Original Meaning
Declaration of Trust (116:1–2)
THE OPENING LINES OF PSALM 116 provide the fundamental reason for the psalmist’s song of thanksgiving: God has heard his prayer. The word order for verse 1 is unusual in that it literally reads in Hebrew, “I love [’ahab] because Yahweh has heard my cry, my plea.” Typically, one would expect the verb ’ahab to be followed by a direct object indicating the object of the psalmist’s affection. A number of English translations have sought to remedy the somewhat awkward phrase by inserting “the LORD” immediately after the verb. Els correctly notes that there was an “undoubted hesitancy” to make Yahweh the direct object of a verb, even the verb ’ahab.6
In other texts, psalmists would mention their love of objects related to Yahweh (i.e., “your name,” “your commandments,” “Jerusalem”). In verse 1 the object of the psalmist’s affection is that “the LORD . . . heard my voice.” Rather than simply attributing such a phrase to circumlocution or pleonasm, the focus of the psalmist’s love is aptly put: the psalmist loves “that the LORD has heard his voice.” Yahweh’s faithful action in the past (vv. 1b, 2a) prompts the psalmist to respond in the future, “I will call [qara’] on him as long as I live.”7
Allen renders the verb qara’ as “proclaim” and suggests that what follows in the remainder of the psalm is the testimony or proclamation of the psalmist.8
Bridging Contexts
THE THREAT OF DEATH. The language and imagery of death pervades Psalm 116. In recounting his plight, the psalmist mentions the word “death” (mawet) three times (vv. 3, 8, 15), and the mention of Sheol in verse 3b introduces yet another reference to death.21
The explicit mention of Sheol and the repeated references to “death” (mawet) in Psalm 116 may seem overdrawn in a thanksgiving psalm, and perhaps their appearance would be more at home in a lament psalm, yet as Christoph Barth and others have noted, the opposite is in fact the case. Language and imagery associated with death and the underworld appear with greater frequency in the thanksgiving psalms than in the lament psalms, with lament psalms rarely even mentioning Sheol by name.22
While death can have positive connotations in the Old Testament, especially in reference to the death of one who was “full of years” (e.g., Abraham [Gen 25:8]; David [1 Chr 29:28]), quite often the idea of death carries a more foreboding sense. The mention of death and Sheol in thanksgiving psalms suggests this latter sense by drawing attention to the acute crisis faced by the psalmist in the past.
This foreboding sense of death often can carry with it the sense of being confined or constrained, as noted above. The sense of confinement and powerlessness captures the angst associated with the tenuous life-and-death experiences confronted by the psalmist. Seemingly, the threatened individual has little power against the deathly grasp of Sheol or the fate that awaits him. In Psalm 18:4–5 the psalmist writes:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Human beings, understanding that death follows life, are well aware of their own mortality. Yet the psalmist’s angst over death does not stem from his inability to confront his own mortality; rather, it stems from the intrusion of the forces of death into the sphere of the living and his inability to hold such forces at bay.
As the cords of death reach into the sphere of the living, one of the chief threats is that death has the capacity to separate the psalmist from God. Death does much more than simply end life. More devastatingly for the psalmist, death threatens to take him to a place removed from the presence of God. In Psalm 88 the psalmist uses death language to describe his crisis, but even in its metaphorical sense the existential crisis created by death is clear. In verse 5 the psalmist bemoans,
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
In response, a contemporary reader might be quick to cite Psalm 139 and exclaim that God is present everywhere, or perhaps refer to the book of Revelation and suggest that, through death, one experiences God in new and more profound ways. In 1 Corinthians 15:55 Paul cites Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Yet such quick rejoinders dismiss too easily the theological crisis articulated by both the psalmist and the New Testament writers. The psalmist is not afraid of death for death’s sake; rather, he fears the possibility of no longer being in the presence of God—a fate even worse than death. Paul acknowledges a similar fear among the early Christians and reminds those at Corinth that there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” in the hope of the resurrection; death will not separate the people of God from the God they serve.
For the psalmists, death signals much more than simply a cessation of life; death signals an absence from God and his provision. Such a perspective on death explains the psalmist’s exuberance in Psalm 116:8–9 that God had delivered him, so he could once more “walk before the LORD in the land of the living” (cf. Ps 56:12–13).
Thanksgiving and testimony. Individual psalms of thanksgiving frequently include the psalmist’s promise to bear witness to God’s act of deliverance. In the first half of Psalm 116 the poet recounts the crisis he faced and the deliverance granted to him by God. In those verses (vv. 1–11) the psalmist addresses himself (“my soul”) in verse 7 and addresses Yahweh in verse 8, but the remaining verses function as a report, of sorts, referring to God in the third person. In verse 5b the psalmist includes a first-person plural pronoun, “[and] our God [we’lohenu] is full of compassion,” thus suggesting that this report of deliverance and song of thanksgiving have moved from the realm of privatized faith to their rightful setting in the context of the larger community.
In the second half of the psalm, twice the psalmist pledges, “I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people” (vv. 14, 18). Other individual thanksgiving psalms include similar promises to bear witness to the work of God. For example, in Psalm 66:16 the psalmist invites all those who fear God to come near and he will tell them “what he has done for me.” Similar promises of testimony appear elsewhere in the Psalter (e.g., Pss 52:9; 118:17). Some may ask why testimony accompanied thanksgiving. Was it not enough simply to utter a song of thanksgiving to God? Why involve the community? To what end? Patrick Miller explains that:
The deliverance of one of God’s afflicted is cause for rejoicing by all. It is not only the thanks of one saved. This act is a pointer to the way that God always acts. The salvation of one who cried out creates a community of praise and thanksgiving, of worship and the fear of the LORD. The voice of the one becomes a choir of many.23
A song of thanksgiving is ultimately never about the one who has been delivered but instead about the God who intervenes in those tenuous places between life and death. Such songs of testimony give proper praise to God, but in so doing they also confirm and perhaps even reorient the community’s confession about this God. To give thanks without testimony is to diminish the significance of deliverance itself, and worse yet, to minimize the fullness of its power for the people of God.
Contemporary Significance
SPIRIT OF GRATITUDE. TESTIMONY OF HOPE. Hermann Gunkel, one of the leading Psalms scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and the pioneer of the form-critical approach to the Psalter, reflected on the concept of thanksgiving in the Psalter. In particular, Gunkel considered the celebrations in which the psalmists would have uttered their poems of thanksgiving within the context of the community. He suggests that such moments must have been among “the most beautiful hours in the life of the pious.”24
In one of my interim pastorates I served a church that had been through a particularly challenging season, and the church had not weathered that season well. The church had a center aisle that divided the sanctuary cleanly in two, and the building’s architecture reflected its present climate. Worship was strained; even more was conversation between members. I was asked by many if I thought that church would survive, and if so, how? I honestly did not know.
I announced one Sunday morning that beginning the following week there would be a testimony each Sunday. I approached one of the lay leaders and tasked him with lining up one person for each week. The people were to come from various age groups, from various Sunday School classes, and from different “sides” in the congregation. I gave each of them a prompt for sharing that simply read, “I saw God this week because he did [blank]. And for that I am thankful.”
Week after week individuals made their way to the pulpit and identified where they had seen God at work in their lives, and week after week they concluded by saying, “And for that I am thankful.” Because of the controversy and conflict in that church, it had been some time since many people had sensed God at work in that community, and longer still since anyone had said, “For that I am thankful.” But together, as the people of God, they listened to one another despite their differences, and they were reminded that God remains at work among his people; each testimony became a “pointer to the way that God always acts.”
Gunkel was right; such experiences can create beautiful moments in the life of the pious. Regrettably, however, in our need to manage time, stay on message, and control quality, the notion of testimony has become a vestige of the past in most of our worship services. There is no room for thanksgiving, no room for testimony. For some these are antiquated practices of another generation. Yet the truth is that some people in the pews before us sense that “the cords of death” are surrounding them. Some feel trapped and “overcome by distress and sorrow” and they are weary from stumbling. They are less concerned about time management, messaging, and quality control in the worship service because they simply need to know there is still hope. They need to know God is still at work.
