And Equal Justice For All

Though while he lives he congratulates himself—and though people praise you when you do well for yourself—he will go to the generation of his fathers; they will never see the light.     Psalm 49:18-19  NASB

The generation of his fathers – Do you recall the investigation into verse 15, the verse that apparently suggests an afterlife?  We discovered that the idea of reward and punishment after death might just be imported into that translation.  That seems to be confirmed by this verse.  What is the final resting place?  It’s returning to the generation of the fathers, not heaven.  Looking closely at the word here provides even more evidence.

Occasionally there is a Hebrew word wherein etymology, as a route to discovery of ancient thought patterns, is all-important in discovering the true life-situation in which the word must be understood. Such is the case here. Authorities all agree that dôr, the noun, is derived from dûr, the verb. The simple primitive sense, not expressly found in any biblical text, is to move in a circle, surround. . . By a thoroughly understandable figure, a man’s lifetime beginning with the womb of earth and returning thereto (Gen 3:19) is a dôr; likewise from the conception and birth of a man to the conception and birth of his offspring is a dôr. A period of extended time and several other related meanings would be inevitable in a language prone to metaphors.  Thus the following analysis of the actual use of dôr in the ot unfolds quite naturally.  1. The circle of a man’s lifetime, from birth to death.^[1]

Duration.  That’s how ancient Semites viewed life.  A transition from birth to death—and in the pagan world, the myth of eternal return, the idea of reincarnation, at least conceptually, when everything starts over again, having simply gone around the circle.  Of course, the Hebrews changed that circular view, believing that the repetitions of life were stages on the way toward completing God’s purposes.  So history is actually going somewhere, not just around and around.  But the fact that history has direction doesn’t mean that you do.  Your “circle of life” is a place on the wheel that is carrying God’s plan forward.  It will take another thousand years before the Hebrews embrace the idea of the ‘olam ha’ba as a personal destiny.  Christianity never had to evolve the idea.  It simply embraced the Greek worldview of Hellenism.

The sons of Korah wrote this song long before the ‘olam ha’ba became a part of Jewish thinking.  In the time of David, life ended at the grave even though there was some expression of the world of shadowy figures afterward.  Of course, many other ancient cultures placed enormous emphasis on the afterlife.  Egyptian preoccupation with the next world had fearful consequences for this life’s experience.  Perhaps that’s one reason the Torah says so little about another world and why God places so much emphasis on righteousness now, not later.  This psalm reflects the cultural world of David’s time or before.  Things will change, but not for many centuries.  For us, the psalm is a significant reminder that we need to pay attention to the life we have now, and let God sort out the rest.

Topical Index:  dôr, generations, lifetime, duration, Psalm 49:18-19

^[1] Culver, R. D. (1999). 418 דּוּר. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 186). Chicago: Moody Press.