The Wrong Preposition

“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry;  do not be silent at my tears; for I am a stranger with You, a sojourner like all my fathers.”  Psalm 39:12  NASB

Stranger with You– David’s short autobiography is coming to an end.  It is coming to the only end possible: a cry for mercy.  “Hear my prayer.”  But until this point we didn’t realize this was a prayer. It didn’t seem to start as a prayer.  It started as an internal conflict.  Then it became a personal revelation.  But now, at the end, we need to read it all over again—as a prayer, a public prayer set to song.  Scholarly examinations of the  etymology of the word for “prayer” may be illuminating.

There is a rich nomenclature for “praying” in the ot. There are at least a dozen Hebrew words for pray and prayer. But easily the most common word for “prayer” is tĕpillâand the related verb, pālal. A number of suggestions have been made for the etymology of pālal. Wellhausen in the 19th century connected it with the Arabic falla, “to notch the edge of a sword” and thus pālal, it was thought, meant “to cut or wound oneself,” and reflected the pagan custom of slashing oneself in a frenzy during worship, a practice forbidden by the law (Deut 14:1).^[1]

Isn’t this David’s experience?  Prayer wounds.  Prayer cuts into our pretensions, denials and diversions. It burns up our self-sufficiency and forces us to face our finitude.  There is nothing left but to cry out for mercy.  David uses the verb šawʿâ, “to cry for help.”  TWOT notes that the verb “is used autobiographically more than it is descriptively.”^[2]It is anintense personal, emotional wail.  When prayer reaches this level, perhaps it dissolves into nothing but tears.  David seems to think so.

But now we come to this unusual sentence, “for I am a stranger with You, a sojourner like all my fathers.”  Once againDavid draws us back to the history of Israel, now including all the Patriarchs.  Strangers in a strange land.  The feeling of homelessness.  Outsiders.  Yes, this is all true, except. . .

Except for the use of ʿim, the preposition translated “with.”  We didn’t expect that. We expected “stranger from You.”  That’s what “stranger” means, someone apart from another.  But David upsets our expectations by choosing the wrong preposition.  What does he have in mind?  In what way is David a stranger with God?

The answer may be in the connection to “sojourner” (tôšāb).  YHVH was with the Patriarchs but they were never at home.  In an important sense, God was also a stranger in the Land until a generation after the exodus.  So Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were with God, but all of them, including God Himself, were homeless.  David’s choice of preposition reminds his audience that they are still homeless even if God is with them.  They were, as we are, alien residents, [3]waiting for the return of the true King and the restoration of the creation.  In the meanwhile, we are strangers with God in this world.

Act accordingly.

Topical Index:  with, ʿim, tôšāb, sojourner, resident alien, Psalm 39:12

^[1]Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 1776 פָּלַל. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 725). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[2]Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 2348 שָׁוַע. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 912). Chicago: Moody Press.

[3]“Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.”  1 Peter 2:11  NASB