Week 18 Psalm 119
I started 119 today.
There was a note at the bottom of the page: this psalm is a Hebrew acrostic poem; there are 22 stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The eight verses within each stanza begin with the Hebrew letter of its section. The editors of another bible I use pasted in Hebrew alphabet headers between each 8-verse stanza – aleph beth gimel and like that.
None of that helps a non-Hebrew-reading guy. But what I did notice right away is that the writer starts talking about something that’s super-easy for a reader to forget. The thing is this: lots of times bible-reading is just a simple information-gathering exercise – for example I read that the Lord created the world and now I know. But 119 talks about an additional feature – an extra that goes beyond reading-the-words. The basic idea when I read is reading but the next-step idea is to try to amalgamate or internalize or metamorphize or transmute that information content.
For example the writer is talking about blessed – or happy – people and says they:
Follow the law of the Lord
Obey his decrees
Search for him with all their hearts
Don’t compromise with evil
Walk only in (the Lord’s) paths.
These are pretty big not-just-reading steps.
I think a lot of the time I’m reading just to read-through. So this thing about doing what I’m reading is a good heads-up (but one that’s very hard).
Note: quote from Psalm 119:1-3 (NLT). The footnote is from NLT.