God will not resurrect blastocysts when Jesus returns.
Psalm 139: 13–14 has nothing to do with life beginning at conception.
Introduction
Psalm 139: 13–14 has absolutely nothing to do with life beginning at conception. Pulling verses out of context is an indication of one’s hubris. Instead of submitting to God’s Word, you force God’s Word to say something it doesn’t. Proof texting leads to misrepresenting God, wrongly condemning people, and undermining our credibility.
So what is this psalm all about if it isn’t about when life begins. Quite literally, it’s about the opposite. It’s about destroying life and the composer’s righteous indignation.
Big Dave’s Modern Summary of Psalm 139
I am livid God. You need to destroy our enemies. They do not deserve your mercy. I loathe those deceitful murderers with an all-consuming hatred. You know that my feelings of indignation are righteous. You know that my desire to slaughter these people is justified. I cannot hide from you. I see you in front of me. I feel you behind me. You have access above me in the heavens. You have access below me in the earth. You have access to the place where the sun rises and the place where it sets. Even in the pitch black of darkness, you can find me. I cannot hide evil intentions inside me. I can’t bury my true feelings or moral intentions in my kidneys; you made them when I was inside my mother’s womb. You saw my skeleton in the depths of the earth before you made my kidneys. You know my indignation is righteous because I live a righteous life. (BDmS)
I don’t like a lot of Hebrew poetry.
I don’t have an affinity with many of the Psalms because I am a left brain, logical, thinker. I am not a right brain, artistic, feeler. The psalms creatively employ poetic design and figurative imagery to elicit visceral reactions to the aesthetics. Many of them appeal more to the feeler, than the thinker. Instead of being awe-inspired, the thinker is self-satisfied by making rational, logical sense of it.
Heed this warning from scholars to left brain, logical, thinking types.
To avoid this is a critical misstep, trained, conservative, Evangelical scholars like Osborne, Ryken, Longman, Ross, VanGemeren and Cragie just to mention a few warn of looking for a “literal” meaning, rather than allowing for the intended visceral reaction. Do not to fill every metaphor and figure with more theological weight than they can bear. Appreciate the artistry.
So let’s respect the artist’s intention. Let’s play by the rules set for us.
Genre unlocks the meaning of the artistic composition.
A heavy metal band celebrates on the highway to hell, while a Gospel singer mourns those on it. A Grunge song drives you into an empty dark bar to find a lot of liquor while agonizing over your feelings of alienation. A Techno song drives you into a packed, laser-lighted club to find a little Molly while celebrating your feelings of love.
In the same way, understanding the genre of Hebrew music helps us to make sense of the overall impression we should get from the psalm.
Psalm 139 is a song or poem that complains. (Lament Psalm)
Postmodern Grunge songs from the 90s were angst-filled reactions to social alienation. Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) laments are also angst-filled reactions to suffering and injustice especially the King’s. It asks, challenges, even demands that God respond to the suffering and injustice.
So let’s look at the entire composition, instead of isolating a couple of verses for our own purpose. To do so, we should ask some probing questions.
What is the composer’s complaint?
In light of the complaint, what does he want?
Does the author ask for forgiveness or affirm his innocence?
How does he express his confidence in God?
Is there a promise to do something, if God satisfies the composer’s need or solves his problem?
Not every lament answers all those questions or in that order, but you should find at least three of those elements.
Along with those probing questions, we need to pay other structural considerations like repetition, inclusion, parallelism, or chiasm, along with expressive, figurative language, not forgetting the historical or cultural context.
Structural considerations flag what is important.
In a song, a change in tempo signals an emphasis on the lyrics that follow. In English poetry, an abrupt change in a poem does the same. An abrupt switch indicated by grammar, vocabulary, style, or theme screams, “Pay Attention! This is important.”
This kind of disjuncture occurs in verses 19–22. The composer abruptly switches from commending God’s comprehensive knowledge to his overwhelming hatred for his enemies, whom he regards as God’s enemies. Like a virtual particle popping in out of nowhere, the composer suddenly wants God to destroy his blood thirsty enemies out of the clear blue sky.
A rhetorical convention signals an emphasis.
In verse 21, this composer uses rhetorical questions to make an emphatic point. Make no mistake on this point. This is the emphasis of this psalm. He is enraged. There is no empathy or compassion. In verse 22, the hate is absolute loathing.
This abrupt change and rhetorical emphasis leaves us with a conundrum. Looking back on verses 1–18, we can see the composer’s confidence is in God’s comprehensive knowledge. What does God’s knowledge have to do with the composer’s request to kill their enemies? If the composer wanted God to destroy his enemies, then he would emphasize his power, not his knowledge. What are we missing?
