Remains of the Day
But You, Lord, remain forever, and Your name remains to all generations. Psalm 102:12 NASB
Remain – God remains forever. In Hebrew, יְהֹוָה לְעוֹלָם. You’ll notice immediately that David uses the personal name of God, יְהֹוָה , not the word “Lord.” This matters, since he continues the thought with “Your name,” not “Your title.” There were plenty of other divine lords in David’s Mesopotamian world, but it is the personal God YHVH who is eternal. He remains when all others have ceased to be worshipped or acknowledged. Today we hardly recognize the importance of this statement because, for the most part, we don’t live in polytheistic cultures, but for David, asserting that the God of Israel is the only eternal God is crucial.
But now a question arises. If “You, YHVH, remain forever,” why does the psalmist need to add “and Your name”? Is there any difference?
Ah, and now the English translation disguises the answer. The choice of “name” means that we imagine the Hebrew to be shem. Perhaps you’re familiar with contemporary Jewish prayers that substitute Ha-Shem for YHVH. But the psalmist doesn’t use this word. Instead, we find zēker, a word that doesn’t mean “name” at all. Zēker comes from the verb zākar which means, “think (about), meditate (upon), pay attention (to); remember, recollect; mention, declare, recite, proclaim, invoke, commemorate, accuse, confess.”[1] Not “name.” It isn’t the personal appellation that continues. It’s God’s reputation. It’s the way God is remembered, proclaimed, confessed, invoked, and declared. And who does that? Why, we do, of course. God is remembered because men declare Him. It’s not the letters YHVH that remain forever. It’s the remembrance of who He is. And we’re right back to Heschel: “to believe is to remember.”
I hope you noticed that the end of this verse “remains to all generations” is in italics. That tells you that the translators have done a bit of interpolation here. In Hebrew it reads: תֵּשֵב וְזִכְרְךָ לְדֹר וָדֹר׃ (Te-Shev Ve-Zikh-Re-Kha Le-Dor Va-Dor).
Let me help. Te-Shev is the verb “abide,” so “You, YHVH, abide [remain].” But there is debate about this verb (yāšab), and because of the debate about its proper use, one suggestion is that this does not mean “dwell” as if God had a place to inhabit on earth, but rather it means “to be enthroned.” That results in the translation, “You, YHVH, are forever enthroned.” Now we come to the verb zākar (Ve-Zikh-Re-Kha) which we translate “your remembrance,” or “your memory.” Finally, notice that the next two words in Hebrew appear very much alike (Le-Dor Va-Dor). They are the same word (דֹּר (dōr)) with different prefixes: לְ (lĕ) and וְ (wĕ). Do you see the sheva below each of these? So we have a single word used with a preposition and a conjunction. What does dōr mean? Generation. What does this Hebrew construction mean? “to generation and generation,” or as the NASB translates “To all generations,” except, of course, the word “all” isn’t in the text. Okay, enough of this technical stuff.
Here’s the point. The “name” of God, that is, His remembrance, depends on the generations of men. As the psalmist says in another song, “Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave?” (Psalm 6:5 NIV). If God is going to be praised, if He is going to be remembered, if His “name” is forever, then there must be someone to do the praising, remembering, and worshipping—someone alive! “If I die,” implies the psalmist, “Your glory will be diminished because I won’t be there to praise You.”
This verse is the “turn around” verse, but it isn’t the personal erasing verse. The psalmist might finally be looking at the great glory of the Creator. He might have turned his thoughts to the magnificence of the one, true God. He might recognize that God’s faithfulness spans the generations. But, he is still in the mix. He is one more added voice to the memory, the praise, the worship. It’s no longer about “come and fix things for me, God.” Now it’s “You are worthy of all praise. Let me be part of that.”
Topical Index: Lord, YHVH, zēker, zākar, remembrance, dōr, generation, Psalm 102:12
[1] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 241). Chicago: Moody Press.
