Week 25 Psalm 111 & 112
I read Psalm 111.
Before I flipped over to Jeremiah I glanced at Psalm 112.
111 & 112 both start with praise the Lord.
Both have ten verses.
Both have a paragraph break at verse-seven.
Might not mean much but there’s a kind of visual symmetry.
I walked into the other room and scanned pages 866 & 867, scissored-out the two psalms, taped 111 together at the page-break, then clipped them onto a sheet of yellow 8½ x 11. I lined them up side-by-side.
The content is different: 111 is about the Lord; 112 about a person who reveres the Lord.
But I see that 111:3b says the Lord’s righteousness endures forever, and 112:3b says the person’s righteousness endures forever.
111:4b says the Lord is gracious and compassionate. 112:4b says the person is gracious and compassionate.
I disregard the verse-numbers and count the number of phrases in 111. There’s 22. 22 in 112, too.
So I’m thinking that maybe something’s going on, something I didn’t see before. Maybe some kind of literary form. A kind of Hebrew sonnet.
How many times do I ask: couldn’t he have written this in an easier way?
Maybe he could have. And maybe he did. Maybe he wrote a soothing ancient-near-eastern sonnet that only translated into teeth-grinding contemporary English.
While I’m looking at bible content I can’t forget about content’s submerged side. Maybe culture, or language, or 22-line sonnets.
So it’s useful to remind myself: if you want low-demand reading go look at a Canadian news magazine.
Note: quotes from NASB version.