The Sound of Honey

How sweet are Your words to my taste!  Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth!  Psalm 119:103  NASB

Your words – What do Genesis 1:3, 3:1 and 3:10 have in common with Psalm 119:103?  The answer is ʾāmar, the Hebrew verb for “say, speak, command, promise.”  Of course, there are a lot of other verses that use this verse (about 5000 of them), here, in Psalm 119:103, the poet uses the derivative ʾimrâ which means “speech” or “utterance.”  This immediately adjusts our understanding of the verse.  The poet is not telling us that God’s written word is like honey.  He’s telling us that God’s spoken word is as sweet as honey.  It’s the taste of sound.  Just think about the skillful use of clashing concepts.  Poetry arrests our thought and makes us reconsider the imagery.  And yet we have no difficulty understanding his metaphor.

But we do have difficulty altering our typical exegesis.  We are so used to God’s word as written text that we fail to grasp the psalmist’s delight in the sound.  We immediately mistake his claim as if it were about all those words on our printed page.  In other words, we transport the psalmist into the Guttenberg era because that’s what we’re used to.  As William Graham rightly notes:

“Scripture is widely understood today to be the antithesis of a community’s oral tradition.  It is conceived as the tangible document that fixes the fluid sacred word and gives it substance and permanence.  The idea hardly even occurs that a sacred text could exist for long without being written; nor does the recognition come easily that virtually every scripture has traditionally functioned in large measure as vocal, not silent discourse.”[1]

“ . . . our paradigm for a scripture is—namely—the printed book of the Bible!”[2]

What a mistake!  If we want to discover the honey of God’s word, we need to listen to it, not just read it, not even “listening” to ourselves reading silently.  In fact, for most of the history of the Bible, God’s words were oral.  That means they were nuanced, emotional, fluid, gestured, rhythmic, sung, chanted—and all the other aspects of audible communication so easily lost when the text becomes fossilized black and white.  Perhaps we’ve left a significant element of God’s words behind in our preoccupation with textual certainty. We are no longer capable of divine imagination, of metaphors like honey dripping from speech.  Oral communication is a living thing in a way that written text can never be.

Now we have to correct another modern misunderstanding.  “Sweet” is not about sugar content.  The word is māh-nimlĕṣû, and it literally means “smooth” or “slippery.”  The idea is the experience of something pleasant, but not because it’s made up of fructose and glucose.  When words are like honey, it doesn’t mean they are sugar-sweet.  It means they flow.  In fact, the words can be confrontational, challenging, even disturbing, but they slide like water over smooth stones.  They drip with pregnant meaning.  That’s what makes the poet enthralled.  When was the last time you felt this emotional response to hearing God’s words?

The poet tells us that the flow of God’s words is even better than the taste of honey.  Is this a way of saying that when I am immersed in Torah, I find myself in the flow of the living God.  I move with Him through His creation.  He carries me along the stream of life.  And that is better than even honey in the mouth.

Topical Index: words, ʾimrâ, māh-nimlĕṣû, honey, smooth, slippery, oral, Psalm 119:103

[1] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. ix.

[2] Ibid.