Set in Stone

I shall delight in Your statutes; I will not forget Your word.  Psalm 119:16  NASB

Statutes – The vocabulary of God’s torah wouldn’t be complete without one other word, ḥōq.   Why?  Because this word represents the ancient practice of permanence.  It is the word that means to engrave something on stone.  If you want to be sure the law is everlasting, you write it on something that will not deteriorate and stone is the medium of choice.  Stone tablets last.  The poet doesn’t want us to forget the permanence of God’s instructions.  In fact, he delights in this abiding and unchanging stability.  But just to be sure you don’t miss the point, he uses a verb rarely found anywhere else, and a tense that is just as unusual: šāʿaʿ (to take delight in) in the Hithpalpel.  What’s important is that this unusual grammatical twist would make you stop and reflect on its appearance.  And that’s the point.  It’s like putting a pause between the words, which in the Hebrew text read “in Your statutes (pause) . . . I will delight.”  So, think about God’s engraved, permanent words, then take a breath, and reflect on your joyous, spontaneous response.

Oh, wait!  You might not feel that joy.  As products of the Western written culture, you might (and probably have) read God’s commandments over and over—and never walked away stunned by their power.  That’s because in the Western culture, written words are so common that we can hardly imagine a world without them.  That wasn’t true when this poet penned his thoughts.  In fact, for most of human history, lessons were oral, not written.  What is quite amazing about the ancient Hebrew culture is that it was written.  You might wonder why?  The answer is twofold: first, because it could be accurately transmitted from generation to generation, and secondly, because it removed anxiety about what God wanted.  At last, we actually know God’s desires.  We know what to do and what not to do; something that may seem obvious today but was a matter of great concern in the ancient world where most gods did not communicate their fickle wishes.  We can delight with the poet because God’s statutes don’t change.  We’re not left in the dark.  We don’t need to guess.  “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good and what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  Isn’t that worth a joyful pause?

It seems that the Church has forgotten šāʿaʿ.  Since it no longer marvels at the permanence of the Law, since it has set aside the statutes in order to free itself from Judaism, it no longer delights in God’s engraved declarations.  Now what matters is not the continuity of revelation but the inner experience of the soul.  The ancients celebrated that fact that God gave them something they could count on; modern man prefers the flexibility of his own heart.  What he loses in the process is reliability.  What he inherits is anxiety.  The ancients solved the problem of what God wants by reading what God wrote on the stone tablets.  Modern man has replaced that security with his own inner feelings.  Good luck!

Topical Index: šāʿaʿ, Hithpalpel, engrave, ḥōq, delight, Micah 6:8, Psalm 119:16