The writer of Psalm 116 testifies to those gathered around him that “our God is full of compassion” (v. 5). Perhaps there are others, even now, who need to know the same truth about our God. And while ministers can climb into the pulpit weekly to make that proclamation, what most people really want to hear is a testimony—a testimony grounded in unadulterated thanksgiving.
Original Meaning
Recollection of Deliverance (116:3–6)
FOLLOWING THE DECLARATION OF TRUST, the psalmist recounts the scene of deliverance that prompted the song of thanksgiving. He recounts the depths of his plight in verses 3 and 6b, thereby creating an inclusio around the verses that deal with Yahweh’s capacity to deliver.
The cords of death entangled me. Although the psalmist alludes to the impending threat of death, he refers to his plight using highly metaphorical and stylized language. Søren Holst, drawing from work in cognitive linguistics, argues convincingly for a metaphorical motif in the Old Testament connected with the idea of being in a tight place, being constricted, or being confined.9
The more concrete idea of being in a tight place or being caught conveys metaphorically the sense of being in need. In Psalm 116:3 the psalmist explains that the “cords of death” had entangled him (’apap). Rather than “entangled,” the verb might better be understood as “encompassed” or “surrounded.” Cords of death that surrounded a victim are part of the “hunt” metaphor frequently employed in the Old Testament. The language and imagery used in this metaphor signal the entrapment of the victim and its impending death or destruction.10
Here in verse 3a, the psalmist confesses that the cords of death had surrounded him and that death was impending.
The second colon in verse 3 continues the same imagery. The NIV reads, “the anguish [metsare] of the grave came over me,” but such a rendering misses the metaphorical imagery suggested above. The word metsare comes from the root tsrr, which in the intransitive sense means “to be narrow” and in the transitive, “to tie up.” The nominative forms of the root suggest “narrowness, constriction, physical and/or mental claustrophobia,” idiomatically rendered quite often as “distress.”11
The connection is rather apparent: even as the ropes of death surround him, so too do the straits or restraints of Sheol. The threat is far more ominous than the NIV’s translation suggests. The Hebrew suggests that the straits of Sheol had found (matsa’) the psalmist; death had hunted him down.
Then I called on the name of the LORD. In verse 3c the psalmist admits that, from the midst of his confining, entrapped, near-death existence, all he can find are sorrow and constraint. There is no relief. As a result, the psalmist’s only recourse is to plead with God for deliverance (v. 4). To call on the name of Lord is to invoke God and all that he is in an attempt to find relief from the current constraints. The desperation of the psalmist’s plea is captured with the use of the particle of entreaty ’annah (“please” or “I pray”) along with the verb malat, “to save.” Some translators opt not to translate ’annah, but in doing so they fail to communicate the despair of the psalmist: “O LORD, save me, I pray.”
The LORD is gracious and righteous. Having just called upon the name of Yahweh, the psalmist recounts the characteristics of God that warrant the psalmist’s trusting in him for deliverance. Verses 5a–6a contain three verbless clauses meant to reinforce the claims about this God. The psalmist has modified what Janowksi calls “the grace formula” (Exod 34:6–7). While use of the larger formula is seen most clearly in Psalms 103:8 and 145:8–9, portions of the formula appear in Psalm 116 as descriptors of Yahweh.12
Variations of this grace formula appeared earlier in Psalms 111:4 and 112:4.
The LORD protects the unwary. In addition to being a gracious and righteous God, full of compassion, the psalmist celebrates that God protects the unwary (peta’im). The word peta’im refers to the simple or naïve ones, those who are still learning their way. The term often elicits negative connotations in the book of Proverbs (cf. Prov 1:32; 14:15, 18; 22:3), but elsewhere the word can refer to those who simply remain in need of instruction (cf. Pss 19:7; 119:130). Because they have yet to receive proper instruction, they are likely to walk in the wrong paths and consequently need the protection of God. The psalmist contends that surely the God who cares for the peta’im would also care for him. Like the peta’im who need protection, so too does the psalmist. In Psalm 116:6b he explains that he had been brought low (dalal). Other texts in the Old Testament indicate that the dal are those who are materially poor and socially estranged, those who cannot contend for themselves.13
The psalmist reports, however, that from his helpless estate Yahweh saved him.
Bridging Contexts
THE THREAT OF DEATH. The language and imagery of death pervades Psalm 116. In recounting his plight, the psalmist mentions the word “death” (mawet) three times (vv. 3, 8, 15), and the mention of Sheol in verse 3b introduces yet another reference to death.21
The explicit mention of Sheol and the repeated references to “death” (mawet) in Psalm 116 may seem overdrawn in a thanksgiving psalm, and perhaps their appearance would be more at home in a lament psalm, yet as Christoph Barth and others have noted, the opposite is in fact the case. Language and imagery associated with death and the underworld appear with greater frequency in the thanksgiving psalms than in the lament psalms, with lament psalms rarely even mentioning Sheol by name.22
While death can have positive connotations in the Old Testament, especially in reference to the death of one who was “full of years” (e.g., Abraham [Gen 25:8]; David [1 Chr 29:28]), quite often the idea of death carries a more foreboding sense. The mention of death and Sheol in thanksgiving psalms suggests this latter sense by drawing attention to the acute crisis faced by the psalmist in the past.
This foreboding sense of death often can carry with it the sense of being confined or constrained, as noted above. The sense of confinement and powerlessness captures the angst associated with the tenuous life-and-death experiences confronted by the psalmist. Seemingly, the threatened individual has little power against the deathly grasp of Sheol or the fate that awaits him. In Psalm 18:4–5 the psalmist writes:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Human beings, understanding that death follows life, are well aware of their own mortality. Yet the psalmist’s angst over death does not stem from his inability to confront his own mortality; rather, it stems from the intrusion of the forces of death into the sphere of the living and his inability to hold such forces at bay.
As the cords of death reach into the sphere of the living, one of the chief threats is that death has the capacity to separate the psalmist from God. Death does much more than simply end life. More devastatingly for the psalmist, death threatens to take him to a place removed from the presence of God. In Psalm 88 the psalmist uses death language to describe his crisis, but even in its metaphorical sense the existential crisis created by death is clear. In verse 5 the psalmist bemoans,
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
In response, a contemporary reader might be quick to cite Psalm 139 and exclaim that God is present everywhere, or perhaps refer to the book of Revelation and suggest that, through death, one experiences God in new and more profound ways. In 1 Corinthians 15:55 Paul cites Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Yet such quick rejoinders dismiss too easily the theological crisis articulated by both the psalmist and the New Testament writers. The psalmist is not afraid of death for death’s sake; rather, he fears the possibility of no longer being in the presence of God—a fate even worse than death. Paul acknowledges a similar fear among the early Christians and reminds those at Corinth that there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” in the hope of the resurrection; death will not separate the people of God from the God they serve.
For the psalmists, death signals much more than simply a cessation of life; death signals an absence from God and his provision. Such a perspective on death explains the psalmist’s exuberance in Psalm 116:8–9 that God had delivered him, so he could once more “walk before the LORD in the land of the living” (cf. Ps 56:12–13).
Thanksgiving and testimony. Individual psalms of thanksgiving frequently include the psalmist’s promise to bear witness to God’s act of deliverance. In the first half of Psalm 116 the poet recounts the crisis he faced and the deliverance granted to him by God. In those verses (vv. 1–11) the psalmist addresses himself (“my soul”) in verse 7 and addresses Yahweh in verse 8, but the remaining verses function as a report, of sorts, referring to God in the third person. In verse 5b the psalmist includes a first-person plural pronoun, “[and] our God [we’lohenu] is full of compassion,” thus suggesting that this report of deliverance and song of thanksgiving have moved from the realm of privatized faith to their rightful setting in the context of the larger community.
