The Trinity

Let my pleading come before You; save me according to Your word.  Psalm 119:170 NASB

Pleading – Three words need to be understood in Hebrew context.  These three words are part of the overall pattern of this long psalm.  They are also crucial terms describing the relationship between the follower and the founder of the faith. They are ḥănînâ, nāṣal, and ʾimrâ.  You may notice their importance when you read the same verse in Robert Alter’s translation:

Let my supplication come before You, as befits Your utterance, save me.

As Alter points out, each of these last eight verses asks God to accept the previous 168 lines.  So we find opening thoughts involving “cry” (joyous shout), “pleading” (supplication), “utter,” “sing,” “happen,” “long for,” “live,” and “gone astray.”  Each of these words will be important.  Here we have the second, ḥănînâ.  TWOT reminds us that “The verb ḥānan depicts a heartfelt response by someone who has something to give to one who has a need. . . According to Flack the verb describes ‘an action from a superior to an inferior who has no real claim for gracious treatment.’”^[1]  The crucial point is that this plea is not simply a vocalized desire.  It is based on the assumption, in fact, the requirement, that God (the Superior) will give to the inferior.  Without God’s expressed gracious character, such a plea is an impossibility.  This is why wishes cast before idols are useless.  They have no commitment to respond, even if they could.  Nor, by the way, does any other apparent deity of modern religions have any reason to respond to the pleadings of men.  Gracious, expressing pity, granting favor—unless God is ḥānan, all is lost.

The second term in the Hebraic trinity is nāṣal.  Deliver, rescue, save—all under the nāṣal umbrella.   None meaning “escape path of heaven.”  The basic idea is to pull out.  It is used to describe tear oneself away, strip off, make separate, deliver.  Fisher’s comment is important: “Quite often, however, a literal personal salvation or deliverance (often physical but not without spiritual overtones or application) is involved.”^[2]  But he also adds, “Spiritual salvation through forgiveness of sins is certainly intended in Ps 39:8 [H 9], ‘Deliver me from all my transgressions’ (cf. ‘ … from bloodguiltiness,’ Ps 51:14 [H 16], ‘ … and purge away our sins,’ Ps 79:9) and figuratively implied by ‘deliver me out of the mire’ in Ps 69:14 [H 15].”^[3]  Hebrew synonyms point to the immediate, temporal reality of this rescue.  In fact, were it not for later rabbinic and Christian extrapolations, we might never have thought that this verb had anything to do with an afterlife escape at all.

Finally, we have ʾimrâ, in syntactical order prior to the verb nāṣal.  You will recognize immediately that this is spoken words, not promises printed on the pages of a Bible.  We should expect nothing else in an oral culture.  My word is my bond, and so it is with God’s word.  The poet relies entirely on what God has said for he knows that what God says is Truth.  As we have seen throughout this poem, it is the enduring character of God’s personal commitment vocalized through the prophets that is the basis of the poet’s confidence.  The written text comes later and, frankly, cannot stand without the spoken word.  As a brief side note, you might want to apply this to the controversy of John 1:1.  For our investigation here, the poet has given us the three building blocks of the Hebraic trinity: the assumption of graciousness, the assurance of rescue, and the reliability of the spoken word.  Is anything else really needed?

Topical Index: ḥănînâ, gracious, nāṣal, deliver, ʾimrâ, spoken word, Psalm 119:170

^[1] Yamauchi, E. (1999). 694 חָנַן. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 302). Moody Press.

^[2] Fisher, M. C. (1999). 1404 נָצַל. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 594). Moody Press.

^[3] Ibid.