Psalm 11

For my weekly quiet time this week, we'll be studying Psalm 11.

At the beginning of this Psalm, in v 1, the Psalmist refers to people who are advising him to flee to the mountain. (Ironically, I write this after watching the Atlas Shrugged trailer). In the sermons that I heard, preachers applied this to the tendency people have to run away from their problems---such as their location, or their job, or their difficult marriage. But the preachers said that we should not be so quick to do so, for that doesn't necessarily take care of the problem. After all, we follow ourselves wherever we go! For the preachers, the solution is to do what the Psalmist did: to trust in God.

In my reading of homiletical or religious sources on the Psalms, I see a tendency to apply various Psalms to something that was going on in the life of David. For Psalm 11, people have related it to those who were encouraging David to flee from Saul. But David held his ground and resolved to trust in God. What puzzles me about those who interpret Psalm 11 in this way---and then go on to say that we shouldn't run from our problems---is that David ultimately did run away from Saul! He found being around Saul to be perilous to his life!

Maybe (if we want to read the Psalm in light of David's experience) we can say that David had a good reason not to flee from Saul at that moment. He felt safe in the Temple (or, technically, it would have been a Tabernacle, since Solomon hadn't built the Temple yet), for he was near to God, plus the Temple was a place of refuge from attackers (see I Kings 1:50). Did David feel that, were he to leave the Temple, he'd be cut off from God's presence, since people in the ancient Near East believed that certain gods were attached to their lands? Many have read I Samuel 26:19 in light of that: David felt that, by being driven out from the land of Israel, he was cut off from his inheritance and pressured to worship other gods. And yet, Psalm 11 appears to say that God is beyond the temple, and even beyond the land of Israel: yes, God is in the Temple, but his throne is in heaven, and his eyes test the children of men.

On testing: In the medieval Midrash on the Psalms, I read the view that God tests the righteous and not the wicked because the righteous are strong enough to take the testing, and they are made better by it. I didn't entirely like this interpretation because it appeared to have a "God loves the strong" sort of mindset. I preferred Rabbi Hirsch's interpretation, which is in the Artscroll: The wicked "are not worthy of Divine discipline because they are no longer capable of profiting from it." It isn't that God refrains from testing the wicked because they're not good enough, due to some condition that they have; rather, it's because they've chosen not to profit from the testing. The ball is in their court. Personally, however, I'd like to think that God loves us even when we're recalcitrant in learning our lessons (and this is not to say that all suffering is God trying to teach people a lesson).

I also find it interesting that the Septuagint for Psalm 11:5 says that the one loving unrighteousness hates his own soul, as opposed to what the Masoretic Text has: his (presumably God's) soul hates the wicked and the lovers of violence. One sermon I heard appealed to Psalm 11:5 to say that "hate the sin, but love the sinner" is incorrect, for God hates sinners---and I doubt that this preacher takes sinners to mean what the author of Psalm 11 thought: people who are violent and who love to harm others; rather, in the spirit of Romans 3, he takes "wicked" to mean everyone in humanity who has not been regenerated through Christ. I myself prioritize Christ being the friend of sinners over anything in the Hebrew Bible that says that God hates the wicked. At the same time, I like the Septuagint's translation of Psalm 11:5: the implication is that God doesn't hate the exceedingly wicked, but that they hurt themselves when they do their evil deeds. It's like how C.S. Lewis conceptualizes hell: the door is locked from the inside. God would love for everyone to have a relationship with him and to be on a path of doing good, but some refuse to do so. When they choose to harm others on a consistent basis, what can God do but punish them? (But, here, I don't want to say that non-Christians are against doing good, for there are many of them who follow moral paths.)

It was interesting how interpreters tried to apply this Psalm to the afterlife. The fire and brimstone that God will rain on the wicked (v 6) is related to hell, or Gehenna. V 7 says that God's countenance will behold the upright (I draw here from the King James Version), but various rabbis have interpreted the verse to mean that the upright will see God's countenance, presumably in the afterlife. One interpreter in Midrash on the Psalms says that the verse means that the faces of the upright will shine (somehow, he associates chazah in v 7 with the name Mahazioth in I Chronicles 25:4, 30). And Daniel 12:3 says that the righteous will shine as the sun after the resurrection. One way to deal with the injustice of this life is to say that the afterlife will be just, and there are people who have tried to interpret Psalm 11 in light of that message.

Psalm 11:3 caught my eye. It says (in the KJV) "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" I once read a book entitled If the Foundations Be Destroyed. It was one of these conservative Christian books about America's Christian heritage and how America is straying from God. It defended Cortes and the Puritans. It said that slavery in the South was no worse than industrial oppression in the North. And it criticized the New Deal. But is Psalm 11:3 about how we should return to some conservative Christian understanding of our Christian heritage, which, in my opinion, doesn't exactly fare well for oppressed people or those on the margins (even though, to be fair, I should point out that the authors of this book did not deem their worldview to be oppressive---actually, that's what they're arguing against)? Psalm 11 is about the hope that God will vindicate the upright from those who try to harm them---from the wicked and the lovers of violence! In many cases, religion has been the agent of harm, as much as some American evangelicals love to complain that they are persecuted!

I read a variety of interpretations of Psalm 11:3 in my study. The Midrash on the Psalms offers interpretations that apply v 3 to the foundations of the temple or the altar: if those are destroyed, then God no longer dwells on earth, and what would happen to God's work in the world? Another interpreter says that Psalm 11:3 means that the righteous need to stay in society rather than fleeing, because only when they stay put can they promote orthodoxy. The Septuagint interprets verse 3 as the wicked wanting to pull down what God has made. This may refer to the Psalmist: if the wicked kill him, an upright person, what will the righteous do? What hope will they have? Peter Craigie says that the Psalmist feels as if the pillars of society are being torn down: that God's reluctance to punish the wicked is overturning society. An amoral social order creates disincentives to be righteous---and yet one could argue that we should be doing right because it is right, not because it brings rewards. Okay, point taken, but an amoral social order is also putting the righteous (and others) in danger, and that should concern God. That's why the Psalmist is hoping for God to intervene.