Psalm 139: Searched and Known

Psalm 139 is the great psalm of being fully known. The opening verb is "chaqar," which means to search out, to investigate, to probe to the bottom. It is the same verb used elsewhere for searching a land, examining a case, plumbing a depth. David puts that verb in God's hands and says of himself that he has been searched. There is no part of him that has not been examined. The sitting and the rising, the path and the lying down, the word not yet on the tongue. The psalm refuses the comfortable distance most religion grants. It says that the God of Israel knows the inside of a person better than the person knows himself.

The middle section asks where one could go from such a presence. The geography is total. Heaven and Sheol, the wings of the dawn meaning the far east, the uttermost parts of the sea meaning the far west, light and darkness which are treated as equals before God. This is not the language of a tribal deity. It is the language of the creator who fills all space and to whom darkness and light are the same. The poetry then turns inward to the womb. "You knitted me together" uses a verb of weaving. "Fearfully and wonderfully made" is two passive participles stacked together, the second from a root meaning to be set apart, distinguished, marked out. The same God who fills the cosmos formed this one body in secret.

Then comes the line that has carried generations of believers through grief. "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God." The Hebrew "yaqar" means weighty, costly, rare. David is saying that God's thoughts toward him are heavier than he can lift, more numerous than the sand. He wakes and is still with God. This is the high point of the psalm and arguably one of the high points of the whole Psalter. It is a statement about the asymmetry of divine attention. God's thoughts toward this single human being outnumber the grains on the shore.

And then, without warning, the psalm swings into imprecation. "Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God." Modern readers often want to delete these verses or treat them as an embarrassing addition. The Hebrew text and every ancient witness keeps them. The theology of the psalm requires them. To be fully known is also to be fully aligned and David's alignment with God includes hatred of what God hates. The closing couplet returns to the opening verb. "Search me, O God and know my heart." The prayer that began as observation becomes invitation. The one who has been searched asks to be searched again, this time with consent and asks for the way everlasting.