Meditation or Perspiration

Attend to me, and listen to me; I was vexed in my pondering and was troubled by the noise of an enemy and by the affliction of a sinner . . .  Psalm 54:3-4a  LXX

Pondering – The Hebrew text of this verse uses the word śîaḥ, from a verb that means “meditate, muse, commune, speak, complain.”^[1]  With that much latitude, it’s easy to see why the LXX uses ᾱ̓δολεσχία (adoleschia) meaning “chatter,” “idle talk,” or “nonsense,” choosing one of the Hebrew umbrella meanings, i.e., meditate.  But once more the nuance pushes us toward a mental experience while the Hebrew word covers audible verbal behavior.

We have often noted that Greek and Hebrew operate on very different assumptions about the world.  The Greek paradigm is basically built around things (nouns) which act or are acted upon through the connecting verbs.  In Greek thought, the world is essentially static.  It is the collection of all the “things.”  These may change over time (an acorn becomes an oak) but the essence of the thing is already contained with the seed so the “thing” itself doesn’t actually change.  What changes is the manifestation of that essence.  This view leads to the assumption that the world as we see it is not actually the essential world.  The real world is the world of the essence of things.  We just experience their temporal alterations in the sensory world, just as we ourselves change in the sensory world but remain the same “person” throughout.  The Bible from a Greek perspective follows the same logic.  What truly matters is the essence, the “soul” of things.  The material body is of much less importance because it is subject to change though time.  God, as the pure essence of everything, is not subject to temporal change at all.  His world is the eternal, timeless world of true reality.  Ours isn’t.  The only connection that we have to God’s eternal world is rationality.  Truth expressed in true ideas does not change and when we contemplate the truth (and the true essence) of the world, we rise above the material changing world and approach the divine.  If we apply this thinking to our verse in the LXX, we see that adoleschia is translated as “pondering” because it moves us toward rational thought and moving toward rational thought means approaching the divine.

But Hebrew is very different.  Hebrew is a verbally-based language, reflecting a worldview that what matter is what we do, not necessarily what we think.  The God of Israel is intimately involved in life, not a transcendent Being of pure thought.  He acts.  He feels.  He speaks.  He even shows anger and joy and disappointment.  To meditate in Hebrew is not to sit quietly contemplating the Truth.  It is to interact with the community and with God, to bring thought into reality, to embody the divine.  That’s why śîaḥ shares its umbrella with “complain, commune” and “speak.”  These are not separate mental acts.  They are the integrated whole of relationship.  And this shift in worldview is crucial if we want to immerse ourselves in the Hebrew view of God, something your English Bible often doesn’t capture because its basic approach comes through Greek patterns.

Topical Index: ponder, meditate, śîaḥ, adoleschia, Psalm 55:2-3a

^[1] Cohen, G. G. (1999). 2255 שִׂיַח. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 875). Chicago: Moody Press.