God of the Living

For the sake of Your name, LORD, give me life, in Your bounty bring me out from the straits.  Psalm 143:11  Robert Alter

Give me life – The NASB translates this single Hebrew word as “revive me,” but that implies I only need resuscitation.  Alter’s translation is more fundamental.  “Give me life,” implies that I don’t have anything without God’s intervention.  It’s not that I was once vibrant and active and now I need a shot in the arm.  No, the Hebrew says more.  I was dead and only God can return me to living.  The verb, ḥāyâ, is a Pi’el form, which can express all kinds of action depending on the context.  Here it is intensive.  We could put an exclamation point after the phrase.  “Give me life!”  The psalmist isn’t asking for spiritual vitamins and an extra shot of biblical caffeine.  He’s begging for his very existence!  If God doesn’t provide ḥāyâ, he’s finished.  And, by the way, his plea has nothing to do with deserving God’s attention.  “In Your bounty” uses the Hebrew ṣĕdāqâ.  It is God’s righteousness that lies behind ḥāyâ.  If I have life, it’s because God’s standard is in play.

There are other psalms that decry the miserable state of our existence.  They challenge us to embrace suffering as part of the divine plan even when we can’t find rational explanation.  We are like the Israelites who were carried off by the Babylonians.  Yes, we admit our sins.  Yes, we were disobedient.  But why should the punishment be so intense? As my rabbi friend said to me when my leg was broken, “Okay, God, I get the message, but did You have to break my hand too?”  One of the great lessons of the Captivity is that suffering must be embraced if hope is to rise.  That seems to be the perspective of the psalmist here.  He’s walked the road to perdition.  Forgiveness isn’t earned.  Life depends on God’s mercy, on God’s righteousness.

But he can still ask.

It might feel as if the sky is a lead ceiling.  It might feel as if the walls are closing in.  But God is good.  There is still a sliver of hope riding a ray from heaven.

“ . . . the essential emphasis [of the Exile] is upon the absolute priority of divine action.  The effect and acceptance of disaster have brought an understanding of restoration in terms of God’s action.  The more effectively the disaster is accepted, and the more realistically the condition of men’s life is appreciated, the more evident it becomes that only in divine action can there be hope; and that this divine action is entirely self-motivated and is not to be, as it were, undergirded with the self-pity of the people, the conscious or unconscious expression of the belief that in the end God will forgive . . .”[1]

God is doing what He wants to do.  We can accept that fact, and accept our responsibility in precipitating His response, followed by our repentance, but it is God’s action, God’s willingness, that brings about the result.  “Give me life” is my hope.  God’s choice is my answer.

Topical Index:  life, ḥāyâ, divine will, Exile, Psalm 143:11

[1] Peter R. Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration, p. 234.