me completely?
Verse 3a: Literally meaning, “How long shall I go on placing counsels in my soul?” A. A. Anderson and Kraus both point out that hxe can mean “anguish, pain,”[8] thus allowing Kraus to translate the phrase as “How long am I to carry sorrows about in my soul?”[9] However, I prefer the image of the psalmist setting up counsels and meetings within his soul (self, psyche, vpn), trying to figure out why God has abandoned him. He comes to no conclusions, finds no answers and God is still gone. He is in an argument with himself, thus displaying how he is not only disconnected from God, but also disconnected from himself. As Kraus explains, “twxe deals with the self-examining, self-condemning, and scrupulous considerations that arise in the experience of abandonment by God and worsen the suffering immeasurably.”[10] How long must I keep having arguments with myself?
Verse 3b: The Septuagint adds hlylw (‘and night’), but I think carrying a heavy heart all day is enough suffering for the psalmist. Although using the word “heavy” to describe the heart is risky when one considers the Hebrew link between the words “heavy” and “glory” (dbk), I use it with the contemporary idiom in mind: heavy heart = heart full of sorrows. Must I carry such a heavy heart all day?
Verse 3c: yle ybya .wry hna-de: Though the verse is often translated, “How long will my enemy be exalted over me?” I prefer Kraus’ translation: “How long will my enemy rise against me?”[11] Kraus communicates the real threat of the enemy and eliminates the less preferred interpretation of the psalmist harboring jealousy towards an enemy’s exaltation. The psalmist is isolated and in grave jeopardy and sick unto death; far past merely being jealous. He has expanded the problem of his own heart and his very life, and lays them before Yahweh with the implication that it is Yahweh’s doing, Yahweh’s responsibility, and Yahweh’s loss and defeat and shame if he will still be left abandoned to emptiness and slaughter. How long will my enemy rise against me?
Verse 4a: yhla hwhy ynne hfybh: Here, “God is implored to consider the plight of his servant, instead of turning his face away from the afflicted man.”[12] The psalmist turns from the lament of his plight to request for help, and starts with a mild request for God to just “notice” him; so mild a request that he might even be speaking ironically: “You know, it might be nice if you took a bit of notice of your covenant partner in his deep distress.” But he quickly moves from standard request to the stronger imperative for God to “answer” him, to respond specifically to the deep needs of his desperate dilemma. Notice—Answer me, Yahweh! My God!
Verse 4b: ynye hryah: I translate the Hiphil Imperative 2nd Masculine Singular verb hryah from the root rwa as “Shed light” rather than “Lighten” because the psalmist is pleading for life, not levity. Although the word “dying” is not in the text as a description of the eyes, I add it to suggest that the eyes are synecdoche. A. A. Anderson explains, “A man’s eyes can be regarded as a ‘barometer’ of vitality. Grief, illness and other troubles dim a man’s eyes, while the restoration of his health, strength or fortunes makes the eyes bright.”[13] Shed light on my dying eyes!
Verse 4c: twmh ,vya-,p: The Hebrew literally means, “Lest I sleep the death.” Anderson explains that sleep is often used metaphorically in the Old Testament to describe death.[14] By translating the phrase as “Or else I will slip into death” I imply the sleep metaphor (as one ‘slips’ away into sleep) along with the precariousness of the psalmist’s situation (as trembling— fwma—a word we will encounter in the next verse—before an abyss, about to slip). Or else I will slip into death.
Verse 5b: fwma yk wlygy yrx: Here, according to Robert Alter, the enemies are “exulting as they behold the speaker tottering, about to topple.”[15] The RSV and most other translations read, “My foes will rejoice because I am shaken” yet A. A. Anderson explains that ‘shaken’ “may be a euphemistic expression for dying.”[16] In remaining faithful to the metaphor and image, I chose the word “dropped,” which also implies a failure on God’s part to keep the psalmist alive. And my foes will rejoice when I am dropped.
Verse 6a: ytjfb ]dsjb ynaw: Robert Alter points out here that “in the Hebrew, all the previous occurrences of ‘I’ and ‘me’ are by way of suffixes and prefixes in declined or conjugated forms, and this is the sole instance of the pronoun proper.”[17] The emphasis of the “I” is made in the above translation by merely repeating the word. In terms of syntax, the above translation of 6a is virtually identical to the original Hebrew. Kraus similarly translates it as, “Yet I—I trust in your goodwill.”[18] dsj is translated as “covenant loyalty”[19] of “loyal love”[20] or, as I prefer, “covenant love.” But I, in your covenant love, I have trusted.
