All My Bones Shall Say

David knew what it was to be hunted. For years a king chased him, straight through the wilderness of Judah, from cave to cave, with only one goal, to kill him. In Psalm 35 you hear a man who runs, turns around, and cries out to the only one who can still save him. Contend, YHWH, with those who contend with me; take up shield and buckler and rise for my help; draw the spear and block the way of my pursuers; say to my soul: I am your salvation. He does not ask for a pious feeling. He asks God to arm Himself and take His stand on the path behind him like a warrior. Around him stand witnesses who charge him with things he has never heard of, men who repay evil for good until he stands entirely alone. Out of that wasted man, worn down to the bone by running and fear, escapes a confession that sits deeper than the mouth. All my bones shall say, YHWH, who is like You? Not his lips, not his heart: his skeleton. What his bones sing of is very concrete. Who is like You, who rescues the weak from one stronger than he, the poor and needy from the one who robs him? There is no god like this, his bones cry out, for no other ever took the side of the victim against the strongest one in the room.

A man can keep running as long as there is ground under his feet. Psalm 40, again from David, begins where that ground gives out. He speaks of a pit of destruction, of mud and mire, the image of an old cistern with a layer of sludge on the bottom, where every movement pulls you deeper and your fingers find no grip on the wall. I waited eagerly for YHWH, he sings, and He bent down to me and heard my cry; He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the mud and mire, and He set my feet upon a rock. From inside that pit he sees nothing more. A hand from above, a jerk, and then stone under his feet, for the first time in days something that does not give way. On that stone he sings a new song, and what it says is the old question in another shape. Nothing can be compared to You.

From the pit David saw only a hand. In Psalm 18 he shows what was behind that hand. He sang this song on the day YHWH rescued him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul, the day the hunting stopped. It opens with a declaration of love: "I love You dearly, YHWH, my strength." The verb belongs with the womb of chapter 5, and in this form it appears nowhere else in the Bible: a human being who loves God with the word by which God shows compassion. Then the song goes down into the water. The cords of death had surrounded him, the torrents of destruction terrified him, the snares of the grave already lay around his ankles. In his distress he cried out, one man, one voice. And above him heaven begins to move. The earth shakes and trembles, the foundations of the mountains quake, smoke rises from God's nostrils and devouring fire from His mouth. He bends the heavens and comes down, with thick darkness under His feet; He rides on a cherub and soars on the wings of the wind. He thunders and shoots His arrows, until the channels of the waters lie bare and the foundations of the world are laid open. All of creation rises for one man in the water. He reached down from on high, He took hold of me, He drew me out of many waters. He brought me out into a wide place. For the first time in years David stands in the open air.

He tells why, and after all that violence it is the last thing you expect. No covenant God was bound to keep, no honor He had to defend. "He rescued me, because He delighted in me" (Ps 18:19). The word is chafets: to delight in someone, to long for someone, to want someone so much that you set everything in motion for them. In the Song of Songs it is love itself that bears this verb: do not awaken her until she pleases (Song 2:7). David knew it from his own life. On the day Saul told his son and his servants that he meant to kill David, the same verse says that Jonathan, Saul's son, delighted greatly in David (1 Sam 19:1). One verse, two gazes. The father wanted him dead; the son could not do without him. In the book of Samuel this song stands right after the day David had the bones of Saul and Jonathan laid in the tomb of Kish, Saul's father (2 Sam 21:12–14). Father and son lay buried together. Jonathan's gaze had not been buried with him. David found it again in the God who had bent the heavens to come and get him. No duty drove the lightning, no treaty forced God to tear the heavens open. He came because He wanted him.

Further on in the song the question from the wilderness sounds again, now with a rock in it: "For who is God, except YHWH? And who is a rock, besides our God?" (Ps 18:31). The stone under his feet has been given a name. Then the years pass, and the man who was pulled out of the water grows old. Psalm 71 names no poet; the Greek translation puts David's name above it, and in any case this is the voice of someone who has lived through the earlier psalms. He still knows the hunt. His enemies smell his weakness the way predators smell a wounded animal, and they whisper to each other that God has forsaken him: pursue and seize him, for there is no one to rescue him. He knows the pit, too. You who have made me see many troubles and calamities, he says, You will revive me again and bring me up again from the depths of the earth. Only his body is not what it was. Do not cast me off in the time of old age, he prays; do not forsake me when my strength is spent. With gray hair and a thin voice he asks not for rest but for more time. Give me a little longer, until I have told of Your arm to the next generation, Your power to all who come after me. His whole life gathers itself into a single line: You who have done great things, God, who is like You? The bones have grown brittle, the voice trembles, and the question has not changed a comma since the wilderness. There are things that do not wear out.

He asked for time for the next generation. At the end of the book of Psalms that generation is there, and it is larger than he had dared to ask. The last five psalms, 146 through 150, know no more enemy, no more mud, no more complaint. Each of the five begins and ends with the same word, hallelujah, praise YHWH. In the middle of that jubilation the delight of Psalm 18 sounds again: "For YHWH takes pleasure in His people; He adorns the humble with salvation" (Ps 149:4). What one man discovered in the water, a whole people sings here. The song swells until it no longer fits on a single voice: praise Him with trumpet blast, with harp and lyre, with tambourine and dance, with strings and pipe, with clashing and with resounding cymbals. The old man's thin voice has become an orchestra. And then the very last line of the book falls, as wide as the sky. Let everything that has breath praise YHWH. Hallelujah.

In the wilderness it was the bones of one hunted man that said it. At the end everything that breathes says it, every breath drawn in and lifted up into praise, including the breath with which you are reading this page. Who is like YHWH, who bent the heavens for one man in the water because He delighted in him? Ask everything that breathes. It already knows the answer; it only needs to burst out with it.

*A note on the source text. "All my bones shall say, who is like You": Psalm 35:10 (the Rescuer of the weak against the strong; the call to arms 35:1–3; the false witnesses 35:11–12). The mud pit, the rock, and the new song; "nothing can be compared to You" (ein aroch): Psalm 40:1–5. Psalm 18: the superscription (cf. 2 Samuel 22:1); the declaration of love (18:1; erchamcha, the only qal form in the Bible of the root of rachamim; the line is missing in 2 Samuel 22); the cords of death and God's descent (18:4–16); "a wide place" and "because He delighted in me" (chafets, 18:19); "who is God, except YHWH?" (18:31). Chafets of Jonathan and David: 1 Samuel 19:1; in the Song of Songs: 2:7; 3:5; 8:4. The bones of Saul and Jonathan: 2 Samuel 21:12–14, directly before the song in 2 Samuel 22. Old age and "who is like You": Psalm 71:9–11, 17–20 (without superscription in the Masoretic Text; the Septuagint, Ps 70, ascribes the psalm to David). The closing Hallel: Psalm 146–150; "YHWH takes pleasure in His people": 149:4 (ratsah, a different verb from chafets); "let everything that has breath praise YHWH": 150:6. The divine Name as YHWH.*