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For my weekly quiet time today, we'll look at Psalm 13 and its interpreters. In Psalm 13, the vexed Psalmist asks God how long God will forget him.
1. In v 3, the Psalmist asks God to brighten his eyes, so that he will not sleep the sleep of death. What does brightening the eyes mean? One view is that the revival of the depressed spirit brightens the eyes. Job says in Job 17:7 that his eyes are dim from grief, and weary Jonathan's eyes are brightened in I Samuel 14:27 after he takes a taste of honey. In Ezra 9:8, Ezra describes God's restoration of Judah from exile as the brightening of the Jews' eyes. Dim eyes can indicate depression, whereas the brightening of the eyes comes when a person is encouraged---something gives the depressed person strength. Speaking of depression, the Orthodox Jewish Artscroll's interpretation of Psalm 13:2 caught my eye. In v 2, the Psalmist says that he has grief in his heart by day. Why does the Psalmist mention the daytime? According to the Artscroll, in this situation, the Psalmist's daytime activities are not "sufficiently distracting to suppress melancholy feelings..."
Another view is that the dimming of the vision occurs when a person is coming close to death. In Psalm 38:10, the Psalmist says that his strength is failing and the light of his eyes is not in him. Deuteronomy 34:7 says that, when Moses died, his eye was not dim, and his natural vigor had not departed. Yes, Moses' eyes were bright even as he was nearing death, but my point is this: dim eyes in the Hebrew Bible can indicate becoming weak and approaching death, whereas bright eyes are signs of health and vitality (which Moses had even when he was dying). I think that this is what brightening of the eyes means in Psalm 13:3, for the Psalmist says in that verse that he does not want to die.
But there is a third interpretation that is prominent: the brightening of the eyes is spiritual enlightenment, or it serves to counter sin and its effects. Augustine spiritualizes Psalm 13, interpreting it as the Psalmist's lament that God has not given to him the knowledge of God. For Augustine, v 3 is talking about how sin closes the eyes of the heart. Is there biblical justification for viewing the brightening of the eyes as spiritual enlightenment? Indeed, Psalm 19:3 says that God's commandment brightens the eyes. But I think that this just means that it encourages people, since the parallel line affirms that God's statutes bring joy to the heart.
Theodore of Mopsuestia, a fourth-fifth century C.E. Christian thinker, relates Psalm 3:3 to guilt darkening the heart, and David's desire for God to bring him joy. For Theodore, this Psalm is about David's flight from Absalom, which was God's punishment of David for his sin with Bathsheba. God has forgiven David, and yet God chastises him so that he'll be more careful to avoid sin in the future. David realizes that there is spiritual and moral benefit from recalling his past guilt even after he has been forgiven, for that can discourage future sin. And yet, David does not want feelings of guilt to crush his spirit, and he desires reconciliation with God.
In his commentary on the Psalms, W.O.E. Oesterley states that suffering can be "the sufferer's own fault, which in his blindness he does not realize..." Oesterley goes with a combination of the first two interpretations of brightening the eyes, which have to do with encouragement and health. But, in his spiritual application section, he appears to apply Psalm 3:3 to one's blindness about how his own actions are contributing to his suffering.
There is debate about whether or not Psalm 13 is saying that the Psalmist is suffering on account of his sins. In the Jewish Study Bible, Adele Berlin and Marc Brettler say that God's hiddenness in Psalm 13:2-3 is due to divine neglect. The Psalmist suffering due to God's neglect to pay attention to him is different from God punishing the Psalmist for his sins.
But John Gill notes something interesting: In Psalm 13, the Psalmist humbly throws himself on God's mercy. In other Psalms, the Psalmist asks God to take into account his righteousness and innocence, but the Psalmist does not do that here. According to Gill, the Psalms in which David appeals to his own righteousness occur during his flight from Saul, when David had done nothing wrong. Psalm 13, however, is set during David's flight from Absalom, which was God's punishment for David's sin. In that case, David could not appeal to his own righteousness to convince God to deliver him. All he could do was throw himself on God's mercy.
2. John Walton refers to a "Sumerian Lament over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur," which asks a deity how long the enemy will triumph. That resembles the plea of the Psalmist in Psalm 13, which asks "How long?". Moreover, Sigmund Mowinkel says that there are parallels between Psalm 13 and Babylonian laments. Mowinkel says something similar about Psalm 12, in which God appears to answer the petitioner through an intermediary: that Babylonian Psalms had that kind of phenomenon. There are significant areas in which the biblical Psalms overlap with other Psalms in the ancient Near East. Could God have been hearing and answering prayers in other cultures, besides ancient Israel?