In the second half of the psalm, twice the psalmist pledges, “I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people” (vv. 14, 18). Other individual thanksgiving psalms include similar promises to bear witness to the work of God. For example, in Psalm 66:16 the psalmist invites all those who fear God to come near and he will tell them “what he has done for me.” Similar promises of testimony appear elsewhere in the Psalter (e.g., Pss 52:9; 118:17). Some may ask why testimony accompanied thanksgiving. Was it not enough simply to utter a song of thanksgiving to God? Why involve the community? To what end? Patrick Miller explains that:
The deliverance of one of God’s afflicted is cause for rejoicing by all. It is not only the thanks of one saved. This act is a pointer to the way that God always acts. The salvation of one who cried out creates a community of praise and thanksgiving, of worship and the fear of the LORD. The voice of the one becomes a choir of many.23
A song of thanksgiving is ultimately never about the one who has been delivered but instead about the God who intervenes in those tenuous places between life and death. Such songs of testimony give proper praise to God, but in so doing they also confirm and perhaps even reorient the community’s confession about this God. To give thanks without testimony is to diminish the significance of deliverance itself, and worse yet, to minimize the fullness of its power for the people of God.
Contemporary Significance
SPIRIT OF GRATITUDE. TESTIMONY OF HOPE. Hermann Gunkel, one of the leading Psalms scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and the pioneer of the form-critical approach to the Psalter, reflected on the concept of thanksgiving in the Psalter. In particular, Gunkel considered the celebrations in which the psalmists would have uttered their poems of thanksgiving within the context of the community. He suggests that such moments must have been among “the most beautiful hours in the life of the pious.”24
In one of my interim pastorates I served a church that had been through a particularly challenging season, and the church had not weathered that season well. The church had a center aisle that divided the sanctuary cleanly in two, and the building’s architecture reflected its present climate. Worship was strained; even more was conversation between members. I was asked by many if I thought that church would survive, and if so, how? I honestly did not know.
I announced one Sunday morning that beginning the following week there would be a testimony each Sunday. I approached one of the lay leaders and tasked him with lining up one person for each week. The people were to come from various age groups, from various Sunday School classes, and from different “sides” in the congregation. I gave each of them a prompt for sharing that simply read, “I saw God this week because he did [blank]. And for that I am thankful.”
Week after week individuals made their way to the pulpit and identified where they had seen God at work in their lives, and week after week they concluded by saying, “And for that I am thankful.” Because of the controversy and conflict in that church, it had been some time since many people had sensed God at work in that community, and longer still since anyone had said, “For that I am thankful.” But together, as the people of God, they listened to one another despite their differences, and they were reminded that God remains at work among his people; each testimony became a “pointer to the way that God always acts.”
Gunkel was right; such experiences can create beautiful moments in the life of the pious. Regrettably, however, in our need to manage time, stay on message, and control quality, the notion of testimony has become a vestige of the past in most of our worship services. There is no room for thanksgiving, no room for testimony. For some these are antiquated practices of another generation. Yet the truth is that some people in the pews before us sense that “the cords of death” are surrounding them. Some feel trapped and “overcome by distress and sorrow” and they are weary from stumbling. They are less concerned about time management, messaging, and quality control in the worship service because they simply need to know there is still hope. They need to know God is still at work.
The writer of Psalm 116 testifies to those gathered around him that “our God is full of compassion” (v. 5). Perhaps there are others, even now, who need to know the same truth about our God. And while ministers can climb into the pulpit weekly to make that proclamation, what most people really want to hear is a testimony—a testimony grounded in unadulterated thanksgiving.
Original Meaning
Self-Exhortation in the Light of Deliverance (116:7–9)
FOLLOWING THE RECOLLECTION of deliverance in verses 3–6, the psalmist turns to reflect on his own condition in the present. The earlier verses mentioned the sense of confinement experienced by the psalmist. In this section such oppressive, life-threatening conditions have been abated and replaced by conditions of hope.
Return to your rest, my soul. As noted above, the psalmist uses the metaphor of being confined or in a tight place as a means of indicating his need. Having been delivered (v. 6b), he reminds himself that he no longer lives under the threat of such circumstances but instead can return to his rest. Rather than understand rest as meaning the absence of activity, the usage here likely is meant to suggest a place of rest. The psalmist has been delivered from Sheol and the grave (v. 3) and delivered to a place of rest.
You, LORD, have delivered me from death. In verse 4a the psalmist used malat (“to save”) in his plea for deliverance, and he employed a different term for deliverance (yasha‘) in verse 6b. In the first instance he called on Yahweh for deliverance, and in the latter the psalmist recounts that deliverance. The use of “save” both times in the NIV obscures the variety of language used by the poet. In verse 8a he mentions God’s capacity for deliverance yet a third time. In this instance, however, the psalmist praises God for having been delivered but uses the verb halats, which often connotes the idea of being pulled out of something (i.e., “deliverance”). The psalmist celebrates that he was pulled out of death, out of the constricting and confining sense of impending death and distress. The verb halats appears in 2 Samuel 22:20, where deliverance and being brought out into an open space are clearly connected (“[Yahweh] brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued [halats] me because he delighted in me”). Arguably, the psalmist has opted for this verb to underscore the idea of “open spaces” as a metaphor for deliverance (cf. Ps 116:9b). The remainder of verse 8 uses a merismus. His being delivered has removed the tears from his eyes and prevented his feet from stumbling. From head to toe the life of the psalmist has been changed.
In the land of the living. Whereas the psalmist’s life had once been lived under the threat of Sheol and the grave, he is now free to walk before the Lord. The verb halak (in the hithpael stem) can mean literally “to walk about” (Gen 13:17), but it also has a figurative sense that indicates a particular way of living, in this case, living in the presence of God. The image once again is that of release—of freedom of movement—to live fully before the Lord. The psalmist indicates that he has been freed so that he might walk in the land of the living (Ps 116:9b) once more. The grave and Sheol had their hold on the psalmist and threatened to pull him down to the grave, but God has delivered him and brought him back to the community in which he lives so that he might dwell in the presence of God and enjoy the fellowship of community.14
Bridging Contexts
THE THREAT OF DEATH. The language and imagery of death pervades Psalm 116. In recounting his plight, the psalmist mentions the word “death” (mawet) three times (vv. 3, 8, 15), and the mention of Sheol in verse 3b introduces yet another reference to death.21
The explicit mention of Sheol and the repeated references to “death” (mawet) in Psalm 116 may seem overdrawn in a thanksgiving psalm, and perhaps their appearance would be more at home in a lament psalm, yet as Christoph Barth and others have noted, the opposite is in fact the case. Language and imagery associated with death and the underworld appear with greater frequency in the thanksgiving psalms than in the lament psalms, with lament psalms rarely even mentioning Sheol by name.22
While death can have positive connotations in the Old Testament, especially in reference to the death of one who was “full of years” (e.g., Abraham [Gen 25:8]; David [1 Chr 29:28]), quite often the idea of death carries a more foreboding sense. The mention of death and Sheol in thanksgiving psalms suggests this latter sense by drawing attention to the acute crisis faced by the psalmist in the past.
This foreboding sense of death often can carry with it the sense of being confined or constrained, as noted above. The sense of confinement and powerlessness captures the angst associated with the tenuous life-and-death experiences confronted by the psalmist. Seemingly, the threatened individual has little power against the deathly grasp of Sheol or the fate that awaits him. In Psalm 18:4–5 the psalmist writes:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Human beings, understanding that death follows life, are well aware of their own mortality. Yet the psalmist’s angst over death does not stem from his inability to confront his own mortality; rather, it stems from the intrusion of the forces of death into the sphere of the living and his inability to hold such forces at bay.
As the cords of death reach into the sphere of the living, one of the chief threats is that death has the capacity to separate the psalmist from God. Death does much more than simply end life. More devastatingly for the psalmist, death threatens to take him to a place removed from the presence of God. In Psalm 88 the psalmist uses death language to describe his crisis, but even in its metaphorical sense the existential crisis created by death is clear. In verse 5 the psalmist bemoans,
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
In response, a contemporary reader might be quick to cite Psalm 139 and exclaim that God is present everywhere, or perhaps refer to the book of Revelation and suggest that, through death, one experiences God in new and more profound ways. In 1 Corinthians 15:55 Paul cites Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Yet such quick rejoinders dismiss too easily the theological crisis articulated by both the psalmist and the New Testament writers. The psalmist is not afraid of death for death’s sake; rather, he fears the possibility of no longer being in the presence of God—a fate even worse than death. Paul acknowledges a similar fear among the early Christians and reminds those at Corinth that there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” in the hope of the resurrection; death will not separate the people of God from the God they serve.
