A Close Reading of Psalm 91

This translation is by the scholar Robert Alter. 

He who dwells in the Most High’s shelter, 

in the shadow of Shaddai lies at night—

I say of the Lord, “My refuge and bastion, 

my God in whom I trust.”

For He will save you from the fowler’s snare, 

from the disastrous plague.

With His pinion He shelters you, 

and beneath His wings you take refuge,

a shield and a buckler, His truth.

You shall not fear from the terror of night

nor from the arrow that flies by day,

from the plague that stalks in darkness

nor from the scourge that rages at noon.

Though a thousand fall at your side 

and ten thousand at your right hand,

you it will not reach.

You but look with your eyes,

and the wicked’s requital you see.

For you—the Lord is your refuge, 

the Most High you have made your abode.

No harm will befall you, 

nor affliction draw near to your tent.

For His messengers He charges for you 

to guard you on all your ways.

On their palms they lift you up 

lest your foot be bruised by a stone.

On lion and viper you tread, 

you trample young lion and serpent.

“For Me he desired and I freed him.

I raised him high, for he has known My name.

He calls Me and I answer him,

I am with him in his straits.

I deliver him and grant him honor.

With length of days I shall sate him,

and show him my rescue.”

I find this psalm interesting on many levels, and Robert Alter in his commentary points out that when you do a close reading of this psalm, that there are three voices in the psalm. There is the poet or psalmist who is writing. There is the second verse where there is a voice that he identifies as a righteous man speaking, and the text in his translation shows quotation marks: 

“My refuge and bastion, 

my God in whom I trust.”

So these are the words of that righteous man. 

And then the final two verses of the psalm, we hear directly from God. The quotes showing God’s communication to the psalmist:

“For Me he desired and I freed him.

I raised him high, for he has known My name.

He calls Me and I answer him,

I am with him in his straits.

One of the levels that we can look at this psalm is a level of protection and security that’s found in God. All of the language indicates this with being in the shadow of God, or Divine protection, being a refuge, being delivered. And then it moves into how we are held up by God, how we are shielded and buckled up, given strength. And, in this place, we are asked not to fear. That it is a dwelling place for us in our relationship to God, to be in this context or this circumstance. And along with that protection comes a kind of companionship. The knowledge that there are angels that have charge over you. That you are known by your name and can be called, and that you can be given honor by God, and this honor leads to both liberation or salvation, and a long life. 

There’s a quality of awesomeness that I experience in this psalm, and that kind of awesomeness or overwhelming presence that we can find in nature or other parts of the universe by looking at the stars at night, or just understanding the magnitude of the created universe, leads me to feel that in this awesomeness, I have to learn to have respect for the infinite qualities of God. Those parts of God that are unknowable. Those parts of God that are mysterious. Parts of God that can’t be named, or even as in the Hebrew Bible there are places where we are told that no one can see God because a mere vision of God is like death to the viewer. But at the same time that there is this awesomeness and this infinite capacity or qualities that exists there, this unknowable part of God, it feels to me that there’s also a balance that comes with accepting the relational aspects of God. The part that says God can speak to you; and this is the last part of the psalm that I find compelling, that the psalmist would be able to express the words of God as if the psalmist heard those directly. And I think that this is that relational nearness, that presence, that personal awareness where we can inquire and receive knowledge or wisdom, that we can know God by our experience of God, even though it may be just the effect of God’s presence without other indications that we could cite as evidence or proof. But that effect, that presence, the knowing that God is present with us is a powerful reminder that, even though this God is infinite in so many ways, this God that we come to know and have faith in also is so near to us. 