Verse 6b: ]tewvyb ybl lgy: A. A. Anderson suggests the verse read, “‘Let my heart rejoice’…‘let me sing.’”[21] However, I prefer, along with Kraus, interpreting the Qal Imperfect 3rd Masculine Singular verbs in the present tense rather than in the Jussive. And my heart rejoices in your salvation.
4. Genre, Form, Order, Number
Within the first five books of the Psalter and among the Davidic Psalms, Psalm 13 behaves as an individual lament. In fact, Gunkel calls the Psalm, “the model ‘lament of the individual’…, in which the individual components of the genre step forth most clearly.”[22] However, Kraus wants to place the psalm in the “form group, prayer songs” because of the “expression of trust…and…thanksgiving” in verse 6.[23]
The meter of the poem is “unsettled.”[24] In verses 2 and 4 (1 and 3 of the English Bible), we see a tetrameter at work (four beats per line) with both iambic and anapestic beats. In verse 6 (5), we see a trimeter and the half verses in 3 (2) and 6 (5) are back to the tetrameter. Though later editors may have attempted to recover or create a meter, “all emendations ‘for the sake of the meter,’” Kraus clarifies, “remain unsatisfactory patchwork.”[25]
However, the psalm is certainly not free from poetic activity. The fourfold ad-anah (‘how long?’) questions are more than just repetition or prostactic paronomasia (repetitive play on words). According to Robert Alter, the psalm uses “anaphora, which is to say, the rhetorically emphatic reiteration of a single word or brief phrase.”[26] In anaphora, “the repeated words or phrase…never mean exactly the same thing twice…in each occurrence it takes on a certain coloration from the surrounding semantic material and from its position in the series.”[27] Alter proposes that, in Psalm 13, the anaphoric ad-anah phrases reveal “an ascent on a scale of intensity, the note of desperate urgency pitched slightly higher with each repetition.” God is first forgetting the speaker. Then, more “personally and concretely,” God’s face is hidden from the speaker. Then, growing in yet more intensity, the speaker “flounders devising futile schemes…in the constant grip of grief.”[28] And then, on top of all of this, “his enemy is winning out against him.” At the climax of the anaphora, the psalm then shifts to petition.
The petition is reinforced with the word “‘lest,’ which stresses the critical precariousness of the present condition.”[29] God must save or else the psalmist will die and then comes “the white-hot point to which the magnifying glass of the structure of intensification has concentrated the assertions of desperate need.”[30]
Here, we see Psalm 13 as a bifid psalm, difficult to categorize as merely a lament due to the potent praise and thanksgiving in the final verse.
Westermann comments on this dramatic shift from petition to praise within the individual lament genre by highlighting “an unequivocal mark”: “At the place where the change occurs, almost all of these Psalms contain a waw adversative, ‘But thou O God…,’ or ‘But I…’”[31]
“The waw adversative,” Westermann elaborates, “ indicates that here something else begins. This is especially clear when these clauses with ‘but’ follow the lament. They indicate a transition from lamentation to another mode of speech, the confession of trust or the assurance of being heard.”[32]
5. Structure and Outline
Psalm 13 is composed of an address / invocation (v. 2a) followed by a three-part complaint about trouble with God, self and others (v. 2b –3)[33]. The Psalm then becomes a three-part petition about God, self and others (v. 4-5), climaxing with the Waw Adversative in verse 6a and then concluding with praise and thanksgiving (v. 6). [34]
I. Address / Invocation (v. 2a)
How long, Yahweh?
II. Complaint (v. 2b – 3)
A. Trouble with God
Will you forget me completely?
How long will you hide your face from me?
- Trouble with Self—increasing in anxiety
How long must I keep having arguments with myself?
Must I carry such a heavy heart all day?
C. Trouble with Others—on the brink of death
How will my enemy rise against me?
III. Petition (v. 4-5)
A. About God
Notice Answer me, Yahweh! My God!
Shed light on my dying eyes
B. About Self
Or else I will slip into death
C. About Others
And my enemy will way, “I have overcome him”
And my foes will rejoice when I am dropped…
IV. But I…Praise (v. 6)
Waw Adversative; Turning Point
A. Praise / Thanksgiving / Resolution
In your covenant love,
I have trusted
And my heart rejoices in your salvation
I will sing to Yahweh
For he is good to me.
