...and his bysshopryk another take!

(with update 1/20/12)

Duccio di Buoninsegna on an unidentified subject, early 14th century, at the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

The thing about Psalm 109 came up again the other day: where you see a bumper sticker or a T-shirt that says "Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8" and you go home and look it up and the text reads, "May his days be few; and may another take his office." Republicans of a certain cast of mind found this very funny for a while around the time of the 2009 inauguration; hahaha, it says it in the Bible.

So Speaker Mike O'Neal of the Kansas House of Representatives, evidently dimmer than most—[jump]
the same guy who referred to the First Lady as "Mrs. YoMama"—just found out about it three years later, and emailed it to all his Republican colleagues: "At last—I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president!" Since which he has had to spend a certain amount of his time not apologizing, and stoutly maintaining as they all did in 2009 that it was only the President's days in office that he wanted to be few, not his days altogether.

But the psalm text as a whole is really pretty remarkably violent, going on (in the language of my own King James version)

9 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
10 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath: and let the stranger spoil his labor.
12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children

And so forth. It makes you wonder what King David, the Sweet Singer of the Lord, normally noted for his forgiving disposition, had been having for breakfast the day he wrote that. And if you do so wonder, you are not alone; in fact lots of people have asked themselves this same question, and thought about it pretty hard, and come up with a pretty good explanation, one that is good enough to be incorporated into some Jewish textual traditions, and adopted by the New Revised Standard Version in English (1989).

Then again, that's the liberal Bible, isn't it? Acceptable, you know, to your United Methodists, and Disciples of Christ, and UCC, and all your hopey-changey rainbow denominations--restricted, for Catholics, to private devotions, and unknown, I guess, to your megachurch evangelicals and TV Christians. Enough to make them reject the reading out of hand, although I believe there is something else as well, which I will come to below.

Anyway, hardly anybody out there in the online Biblical-exegesis world knows about it. And those who do (such as NewDealer at Daily Kos, who went over much of this ground a couple of years ago) are not aware that nobody else does, and therefore have a really hard time explaining it.

The solution to the problem of how our beloved King David could write a poem as nasty and cruel as Psalm 109 is like this: It rests on the clear fact that the poem divides into three distinct parts, in the first and third of which a speaker is complaining about a group of enemies who have falsely accused him of some crime, while in the second the speaker is cursing a single individual, and that second part is to be understood as in quotation marks; that is, it is the words, quoted by the poet, of the enemies that are accusing him, which is why they are directed against just one man, and also why they are so extraordinarily hateful.

Thus,
Part 1 (in the NRSV translation):

1 Do not be silent, O God of my praise. 2 For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues. 3 They beset me with words of hate, and attack me without cause. 4 In return for my love they accuse me, even while I make prayer for them. 5 So they reward me evil for good, and hatred for my love.

Part 2 (with the non-canonical addition of "They say" and the quotation marks)

6 They say, "Appoint a wicked man against him; let an accuser stand on his right. 7 When he is tried, let him be found guilty; let his prayer be counted as sin. 8 May his days be few; may another seize his position. 9 May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow. 10 May his children wander about and beg; may they be driven out of the ruins they inhabit. 11 May the creditor seize all that he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil. 12 May there be no one to do him a kindness, nor anyone to pity his orphaned children. 13 May his posterity be cut off; may his name be blotted out in the second generation. 14 May the iniquity of his father be remembered before the Lord, and do not let the sin of his mother be blotted out. 15 Let them be before the Lord continually, and may his memory be cut off from the earth. 16 For he did not remember to show kindness, but pursued the poor and needy and the brokenhearted to their death. 17 He loved to curse; let curses come on him. He did not like blessing; may it be far from him. 18 He clothed himself with cursing as his coat, may it soak into his body like water, like oil into his bones. 19 May it be like a garment that he wraps around himself, like a belt that he wears every day."

And part 3:

20 May that be the reward of my accusers from the Lord, of those who speak evil against my life. 21 But you, O Lord my Lord, act on my behalf for your name's sake; because your steadfast love is good, deliver me. 22 For I am poor and needy, and my heart is pierced within me. 23 I am gone like a shadow at evening; I am shaken off like a locust. 24 My knees are weak through fasting; my body has become gaunt. 25 I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they shake their heads. 26 Help me, O Lord my God! Save me according to your steadfast love. 27 Let them know that this is your hand; you, O Lord, have done it. 28 Let them curse, but you will bless. Let my assailants be put to shame; may your servant be glad. 29 May my accusers be clothed with dishonor; may they be wrapped in their own shame as in a mantle. 30 With my mouth I will give great thanks to the Lord; I will praise him in the midst of the throng. 31 For he stands at the right hand of the needy, to save them from those who would condemn them to death.

(In the text of the 1917 English Tanakh published by the Jewish Publication Society, New York, translated by Kaufmann Kohler (1843-1926), there is a radically different reading for verse 20: "This would mine adversaries effect from HaShem, and they that speak evil against my soul.")

Now consider how vivid this is if you identify David with Barack Obama--with his wicked and deceitful enemies attacking him without cause, in return for his proffered love and prayer. They want him tried by a wicked man, with an accuser at his right hand (in the Hebrew, the accuser is HaSatan). They want him found guilty and deprived of his office, and they obviously want him dead, however Speaker O'Neal denies it.

In making the prayer joke, Republicans are precisely putting Obama in the place of King David, and themselves in the place of his dishonest and implacable enemies, and if they are as religious as they want us to think, they had better tremble: because as verse 20 says, those curses can redound upon them: May that be the the reward of my accusers (except in the more forgiving Jewish translation).

So watch out, conservatives, if your memory is cut off from the earth, if you pursue the poor and needy and the brokenhearted to their death, if you clothe yourselves with cursing, cursing could soak into your bodies, like oil into your bones, and it's not going to be pretty.

Motet Heu, nos miseros by Leonardo Leo. For some reason various online sources say the text is from Psalm 109, but it isn't (neither in the Greek nor Hebrew numberings). I don't know where it's from, but it sounds pretty remarkable.

Oh, and the reason they don't accept the intepretation with the quotation marks? It's because of a New Testament passage, in Acts 1:20, where Peter quotes the psalm with reference to Judas and the field where he hanged himself:

For it is written in the book of Psalms, "Let his habitation become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it," and, "Let another take his position of overseer."

or, following the Greek more closely, "and, his bishopric let another take." (Whence some English wags used to say Judas was the first bishop.)

Because if the reading of Psalm 109:6-19 treating the words as those of David is wrong, then Peter is making the same mistake—and if you are a real religious conservative, that just cannot be.

Update 1/20/12
O'Neal did apologize, confronted with a petition from Faithful America (an organization of that weird old-fashioned kind of Christians who are more interested in the Sermon on the Mount than in selected abominations from Leviticus, and other religions) and 30,000 signatures demanding that he resign--"Keep your hands off my bishopric!" he cried. Just kidding.