And, it’s both reassuring and maybe in some ways even a little bit terrifying. And when we get inside of that awesomeness, when we get inside of that awareness of God, it’s a point where we become humbled by that awareness because this deep awareness that we have in the moment is kind of coming from an understanding that the world that is outside of us can only come through our own eyes, our own ears and experiences, our insights, that there’s a uniqueness to our own experience, as if every part of this exterior world was tailor made for us. That it comes in service to who we are. It comes in service to our own enlightening. I’m using the word “enlightening” because the word “enlightenment,” that condition of enlightenment, in some ways to me feels as if that’s reserved for God. That that’s a completeness or wholeness that exists in God, rather than the human being where there might be the wholeness of the human person, but there’s an incompleteness of our consciousness and our awareness. We might find it easier, or I should say, I find it easier to think of enlightening, the gerund, to indicate that process, so that when we understand our own being, we understand there’s a continuous process that’s occurring, not only in our experience of the world, but in our relationship to God. So that we can both reach up to those awesome heights in a way where we can experience wonder and awe, but then there’s also this process that’s generated inside of us where that most essential part of us that’s connected to God and God’s most essential part is also so personal. That, the saying that God is nearer to us than our own understanding of ourselves is an expression that indicates this kind of closeness. That there’s a knowing, and along with that knowing, a kind of love that comes. It holds us. It comforts us. When we can accept it and let it in, it can bring us a kind of peace in knowing that there’s nothing we can do to earn this. We are acceptable as we are. 

There are so many ways that we can speak about this. Each person’s experience can be a little bit different, but one of the ways that I’ve seen this described, I don’t remember the exact reference to it right now, but it was a rabbi, a Hassidic Jew, who talked about two different levels of light. There’s the light of God that kind of comes down into us as a human being, where it’s kind of limited and very narrow. I think one of the metaphors or similes that the rabbi used was it’s like being in the thorn bush where there’s all these prickly parts of the world all around you that can hurt you and cause you suffering, and yet at the same time, that light penetrates through that thicket down into that very narrow place. And in a way, in this psalm, there’s one line that indicates this same thing: “I am with him in his straights.” So, it’s in that, “I am with him in that narrow place,” where this more limited bit of light comes in. And yet that light that comes in into that narrow space, if we could see outside of that thicket, we could see a greater light that’s out there in the world. And so this kind of parallels what I was talking about earlier about, there’s this awesome part and there’s this personal part, where we can identify with either one. We can identify with that awesome part, but that’s kind of hard because we can feel our own limitations, the limitations of our freedom, our ability to see or hear or to do certain things. We can try to identify with that awesome, larger aspect of God, or on that more personal level, or down in the thicket, among the thorns, in that straight, we realize that God is there as well. So that the nearness of God, our experience of God, we can identify with that lesser light, but it is still the same light that is within God that is within us.

It reminds me of the first part of the Gospel according to John where the Logos, or the Word of God, as Jesus Christ is the light that enlightens every human being. So that we see in the incarnation of Jesus, and I don’t necessarily mean that in the theological sense of some traditional Christian interpretations, but just in the sense of a human being incarnating, we have that light revealed to us in that person of Jesus, and we can put that up on a pedestal, and put it in that awesome territory of the unknowable or the mysterious God, or we can bring that down into the personal, and understand that it is also revealing to us our own heritage, our own inheritance of the same light, the same essence, following through on the idea that if God is in all of creation, and God creates out of God’s own being. And, so the goodness of that, which is echoed in the creation stories in Genesis, is a deep and lasting indicator of our value as a human being; our individual participation in the cosmos; our own individual participation in the life of God, but also God experiencing life through us, and participating in our living, breathing, doing, speaking, being here in this world. 

Where does that leave us? Well, I think that the value of this kind of psalm is it reminds us that there are these different levels of God speaking to us. That we can sit back, and we can give words to our experience, we can give words to what it feels like, and we can see examples of that in the world around us, but also to know that we can hear those words, that there is a way that the world, a way that God speaks to us. And so in opening ourselves to that kind of message, we can learn that what the psalmist wrote, we can learn a bit of what was inside of the writer of the psalm, but then we can also internalize that and match it to our own experience, and understand that our own internal process, our own way of living and seeing can also be that same expression of God—those same expressions of security, of knowledge, of honor, of liberation—that it can be very personal and present with us at all times. 

Thank you.