6. Commentary
I. Address / Invocation (v. 2a) How long, Yahweh?
The laconic invocation of Psalm 13 has “no time for convention or nicety.”[35] The psalmist completely bypasses any laudatory introductions and plunges right into complaint. The brief initial address makes clear that this psalm is not a prayer of “interior reflection or meditative musing but direct address.”[36]
The only real address or invocation in the psalm is the use of God’s name after the first “How long?” Yet using God’s name carries immense weight and significance within itself. The psalm uses “the name that God has given the people of God as self-revelation…[thus] the name bestows the possibility and promise of prayer.”[37] By giving God’s name, God invites the faithful to reach out and pray.
“Nothing in the troubles of life,” Mays explains, “and the experience of the absence of God cancels the privilege of faith to speak directly to God in confidence of being heard. Prayer arises because God has first taken the initiative to call forth faith.”[38] The psalmist could not pray to this God if this God had not first given the psalmist the name (Yahweh), by which God is to be addressed and by which faith is called forth.
Also, the name of God carries with it God’s reputation as well: God’s past salvation and even more, God’s covenant commitment. The psalmist appeals to God’s reputation and commitment by using the name. “The speaker,” Brueggemann writes, “establishes the right to expect some action from God; in so doing the speaker does not so much flatter the deity as appeal to previous mutual commitments, which are now recalled and invoked.”[39]
II. Complaint (v. 2b-3)
The Psalmist’s complaint revolves primarily around three major factors: “trouble with God, with self and with others.”[40] Westermann claims that all lament psalms carry this threefold dilemma: “God, the one who laments, and the enemy…these three parts or dimensions alone constitute the lament as complete.”[41] No psalmist stands in a vacuum, unaffected by others. The psalmist’s complaint is always intimately linked with the stimuli that is the surrounding community. “For the one who utters the lament is never an isolated individual standing alone; the lamenter is always a member of a group.”[42] So “the agenda of distress,” Mays says, “is threefold: theological, personal, and social.”[43]
A. Trouble with God: Will you forget me completely? How long will you hide your face from me?: The first dilemma put forth by the psalmist is theological, involving the apparent absence of God. Brueggemann suggests that the “How long?” questions are not so much questions as they are “statements that describe a situation of disorientation and intend to fix the blame firmly on Yahweh.”[44] Even before the psalmist explains the rest of his problems to Yahweh, he wants to make it clear that it is all Yahweh’s fault. The theological problem proves not only to be one aspect of the threefold dilemma, but is, in fact, the ultimate problem, responsible for the personal and social troubles as well. All of the psalmist’s suffering, according to Brueggemann, “is because of Yahweh’s irresponsible absence, which is regarded as not only unfortunate, but unfaithful to covenant.”[45]
Initially, this sounds outlandish on the part of the psalmist to blame God for everything wrong. If I were to get in a car accident, and then blame God for it, I would certainly sound ridiculous. We might be inclined to think that the psalmist sounds comparably silly, especially if we were to discover that he brought these troubles upon himself. However, surprisingly enough, the psalm invites us to do just that: blame God!
“It is risky,” May admits, “to think of human problems too easily in terms of God’s forgetting and turning away, to involve God in real and imagined threats, but it is more dangerous for faith to consent to isolation and believe that the experience of alienation cannot be turned into prayer.”[46] The psalm suggests that it is better to blame God and pray then it is to not blame God (and perhaps blame oneself) and to not pray.
Ironically, blaming God for everything wrong can be seen as a form of praise. If God’s absence brings about such hardship, it is implied that God’s presence is full of blessing: “God is so much a God of blessing and salvation that one must speak of tribulation and terror as the absence of God.”[47]
B. Trouble with Self: How long must I keep having arguments with myself? Must I carry such a heavy heart all day?: The second stage of the trifecta of trouble is personal, involving a serious “situation of sickness.”[48] Although the sickness appears to be nearly fatal as the description in the petition indicates, the complaint describes emotional and even psychological distress.
