19 Rise up, O Lord! Do not let mortals prevail;
let the nations be judged before you.
20 Put them in fear, O Lord;
let the nations know that they are only human.
HP articulates at the end of this Psalm a justifiable horror at human arrogance. He prays,
let the nations know that they are only human.
He seems genuinely sensitive to the dire effects of human pride. When I think that I can “prevail” over life, I am headed into dangerous territory. I need to be put “in fear.” Human presumption is always a recipe for disaster. The illusion of my own belief that I can “prevail” is the root of the arrogance of “the nations” that need to “be judged” in order that they might come to see more clearly their true state and view reality with greater humility – “let the nations know that they are only human.”
In most contexts, I am not a big fan of the expression “Well I am only human,” by which people seek to excuse their behavior. To say, “Well I am only human,” to justify abhorrent behaviour, is a trivialisation and diminishment of the beauty of what it means to be truly human. To be “only human” is to live as a child of the Divine. I am a being created in the image of that beauty and light we call God. My problem is not that I am “only human,” but that I so often live as something less than human.
But HP is using the expression “only human” in a slightly different way in Psalm 9. Here he is calling the arrogant nations back to an awareness of the profound limitations of their capacity to understand and to conduct their affairs in such a way that they might exist as a source of light and truth for all people. When we forget our limitations – that we “are only human” – we risk inflicting the violence of our arrogant attitudes on other people and creating a brutal, divided and violent human community.
What are the signs that I have moved from excusing my behaviour as “only human” to the arrogance of believing I am something greater than “only human”?
Lord, help me to have a realistic vision of what it means to be truly and deeply human.
In A Spacious Place 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
June 17, 2021 at 9:25 am
bobmacdonald
My comment became too long so I turned it into a post here.
June 17, 2021 at 9:49 am
Christopher Page
thank you Bob for all your work on the Psalms. You are making a tremendously valuable contribution to the study of this literature.
The complexity and intricacy of your translation observations does however raise a question that I am sometimes asked. Given the biases, predilections and shortcomings of so many translations, how much value is there in reading these texts in translation?
June 17, 2021 at 10:13 am
bobmacdonald
It’s a good question – how much value is there in reading these texts in translation?
I think there is great value in it, but I think it is important to read more than one translation. If that’s possible. Every time I read, it seems I am focused or pointed to some other aspect of what I am reading that I didn’t hear before. Or I am reminded of what I had forgotten (which is plenty).
Two questions are uppermost in my mind at this late state of my life. Why is this poem relevant to me? What trouble has it caused in the past? (There are many variations on these questions.)
Never before had I seen Psalms 9 as a reflection of the ruins that are caused by nations. I had not even noted the nations-mortal axis until this reading. There is so much richness that one can’t ‘know it all at once’.
This is true of poetry – Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi comes to mind. I have to be satisfied with what I am given at the time. I have to be somewhat wary of how I read, even if Hebrew were my native tongue.
Past trouble – the ‘heathen’ gloss points out that we have misread these psalms and caused many pains to ourselves and others.
I ask too, how Jesus would have read these in the days of his flesh. That is a key question for Christians, not to be short-circuited by our theologies.
June 17, 2021 at 3:10 pm
Reading The Bible In Translation | In A Spacious Place
[…] June 17, 2021 at 9:49 am […]