!!!!  😭

Hear my prayer, Lord!  And let my cry for help come to You.  Psalm 102:1  NASB

Cry for help – Isn’t punctuation wonderful?  With these little extra characters in language, we can convey the emotional context of a sentence.  Just imagine what writing would be like without ! or “ ”, or ?  Why, you’d have to already know what the words say before you could read them correctly.  And that, of course, is precisely the situation with Hebrew.  Hebrew—without vowel pointing—is a language that cannot be read unless you already know what it says.  And since it has no punctuation, you can’t tell the difference between “God said” and “Did God say?” unless someone who knows tells you (you’ll recall the translation issues with Genesis 3:1).  But messy Hebrew doesn’t stop here.  Sometimes the necessity of oral transmission in order to know what the written text says extends even to the words themselves.  For example, šāwaʿ, our word that is translated “cry for help.”  TWOT notes:

“The intensity of the action conveyed by šāwaʿ is aptly illustrated by the fact that the verb occurs only in the Piel.”^[1]

But what does that mean?  For academics, consult Beckman’s analysis (CLICK HERE).  For the rest of us, we note that the Piel is about intensity.  Of course, if you listened (rather than read) the verse, you wouldn’t need an explanation.  The intensity would be communicated in the intonation of the speaker.  But we’re not listening to David’s prayer.  We’re reading it.  So we need a few clues from the written words about the mood of the sentence.  It’s not surprising, therefore, to find that of the twenty-two occurrences of šāwaʿ, thirteen are first-person singular (I cried) and usually in laments or thanksgiving.  Very personal stuff—that’s Piel.  “It is used to describe the cry of anguish, the cry of the oppressed, the cry of those who are approaching the breaking point. Exodus 2:23 illustrates this nicely: ‘The Israelites cried (zāʿaq) and their cry (šanti ʿātām) came up to God.’”^[2]

But notice that the one praying doesn’t say, “Let me come before you.”  That’s a bit too self-centered for ancient Semitic thought.  And it doesn’t fit the divine drama typical of the Psalms.  What do I mean?  David Lambert noticed that one of the ways to get God’s attention is to remind God of orderliness.  God isn’t a God of chaotic behavior where evil and good battle each other, where you never know how things are supposed to be.  No, the Hebrew God creates order.  The entire cosmos follows His divine plan.  Chaos never has the final word.  Therefore, when the divine order is broken, when things don’t go according to plan, the best approach to God is to remind Him that He is in charge and that He can set things back on the proper path.  After all, it’s His world.  So what comes before God is not my pitiful condition but rather the disturbance in the divine order which results in my pitiful condition.  I am not asking God to intervene because I have some special status before Him.  No, I am reminding Him that His universe isn’t operating correctly and this affects His reputation.  It’s my reminder that comes before Him, hopefully.

Of course, this implies that I find the current situation to be an affront to God’s order.  It could be that my observation is simply mistaken—that God is doing something orderly that I just don’t comprehend.  In that case, I am sure He will correct me.  But since I am in relation with Him, a gentle reminder that the universe is acting up should be enough.  So, let my cry come before You, not my current distress but my recognition that something seems to be inconsistent with Your design.  That inconsistency is of great distress to me because I believe God is reliably consistent.  So I’m just pointing toward this thing that seems incompatible with His character.

And then I have to wait to see what happens.

Topical Index:  šāwaʿ, Piel, order, Psalm 102:1

^[1] 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. 911). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.