Does God Do It All?
I will cry to God Most High, to God who accomplishes all things for me. Psalm 57:2 [English] NASB
Who accomplishes all things – Poetry is difficult to understand. Just ask my Italian students who are studying Walt Whitman or Edgar Allen Poe. Poets like to manipulate the language, strike unusual parallels, twist resonance, and bend meanings in order to penetrate the complacency of the reader. The poets of the psalms are no different. Unfortunately, this makes translation exceedingly difficult. Consider Robert Alter’s remark: “Biblical Hebrew is what linguists call a synthetic language, as opposed to analytic languages such as English.”[1] What this means is that Hebrew words often collapse nouns, possessive indicators, and even tenses into single expressions, cemented together in a consonant string. Translators can’t just communicate individual words from one language to another. They must first unpack the density of the Hebrew, and then find appropriate English equivalents. Unfortunately, unpacking isn’t always so obvious. “Biblical syntax [word order] is more flexible than English syntax, often adjusting the order of terms for emphasis or for other expressive purposes.”[2] We write, “He climbed the mountain.” Hebrew might change this to “Climbed he the mountain” or “Mountain climbed he the” depending on what the author wants the reader to prioritize. And, of course, all of this can be crammed into just two words with attachments. When it comes to poetry, which is already malleable, the translator’s task is exacerbated. How to represent what is poetry in Hebrew (which, by the way, doesn’t rhyme sounds) and still have readable English is a strenuous task. It often leads to interpretive messes, even more so when the original Hebrew text is already messy.
Let’s take this verse as an example. The NASB treats the Hebrew gomer alai as “who accomplishes all things for me.” The NIV renders the Hebrew as “who is good to me.” Alter pens, “who requites me.” At least Alter tells us that he has not used the Masoretic text. His translation comes from the LXX. The problem is that the MT’s Hebrew is gomer, not gomel. As such, the MT just doesn’t make any sense. Gomer means “to finish.” How can the poet write, “I will cry to God Most High, to God who finishes me.” Ah, but perhaps poetry isn’t quite as obvious as narrative. Gordon Tucker notes: “The traditional Hebrew reading gomer (‘finish, decide’) is puzzling; the variant read gomel is preferred by modern scholars. But the midrashist put the traditional Hebrew version to good use.”[3] How did that happen? The midrashist reads the text as “ . . . to the God who decides with me.”
What an amazing idea! It’s perfect poetry, pushing us into the space where we have to reconsider the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human free agency. God decides with me, not dictates to me, not leaves me to figure it out on my own, but rather involves Himself in my very decision. Gomel is too easy. God does me good. God accomplishes things through me. Yeah, so? What poetic insight is there in that? But God decides with me? Oh my, suddenly every decision I make is laced with divine involvement. I have impact on God; He has impact on me. The title of Heschel’s God in Search of Man says it all. Because we’ve grown up in the Western world of the transcendental God, we don’t often think that God really needs us to complete His purposes, but this “mistake” in the text is a nice reminder. Maybe the midrash reading is right.
Topical Index: gomel, gomer, finish, decide, Psalm 57:2
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 3 Writings, p. 17
[2] Ibid., p. 18.
[3] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (ed. and trans. by Gordon Tucker, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2007), p. 516, fn. 46.
