Continental Divide

My eyes shed streams of water, because they do not keep Your Law.  Psalm 119:136  NASB

Streams – The idiom is obvious.  We have no problem understanding the poet’s description of “crying your eyes out” (our version of the idiom).  But until we investigate the Hebrew word for “streams,” we might not see the deeper possibilities.  That word is pālag.  TWOT notes that it only occurs in the Niphal and Piel stems, i.e., the simple passive or the declarative.  Furthermore, it only occurs ten times, almost all in the Psalms.  And finally, it refers to an artificialchannel like a man-made canal.  When it’s used with mayim (water, only in the plural), it means a divide, a place where water flows in two directions.  You can think of it as the continental divide.

What does that tell us?  Well, the first thing it could say is that both eyes are crying a lot of tears.  But I think there’s more.  It could also mean that these tears themselves are divided.  The poet weeps over the fact that people don’t keep God’s instructions for two reasons.  First, is the tragedy of the results.  They are lost and will eventually reap the results of being lost.  But second, they are presently an obstacle to God’s law and will eventually be swept away.  So, I cry because of what will happen to them, and I cry because of what they are doing to block God’s intentions now.  My tears are divided; one stream implores mercy, the other desires judgment.  “Because they do not keep” is the double-edged sword of compassion and condemnation.  The “continental divide” is still with us today.

Of course, from the perspective of Western theology we almost always read this verse as heartfelt agony over lost souls.  We tend to ignore that fact that they are lost because they do not keep (šāmar) the Torah.  Amazingly, in the Christian world keeping the Torah is a sign of rejection, not acceptance.  We’ve turned the continental divide on its head.  Since the age of Augustine, we’ve been blind to the ki (“because”), deliberately ignoring the psalmist’s clear connection between judgment and lack of observance.  The baby was thrown out with the bath water.  And the result is devastating for it immediately raises the question, “Why would God reject us?”  If the Law really is of no consequence, then why is God angry?  What have we done to disturb Him?  It can’t be violations of His instructions because those instructions have been set aside.  This can only mean that we, as Westerners, are right back in the ancient Near Eastern kingdoms of idolatry.  The gods of those kingdoms didn’t tell men how to live.  They simply punished them for living.  In Babylon you knew you were guilty.  You just didn’t know why.  And frankly, neither do we.  So life became an effort to appease the angry gods without ever really knowing why they were angry or what to do about it.  We tried everything from food offerings to human sacrifice, but life circumstances still were harsh and unexplainable.  The wonder of Israelite faith is that God told us what He wanted—for the first time ever.  And now we’ve thrown all that out and discovered we don’t have a clue what to do.  So, we import a few commands here and there to comfort our aching conscience.  Maybe we should listen to the psalmist again.

Topical Index: pālag, streams, divide, water, mayim, compassion, condemnation, Psalm 119:136