Known by God: a psalm of searching, presence and formation

Psalm 139 is one of the most personal prayers in the Psalter. The title calls it 'A Psalm of David' and gives it to the choirmaster, so that it was meant for use in worship. It belongs to the last group of Davidic psalms in Book V (Psalms 138 to 145). Traditional readers take it as David's own. Some modern scholars note unusual word forms in the Hebrew, a few of which look like Aramaic, and take these as signs of a later date after the exile, perhaps with the title meaning 'in the Davidic tradition'. The psalm itself does not name an event. Nothing in it depends on a date.

In the world of the first singers, gods were commonly thought to be tied to places. A deity of the river, of a city, or of the sky had a territory. Against this, Psalm 139 declares that the God of Israel is not confined to the temple or even to Canaan, and that nothing about a person, from conception to old age, falls outside his knowledge.

The prayer may have been prompted by an accusation or by danger. Verses 19 to 24, which turn to the wicked and ask God to examine the psalmist's own heart, suggest that someone had spoken against him. If the psalmist was falsely charged, the long meditation on God's knowing is the foundation of an appeal: let the God who knows everything judge between us.

Psalm 139 is a hymn of praise that turns into a prayer of petition, which is a common movement in the Psalter. It is built in five parts: three meditations in verses 1 to 18, each about one aspect of God, then a protest in verses 19 to 22 and a petition in verses 23 and 24. The psalm shifts from speaking about God in the opening lines to speaking to God, and it is addressed to God throughout, including its harshest moments.

The poetry is concrete. The theological terms that later teachers use for these ideas, omniscience (knowing all things), omnipresence (being everywhere) and the like, do not occur in the psalm. The writer speaks in terms of sitting and rising, ascending and descending, darkness and light, womb and book. Readers should therefore ask what the images mean in the psalm's own world before deriving doctrine from them. The images of verses 13 to 16 are especially poetic, and statements about the womb are not a medical description. They are a way of saying that God was at work before the person was aware of anything.

The rule for reading verses 19 to 22 is that they must be read inside the whole psalm. A hasty reader of those verses might think the psalmist has changed subject. In fact, the same logic runs on. If God knows everything and is present everywhere, then he knows the wicked and sees what they do, and the singer asks him to act. The final petition, in which the psalmist asks to be searched himself, turns the question of hatred and enmity into self-examination.

Verses 1 to 6. 'O LORD, You have searched me and known me.' The verb 'searched' (chaqar) is used of digging for ore or of an investigator probing a case. The verb 'known' (yada) in the Old Testament means more than knowing facts. It denotes close, personal acquaintance, as in Genesis 4:1 or Amos 3:2. The psalmist lists the daily acts God knows: sitting and rising, a path and a lying down, a thought 'from afar', and a word before it is spoken. Verse 5, 'You hem me in behind and before; You have laid Your hand upon me', can feel either like protection or like confinement, and the psalmist's reaction in verse 6 is amazement: such knowledge is 'too wonderful for me'. He does not say it is frightening. He says it is beyond his reach.

Verses 7 to 12. 'Where can I go to escape Your Spirit?' The question assumes the answer: nowhere. The poem runs through heights and depths, east and west. Heaven and Sheol, the place of the dead, are the two extremes of the vertical scale; 'the wings of the dawn' and 'the farthest sea' (probably the western Mediterranean) mark the horizontal. Amos 9:2-3 makes a similar list as a warning to the wicked, and Jonah 1:3 shows a prophet who tried to run from the LORD's presence and found that he could not. Here the same fact is a comfort: 'Your right hand will hold me fast.' Verses 11 and 12 take up the last refuge, darkness. 'Even the darkness is not dark to You.' Night does not hide anything from God, and for the one who prays it need not be frightening either.

Verses 13 to 16. 'For You formed my inmost being.' The Hebrew word for 'inmost being' is literally 'kidneys', which the Israelites thought of as the seat of deep feeling and conscience. 'Knit me together' uses the verb sakak, to weave or cover, and 'woven together in the depths of the earth' is a poetic way of speaking of the womb, since the human body was made of earth (Genesis 2:7; compare Job 10:8-11). Verse 14 reads, 'I am fearfully and wonderfully made'. The words mean that the work was both awe-inspiring and distinct. In verse 16 the word translated 'unformed body' (golem) occurs nowhere else in the Old Testament and refers to something not yet shaped. God saw it before it had form. The line 'all my days were written in your book' says that no day of the singer's life falls outside God's plan. The Hebrew of the line is difficult, and commentators differ on whether it is the days or the bodily parts that were written, but the point about God's prior knowledge is clear either way. Jeremiah 1:5, Isaiah 49:1 and Psalm 22:9-10 speak of God's work in the womb in similar terms.

