The Adjustment Bureau

The LORD is my light and my rescue.  Whom shall I fear?  Psalm 27:1  Robert Alter

Rescue – I checked twenty-seven English Bible translations of Psalm 27:1.  Every one of them translated these words as “the Lord is my light and my salvation.”  In fact, I doubt you’ve ever heard it any other way.  The theological framework of the translators is so ubiquitous that there is no variation in the treatment of the Hebrew.  Unfortunately, every one of them is wrong.

‘Salvation’ is the term that the translators in 1611 chose to represent the Hebrew yeshu’ah, and it has shown more than a little persistence in the various modern translations.  ‘Salvation’ is a heavily fraught theological term, pulling in its tow all sorts of associations of eschatological redemption or radical spiritual transformation and subline elevation of the individual sinner.  In Christianity, it also strongly implies a particular Savior (whose name is derived from this verbal stem); in postbiblical Judaism as well, the Hebrew word yeshu’ah comes to designate a global process of messianic redemption.  But in Psalms this noun and its cognate verb hoshi’a are strictly directed to the here and now.  Hoshi’a means to get somebody out of a tight fix, to rescue him.  When the tight fix involves the threat of enemies on the battlefield, yeshu’ah can be ‘victory,’ and hoshi’a ‘to make victorious’; more commonly, both the noun and the verb indicate ‘rescue.’[1]

In other words, the psalmist is not writing about getting to heaven, forgiving your sins, finding inner spiritual peace, or the hope of a Messianic Age.  He’s simply asking God to send reinforcements and get him out of the present mess he’s in.  That’s it.  That’s all.  We’ve added all the rest: the eschatology, the global prophecy, the heavenly trajectory, the “blessed assurance.”  We’ve converted the poems of ancient Israel into contemporary theological missives.  In the process, we’ve done more damage than simply lose track of the worldview of the writers.  We’ve introduced all sorts of theological issues that have become doctrinal dead weight.  And, by the way, yeshu’ah and hoshi’a aren’t the only victims here.  Nephesh, translated “soul,” hauls along an entire Greek cosmology.  Kingdom, malekût, is another; shifting the trade balance to divine realms divorced from ordinary social-political involvement.  Our religious upbringing inadvertently made the Bible a product of the Roman Catholic manifest destiny, and we, unknowingly, absorbed the spiritual pablum along with our hymns and sacraments.

But what would happen if we just stopped being so religious.  Not “Christian,” no, it’s not just a “Christian” problem.  You will have noticed, hopefully, that Alter’s comment included “postbiblical Judaism,” that is, the Jewish world after the prophets, the world of post Babylon rabbinic exegesis.  Religion absorbs its enemies; it doesn’t convert them.  It transforms the old ways into new halacha, and continues without any serious glance backward to see what was left behind.  Religion makes spiritual hunger contemporary.  Like all good liberal education, it simply redefines the terms so that they come to mean something else, something more “fitting.”

Ah, but now you know.  Good luck with that.

Topical Index: yeshu’ah, hoshi’a, nephesh, malekût, religion, Psalm 27:1

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 3 Writings, “Psalms: Introduction,” p. 22.