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And hide not Your face from Your servant, for I am in straits.  Hurry, answer me.  Psalm 69:18 [Hebrew Bible]  Robert Alter

Hurry – First we need to clear up an English rendering of צָרַר tsarar.  Alter’s choice doesn’t fit the topography of Israel.  The English “strait” is usually associated with a narrow body of water.  No such thought would have occurred to David.  For him,  tsarar is about binding, being tied up, restricted, cramped.  Semitic freedom is open space, the edge of the horizon in every direction, the vastness of the canopy of stars overhead.  When David employs metaphors about wells and cisterns, you can imagine the view you would have from the bottom looking up.  Distress is confinement—and there are plenty of things in this world that hold us in.  As God’s servant, David pleads for space—psychic and otherwise—for the ability to maneuver, to find another way, to follow a different track.  Actually, his self-designation is a bit stronger than servant.  It’s ʿebed, slave.  And a slave is at the mercy of the Master.

“Hurry, answer me,” writes David.  Don’t you think this is a bit presumptuous?  Slaves don’t make demands of masters.  David writes, “mahēr ʿāne’ni.”  Perhaps he has something other than a demand in mind.  A significant use of the term mahēr (quickly) is found in another flashback to Moses.  Exodus 32:8 says, “They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them.”  The event is the tragedy of the Golden Calf.  The warning comes later.  Continue in the direction and you will be quickly destroyed.  The word is not common.  In David’s time, it would have been found only nine times in the Pentateuch, most of the occurrences in the Golden Calf story.  Perhaps David is employing a poetic technique here by alluding to a disaster for both God and men.  “If you don’t answer me quickly, think of what might happen.  Like before.”  Or maybe his reminder is that he isn’t like those who quickly turned aside.  He is an ʿebed, devoted to his Master.  And the Master is the only One who can rescue him from these circumstances that bind him.  David isn’t so arrogant as to believe God owes him a response, but he is bold enough to push the matter to the forefront.

That’s a lesson we need to learn.  We’re quick to boldly proclaim His praises.  We’re quick to bring our troubles before Him.  But maybe we’re not so swift when we suffer from a case of Egyptomania.  You remember the term, right?  Just in case you’ve forgotten, here are remarks from Eric Santer, who coined the term, and Avivah Zornberg, who applied it to Exodus interpretation:

“Revelation is ultimately nothing but a clearing away of the fantasies that confine our energies within an ultimately defensive protocosmic existence—our various forms of ‘Egyptomania’—that keep us at a distance from our answerability within everyday life and . . . from the possibilities for new possibilities that are all the time breaking out within it.”[1]

“Observing God’s mandate, then, may imply being vigilant, sustaining a sense of trust, keeping faith with a future yet to evolve.  In a word, waiting.  It also evokes a kind of freedom from what Eric Santner calls ‘the repetition compulsions—the Egyptomaniacal labors—that sustain idolatrous attachments.’”[2]

“. . . the Egyptian sickness” (Exodus 15:26).”[3]

“For Santner, Exodus involves finding a way ‘to separate from the various forms of Egyptomania that so profoundly constrain our lives.’”[4]

“An unimaginative passion constricts life into Egyptomaniac forms.”[5]

Perhaps David is the real inventor of the idea.  Repeating those typical emotional anesthetics which seem so necessary in order to cope with the “double, double, toil and trouble” world only binds us to a surface reality while God’s divine providence attempts to burst into being.  Egyptomania is the standard operating principle of the yetzer ha’ra.

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.  (Macbeth)

The choice is yours.  Macbeth or YHVH.  Sound and fury or waiting.

Topical Index: hurry, mahēr, Egyptomania, Yetzer ha’ra, Macbeth, Psalm 69:18

[1] Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, pp. 100-101.

[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 45, citing Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 115.

[3] Cf. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 94.

[4] Ibid., p. 94, citing Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 45.

[5] Ibid., p. 98.