Verses 17 and 18

The psalmist turns from God's knowledge of him to his thoughts of God. 'How precious to me are Your thoughts.' If he tried to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. 'When I awake, I am still with You' can be read as waking from sleep or, at the limit, as awaking from the exhaustion of counting.

Verses 19 to 22. The mood changes sharply. 'O God, that You would slay the wicked.' The enemies are described by what they do to God: they 'speak of You deceitfully' and 'take Your name in vain'. The statement 'I hate them with perfect hatred' is not a licence for personal revenge. In the psalmist's world, to share God's covenant meant to share his loyalties; hatred of those who hate God is the other face of loyalty to him. The psalmist takes the matter to God and does not take it into his own hands.

Verses 23 and 24

The psalm closes where it began, with search. 'Search me, O God, and know my heart.' The verbs repeat those of verse 1. What was a fact in verse 1 is now an invitation. The psalmist asks God to test his 'concerns' (anxious thoughts) and to see whether any 'offensive way' is in him, a way that causes pain to God and to others. 'Lead me in the way everlasting' is a request for a path that will last.

Psalm 139 is one of the Old Testament's central texts on the character of God. It asserts that God knows all things, is present everywhere, and has made and numbered each life. These are not offered as puzzles, but as the basis of trust. The Bible does not say elsewhere that God is distant. In Jeremiah 23:23-24 the LORD asks whether he is a God only near at hand, and says that he fills heaven and earth. Solomon at the dedication of the temple said that heaven and the highest heaven could not contain God (1 Kings 8:27), and Solomon also said that God alone knows the hearts of all (1 Kings 8:39).

The psalm also bears on human worth. A person is known, formed and written in God's book from the first. Psalm 8, Genesis 1:26-27 and Job 31:15 all say that human beings are made by God with care. The psalm does not give a rule about when personhood begins, but it does show that God's regard for a human being does not wait on the person's own awareness. Many Christians draw ethical conclusions from these verses, and the text itself leaves the weight on God's initiative.

The psalm also bears on the problem of evil. The singer does not pretend that the world is free of hatred and violence. Verses 19 to 22 stay in the psalm, and the poem ends not with a verdict against others but with an offer to be examined. That pairing, of honest protest and honest self-examination, is characteristic of the Psalter's prayers.

The connection here is mostly one of echo and fulfillment, since the psalm contains no direct prediction. The New Testament says of Christ what the psalm says of God. In John's Gospel, Jesus knows Nathanael before he meets him (John 1:48) and, according to John 2:24-25, did not entrust himself to people because he knew what was in them. In Revelation 2:23 the risen Christ says that he is the one who searches minds and hearts, which the Old Testament says of the LORD (Jeremiah 17:10). The same knowledge that the psalm gives to God is given to Jesus, and the early church accepted this as a statement about his identity. Hebrews 4:13 says that nothing in creation is hidden from the eyes of the one to whom we must give account.

The theme of God's presence is carried by the way the New Testament treats Christ. Colossians 1:16-17 says that all things were created through Christ and hold together in him, which echoes the psalm's picture of the God who forms the person and sustains his days. Jesus' promise 'I am with you always' in Matthew 28:20 fits the claim that there is nowhere one can go to be out of God's presence. Paul tells the Athenians that God is not far from each of us, since in him we live and move (Acts 17:27-28), which echoes the psalm without quoting it.

The final request, 'lead me in the way everlasting', is an echo that links with Jesus' words in John 14:6, 'I am the way'. This link is tentative: the psalm speaks of the path of life with God, and the Gospel claims that this path is a person. Finally, the ethical difficulty of verses 19 to 22 receives a Christian answer in the teaching to love enemies (Matthew 5:44) and, in the Christian reading, in the cross, where God deals with evil by bearing it.