The psalmist torments himself trying to figure out why God has left. He wonders if he has done something wrong although, as Craigie points out, “there is no confession or statement of sin to suggest that the trial was a judgment deserved.”[49] The psalmist argues with himself, perplexed and full of sorrow, yet not repentant. “The urgency of the psalmist’s plea springs from a sense of profound anxiety, not penitence.”[50]
Again, the internal anguish and confusion of the psalmist involve “the self-examining, the self-condemning, and scrupulous considerations that arise in the experience of abandonment by God and worsen the suffering immeasurably.”[51]
C. Trouble with Others: How long will my enemy rise against me?: Finally, the Psalmist addresses the social problem in asking, “How long will my enemy rise against me?” Mays interprets the enemy as “the foe of life” wearing “the mask of death.”[52] Similarly, Kraus sees the enemy as “a force that separates from God.”[53] Craigie claims that the enemy is death itself, boldly asserting, “The singular enemy is no doubt the personification of death.”[54] All interpretations view the enemy as a serious threat to life.
Although the enemy creates a social problem, the trouble still remains theological. The enemy threatens life and, therefore, encourages the psalmist’s separation from God.
III. Petition (v. 4-5)
A. About God: Notice—Answer me, Yahweh! My God!: With his God absent, his soul troubled, his heart weighed down by sorrow and his enemy towering threateningly over him, the psalmist cries out, “Pay attention!” to God. “The lament,” Brueggemann states, “leads directly and necessarily to the petition or supplication.”[55] Craigie boldly asserts, “Lament is pointless unless it culminates in prayer.”[56] Although lament may not be meaningless without petition (as one may find comfort and solace in merely sharing pain to another who listens attentively), it is appropriate here for the psalmist, on the brink of death, to demand God’s attention.
The speaker yells, “Answer me,” desiring some evidence that God is at least listening. “Any word that faith can hear as answer from God,” Mays explains, “breaks the isolation of suffering and renews the strength of hope.”[57]
By addressing God as “My God” the psalmist implies intimacy with the divine as well as solidarity with God’s people. “Just as all the children in a family each say, ‘my mother’ in an intimate and personal way without in any sense losing their sense of the family, the psalmist says, ‘my God’ as part of the people of God.”[58]
B. About Self: Shed light on my dying eyes or else I will slip into death: The request for God to “shed light on my dying eyes” reveals the psalmist’s sickness. Although some commentators suggest the sickness involved the eyes (some eye disease or malaise), most understand the eyes as synecdoche, representing the whole body and person. Calvin, assuming the psalmist to be David, writes about the eyes in this way,
To enlighten the eyes signifies the same thing in the Hebrew language as to give the breath of life, for the vigor of life appears chiefly in the eyes…In short, David confesses that unless God causes the light of life to shine upon him, he will be immediately overwhelmed with the darkness of death, and that he is already as a man without life, unless God breathe into him new vigor. And certainly our confidence of life depends on this, that although the world may threaten us with a thousand deaths, yet God is possessed of numberless means of restoring us to life.[59]
Though death appears so imminent, the speaker still believes God can throw down a lifeline. In order to encourage God to do so, the psalmist makes an “appeal to God’s reputation”[60] through a method called bargaining or motivation.
C. About Others: And my enemy will say, ‘I have overcome him’ and my foes will rejoice when I am dropped: “God, if you do not rescue me,” the speaker explains, “then you are going to look bad. My enemy knows I am associated with you. So if my enemy defeats me, then he will, indirectly, defeat you too. How can you let that be?”
“Form critics have called this ‘motivation’ (Begrundigung) or giving God reason for change.”[61] In his fearless manner, Brueggemann exposes the psalmist’s raw approach in prayer: “Not constrained to be polite[62]…[the psalmist] resort[s] to threats, intimidation, and appeals to Yahweh’s pride and vanity.”[63] And it works: “The psalm succeeds in making the problem into Yahweh’s problem, because if Yahweh’s partner be ridiculed, Yahweh is also diminished.”[64]
So the speaker hurls the sickness, the pain, the confusion, and the threat of the enemy all at this absent God. It appears as though the enemies will soon be rejoicing before the psalmist’s corpse.
IV. But I…Praise (v. 6): But I, in your covenant love, I have trusted and my heart rejoices in your salvation I will sing to Yahweh for he is good to me.
There are numerous suggestions as to what occurs in between verses 5 (4) and 6 (5). The most widely accepted idea is that a salvation oracle has spoken with the psalmist.[65] Others suggest that God spoke to the psalmist, most likely through a priest.[66]
A. A. Anderson points out that “it has been argued that the change is the result of a psychological process or due to actual healing.”[67] Westermann sides with the “oracle of salvation” camp, suggesting that the oracle be “pictured in the middle of the Psalm.”[68]
Brueggemann, on the other hand, insists that, after verse 5 (4), “the psalmist waits. It is a long wait after verse 5 (4), a wait in the darkness of death, a wait in disorientation, a waiting ‘until hell freezes over.’ There must be such a wait, perhaps a long wait, because there is no other court of appeal. One must simply wait here until there is a response.”[69] I lean mostly towards Brueggemann’s interpretation, mostly because it coincides with the theme of “waiting on the Lord” which saturates the Psalms.