For the psalmists, death signals much more than simply a cessation of life; death signals an absence from God and his provision. Such a perspective on death explains the psalmist’s exuberance in Psalm 116:8–9 that God had delivered him, so he could once more “walk before the LORD in the land of the living” (cf. Ps 56:12–13).
Thanksgiving and testimony. Individual psalms of thanksgiving frequently include the psalmist’s promise to bear witness to God’s act of deliverance. In the first half of Psalm 116 the poet recounts the crisis he faced and the deliverance granted to him by God. In those verses (vv. 1–11) the psalmist addresses himself (“my soul”) in verse 7 and addresses Yahweh in verse 8, but the remaining verses function as a report, of sorts, referring to God in the third person. In verse 5b the psalmist includes a first-person plural pronoun, “[and] our God [we’lohenu] is full of compassion,” thus suggesting that this report of deliverance and song of thanksgiving have moved from the realm of privatized faith to their rightful setting in the context of the larger community.
In the second half of the psalm, twice the psalmist pledges, “I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people” (vv. 14, 18). Other individual thanksgiving psalms include similar promises to bear witness to the work of God. For example, in Psalm 66:16 the psalmist invites all those who fear God to come near and he will tell them “what he has done for me.” Similar promises of testimony appear elsewhere in the Psalter (e.g., Pss 52:9; 118:17). Some may ask why testimony accompanied thanksgiving. Was it not enough simply to utter a song of thanksgiving to God? Why involve the community? To what end? Patrick Miller explains that:
The deliverance of one of God’s afflicted is cause for rejoicing by all. It is not only the thanks of one saved. This act is a pointer to the way that God always acts. The salvation of one who cried out creates a community of praise and thanksgiving, of worship and the fear of the LORD. The voice of the one becomes a choir of many.23
A song of thanksgiving is ultimately never about the one who has been delivered but instead about the God who intervenes in those tenuous places between life and death. Such songs of testimony give proper praise to God, but in so doing they also confirm and perhaps even reorient the community’s confession about this God. To give thanks without testimony is to diminish the significance of deliverance itself, and worse yet, to minimize the fullness of its power for the people of God.
Contemporary Significance
SPIRIT OF GRATITUDE. TESTIMONY OF HOPE. Hermann Gunkel, one of the leading Psalms scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and the pioneer of the form-critical approach to the Psalter, reflected on the concept of thanksgiving in the Psalter. In particular, Gunkel considered the celebrations in which the psalmists would have uttered their poems of thanksgiving within the context of the community. He suggests that such moments must have been among “the most beautiful hours in the life of the pious.”24
In one of my interim pastorates I served a church that had been through a particularly challenging season, and the church had not weathered that season well. The church had a center aisle that divided the sanctuary cleanly in two, and the building’s architecture reflected its present climate. Worship was strained; even more was conversation between members. I was asked by many if I thought that church would survive, and if so, how? I honestly did not know.
I announced one Sunday morning that beginning the following week there would be a testimony each Sunday. I approached one of the lay leaders and tasked him with lining up one person for each week. The people were to come from various age groups, from various Sunday School classes, and from different “sides” in the congregation. I gave each of them a prompt for sharing that simply read, “I saw God this week because he did [blank]. And for that I am thankful.”
Week after week individuals made their way to the pulpit and identified where they had seen God at work in their lives, and week after week they concluded by saying, “And for that I am thankful.” Because of the controversy and conflict in that church, it had been some time since many people had sensed God at work in that community, and longer still since anyone had said, “For that I am thankful.” But together, as the people of God, they listened to one another despite their differences, and they were reminded that God remains at work among his people; each testimony became a “pointer to the way that God always acts.”
Gunkel was right; such experiences can create beautiful moments in the life of the pious. Regrettably, however, in our need to manage time, stay on message, and control quality, the notion of testimony has become a vestige of the past in most of our worship services. There is no room for thanksgiving, no room for testimony. For some these are antiquated practices of another generation. Yet the truth is that some people in the pews before us sense that “the cords of death” are surrounding them. Some feel trapped and “overcome by distress and sorrow” and they are weary from stumbling. They are less concerned about time management, messaging, and quality control in the worship service because they simply need to know there is still hope. They need to know God is still at work.
The writer of Psalm 116 testifies to those gathered around him that “our God is full of compassion” (v. 5). Perhaps there are others, even now, who need to know the same truth about our God. And while ministers can climb into the pulpit weekly to make that proclamation, what most people really want to hear is a testimony—a testimony grounded in unadulterated thanksgiving.
Original Meaning
Confession of Trust (116:10–11)
THE CONFESSION OF TRUST IN VERSES 10–11 links back to the declaration of trust in verses 1–2. In essence, these two sections create an inclusio around verses 3–9 by opening and closing the thanksgiving song with affirmations of the psalmist’s trust in God’s capacity to deliver. Verses 1–2 recount his call to God amid his distress, and verses 10–11 recount the severity of the plight amid that call. For the casual reader who expects a smooth linear or narrative sequence of events in a text, the location of verses 10–11 may seem unusual at best, if not a misplacement. Yet verses 10–11 serve as a recapitulation of the thanksgiving song by highlighting the psalmist’s belief in God and the hopelessness of his situation.
I trusted. The verb ’aman in the hiphil means “to believe” or “to put trust in something.” Similar to verse 1, the syntax of verse 10a has a verb but no direct object. While many translations render verse 10a as “I trusted in the LORD,” the prepositional phrase does not actually appear in the Hebrew; the text reads “I believed/trusted when I said.” As noted in verse 1 above, there was some hesitancy to make Yahweh the object of a verb, and this hesitancy also appears to surface with respect to verse 10a. Perhaps for the psalmist the object need not even be mentioned—after all, in whom else would one believe?
I am greatly afflicted. The psalmist affirms that he maintained his belief even when he was “greatly afflicted.” The verb ‘anah means to “be bowed down,” but in the sense of forced subjugation by another. Other Semitic languages carry a similar meaning for this root. For example, the ninth-century Moabite Inscription (i.e., The Mesha Stele) uses this root in the opening lines, referring to the oppression experienced by the Moabites at the hands of King Omri of Israel (lines 5, 6). In Psalm 116 the use of the term ‘anah likely suggests the affliction experienced by the psalmist was external. The fact that in verse 6 the psalmist praises God as a “protector” may provide additional support to this claim. In verse 6 the poet describes his condition as having been brought low (dalal), and in verse 10b he refers to himself as being “bowed down.” These images correspond well to the other metaphorical images in verse 3 in which the cords of death and the ropes of Sheol appear to be trapping him in his own grave (v. 3b). The figurative descriptions of being beaten down and being trapped in the grave signal a person who is powerless to overcome the external threat that is before him. The psalmist confesses in verse 10 that when he was in this position, he remained firm in his belief that God would deliver him.
Everyone is a liar. This generalized assessment that “every person” (kol ’adam) is a liar may appear puzzling given the scope of the psalm thus far. The verb kazab means “to lie” or “to deceive,” but the term can also imply deception or worthlessness. Hossfeld and Zenger contend that kazab, in this instance, is not an ethical qualification (i.e., “people tell lies”) but a metaphysical qualification (“humans are unreliable”).15
Because humans are unreliable, they cannot be the source of deliverance or the ultimate source of hope. In this second confession of trust (vv. 10–11) the psalmist acknowledges that he has only one source of hope, and it is in that one source that he believes (v. 10a).
