Unforgettable

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

Not forget – Victor Hamilton’s remark in TWOT is crucial.  We have the tendency to think of “forget” as a mental lapse, but he makes it quite clear that this is not the biblical usage.  šākaḥ is an action verb.

Forgetting is not simply a psychological act of having a thought pass from one’s consciousness, a temporary or permanent lapse of memory. This is indicated by the frequent identification of the verb with an action. To forget God is to ignore his commandments (Deut 8:11). To forget God is to follow other gods (Deut 8:19); to forget God is to stand in fear of harm and danger, to live fretfully and timidly (Isa 51:13). To forget God is to challenge him (Ps 106:13). The Bible would indicate that satiety is the major factor for forgetting God (Deut 8:12ff.; Hos 13:6 for example).^[1]

Like most verbs in Hebrew, the emphasis is on action, not cognition.  In this case, to avoid the mistake of thinking that the poet claims mental acuity, we should probably translate the verb as “ignore,” that is, “I will not ignore Your word.”  It’s not a matter of failing to remember.  It’s a matter of not doing what is commanded.

Of course, if David wrote this psalm, he didn’t have God’s words that came from the prophets.  He had Moses.  This means that “Your word” focuses on the Pentateuch.  The poet delights (šāʿaʿ) in God’s revelation to Moses.  It’s truly amazing!  Without it, humanity would be in a state of continual anxiety, subject to the fickle whims of the gods.  Because this revelation of what God wants is so important, the author exclaims, “I won’t ignore this!  I won’t fail to act upon it!”  As Simon Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

The Greek word for “forget” points us to another interesting connection.  It’s buried in the word alḗtheia, which, in case you didn’t know, means “truth.”  In other words, the truth is something not (the Greek negative a) forgotten (lḗthō).  Plato capitalized on this Greek construction in the Socratic dialogues to argue that Truth (with a capital T) is really buried in a man’s soul and only needs to be remembered to become active.  Perhaps the rabbis hinted at the same conclusion when they suggested that before a person is born he or she is taught all the Torah in the womb, but at the moment of birth an angel slaps the newborn and causes him or her to forget.  “According to the Tikkunei Zohar the purpose of this teaching is so that when the child learns Torah anew, he recalls the learning that took place before he was born, which offers strength and vitality to the knowledge.”[2]  No matter which biblical language you read, forgetting is directly tied to Truth.  That’s worth remembering.  Now do something with it.

Topical Index: forget, šākaḥ, alḗtheia, truth, lḗthō, remember, John 6:68, Psalm 119:16

^[1] Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 2383 שָׁכַח. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 922). Moody Press.

[2] https://steinsaltz.org/daf/nidda30/