Poaching on Psalms territory

By posting under the rubric Hebrew, my alter-bloggo has been studying the alef-bet through the Psalms. If you have missed them, be sure to have a look.

Rashi wins on Psalm 2

Further to a recent post, I really like the purity argument for BR now. Purity can stand in the circle (see the circular structure of the psalm here) with the anointed king in all ages. Also BR is alliterative with B`R in the same verse. So I have retranslated as follows - and rather than the military metaphor, I have used a fire metaphor for the kiss word.

נַשְּׁקוּ-בַר,
פֶּן-יֶאֱנַף וְתֹאבְדוּ דֶרֶךְ
כִּי-יִבְעַר כִּמְעַט אַפּוֹ
Aflame yourself pure,
lest he face you,
and you perish in the way,
for kindled a little his face.

So how do you enflame yourself in with - purity? You do what 1 John (3:3) advises - all who have this hope purify themselves as he is pure. Method is unspecified - but application of the ointment and spices of the cross strongly recommended.

And if you are Jewish - then rejoice that your Gentile siblings (even kings and peoples) have such a means to share purity and that this psalm (even this psalm!) implies that they too are invited into covenant. And if you read other books - ask yourself what means are at your disposal to achieve joy in self and over turbulence.

Reminiscing

	I no longer have the first diagram I did of Psalm 1. I remember being struck by the effect one could make of light at the centre if one reversed the gradient of two adjacent nodes. It was almost by accident that I began with individual words in each node.
	I don't recall how I first encountered the idea of shape in text that was so different from English rhythm and rhyme.In memory of that first diagram, I have reconstructed its shape from Psalm 1 - without the words. If you click either image, it will become one piece. Compare the shape with Psalm 1 as it is now.

Psalm 2 - and Rashi

Rashi's psalms will not unpack easily. His comments are stream of consciousness notes. The footnotes by the translator Mayer I. Gruber are physically after each Psalm and the Hebrew is in an appendix. If you were trying to learn medieval Hebrew and fathom the commentary, you need to have fingers in three places in the text at once.

But Rashi's comments do yield some historical nuggets... It seems that the translation of verse 11 - Kiss the son - was not even on the horizon in France the 11th century. Since Rashi specifically comments to preclude Christian arguments, it was surprising to me that he says nothing on this. Apparently (from the footnote) it was Abraham Ibn Ezra a few years later in Spain who read the Hebrew as Kiss the son - (and so Luther and the KJV.) Rashi also adds the word heart to the verse - Arm yourselves with purity of heart.

Arm yourselves with purity - is a nice parallel to the beginning of the poem - parallel to the anointed. I think I could live with this structurally and as a pointer to Christ also. Reminds me of the instruction in 1 John to become pure as he is pure.

The crux for Rashi in verse 11 is whether it is reasonable to suppose that the same people can both rejoice and tremble. I never considered this a problem - rejoicing with trembling is just what one might do when discovering the joy of life in the covenant of the Lord. [update: I wonder just what kind of trembling though - this word seems rare in the Bible and not very positive - but perhaps there is need of an extreme negative to accompany its opposite...] I guess one could say that Rashi is not a translation - since he didn't have to translate anything of course.

Curiously enough there is an answer in this verse in the LXX to James McGrath's recent question - Seize upon instruction or the Lord may become angry!

There was much discussion of psalm 2 among bloggers a year ago. Some links here.

Rashi

I just received a copy of Rashi's commentary on Psalms - that should give me some challenging reading!

I see I haven't posted for 2 weeks - well I've been busy on the next release of our diagramming software. That's the tool I use to make all those diagrams. They are a major piece of test data. In essence the Logic Modeler is like a three-legged stool -

1. a free form drawing surface. Associative thought process.
   
2. a reporting mechanism. Sequential thought process.
   
3. a configuration environment that allows integration with any available data in the database and on the web.