Bridging Contexts
THE THREAT OF DEATH. The language and imagery of death pervades Psalm 116. In recounting his plight, the psalmist mentions the word “death” (mawet) three times (vv. 3, 8, 15), and the mention of Sheol in verse 3b introduces yet another reference to death.21
The explicit mention of Sheol and the repeated references to “death” (mawet) in Psalm 116 may seem overdrawn in a thanksgiving psalm, and perhaps their appearance would be more at home in a lament psalm, yet as Christoph Barth and others have noted, the opposite is in fact the case. Language and imagery associated with death and the underworld appear with greater frequency in the thanksgiving psalms than in the lament psalms, with lament psalms rarely even mentioning Sheol by name.22
While death can have positive connotations in the Old Testament, especially in reference to the death of one who was “full of years” (e.g., Abraham [Gen 25:8]; David [1 Chr 29:28]), quite often the idea of death carries a more foreboding sense. The mention of death and Sheol in thanksgiving psalms suggests this latter sense by drawing attention to the acute crisis faced by the psalmist in the past.
This foreboding sense of death often can carry with it the sense of being confined or constrained, as noted above. The sense of confinement and powerlessness captures the angst associated with the tenuous life-and-death experiences confronted by the psalmist. Seemingly, the threatened individual has little power against the deathly grasp of Sheol or the fate that awaits him. In Psalm 18:4–5 the psalmist writes:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Human beings, understanding that death follows life, are well aware of their own mortality. Yet the psalmist’s angst over death does not stem from his inability to confront his own mortality; rather, it stems from the intrusion of the forces of death into the sphere of the living and his inability to hold such forces at bay.
As the cords of death reach into the sphere of the living, one of the chief threats is that death has the capacity to separate the psalmist from God. Death does much more than simply end life. More devastatingly for the psalmist, death threatens to take him to a place removed from the presence of God. In Psalm 88 the psalmist uses death language to describe his crisis, but even in its metaphorical sense the existential crisis created by death is clear. In verse 5 the psalmist bemoans,
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
In response, a contemporary reader might be quick to cite Psalm 139 and exclaim that God is present everywhere, or perhaps refer to the book of Revelation and suggest that, through death, one experiences God in new and more profound ways. In 1 Corinthians 15:55 Paul cites Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Yet such quick rejoinders dismiss too easily the theological crisis articulated by both the psalmist and the New Testament writers. The psalmist is not afraid of death for death’s sake; rather, he fears the possibility of no longer being in the presence of God—a fate even worse than death. Paul acknowledges a similar fear among the early Christians and reminds those at Corinth that there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” in the hope of the resurrection; death will not separate the people of God from the God they serve.
For the psalmists, death signals much more than simply a cessation of life; death signals an absence from God and his provision. Such a perspective on death explains the psalmist’s exuberance in Psalm 116:8–9 that God had delivered him, so he could once more “walk before the LORD in the land of the living” (cf. Ps 56:12–13).
Thanksgiving and testimony. Individual psalms of thanksgiving frequently include the psalmist’s promise to bear witness to God’s act of deliverance. In the first half of Psalm 116 the poet recounts the crisis he faced and the deliverance granted to him by God. In those verses (vv. 1–11) the psalmist addresses himself (“my soul”) in verse 7 and addresses Yahweh in verse 8, but the remaining verses function as a report, of sorts, referring to God in the third person. In verse 5b the psalmist includes a first-person plural pronoun, “[and] our God [we’lohenu] is full of compassion,” thus suggesting that this report of deliverance and song of thanksgiving have moved from the realm of privatized faith to their rightful setting in the context of the larger community.
In the second half of the psalm, twice the psalmist pledges, “I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people” (vv. 14, 18). Other individual thanksgiving psalms include similar promises to bear witness to the work of God. For example, in Psalm 66:16 the psalmist invites all those who fear God to come near and he will tell them “what he has done for me.” Similar promises of testimony appear elsewhere in the Psalter (e.g., Pss 52:9; 118:17). Some may ask why testimony accompanied thanksgiving. Was it not enough simply to utter a song of thanksgiving to God? Why involve the community? To what end? Patrick Miller explains that:
The deliverance of one of God’s afflicted is cause for rejoicing by all. It is not only the thanks of one saved. This act is a pointer to the way that God always acts. The salvation of one who cried out creates a community of praise and thanksgiving, of worship and the fear of the LORD. The voice of the one becomes a choir of many.23
A song of thanksgiving is ultimately never about the one who has been delivered but instead about the God who intervenes in those tenuous places between life and death. Such songs of testimony give proper praise to God, but in so doing they also confirm and perhaps even reorient the community’s confession about this God. To give thanks without testimony is to diminish the significance of deliverance itself, and worse yet, to minimize the fullness of its power for the people of God.
Contemporary Significance
SPIRIT OF GRATITUDE. TESTIMONY OF HOPE. Hermann Gunkel, one of the leading Psalms scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and the pioneer of the form-critical approach to the Psalter, reflected on the concept of thanksgiving in the Psalter. In particular, Gunkel considered the celebrations in which the psalmists would have uttered their poems of thanksgiving within the context of the community. He suggests that such moments must have been among “the most beautiful hours in the life of the pious.”24
In one of my interim pastorates I served a church that had been through a particularly challenging season, and the church had not weathered that season well. The church had a center aisle that divided the sanctuary cleanly in two, and the building’s architecture reflected its present climate. Worship was strained; even more was conversation between members. I was asked by many if I thought that church would survive, and if so, how? I honestly did not know.
I announced one Sunday morning that beginning the following week there would be a testimony each Sunday. I approached one of the lay leaders and tasked him with lining up one person for each week. The people were to come from various age groups, from various Sunday School classes, and from different “sides” in the congregation. I gave each of them a prompt for sharing that simply read, “I saw God this week because he did [blank]. And for that I am thankful.”
Week after week individuals made their way to the pulpit and identified where they had seen God at work in their lives, and week after week they concluded by saying, “And for that I am thankful.” Because of the controversy and conflict in that church, it had been some time since many people had sensed God at work in that community, and longer still since anyone had said, “For that I am thankful.” But together, as the people of God, they listened to one another despite their differences, and they were reminded that God remains at work among his people; each testimony became a “pointer to the way that God always acts.”
Gunkel was right; such experiences can create beautiful moments in the life of the pious. Regrettably, however, in our need to manage time, stay on message, and control quality, the notion of testimony has become a vestige of the past in most of our worship services. There is no room for thanksgiving, no room for testimony. For some these are antiquated practices of another generation. Yet the truth is that some people in the pews before us sense that “the cords of death” are surrounding them. Some feel trapped and “overcome by distress and sorrow” and they are weary from stumbling. They are less concerned about time management, messaging, and quality control in the worship service because they simply need to know there is still hope. They need to know God is still at work.
The writer of Psalm 116 testifies to those gathered around him that “our God is full of compassion” (v. 5). Perhaps there are others, even now, who need to know the same truth about our God. And while ministers can climb into the pulpit weekly to make that proclamation, what most people really want to hear is a testimony—a testimony grounded in unadulterated thanksgiving.
Original Meaning
Act of Thanksgiving (116:12–14)
FOLLOWING THE SONG OF THANKSGIVING for the psalmist’s deliverance in verses 1–11, the poet considers his response to God: “What shall I return to the LORD for all his goodness to me?” in the context of the subsequent verses 13–14 and 17–19 refers to the psalmist’s participation in a sacrificial thanksgiving meal. His expression of praise is manifested in action before the people of God. As evidence of thankfulness, the psalmist raises a “cup of salvation.” Cups were used in various worship events and sacrifices, so the precise meaning of the “cup of salvation” remains difficult to determine. Yet, as Janowski has observed, the fact that the deliverance of the psalmist is linked to the raising of a cup suggests that the cup had a symbolic meaning; it is “understood as an elementary symbol of salvation from death and the continued existence of the one who has been saved.”16
In raising the cup, the psalmist also calls upon “the name of the LORD,” the very name he called upon from the depths of Sheol (v. 4).
