Us and Them
So that people may tell of the name of the Lord in Zion, and His praise in Jerusalem, when the peoples are gathered together, and the kingdoms, to serve the Lord. Psalm 102:21-22 NASB
So that people may tell of – Brevity. That’s what’s happening here. In Hebrew, לְסַפֵּר (le-saper). One verb plus the conjunction. And the verb is not conjugated. It’s the infinitive, “to recount.” You might recognize some of the derivatives: sēper (book), sōpēr (scribe), sĕpōrâ (number). Literally, “so that to recount.” The noun, “people,” and the verb tense “may tell” are translation additions. Of course, you might argue that the sense of the sentence is the same: All the previous declarations of God’s care are intended as the basis for proclaiming God’s name. But this is a case of what Robert Alter calls the misconception that modern readers need to have everything explained. He warns, “. . . the impulse to explain through translation has still more dire consequences because it becomes an explanation to make the Bible conform to modern views or modern ideologies.”[1]
“ . . . the Bible itself does not generally exhibit the clarity to which its modern translators aspire: the Hebrew writers reveled in the proliferation of meanings, the cultivation of ambiguities, the playing of one sense of a term against another, and this richness is erased in the deceptive antiseptic clarity of the modern versions.”[2]
Let’s not fall into this trap. The poem is intentionally vague, perhaps because the reader must decide what recounting means and who is doing the recounting. What we do know is that whatever is recounted and whenever it occurs, it happens in assembly, ʿammîm, “the people.” It’s a plural noun, but it’s also a class noun, so rendering it as a plural in English (“peoples”) isn’t necessary. “The people” is a typical way of designating Israel.
But what about the next phrase, u-mamlākot? “The kingdoms” are certainly not “the people.” They are everything other than David’s realm. These are the Gentile nations. The purpose of recounting God’s care for the downhearted, the destitute and the discouraged is to showcase YHVH to the goyim, the foreigners. Why? Because there is absolutely no reason for Gentiles to serve the God of Israel unless they believe it is in their best interests to do so. And it’s not about forgiveness. Gentiles have no concept of biblical sin. They can’t. Why? Because sin is a covenant idea. It belongs to Israel.
“Sin is violation of the command of God. It is this that distinguishes sin from wrongdoing.”[3]
“Sin is possible only when the transgression is a violation of the command of a divine lawgiver.”[4]
“Sin is a religious and not an ethical category.”[5]
“But when man develops a morality not based on God’s commandment—even if coincidentally much of it may coincide with those commandments—an act of expulsion of God has occurred. He is no longer the lawgiver. Now reason or moral intuition or something else performs the function that the Bible can only envisage God as performing. Man dethrones God, and this form of rebellion is particularly dangerous because it leaves man morally fulfilled, freed of the guilt that may be experienced—sooner or later—by the rebel who violated God’s command and who might not remain self-righteous as the moral rebel. The moral rebel finds a relationship with God increasingly irrelevant as his moral convictions deepen and he engages himself more and more in the realization of his moral ideals in the context of the real world.”[6]
There is no point in recounting stories of God’s forgiveness of sin. That is irrelevant. As Wyschogrod makes abundantly clear, sin is not wrongdoing. Sin exists only in the context of a divinely given commandment and since the goyim do not have YHVH’s commandments, sin means nothing to them. But help does! Every man knows the agony of pain, the despair of living, the anxiety of injustice. When we speak of God’s care, we are not talking about God’s willingness to forgive. Salvation is an after-thought here. We are talking about God’s love, not His redemption. We are talking about a divinity who empathizes, who feels as we do, who acts on our behalf, not to return us to some righteous state but to lift us from despair and give us hope. Rescue comes first. Mercy comes later.
Topical Index: people, saper, recount, u-mamlākot, kingdoms, sin, rescue, Psalm 102:21-22
[1] Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation (Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 7.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, ed. and trans. R. Kendall Soulen (Eerdmans, 2004), p. 54.
[4] Ibid., p. 5
[5] Ibid., p. 57.
[6] Ibid., p. 59.