It’s time to ask another probing question. Does the composer ask for forgiveness or affirm his innocence? Yes he does in verses 23 and 24. In those verses, the composer is asserting his innocence.
The request to destroy those, who are bloodthirsty, is a righteous request. His hatred is justified. He is not an idolater. God knows this. He knows the composer is walking on the path of righteousness, not wickedness. (Proverbs 4:18–19)
In other words, the composer commends God’s comprehensive knowledge in the first 18 verses to support this angst-filled request. Let’s take a look at how he does that.
I mentioned that there were creative design elements or structural features that help reinforce our initial assessment. The composer used an inclusion. This is a literary device that brackets off material belonging together. The words “search” and “know” (1, 23) serve as the inclusion. They indicate that God’s complete knowledge needs to be understood in light of the composer’s righteous indignation. These two themes are not to be separated out from each other.
Also, in the first four verses, there are a number of paired synonyms that further indicate God knows the composer through and through. Knowledge in these first 18 verses is the emphasis.
Every metaphor and simile in the first 18 verses are different ways to present God’s comprehensive knowledge in relation to the composer’s justified angst-filled request. God knows the composer through and through. All the figures and hyperbole highlight this comprehensive knowledge. Even if the composer hid his true intention, it is impossible to find a place that God doesn’t see what he is doing. God has access to all of the composer’s hidden motives and knows them before he ever speaks.
When we understand the intended visceral reaction, and recognize the structural design, and the poetic techniques, it becomes apparent the composer is not intending to teach that life begins at conception. Everything is related to why the composer’s indignation and call for the destruction of life are righteous. Why, because God knows him through and through.
Understand the historical and cultural context to understand the imagery.
When we look a little closer at the verses 1–18, it is important to understand the cultural context in which we find this psalm. We are dealing with Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) ideas and literary conventions.
Remember, when this psalm was composed, the Ancient Near East (ANE) has not been touched by Greek ideas or culture. Unfortunately, when people see the word omnipresence in an English heading or outline, they think of the Greek and Christian idea of God simultaneously being everywhere all the time. This is not how the ANE cultures including this Hebrew composer thought of God’s presence. Instead, God had access to every place anytime he wanted to have access.
This ANE conceptual framework makes better sense of how God’s comprehensive knowledge is pictured by this composer. There isn’t a place the composer can hide. God has access to the heavens. He has access to the underworld. He has access to the place where the sun rises and the sun sets. Even the darkness will not hide the composer. Nothing can be done in secret behind God’s back in a place, where God does not have access.
But what if the composer buried his true intentions down inside himself? No matter. God knows what he will say even before he says it. How is that possible you may ask? How can God know what is hidden inside a person? God made the composer’s organs.
139:13 Certainly you made my mind and heart;
you wove me together in my mother’s womb.
The above translation (NET Bible) uses two terms to capture the Christian concept of emotion (heart) and moral intention (mind). This is a distinctively Greek idea, but it captures the Hebrew concept. The word used by the Hebrew composer here is the word for kidneys in Hebrew. Ancient Near Eastern cultures including the Hebrews viewed the kidneys as the seat of one’s emotions and moral intentions (cf. Pss 7:9; 26:2).
The composer continues to lean heavily on ANE ideas.
139:15 my bones were not hidden from you,
when I was made in secret
and sewed together in the depths of the earth.
These words reflect a prescientific belief that the embryo exists deep beneath the earth’s surface prior to becoming a fetus in the mother’s stomach. We find this specific belief in much of the ANE literature and in other parts of the Bible. Notice in Job 1:21, he returns back to the earth when he dies, not his mother’s womb.
Is there anything in the text that suggests this is exactly the figurative imagery that the composer wanted to use because it contributes the artistic aesthetic? Absolutely, you can’t hide from God. Even if the composer travels to the underworld, God is there. Not only did God have access to his mother’s womb, where he made his organs (another ANE concept), but he had access to the underworld, where he saw the formless embryo take shape (another ANE concept).
Again, it is important to remember the directions of our respected, conservative, Evangelical Old Testament scholars? Do not fill every metaphor and figure with more theological weight than you should. Don’t look for a literal meaning. Allow the intended visceral reaction to the aesthetics emotionally move you.
So is there an applicable truth that doesn’t go too far out on a questionable theological limb?
You can’t hide your true feelings or motives from God. He knows.
It is possible, but more questionable to assert the following.
Deceitful murderers, who are God’s enemies, are beyond grace and mercy.
Can we ever justify the intractable loathing felt by the composer? No, the Sermon on the Mount does not allow for the composer’s intractable loathing.