Bridging Contexts
THE THREAT OF DEATH. The language and imagery of death pervades Psalm 116. In recounting his plight, the psalmist mentions the word “death” (mawet) three times (vv. 3, 8, 15), and the mention of Sheol in verse 3b introduces yet another reference to death.21
The explicit mention of Sheol and the repeated references to “death” (mawet) in Psalm 116 may seem overdrawn in a thanksgiving psalm, and perhaps their appearance would be more at home in a lament psalm, yet as Christoph Barth and others have noted, the opposite is in fact the case. Language and imagery associated with death and the underworld appear with greater frequency in the thanksgiving psalms than in the lament psalms, with lament psalms rarely even mentioning Sheol by name.22
While death can have positive connotations in the Old Testament, especially in reference to the death of one who was “full of years” (e.g., Abraham [Gen 25:8]; David [1 Chr 29:28]), quite often the idea of death carries a more foreboding sense. The mention of death and Sheol in thanksgiving psalms suggests this latter sense by drawing attention to the acute crisis faced by the psalmist in the past.
This foreboding sense of death often can carry with it the sense of being confined or constrained, as noted above. The sense of confinement and powerlessness captures the angst associated with the tenuous life-and-death experiences confronted by the psalmist. Seemingly, the threatened individual has little power against the deathly grasp of Sheol or the fate that awaits him. In Psalm 18:4–5 the psalmist writes:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Human beings, understanding that death follows life, are well aware of their own mortality. Yet the psalmist’s angst over death does not stem from his inability to confront his own mortality; rather, it stems from the intrusion of the forces of death into the sphere of the living and his inability to hold such forces at bay.
As the cords of death reach into the sphere of the living, one of the chief threats is that death has the capacity to separate the psalmist from God. Death does much more than simply end life. More devastatingly for the psalmist, death threatens to take him to a place removed from the presence of God. In Psalm 88 the psalmist uses death language to describe his crisis, but even in its metaphorical sense the existential crisis created by death is clear. In verse 5 the psalmist bemoans,
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
In response, a contemporary reader might be quick to cite Psalm 139 and exclaim that God is present everywhere, or perhaps refer to the book of Revelation and suggest that, through death, one experiences God in new and more profound ways. In 1 Corinthians 15:55 Paul cites Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Yet such quick rejoinders dismiss too easily the theological crisis articulated by both the psalmist and the New Testament writers. The psalmist is not afraid of death for death’s sake; rather, he fears the possibility of no longer being in the presence of God—a fate even worse than death. Paul acknowledges a similar fear among the early Christians and reminds those at Corinth that there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” in the hope of the resurrection; death will not separate the people of God from the God they serve.
For the psalmists, death signals much more than simply a cessation of life; death signals an absence from God and his provision. Such a perspective on death explains the psalmist’s exuberance in Psalm 116:8–9 that God had delivered him, so he could once more “walk before the LORD in the land of the living” (cf. Ps 56:12–13).
Thanksgiving and testimony. Individual psalms of thanksgiving frequently include the psalmist’s promise to bear witness to God’s act of deliverance. In the first half of Psalm 116 the poet recounts the crisis he faced and the deliverance granted to him by God. In those verses (vv. 1–11) the psalmist addresses himself (“my soul”) in verse 7 and addresses Yahweh in verse 8, but the remaining verses function as a report, of sorts, referring to God in the third person. In verse 5b the psalmist includes a first-person plural pronoun, “[and] our God [we’lohenu] is full of compassion,” thus suggesting that this report of deliverance and song of thanksgiving have moved from the realm of privatized faith to their rightful setting in the context of the larger community.
In the second half of the psalm, twice the psalmist pledges, “I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people” (vv. 14, 18). Other individual thanksgiving psalms include similar promises to bear witness to the work of God. For example, in Psalm 66:16 the psalmist invites all those who fear God to come near and he will tell them “what he has done for me.” Similar promises of testimony appear elsewhere in the Psalter (e.g., Pss 52:9; 118:17). Some may ask why testimony accompanied thanksgiving. Was it not enough simply to utter a song of thanksgiving to God? Why involve the community? To what end? Patrick Miller explains that:
The deliverance of one of God’s afflicted is cause for rejoicing by all. It is not only the thanks of one saved. This act is a pointer to the way that God always acts. The salvation of one who cried out creates a community of praise and thanksgiving, of worship and the fear of the LORD. The voice of the one becomes a choir of many.23
A song of thanksgiving is ultimately never about the one who has been delivered but instead about the God who intervenes in those tenuous places between life and death. Such songs of testimony give proper praise to God, but in so doing they also confirm and perhaps even reorient the community’s confession about this God. To give thanks without testimony is to diminish the significance of deliverance itself, and worse yet, to minimize the fullness of its power for the people of God.
Contemporary Significance
SPIRIT OF GRATITUDE. TESTIMONY OF HOPE. Hermann Gunkel, one of the leading Psalms scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and the pioneer of the form-critical approach to the Psalter, reflected on the concept of thanksgiving in the Psalter. In particular, Gunkel considered the celebrations in which the psalmists would have uttered their poems of thanksgiving within the context of the community. He suggests that such moments must have been among “the most beautiful hours in the life of the pious.”24
In one of my interim pastorates I served a church that had been through a particularly challenging season, and the church had not weathered that season well. The church had a center aisle that divided the sanctuary cleanly in two, and the building’s architecture reflected its present climate. Worship was strained; even more was conversation between members. I was asked by many if I thought that church would survive, and if so, how? I honestly did not know.
I announced one Sunday morning that beginning the following week there would be a testimony each Sunday. I approached one of the lay leaders and tasked him with lining up one person for each week. The people were to come from various age groups, from various Sunday School classes, and from different “sides” in the congregation. I gave each of them a prompt for sharing that simply read, “I saw God this week because he did [blank]. And for that I am thankful.”
Week after week individuals made their way to the pulpit and identified where they had seen God at work in their lives, and week after week they concluded by saying, “And for that I am thankful.” Because of the controversy and conflict in that church, it had been some time since many people had sensed God at work in that community, and longer still since anyone had said, “For that I am thankful.” But together, as the people of God, they listened to one another despite their differences, and they were reminded that God remains at work among his people; each testimony became a “pointer to the way that God always acts.”
Gunkel was right; such experiences can create beautiful moments in the life of the pious. Regrettably, however, in our need to manage time, stay on message, and control quality, the notion of testimony has become a vestige of the past in most of our worship services. There is no room for thanksgiving, no room for testimony. For some these are antiquated practices of another generation. Yet the truth is that some people in the pews before us sense that “the cords of death” are surrounding them. Some feel trapped and “overcome by distress and sorrow” and they are weary from stumbling. They are less concerned about time management, messaging, and quality control in the worship service because they simply need to know there is still hope. They need to know God is still at work.
The writer of Psalm 116 testifies to those gathered around him that “our God is full of compassion” (v. 5). Perhaps there are others, even now, who need to know the same truth about our God. And while ministers can climb into the pulpit weekly to make that proclamation, what most people really want to hear is a testimony—a testimony grounded in unadulterated thanksgiving.
Original Meaning
Confession of Trust (116:15–16)
AS PART OF THE ACT OF THANKSGIVING, the psalmist offers up the third confession of trust in Psalm 116:15–16. In both verses he explains why God has sought to deliver him.
Precious in the sight of the LORD. The translation of yaqar as “precious” has resulted in a number of interpretations of this text. Some believe that God sees the death of his beloved ones (“faithful servants”) as precious or beautiful in the eyes of God. Such a reading would explain why Psalm 116 was mentioned in tandem with martyrdom, especially in the early church.17
While more popular uses of this verse today do not make the association with martyrdom, they do continue the idea that the death of a godly person is considered beautiful or esteemed in the eyes of God. Such a reading, however, would run counter to how the rest of the Old Testament viewed death. Death is never viewed as positive, even for the righteous ones. Further, in Psalm 116 the psalmist has pleaded repeatedly for God to deliver him from the “cords of death” and for God to prevent the “anguish of the grave” from overcoming him. It would seem inconsistent that in this third confession of trust the psalmist would refer to death in such affirming ways.
In light of the larger context in Psalm 116, a better rendering of yaqar might be “costly.” The death of a righteous one is “costly in the eyes of God.” Janowski suggests it is costly in that Yahweh loses a witness when a devout one dies.18
Rather than stressing that “death” is precious, the psalmist is really try to affirm that it is the life that is precious; death is costly because it takes life away. Because these lives matter to God, when he hears the psalmist’s request for deliverance (v. 4) he acts upon it to deliver him from death.
