"Set out a table before me"
Though I walk in the veil of
death’s shadow,
I fear no harm,
For You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff—
it is they that console me.
You set out a table before me
in the face of my foes.
You moisten my head with oil,
my cup overflows.
Let but goodness and kindness pursue me
all the days of my life.
And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
for many long days.
Thus, Robert Alter, attempts to deliver a sense of how the original Hebrew language might have expressed Psalm 23.
James Wood reviews Alter's Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, in The New Yorker.
One more excerpt:
"Psalm 90 is one of the most exquisite of the Psalms. Shakespeare was no doubt happy to borrow from it because it has a quality of desolation (despite its religious affirmations) that he wanted Macbeth to feel and transmit at the end of his life. The psalm uses different temporalities to evoke the massiveness of God’s presence. Before the mountains were born, the psalmist says, you not were but “are God.” A thousand years in your sight, he continues, “are like yesterday gone, / like a watch in the night.” (Alter nicely comments that this triadic diminishment takes us from a thousand years to a day, and, finally, to a night watch, lasting just a few hours.) We humans, by contrast, are like the grass that grows up in the day and withers by night; “all our days slip away in Your anger.” Our days are “but seventy years, / and if in great strength, eighty years.” At any time, God can cancel a life. “So teach us to number our days,” as the King James Version has it, “that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”"
Thanks TT
death’s shadow,
I fear no harm,
For You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff—
it is they that console me.
You set out a table before me
in the face of my foes.
You moisten my head with oil,
my cup overflows.
Let but goodness and kindness pursue me
all the days of my life.
And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
for many long days.
Thus, Robert Alter, attempts to deliver a sense of how the original Hebrew language might have expressed Psalm 23.
James Wood reviews Alter's Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, in The New Yorker.
One more excerpt:
"Psalm 90 is one of the most exquisite of the Psalms. Shakespeare was no doubt happy to borrow from it because it has a quality of desolation (despite its religious affirmations) that he wanted Macbeth to feel and transmit at the end of his life. The psalm uses different temporalities to evoke the massiveness of God’s presence. Before the mountains were born, the psalmist says, you not were but “are God.” A thousand years in your sight, he continues, “are like yesterday gone, / like a watch in the night.” (Alter nicely comments that this triadic diminishment takes us from a thousand years to a day, and, finally, to a night watch, lasting just a few hours.) We humans, by contrast, are like the grass that grows up in the day and withers by night; “all our days slip away in Your anger.” Our days are “but seventy years, / and if in great strength, eighty years.” At any time, God can cancel a life. “So teach us to number our days,” as the King James Version has it, “that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”"
Thanks TT
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