"The Law" and Psalm 119

A funny thing happened on the way from the Pentateuch to the New Testament.

Well, perhaps that’s not the best way to put it. But bear with me a bit while I explore some things that have come up for me as Merna and I have been reading the Psalms together, especially as we’ve spent some time in Psalm 119, which has always been (to my ears) one of the more boring of the psalms.

But before we get to Psalm 119 and its frequent references to “the law,” let’s consider that word. In the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), the word translated “law” is Hebrew tôrah. The basic problem comes in the fact that tôrah does not mean precisely what we mean by English law. The core meaning of the word is akin to “teaching” or “instruction.” I don’t know about you (although I have my suspicions), but law to me typically means a rule that I must obey or there will be penalties. This is true whether I think about the speed limit on the road I take into town or the requirement that I pay my taxes or even something my parents said when they “laid down the law.” “Law” in my mind has strong institutional associations.

There are words in Biblical Hebrew that are akin to our common word “law,” and they are usually translated something like “statutes” or “ordinances.” Those words are closer to what we mean in English when we use the word “law.” Nonetheless, the core word that came to be the short descriptor for the first five books, tôrah, doesn’t really mean what we commonly understand as “law.” The problem was aided and abetted by the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, which was made ca. 200 B.C.E.; this translation used the Greek word nomos to translate Hebrew tôrah, and it is simply true that Greek nomos is closer to our English word “law” than is the original Hebrew word.¹

To get out of the general and into the specific, though, let’s look at (boring!) Psalm 119, famous for the fact that it’s not merely the longest psalm but also the longest chapter in the Bible. It’s an acrostic psalm: each verse in each 8-verse chunk (formally: stanza) starts with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So, for instance, the first 8 verses all start with the Hebrew letter aleph. The poet seems to work quite hard to achieve this, and that’s part of what can make the psalm seem boring: the same ideas are repeated, seemingly at random, with the constraint of the verse needing to begin with a specific alphabetic letter bringing some disorder to the thought. It can feel quite random.²

In approaching this subject, I’ve been helped significantly by John Goldingay’s commentary on the psalms.³ Goldingay makes clear that tôrah (translated “law” in the KJV and many translations) in the psalms does not mean what we mean when we use English “law” but really should be translated (as noted above) “teaching, instruction.” Furthermore, it certainly does not refer to the Pentateuch; in the psalms, the word is never associated with Moses or Deuteronomy, even though from a young age, I’m sure that I always heard Psalm 119:97 as referring to the “Law of Moses.” This verse, one of the more famous verses in the psalm and regularly used to encourage youth to “love Scripture,” reads (NIV): “Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.” Psalm 119 is chock-a-block with this sorts of expression.

Here’s Goldingay’s translation: “How am I dedicated to your teaching; it is my murmur all day.” ⁴

As we’ve worked through Psalm 119 in the course of a number of days, something has seemed clearer to me. I wonder if the Lord’s tôrah, “teaching,” is instruction about the way that God has organized the world. There are moral and judicial aspects to the nature of the world, and the teaching that the psalmist is referring to is how things ought to be, whether it be the actions of people (toward the world, toward each other) or the actions of God. The tôrah that the psalmist is obsessed with is a description of how to live in the world and with the world, in community with people and all of life.

When Jesus summed up “the law” in a response to a question about what was the greatest “commandment” (teaching? I think so), he said that we are called to “love God fully” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:36–40). This is the core of tôrah, the core of teaching from God.

Once we get this clear distillation of God’s intent for our world and for us, and if our minds are shaped by this truth, then we will find our minds regularly turning to what we see going on around us and in ourselves—what is right, and what is not right. Our days (and our nights, sometimes) will be full of this; it won’t leave us.

Try reading Psalm 119 in this way, hearing “law” and all of the other words as reflecting what God wants us to know about our world, what God wants, and how we best can see things from God’s perspective.

1. I’ve wondered whether this translation issue, from the Hebrew word to the Greek word—the latter is of course used in the Greek New Testament to refer to the Hebrew Bible’s tôrah—has influenced our understanding of the discussion of “law” in the New Testament. Most beliefs or ideas tend, over time, to take on a less flexible meaning. Could it be that the more general sense of tôrah became more institutionalized, more rigid, in the centuries after its use in the Pentateuch, as Judaism became more of a rule-bound religion? I’ve wondered about this, and I think it bears further thought. If so, the frequent debate about “law vs. grace,” which seems to have gained more effect than the NT texts warrant, may be due to a shift in a word’s meaning over time, a shift that we must take into account to understand certain NT texts aright.

2. I’m a lover of Scripture. Please don’t shoot me for these thoughts!

3. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2008. 3 volumes!

4. Goldingay implies that “to murmur” in this psalm means to have the topic on your mind in a way that it’s become something of an ear-worm (to use a very modern phrase, usually applied to music).