You have freed me from my chains. The psalmist returns to the imagery of confinement as a way of speaking about his distress. He refers to his chains or bonds (moser), a term that evokes images of a yoke around the neck of a slave, and the use of moser accords well with his self-description as a slave in the first part of the verse.19
In describing himself, however, the psalmist admits to his powerlessness. He calls himself a “servant” but then extends that claim. The Hebrew literally says, “I am your servant, the son of your handmaiden.” This latter phrase is legal terminology that refers to a slave born into a household (Exod 23:12). Such a child has neither power to free himself nor legal rights to claim such freedom. He is “the lowliest servant and slave.”20
In using this second image the psalmist holds two contrasting ideas in tension. In Psalm 116:15 he confesses that the life of a godly one is important to God, and in verse 16 freely admits that his life is not worth much, that he is like a lowly slave. Yet God’s zealous concern to deliver people from death overrides whatever status they may hold. Out of his abundant desire for his people to walk in the land of the living (v. 9), God frees the psalmist from his chains.
Bridging Contexts
THE THREAT OF DEATH. The language and imagery of death pervades Psalm 116. In recounting his plight, the psalmist mentions the word “death” (mawet) three times (vv. 3, 8, 15), and the mention of Sheol in verse 3b introduces yet another reference to death.21
The explicit mention of Sheol and the repeated references to “death” (mawet) in Psalm 116 may seem overdrawn in a thanksgiving psalm, and perhaps their appearance would be more at home in a lament psalm, yet as Christoph Barth and others have noted, the opposite is in fact the case. Language and imagery associated with death and the underworld appear with greater frequency in the thanksgiving psalms than in the lament psalms, with lament psalms rarely even mentioning Sheol by name.22
While death can have positive connotations in the Old Testament, especially in reference to the death of one who was “full of years” (e.g., Abraham [Gen 25:8]; David [1 Chr 29:28]), quite often the idea of death carries a more foreboding sense. The mention of death and Sheol in thanksgiving psalms suggests this latter sense by drawing attention to the acute crisis faced by the psalmist in the past.
This foreboding sense of death often can carry with it the sense of being confined or constrained, as noted above. The sense of confinement and powerlessness captures the angst associated with the tenuous life-and-death experiences confronted by the psalmist. Seemingly, the threatened individual has little power against the deathly grasp of Sheol or the fate that awaits him. In Psalm 18:4–5 the psalmist writes:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Human beings, understanding that death follows life, are well aware of their own mortality. Yet the psalmist’s angst over death does not stem from his inability to confront his own mortality; rather, it stems from the intrusion of the forces of death into the sphere of the living and his inability to hold such forces at bay.
As the cords of death reach into the sphere of the living, one of the chief threats is that death has the capacity to separate the psalmist from God. Death does much more than simply end life. More devastatingly for the psalmist, death threatens to take him to a place removed from the presence of God. In Psalm 88 the psalmist uses death language to describe his crisis, but even in its metaphorical sense the existential crisis created by death is clear. In verse 5 the psalmist bemoans,
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
In response, a contemporary reader might be quick to cite Psalm 139 and exclaim that God is present everywhere, or perhaps refer to the book of Revelation and suggest that, through death, one experiences God in new and more profound ways. In 1 Corinthians 15:55 Paul cites Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Yet such quick rejoinders dismiss too easily the theological crisis articulated by both the psalmist and the New Testament writers. The psalmist is not afraid of death for death’s sake; rather, he fears the possibility of no longer being in the presence of God—a fate even worse than death. Paul acknowledges a similar fear among the early Christians and reminds those at Corinth that there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” in the hope of the resurrection; death will not separate the people of God from the God they serve.
For the psalmists, death signals much more than simply a cessation of life; death signals an absence from God and his provision. Such a perspective on death explains the psalmist’s exuberance in Psalm 116:8–9 that God had delivered him, so he could once more “walk before the LORD in the land of the living” (cf. Ps 56:12–13).
Thanksgiving and testimony. Individual psalms of thanksgiving frequently include the psalmist’s promise to bear witness to God’s act of deliverance. In the first half of Psalm 116 the poet recounts the crisis he faced and the deliverance granted to him by God. In those verses (vv. 1–11) the psalmist addresses himself (“my soul”) in verse 7 and addresses Yahweh in verse 8, but the remaining verses function as a report, of sorts, referring to God in the third person. In verse 5b the psalmist includes a first-person plural pronoun, “[and] our God [we’lohenu] is full of compassion,” thus suggesting that this report of deliverance and song of thanksgiving have moved from the realm of privatized faith to their rightful setting in the context of the larger community.
In the second half of the psalm, twice the psalmist pledges, “I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people” (vv. 14, 18). Other individual thanksgiving psalms include similar promises to bear witness to the work of God. For example, in Psalm 66:16 the psalmist invites all those who fear God to come near and he will tell them “what he has done for me.” Similar promises of testimony appear elsewhere in the Psalter (e.g., Pss 52:9; 118:17). Some may ask why testimony accompanied thanksgiving. Was it not enough simply to utter a song of thanksgiving to God? Why involve the community? To what end? Patrick Miller explains that:
The deliverance of one of God’s afflicted is cause for rejoicing by all. It is not only the thanks of one saved. This act is a pointer to the way that God always acts. The salvation of one who cried out creates a community of praise and thanksgiving, of worship and the fear of the LORD. The voice of the one becomes a choir of many.23
A song of thanksgiving is ultimately never about the one who has been delivered but instead about the God who intervenes in those tenuous places between life and death. Such songs of testimony give proper praise to God, but in so doing they also confirm and perhaps even reorient the community’s confession about this God. To give thanks without testimony is to diminish the significance of deliverance itself, and worse yet, to minimize the fullness of its power for the people of God.
Contemporary Significance
SPIRIT OF GRATITUDE. TESTIMONY OF HOPE. Hermann Gunkel, one of the leading Psalms scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and the pioneer of the form-critical approach to the Psalter, reflected on the concept of thanksgiving in the Psalter. In particular, Gunkel considered the celebrations in which the psalmists would have uttered their poems of thanksgiving within the context of the community. He suggests that such moments must have been among “the most beautiful hours in the life of the pious.”24
In one of my interim pastorates I served a church that had been through a particularly challenging season, and the church had not weathered that season well. The church had a center aisle that divided the sanctuary cleanly in two, and the building’s architecture reflected its present climate. Worship was strained; even more was conversation between members. I was asked by many if I thought that church would survive, and if so, how? I honestly did not know.
I announced one Sunday morning that beginning the following week there would be a testimony each Sunday. I approached one of the lay leaders and tasked him with lining up one person for each week. The people were to come from various age groups, from various Sunday School classes, and from different “sides” in the congregation. I gave each of them a prompt for sharing that simply read, “I saw God this week because he did [blank]. And for that I am thankful.”
Week after week individuals made their way to the pulpit and identified where they had seen God at work in their lives, and week after week they concluded by saying, “And for that I am thankful.” Because of the controversy and conflict in that church, it had been some time since many people had sensed God at work in that community, and longer still since anyone had said, “For that I am thankful.” But together, as the people of God, they listened to one another despite their differences, and they were reminded that God remains at work among his people; each testimony became a “pointer to the way that God always acts.”
Gunkel was right; such experiences can create beautiful moments in the life of the pious. Regrettably, however, in our need to manage time, stay on message, and control quality, the notion of testimony has become a vestige of the past in most of our worship services. There is no room for thanksgiving, no room for testimony. For some these are antiquated practices of another generation. Yet the truth is that some people in the pews before us sense that “the cords of death” are surrounding them. Some feel trapped and “overcome by distress and sorrow” and they are weary from stumbling. They are less concerned about time management, messaging, and quality control in the worship service because they simply need to know there is still hope. They need to know God is still at work.
