The law of the Lord is perfect,
converting the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
The statutes of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
The commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
The fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
The judgments of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.
Each couple begins with a noun (law, testimony, statutes, commandment, fear, judgments). The pattern is formed by two singular nouns followed by a plural noun; the pattern occurs twice. All six times, the noun is modified by “of the Lord” and after the noun phrase, an adjective appears as a predicate for the initial noun (perfect, sure, right, pure, clean) in the first five instances. In the sixth instance, two adjectives appear (true, righteous).
After the first clause of the couplet, a present participle follows in the first five occurrences (converting, making, rejoicing, enlightening, enduring). The final occurrence abandons the participle for a present tense indicative verb.
The sixth couplet, violating the pattern of the first five in order to signify the end of the passage, doubles the number of adjectives in order to compensate for the omitted participle.
The question poses itself: If this is a more-or-less accurate analysis of the English text, is it also true of the underlying Hebrew Vorlage?
The reader will not be burdened with a detailed and nuanced discussion of Hebrew grammar, but will rather be given the conclusion of that discussion: The English translation of these verses is good enough.
Using the usual understanding of Hebraic parallelism, one might tentatively conclude that:
§ In the mind of the Psalmist, “law, testimony, statutes, commandment, fear, judgments” are, if not perfectly synonymous, then at least words with related and overlapping semantic fields.
§ Likewise with “perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, true, righteous.”
§ So then also the following phrases: “converting the soul,” “making wise the simple,” “rejoicing the heart,” “enlightening the eyes,” and “enduring forever.”
It would therefore be possible to take this well-defined structure and salva veritate rearrange its parts, as in the following examples:
The law of the Lord is perfect.
The testimony of the Lord is sure.
The law of the Lord is sure.
The testimony of the Lord is perfect.
Likewise, the second clause of each couplet could be arbitrarily replace and become the second clause of another couplet, to wit:
The testimony of the Lord is sure,
rejoicing the heart;
The statutes of the Lord are right,
making wise the simple.
To be sure, these arbitrary rearrangements will have different nuances than the original text. Yet they will be true. The result is fruitful for meditation and preaching. The Psalmist was doing his best to capture God’s majesty in human words; yet it is known that human words are incapable of doing that fully.
Commenting on Psalm 19, Franz Delitzsch and Carl Friedrich Keil note that the subunit in question sets itself apart from other parts of the Psalm by using “YHWH” instead of “Elohim” to refer to God. They also report that Torah “does not in itself mean the law, but a pointing out, instruction, doctrine or teaching, and more particularly such as is divine, and therefore positive.”
Psalm 20 offers a similar text-within-a-text. A series of optative clauses are presented as parallel:
May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble;
May the name of the God of Jacob defend you;
May He send you help from the sanctuary,
And strengthen you out of Zion;
May He remember all your offerings,
And accept your burnt sacrifice.Selah
May He grant you according to your heart’s desire,
And fulfill all your purpose.We will rejoice in your salvation,
And in the name of our God we will set up our banners!May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.
The pattern here is perhaps more complex than in Psalm 19. The first three clauses are parallel and synonymous: “May the Lord …” and “May the name of the God of Jacob …” and “May He …”
But the fourth iteration omits the subject, allowing the “He” from the previous line to be distributed to the next optative verb “and strengthen you …”
Here the English can be somewhat misleading. In several of these lines, the English clause has two verbs, “may” and “answer,” or “may” and “defend,” or “may” and “send.” In Hebrew, the optative is achieved with a single verb: the English “may” is a modal auxiliary which is replaced in Hebrew with a one-word verb form. The other option for a translator is equally structured: “Let the Lord answer you …” or “Let the name of the God of Jacob defend you.” Again, two English verbs, “let” and one other, replace a Hebrew structure which has only one verb.
Occasionally, English achieves a structure similar to the Hebraic one-word optative, as in the well-known song:
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year.
And God send you a Happy New Year.
In this song, the phrase “God bless you and send you …” is a true optative, replacing the more cumbersome “Let God bless you and let Him send you …” or “May God Bless you and May He send you …”
In this text from Psalm 20, the first two lines are neatly parallel, and offer an economy of structure. The next six lines, i.e., lines three through eight of the larger subunit, offer a variation of that structure, the first, third, and fifth lines stating the grammatical nominative subject, and the second, fourth, and sixth lines distributing that subject by means of the conjunction “and” over the second clause.
The “Selah” seems oddly placed, intervening within a structure rather than marking a change of structure. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to determine the logic of this placement.
After the eighth line of the passage, i.e., of the larger subunit, the structure is temporarily abandoned altogether. A couplet appears with no optative verb, but rather with indicative verbs. Here, too, the logic of the placement of this couplet demands exploration.
A final single line, not a couplet, returns to not only the structure, but the exact wording, of the first line of the passage, i.e., “May the Lord …” and works in a summative capacity with the phrase “all your petitions.”
Again, the question must be posed, whether this analysis of the English translation applies with equal validity to the Hebrew Urtext. It has already been seen that the Hebrew one-word optative form appears in the more cumbersome English two-word forms, “May He remember …” or “Let Him remember …”
Are there other issues in the translation? Certainly there are, but are they relevant to the present discussion? Probably not.
It could be noted that, e.g., the Messianic over- and undertones are stronger in Hebrew, given that the noun “salvation” is a form of the name “Jesus.”
Generally, the Hebrew text exhibits that marvelous economy of words which Hebrew generally has in contrast to English. Often a single Hebrew word requires two, three, or even four English words to make a reasonable English translation.
Using again the principles of Hebraic poetic parallelism, the reader may deduce synonymies:
To write that God will “answer you in the day of trouble” is to write that He will “defend you.” To write that He will “send you help from the sanctuary” is to write that He will “strengthen you out of Zion,” and so on.
Franz Delitzsch and Carl Friedrich Keil explain that Psalm 20 is “closely attached” to Psalm 19. The subunit within Psalm 20 has “a synonymous parallelism of the members,” and they suggest that the placement of “Selah” within the text might be explained by the Psalm’s ritual use: if it were sung during worship, the “Selah” might indicate a pause for the actual physical placement of the sacrifice.
By extension, if the “Selah” indicates the physical performance of a sacrifice as part of the rhythm of worship, then the seemingly disruptive placement of the couplet that begins with “We will rejoice …” may be perceived as more fitting inasmuch as it functions to begin the conclusion of that particular phase of the worship service. The final optative clause could be seen as the end of that phase.
In sum, the understanding of parallelism and synonymy in these two Psalms has importance both for devotional reading and for theological reading.
