My blog post about my weekly quiet time will concern Psalm 119: Mem.
The
Psalmist says in Psalm 119:99-100 that he has more understanding than
his teachers and his elders. The following are some of the
interpretations of one or both of these verses that I encountered in my
reading:
1. W.O.E. Oesterley
relates these verses to the growing predominance of religious wisdom
literature. According to Oesterley, later wisdom literature was more
religious than earlier wisdom literature. Consequently, the Psalmist
considers himself wiser than his teachers and elders who believed in the
older, more secular wisdom mindset. The Psalmist believes that he has
more understanding than them on account of his greater recognition of
God.
2. Matthew Henry speculates as follows: "He means either
those who would have been his teachers, who blamed his conduct and
undertook to prescribe to him (by keeping God's commandments he managed
his matters so that it appeared, in the event, he had taken the right
measures and they had taken the wrong), or those who should have been
his teachers, the priests and Levites, who sat in Moses's chair, and
whose lips ought to have kept knowledge, but who neglected the study of
the law, and minded their honours and revenues, and the formalities only
of their religion; and so David, who conversed much with the
scriptures, by that means became more intelligent than they. Or he may
mean those who had been his teachers when he was young; he built so well
upon the foundation which they had laid that, with the help of his
Bible, he became able to teach them, to teach them all. He was not now a
babe that needed milk, but had spiritual senses exercised, Heb.
v. 14. It is no reflection upon our teachers, but rather an honour to
them, to improve so as really to excel them, and not to need them. By
meditation we preach to ourselves, and so we come to understand more than our teachers, for we come to understand our own hearts, which they cannot."
There
are a lot of good thoughts here! First of all, I like how Matthew
Henry criticizes those who got on their judgmental high horse and
presumed to criticize and teach David. It's not that David was beyond
criticism, mind you, but I'm sure that I'm not the only person who has
come into contact with judgmental, holier-than-thou busybodies. Second,
Henry speculates that those who should have been teachers may
have been neglecting their responsibilities, and that could be why David
thought that his own meditation on the Torah gave him more
understanding than his teachers. Third, Henry speculates that David may
have surpassed his teachers by building on what they imparted to him
when he was young. I think that it's one thing to outgrow one's
teachers and to build on their instruction, but that it's something else
to conclude that one is smarter than one's teachers. I have outgrown
and built on some of the teaching that I got in junior high school, but I
wouldn't say that I'm smarter than my teachers from back then. But,
fourth, Henry suggests that we become smarter than our teachers when we
apply the Word of God to our own hearts, for (among human beings) only
we know our own hearts. This makes a degree of sense, for, while
teachers may teach us, only we know ourselves, and in that sense we're
smarter than our teachers, at least when it comes to our own
self-knowledge. At the same time, there may still be areas in which our
teachers are smarter than us: they, after all, have their own
self-knowledge that is inaccessible to us! So these are good thoughts,
but I have reservations about a few of them.
3. St. Augustine
relates Psalm 119:99-100 to Jesus Christ. Jesus as a young man of
twelve years of age knew more than the teachers of Israel when he was
astounding them with his wisdom in the Temple (Luke 2:42-46). And Jesus
must have thought that he knew more than his elders because he
disobeyed and challenged the elders' tradition (Matthew 15:2-3).
According to Augustine, Jesus was wise because he received instruction
from God the Father (John 8:28) and studied God's testimonies about
him. This, in my opinion, coincides with the depiction of the Torah in
Psalm 119: that it is not just a written law or teaching, but that it
also entails God's personal guidance of the Psalmist (see here).
4.
The Orthodox Jewish Artscroll commentary appears to have a problem with
the notion that the Psalmist would be wiser than his teachers.
Consequently, it understands the m- (short for min), not in the comparative sense of "than", but rather as "from": the Psalmist gains understanding from
his teachers. Appealing to Pirkei Avot 4:1, the Artscroll affirms that
the point of v 99 is that the Psalmist gains understanding from all of
his teachers, great and small. He's open to learning from a variety of
people, in short. Regarding the m- as "from" in Psalm 119:99
appears to be common within Judaism, for such an interpretation is in
the Midrash on the Psalms, and in the translation of this verse into English that the Chabad's web site uses.