Allowing the Ancient Near Eastern culture to speak for itself can be disorienting for devotional readers of the Scripture, but just for a moment, jump into my time machine. It is important to understand why this occurs.
Abraham was probably a Horite (although we don’t know these things for sure). The Horites and Edomites intermarried and shared their cultural life. His father was definitely idolatrous and polytheistic.
Jacob’s offspring spend hundreds of years in Egypt. Their patron initially is Jacob’s son Joseph, who was sold into Egyptian slavery at a young age. Joseph takes on the Egyptian culture marrying one and serving as an administrator in the Pharaoh’s court.
Their eventual deliverer is raised in the Egyptian palace as a son of the Pharaoh. Moses seems to have learned little about the God of Abraham, while Pharaoh’s son. Out in the desert, when Moses heads up the mountain to get the law, we find out the freed Hebrew slaves assimilated some of the Egyptian culture. Some of them were polytheistic and idolatrous.
When they get to the land, there are other tribes living there. Those tribes are also polytheistic and idolatrous. Instead of getting rid of them all, the conquest fails on a few fronts. They begin living in and around people with different views about God. God Himself allows them to take virgins as their mistresses from defeated tribes so there is intermarrying going on from the beginning.
We see compromises in Judges. Saul’s compromise with false religious practices cost him his kingdom and life. Solomon’s many marriages with women from other tribes invite those cultures to mix with Israel’s. They bring their worldviews filled with multiple Gods, idol worship, and aberrant religious ritual.
Many of the Kings after the divided Kingdom also invite other cultures to influence Israel. Eventually, the prophets tell us God used other nations to destroy Israel because they did not remain distinct from other cultures.
Again, there is nothing out of the ordinary here for conservative Evangelicals. When historians study the language and literature of the Hebrews, they find ideas and literary conventions used by other cultures in the Ancient Near east. Since, these cultures existed before Israel existed and Israel intermingled with these other cultures, it is undeniable that some of the ideas and literary conventions of the neighboring ANE cultures find their way into our Hebrew Bible.
I’ll try to demonstrate this with two uncontroversial and hopefully unintimidating examples. The first is the Law that God gives to Moses to define God’s relationship with His people. It is called a Suzerain Treaty or Suzerain Vassal Treaty. The template of this conditional contract between YAHWEH and Israel is found all throughout the ANE world. God decided to use a standard contract throughout the ANE to define his relationship with his people. It would be like downloading a divorce template from legal zoom. You may change some things depending on your state, but why invent the wheel?
A second example is the songs or poetry that we are studying. We know the genres used by the composer of the psalms existed in other cultures before Israel’s artists employed them in their community. A parallel might be the secular genres we use for our worship songs. During the Reformation, Martin Luther changed the profane lyrics sung in drinking songs, but retained the form of the song. It happens. It happened.
Ideas are more difficult to discuss because now we get into the divisive and incoherent debate about inerrancy, but there are two concepts that occur in our psalm taken directly from ANE cultures.
God’s abode above the earth in the heavens and the dead’s abode under the earth in Sheol are concepts in this psalm that occur all throughout the ANE prior to the Hebrews writing about them. These are essential ANE worldview concepts.
The sun moves around the earth, not the other way around. This isn’t an astronomical observation unique to the Hebrew’s worldview. Everyone in the ANE believed this to be unassailable cosmology.
Are there any ANE parallels to a deity knowing an individual before birth? There are examples all over from Africa to Mesopotamia and everywhere in between. Here are just a few examples for you to follow up on. In Egypt Khnum (a creator god portrayed as a potter). The god Amun knew Pianki (an Egyptian monarch of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty in the eighth century B.C.) while he “was in the belly of his mother,” where he knew he was to be the ruler of Egypt. In the Gilgamesh Epic, Gilgamesh’s role as king was said to be destined for him “when his umbilical cord was severed.” Personal gods are praised as the “producer of my progeny.” Nebuchadnezzar praises Marduk as the one who created him. In Sumerian literature the goddess Ninhursag (Nintur) is responsible for the birth process from conception through gestation and delivery, and even serves as midwife.
“It is clear then that the psalmist is not introducing new theological concepts but using stock phrases familiar in the ancient world.” (Victor Harold Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, and John H. Walton, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (electronic ed.; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), Ps 139:4–16.)
However, in most of these parallels, scholars who have taken the time to compare and contrast them with the language used in Hebrew poetry realize that the gods do not share the same concern or intimacy with the common people that the leader commands. It seems in the Hebrew literature that this knitting and knowing process is reserved only for the true king, prophet, or priest, not the people they lead.
Conclusion
So what is this psalm all about if it isn’t about when life begins? Quite literally, it’s about the opposite. It’s about destroying life and the composer’s righteous indignation.