“Then—we do not know how long the wait is—things are changed. When the psalmist speaks again, he is on the way to a new orientation.”[70] The Qal perfect tense “I have trusted” is striking. Brueggemann uses this completed tense in order to reinforce his idea that the psalmist experienced a period of serious waiting in between verse 5 (4) and 6 (5): “The waiting in the dark space after verse [5 (4)] was not an act of distrust. There was a real wait—and now it is completed.”[71]
No matter what happens in between verses 5 (4) and 6 (5), it is clear that the psalmist is now approaching God in a new way. “The expression of trust beginning with ynaw has the force of an emphatic affirmation: Even though everything points to death and the end, I trust in your goodness.”[72] “The language,” Brueggemann explains, “reflects a new liberated, self-confidence.”[73]
7. Purpose, Meaning, Value, Relation to other Psalms, OT and NT Themes
Psalm 13, behaving as a model of the lament psalm, opens up the invitation to approach God in prayer with brutal honesty, anger and confidence. In the lament psalm, “God is considered ultimately responsible for the psalmist’s grief and the enemies’ dominance.”[74] The psalmist puts God on trial and is not condemned for doing so, but rather experiences God’s salvation as a result.
Westermann wonders if this raw approach to God has been smothered by outside influences thus weakening its role in Christian prayer,
It would be a worthwhile task to ascertain how it happened that in Western Christendom the lament has been totally excluded from human relationship with God, with the result that it has completely disappeared above all from prayer and worship. We must ask whether this exclusion is actually based on the message of the New Testament or whether it is in part attributable to the influence of Greek thought, since it is so thoroughly consistent with the ethic of Stoicism.[75]
Brueggemann also expresses concern for the loss or lack of laments in church, which he thinks leads to “both psychological inauthenticity and social immobility.”[76] By not confronting and even accusing God with our pain, we lose our voice and our capacity for “genuine covenant interaction.”[77] We also lose “the ego strength that is necessary for responsible faith”[78] and our prayers become “a practice of denial, cover-up, and pretense,”[79] creating “a false narcissism which keeps hoping for a centered self.”[80]
Without lament and the hard questions of theodicy, we fall into “civility…docility…grim obedience and eventually despair.”[81] Brueggemann asserts that ego is necessary in order for one to engage with God in a covenant relationship and in order to have genuine faith.
Also, Brueggemann explains how the “redistribution of power” that takes place in lament makes God more accessible to the individual in prayer: “The petitionary party is taken seriously and the God who is addressed is newly engaged in the crisis in a way that puts God at risk…so the unmitigated supremacy of the greater party (God) is questioned, and God is made available to the petitioner.”[82]
God is “put at risk” whenever the psalmist asks, “How long, O LORD?” (6:2; 13), “Will you hide yourself forever?” (89:46) or “Why have you forsaken me?” (22:1). The presence of these questions in the Psalter invite us to put God at risk in our prayer and to hold God accountable to his covenant.
When we suffer, we are invited to blame God in order to be in genuine covenant interaction with him instead of meekly yielding to Christian clichés like “God will work all things out for good” or “God will use this suffering to perfect you” or (heaven forbid!) “You need to have more faith” or “This must be punishment for your sins.” Although there might be some truth to these clichés, they often make things worse. Imagine telling a mother who has lost her son, “God will work all things out for good” or telling someone who has terminal cancer, “God will use this suffering to perfect you.” While so many Christians are guilty of using such clichés, Psalm 13 and the lament psalms invite us to put away our impotent platitudes and confront and question God with boldness, even if that means blaming God.
Desiring to be in communion with our authentic selves, God would rather interact with our genuine anger and confusion than our false submission. But where do we see this theme of God desiring genuine interaction in the New Testament? What does Christ teach us about lament? Deserving more attention and research than this work allows, these questions lead me to consider understanding the Cross in a new and powerful way. In blaming God for our suffering, we are putting God on trial. If God is omnipotent and therefore allows such evil and suffering to exist, then is not God therefore responsible for all evil? Should not God therefore be convicted as guilty? Should not God therefore be punished for all the evil he has allowed?
