Silence of the Lambs (5)
The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him. Lamentations 3:25 NASB
Discovering Despair – Hebrew Scripture uses two words for the concept of seeking. Translated identically, they actually have important differences. The two are bāqaš and dāraš. TWOT notes:
Our word is distinguished from its frequent parallel and equivalent bāqaš (q.v.) (dāraš-bāqaš, Ps 38:12 [H 13]; Ezk 34:6; bāqaš-dāraš, Jud 6:29; Deut 4:29) inasmuch as it 1. means “to seek with care” (I Sam 28:7), 2. is often cognitive (its end is “to know”), and 3. seldom governs an infinitive.[1]
dāraš is used, for example, in II Sam 11:3 where David carefully, and quietly, seeks to find out about the woman he observed bathing. He wants to know about her. It’s not surprising that dāraš is the root of midrāš, an exegetical quest to find something deeper in a text. But it seems a bit strange to find dāraš here, in this poem of lament. What does seeking to know have to do with the fate of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians?
As we work our way backwards through the text, we have already learned that the ultimate goal of this tale of woe is freedom, the experience of unfettered, open space. That goal comes about because God delivers, because God rescues. Anticipating God’s rescue requires remembering, both His promises of blessing and His warnings of punishment, especially when we know only too well the long history of our departure from His hopes and expectations. In fact, part of the process of salvation seems to be sharing in God’s agony and disappointment. Freedom is, as Janis was wont to say, just another word for nothing left to lose, and until we get to the place where we have nothing left to lose, we probably can’t enter into the rest God has in mind.
This is the sense of dāraš in the poem. It is the careful and diligent quest to fully understand our real condition before God, to not only experience the silence of His remorse over us but to cognitively appreciate how much His faithfulness has cost Him. The way to freedom is not merely experiential. For this poet, there is a great shift in thought, an awakening to the divine tragedy of disobedience. dāraš is the discovery of the heart of God, broken over His children. When Yeshua wept over Jerusalem, hundreds of years after this poet languished after its fall, he echoed the realization that God’s great purposes could be thwarted by the very ones who were designed to carry His image. The vice-regents of creation are the source of its collapse. How that must hurt! dāraš is empathy of God. Without it, salvation is just an egocentric game.
Topical Index: dāraš, seek, Lamentations 3:25
[1] Coppes, L. J. (1999). 455 דָּרַשׁ. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 198). Chicago: Moody Press.