The writer of Psalm 116 testifies to those gathered around him that “our God is full of compassion” (v. 5). Perhaps there are others, even now, who need to know the same truth about our God. And while ministers can climb into the pulpit weekly to make that proclamation, what most people really want to hear is a testimony—a testimony grounded in unadulterated thanksgiving.
Original Meaning
Thanksgiving Sacrifice (116:17–19)
THE POEM CONCLUDES with the psalmist’s promising to give a thanksgiving offering while once again calling on the name of the Lord (v. 17). The poet announces that he will make good on this promise “in the presence of all [God’s] people,” in the court of the temple in Jerusalem. Then his deliverance will be full and complete. The one who had been brought low and was greatly afflicted was the one who had felt the cords of death wrapping about him. This one cried out to God, who not only enabled him to walk among the living (v. 9) but also raised him up to stand in the temple with God’s people. Such deliverance is worthy of the psalm’s final admonition: hallelu yah, “Praise the LORD.”
Bridging Contexts
THE THREAT OF DEATH. The language and imagery of death pervades Psalm 116. In recounting his plight, the psalmist mentions the word “death” (mawet) three times (vv. 3, 8, 15), and the mention of Sheol in verse 3b introduces yet another reference to death.21
The explicit mention of Sheol and the repeated references to “death” (mawet) in Psalm 116 may seem overdrawn in a thanksgiving psalm, and perhaps their appearance would be more at home in a lament psalm, yet as Christoph Barth and others have noted, the opposite is in fact the case. Language and imagery associated with death and the underworld appear with greater frequency in the thanksgiving psalms than in the lament psalms, with lament psalms rarely even mentioning Sheol by name.22
While death can have positive connotations in the Old Testament, especially in reference to the death of one who was “full of years” (e.g., Abraham [Gen 25:8]; David [1 Chr 29:28]), quite often the idea of death carries a more foreboding sense. The mention of death and Sheol in thanksgiving psalms suggests this latter sense by drawing attention to the acute crisis faced by the psalmist in the past.
This foreboding sense of death often can carry with it the sense of being confined or constrained, as noted above. The sense of confinement and powerlessness captures the angst associated with the tenuous life-and-death experiences confronted by the psalmist. Seemingly, the threatened individual has little power against the deathly grasp of Sheol or the fate that awaits him. In Psalm 18:4–5 the psalmist writes:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Human beings, understanding that death follows life, are well aware of their own mortality. Yet the psalmist’s angst over death does not stem from his inability to confront his own mortality; rather, it stems from the intrusion of the forces of death into the sphere of the living and his inability to hold such forces at bay.
As the cords of death reach into the sphere of the living, one of the chief threats is that death has the capacity to separate the psalmist from God. Death does much more than simply end life. More devastatingly for the psalmist, death threatens to take him to a place removed from the presence of God. In Psalm 88 the psalmist uses death language to describe his crisis, but even in its metaphorical sense the existential crisis created by death is clear. In verse 5 the psalmist bemoans,
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
In response, a contemporary reader might be quick to cite Psalm 139 and exclaim that God is present everywhere, or perhaps refer to the book of Revelation and suggest that, through death, one experiences God in new and more profound ways. In 1 Corinthians 15:55 Paul cites Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Yet such quick rejoinders dismiss too easily the theological crisis articulated by both the psalmist and the New Testament writers. The psalmist is not afraid of death for death’s sake; rather, he fears the possibility of no longer being in the presence of God—a fate even worse than death. Paul acknowledges a similar fear among the early Christians and reminds those at Corinth that there is “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” in the hope of the resurrection; death will not separate the people of God from the God they serve.
For the psalmists, death signals much more than simply a cessation of life; death signals an absence from God and his provision. Such a perspective on death explains the psalmist’s exuberance in Psalm 116:8–9 that God had delivered him, so he could once more “walk before the LORD in the land of the living” (cf. Ps 56:12–13).
Thanksgiving and testimony. Individual psalms of thanksgiving frequently include the psalmist’s promise to bear witness to God’s act of deliverance. In the first half of Psalm 116 the poet recounts the crisis he faced and the deliverance granted to him by God. In those verses (vv. 1–11) the psalmist addresses himself (“my soul”) in verse 7 and addresses Yahweh in verse 8, but the remaining verses function as a report, of sorts, referring to God in the third person. In verse 5b the psalmist includes a first-person plural pronoun, “[and] our God [we’lohenu] is full of compassion,” thus suggesting that this report of deliverance and song of thanksgiving have moved from the realm of privatized faith to their rightful setting in the context of the larger community.
In the second half of the psalm, twice the psalmist pledges, “I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people” (vv. 14, 18). Other individual thanksgiving psalms include similar promises to bear witness to the work of God. For example, in Psalm 66:16 the psalmist invites all those who fear God to come near and he will tell them “what he has done for me.” Similar promises of testimony appear elsewhere in the Psalter (e.g., Pss 52:9; 118:17). Some may ask why testimony accompanied thanksgiving. Was it not enough simply to utter a song of thanksgiving to God? Why involve the community? To what end? Patrick Miller explains that:
The deliverance of one of God’s afflicted is cause for rejoicing by all. It is not only the thanks of one saved. This act is a pointer to the way that God always acts. The salvation of one who cried out creates a community of praise and thanksgiving, of worship and the fear of the LORD. The voice of the one becomes a choir of many.23
A song of thanksgiving is ultimately never about the one who has been delivered but instead about the God who intervenes in those tenuous places between life and death. Such songs of testimony give proper praise to God, but in so doing they also confirm and perhaps even reorient the community’s confession about this God. To give thanks without testimony is to diminish the significance of deliverance itself, and worse yet, to minimize the fullness of its power for the people of God.
Contemporary Significance
SPIRIT OF GRATITUDE. TESTIMONY OF HOPE. Hermann Gunkel, one of the leading Psalms scholars at the turn of the twentieth century and the pioneer of the form-critical approach to the Psalter, reflected on the concept of thanksgiving in the Psalter. In particular, Gunkel considered the celebrations in which the psalmists would have uttered their poems of thanksgiving within the context of the community. He suggests that such moments must have been among “the most beautiful hours in the life of the pious.”24
In one of my interim pastorates I served a church that had been through a particularly challenging season, and the church had not weathered that season well. The church had a center aisle that divided the sanctuary cleanly in two, and the building’s architecture reflected its present climate. Worship was strained; even more was conversation between members. I was asked by many if I thought that church would survive, and if so, how? I honestly did not know.
I announced one Sunday morning that beginning the following week there would be a testimony each Sunday. I approached one of the lay leaders and tasked him with lining up one person for each week. The people were to come from various age groups, from various Sunday School classes, and from different “sides” in the congregation. I gave each of them a prompt for sharing that simply read, “I saw God this week because he did [blank]. And for that I am thankful.”
Week after week individuals made their way to the pulpit and identified where they had seen God at work in their lives, and week after week they concluded by saying, “And for that I am thankful.” Because of the controversy and conflict in that church, it had been some time since many people had sensed God at work in that community, and longer still since anyone had said, “For that I am thankful.” But together, as the people of God, they listened to one another despite their differences, and they were reminded that God remains at work among his people; each testimony became a “pointer to the way that God always acts.”
Gunkel was right; such experiences can create beautiful moments in the life of the pious. Regrettably, however, in our need to manage time, stay on message, and control quality, the notion of testimony has become a vestige of the past in most of our worship services. There is no room for thanksgiving, no room for testimony. For some these are antiquated practices of another generation. Yet the truth is that some people in the pews before us sense that “the cords of death” are surrounding them. Some feel trapped and “overcome by distress and sorrow” and they are weary from stumbling. They are less concerned about time management, messaging, and quality control in the worship service because they simply need to know there is still hope. They need to know God is still at work.
The writer of Psalm 116 testifies to those gathered around him that “our God is full of compassion” (v. 5). Perhaps there are others, even now, who need to know the same truth about our God. And while ministers can climb into the pulpit weekly to make that proclamation, what most people really want to hear is a testimony—a testimony grounded in unadulterated thanksgiving.
NIDOTTE 1:277–99, see esp. 288–89.
(ṣrr I),” NIDOTTE 3:853.