I have used the drawing surface and the configuration environment extensively in these Blog pages - but I have used only a small part of the reporting - nothing more than images and simple queries and charts. I am still wondering how to apply some of the ideas that might make an interactive playing field for my readers and for me. An environment where you could experiment and interact with the psalms - perhaps without even needing to be connected to the database - we expect to use web-services for this type of play. I will be pursuing this idea over the next few months.

I was playing with the diagram I wrote about two weeks ago - the letter samech ס as first letter occurs in combination with 13 of the other letters. Of these some two letter combinations begin only one or only a few words in the Psalms. There are so many combinations, it is hard to know where to begin to report in an essay - but an interactive diagram would not just report a selected sequential presentation of a few results, but would enable exploration with I think something more than a search mechanism, valuable though those are.

Here's a bit of trivia I observed: (Firefox does not display Hebrew correctly - like some version of Java - I don't know why. I hope they fix it.). These are the counts of all 423 two letter combinations in the first two letters of every word in the psalter. Where the count is 23, the letter also occurs with itself. [update - I posted a full matrix here]

Hebrew letter ט as first letter occurs with 9 second letters in the words of the psalms.
Hebrew letter ז as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter ס as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter ק as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter צ as first letter occurs with 13 second letters.
Hebrew letter ד as first letter occurs with 14 second letters.
Hebrew letter ג as first letter occurs with 15 second letters.
Hebrew letter פ as first letter occurs with 15 second letters.
Hebrew letter שׂ as first letter occurs with 16 second letters.
Hebrew letter ח as first letter occurs with 18 second letters.
Hebrew letter ר as first letter occurs with 18 second letters.
Hebrew letter ע as first letter occurs with 18 second letters.
Hebrew letter שׁ as first letter occurs with 20 second letters.
Hebrew letter א as first letter occurs with 22 second letters.
Hebrew letter ו as first letter occurs with 22 second letters.
Hebrew letter ב as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter י as first letter occurs with 23 second letters (only because of my abbreviation of the tetragrammeton - the Genesis typo is not included!)
Hebrew letter ל as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter מ as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter ת as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter נ as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter כ as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.
Hebrew letter ה as first letter occurs with 23 second letters.

The 13s are of course all differing subsets of the 23.

Rashi will likely be more interesting...

Reached the two-year-old stage

How do you learn a language? When I was best at it, the process was completely unconscious. I knew nothing of grammar or of spelling. It was aurally imitative and whether I got it right or not, the rewards were adequate. Can one summon such momentum into an old age? I don't yet know, but even though I have deciphered the psalter, I am still having a hard time remembering spelling and grammar - though I can identify a few bits and pieces.

For fun, I used the diagramming tool to create some mac-tac blocks with a little help from 4 bags of cheap blocks from the $ store. (Thanks for the wood to my comptroller - and what do my employees think of this application of their software!)

It is a challenge to spell with blocks - I doubled and trebled some of the more common letters but it is quite an exercise still to look for the last resh to complete a word.

Imagine if you had learned phonetics at your mother's knee. (See this post from Iyov and the comments.)

Psalm 12

[I deleted the questions - I asked them on the Biblicalist and got some very helpful responses].

Let me see if I can 'make sense' of this psalm, having just read the morning's Globe and Mail section 1 with its stories of mass child abuse and the corruption of warlords, and the bridge column - warning me to make an appropriate safety play.

For the leader, in octaves	A Psalm of David
Save LORD, for ceased are the mercied for vanished are the faithful among the children of dust.
	Emptiness they speak a man to his friend lip divided in heart and heart they speak
	The LORD shall cut off all lips from the divided tongue speaking boasts
	who said with our tongue is strength our lips with us who is Lord to us?
	For havoc of the poor for the groaning of the needy now I will arise says the LORD I will impose. In safety he will breathe to it.
	The sayings of the LORD sayings of purity silver refined in a furnace in earth purified seven times
	You, O LORD keep them You will guard us from this generation to an age
All around the wicked walk to lift up the worthlessness of the children of dust.

If the first pass through the psalms took 1.5 years - the second pass will take 15. Every letter, every differing translation, every note - one psalm a month? Yet I know this is not possible - there must be a better way. Instant love.