Worship Weblog
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 18: Gored
Reading 5: Psalm 18
Psalm 18 focal phrase: “the horn of my salvation” focal word: gored “Horn” is one of those poetic images that needs an explanation. I actually thought it was a little more poetic than it turned out to be. I was thinking “horn” as in “horn of plenty,” with salvation spilling out. Especially when you read the Vulgate, which has “cornu salutis meae”—“horn of my salvation”—with “cornu” as in “cornucopia.” Or maybe “horn” is some ancient military instrument or shield. Or “horn” as in “blow your horn,” the announcement of salvation, as when Joshua blew down the walls of Jericho in Joshua 6 with ram’s horns. But most of the commentaries I checked say that “horn” is just a “horn”—the horn of an animal. The Hebrew word is qeren, for animal horn, the same one used in Genesis 22 when Abraham is called off on his sacrifice of Isaac and sees “a ram caught in the thicket by his horns.” Why “horn”? An NIV footnote explains, “‘horn’ here symbolizes strength.” A footnote in the Contemporary English Version—which translates verse 2 as “my shield, my powerful weapon, and my place of shelter”—is the most helpful of all: “The Hebrew text has ‘the horn,’ which refers to the horn of a bull, one of the most powerful animals in ancient Palestine.” When I look at the number of ways the word “horn” is used figuratively in the Old Testament, I still can’t quite believe that this rhetorical flourish actually has in mind the pointy protrusion of a bull. But as I reflected on this phrase, I challenged myself to take the literal meaning and run with it. What does it mean, then, to praise God as the “horn” of our salvation? The NIV Study Bible points to two verses that integrate the literal and figurative meanings of “horn”: first, Moses’ rather gruesome tribute to Joseph and his tribe in Deuteronomy 33:
A firstborn bull—majesty is his! His horns are the horns of a wild ox; with them he gores the peoples, driving them to the ends of the earthAnd Jeremiah 48, where losing your horn is the mark of defeat: “The horn of Moab is cut off, and his arm is broken, says the Lord.” Relatedly, Psalm 82 says:
I say to the boastful, ‘Do not boast’, and to the wicked, ‘Do not lift up your horn; do not lift up your horn on high, or speak with insolent neck.’ ... All the horns of the wicked I will cut off, but the horns of the righteous shall be exalted.These verses make it a little less strange to praise God as the “horn of our salvation.” But I still find it hard to relate to the language of attack and defense in Psalm 18. In fact, I’ve been struggling with the Psalms’ exultations of God’s violent deliverance throughout my psalm readings so far. I find it hard to celebrate war and death, even when it’s God’s hand working through them. (Psalm 18 is adapted from David’s song in 2 Samuel 22, after he escaped Saul). And I struggle to apply them to my own life, which is free from persecution and military attack. I’ve come up with three guesses. First, these psalms about deliverance remind us to keep celebrating the acts of God in the biblical story: the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus 14, the defeat of Goliath in 1 Samuel 17, the rescue of Daniel’s three friends from the fiery furnace in Daniel 3, the miraculous prison breaks of Peter in Acts 12 and Paul in Acts 16. Second, we can celebrate our ultimate deliverance, the fact that no matter what suffering or death we experience, “nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” But third, and most directly, there are some echoes, some faint, some furious, of this previous and future deliverance in our current lives. Just this past week, the brother of a colleague in Africa was inexplicably spared his job after several of his coworkers were fired for being Christians. The six-month-old daughter of another colleague, after weeks of chemotherapy on her tiny body, was pronounced cancer-free. This kind of deliverance doesn’t always happen, but when it does, our souls leap. And in these moments, the image of an animal’s horn isn’t entirely disagreeable. Let’s be honest—because the Psalms are nothing if not honest—don’t we kind of like the image of God as a charging bull, horn poised for attack, not just waving a wand over a medical chart but actually goring that cancer, driving it away? Don’t we take comfort in standing behind a horn so sharp that sometimes it scares persecutors away? Deliver us from evil, we pray. God has in the past, and God has secured our eternal refuge. And once in a while, even now, we see evil with holes poked in it, deflated, defeated.
More Meditations on the Psalms
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The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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