HDR
My days are like a lengthened shadow, and I wither away like grass. Psalm 102:11 NASB
Lengthened – For those of you who aren’t familiar with exposure problems in photography, let me explain HDR. High Dynamic Range is the situation where the light in the picture varies significantly between highs (whites) and lows (blacks). While the human eye almost instantaneously adjusted for these conditions, even modern cameras find these extremes nearly impossible to accurately record in a single frame. That’s why professionals resort to bracketing images, that is, taking multiple images of the same scene at various exposure levels and then combining those images so that the proper exposure is given to the entire range in the natural scene. All of this is accomplished these days with sophisticated computer applications either after the shots or instantaneously in the camera chip. HDR photos are responsible for some amazing images which can’t be reproduced any other way.[1]
When I read a verse like this one, I think about HDR. Why? Because shadows are really difficult to photograph. Too much exposure and they turn into gray blotches on the image. Too little and they devolve into black holes. That’s what the psalmist faces, long before anyone ever imagined using computer-aided manipulation to achieve what the eye can do. His days are lengthening shadows. The once-bright exposure that made his life so vibrant is fading into night, into death, into the black holes of invisibility. Every day, if the truth be told, we are moving closer and closer to the end, where the shadows finally triumph and we drop into the dark. No hope of reprocessing the image to recover the lost detail. No Photoshop fixes. As far as this ancient lyricist is concerned, the fingers of She’ol are reaching for him, coming closer and closer and the light fades.
In proper Hebraic parallelism he adds the second metaphor—withering grass. In verse 4 the psalmist introduced us to “grass” with the Hebrew ʿēśeb. Now, it seems, he returns to that idea. But not quite. In verse 4, “ʿēśeb and its synonyms correspond more closely to the American English use of the word ‘plant’ than to ‘herb.’”[2] Here the same word is connected to yābēš, “to be or become dry without moisture from necessary or normal fluids.”[3] This is the word for two miracles: the drying up of the earth after the flood and the dryness of the surface when the Israelites cross the Red Sea and the Jordan River. But it is also a word of judgment. When God punishes, He withholds the necessary rains of life. Men become “dry bones.” The psalmist recalls both miraculous rescue and divine judgment, and—the absolute frailty of life itself, flush and nourished in the morning, withered and dead by the evening. It’s important to recognize that this is the verb: “I am withered up like grass.” It is first person singular present. Right now, I experience lack of life-giving. To put it quite simply, “I’m dying.”
Bottom of the barrel. End of the road. Finished. Our poet has come to the inevitable conclusion. Unless God responds, he’s dead. He already feels it, clutching at his ankles. The air he breathes is dry, raspy. The smell is the inside of a coffin. There’s nothing left.
Except.
And now the poem turns, as we shall see.
Topical Index: shadow, grass, lengthen, wither, death, Psalm 102:11
[1] Interested? See this: https://www.thephotoargus.com/50-incredible-examples-of-hdr-photography-done-right/
[2] Allen, R. B. (1999). 1707 עשׂב. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 700). Chicago: Moody Press.
[3] Alexander, R. H. (1999). 837 יָבֵשׁ. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 360). Chicago: Moody Press.