Perhaps the Cross is the answer to these questions. Perhaps the Cross is God’s way of saying, “Yes, I am guilty. I have not met your expectations. I have allowed horrific things to happen to you and therefore you can convict me as the Great Murderer. You can punish me with the ultimate punishment.” The psalmists do not seem to take God’s responsibility and punishment this far, but perhaps God does. God takes on the punishment that only the one responsible for all the evil in the world deserves.
Just as the Psalms invite us to blame God for the suffering we experience, perhaps the Cross invites us to punish God for the suffering we experience. So at the Cross, we make God suffer the punishment of all the evil that God allowed. And part of that punishment involves making God feel as abandoned as we often feel, making God say, “Why have you forsaken me?”
Perhaps I am going too far in suggesting that God invites us to punish him. However, the psalmist of Psalm 13 experienced salvation after blaming God and then waiting in faith. As believers in Christ, can we not also experience salvation after punishing God and then waiting?
This question offers a new way of understanding the resurrection: We punish God and bury Christ and wait. And after the wait, Christ resurrects from the dead to tell us, “I still love you and want to be with you. Even though you murdered me and punished me for all the suffering in the world, I still love you. You do not understand the problem of evil, but I understand your frustration. Because I want to be with you so much I am willing to hold you even in your murderous anger.” So in Christ, God is willing to die, even at our hands, to be in genuine covenant interaction with us. And in response to such overwhelming love we can say with the psalmist, “But I, in your covenant love, I have trusted…I will to sing to Yahweh for he is good to me.”
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[1] In referencing verses in the Psalm, I will refer to the verses of the Hebrew text. If included, the verses of the English text will always be parenthetical.
[2] Anderson, Psalm, 44
[3] Anderson, Psalm, 44-45
[4] Psalm 24:7,9 and Psalm 51:16-19 include references to the temple which had not yet been built during the reign of King David
[5] Goldingay, 504 Reader Fall 06, 57
[6] A. A. Anderson, Psalms, 128
[7] Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 212
[8] A. A. Anderson, Psalms, 129
[9] Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 212
[10] Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 215
[11] Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 212
[12] A. A. Anderson, Psalms, 129
[13] A. A. Anderson, Psalms, 129
[14] Ibid.
[15] Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 66
[16] A. A. Anderson, Psalms, 129
[17] Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 66
[18] Kraus, 212
[19] A. A. Anderson, 130
[20] Allen, Psalms 101-150, 4
[21] A. A. Anderson, 130
[22] Gunkel, Die Psalmen, 46
[23] Kraus, 212
[24] Kraus, 213
[25] Kraus, 213
[26] Alter, 64
[27] Alter, 64
[28] Alter, 65
[29] Alter, 66
[30] Alter, 66
[31] Westermann, 70
[32] Westermann, 72
[33] Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, 169
[34] The outline is my synthesis of interpretations from Westermann, Mays and Alter. The threefold concern with God, self and others is adapted from Westermann’s Praise and Lament in the Psalms and Mays’ Interpretation: Psalms while the Waw Adversative Turning Point is adapted from Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry.
[35] Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, 59
[36] Mays, 78
[37] Mays, 78
[38] Ibid.
[39] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 70
[40] Mays, 78
[41] Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, 169
[42] Westermann, 170
[43] Mays, 78
[44] Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, 59
[45] Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, 59
[46] Mays, 78
[47] Mays, 79
[48] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 70
[49] Craigie, Psalms 1-50, 142
[50] Craigie, 142
[51] Kraus, 215
[52] Mays, 79
[53] Kraus, 215
[54] Craigie, 142
[55] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 71
[56] Craigie, 142
[57] Mays, 78
[58] Mays, 79
[59] Calvin on Ps. 13:4, trans Anderson [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949]
[60] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 71
[61] Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, 91
[62] Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, 91
[63] Ibid.
[64] Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, 59
[65] Begrich, “Das priesterliche Heilsorakel” 81 as cited in Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, 91
[66] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 73
[67] A. A. Anderson, 130
[68] Westermann, 73
[69] Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 59
[70] Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 60
[71] Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 60
[72] Kraus, 216
[73] Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 60
[74] Broyles, 184
[75] Westermann, 265
[76] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 111
[77] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 102
[78] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 103
[79] Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 100
[80] Brueggemann, 101
[81] Brueggemann, 102
[82] Brueggemann, 100
