Wednesday 29 March 2023

Psalm 102:18-28

Background

This is one of the more puzzling passages in a puzzling book. The woman describes a night-time experience in which she hears her beloved knocking and gets up to let him enter, only for him to have vanished. Once again, she goes searching the city for him, asking the watchmen if they have seen him, but this time she is met with violence. Again, she asks ‘the daughters of Zion’ for help; if we read on we see that they (v. 8) are reluctant to assist.

It is not clear whether this is an actual experience that the woman is describing or a dream that she had, nor, if it were a dream, at what point she woke up. Whatever we should understand about that, the boldness of the woman’s narrative is striking: she describes intense physical feelings but nonetheless she seems to delay admitting the man and then, when she finds he has gone, she rushes off after him.

The watchmen or sentinels would appear to be those who ensured that the streets of a town or city were kept safe overnight, offering a form of policing to deter or to prevent crime against property or against the few people who would need to be outside their homes at night. What the woman recounts is an abuse of their power: those whose job it was to make sure that the streets were safe made that street unsafe for that woman and the passage ends with her frightened and alone.  This is far from the last instance of such abuse in history, and we know also that there can be a racial element to that abuse: the experience of those who are seen to be foreigners or different from others is worse than that of those who belong to the majority community. It is pertinent to note that the woman in the Song is black (1:5).

To Ponder:

• From the work of Sigmund Freud and others, we have a very different understanding of dreams from that which biblical writers would have had. Do you think dreams can enable us better to understand our own reality and, if so, how?
• The actions of the sentinels in v. 7 might remind us of the murder of Sarah Everard or other stories of men in authority committing acts of violence against women. There is also data showing black people are more likely to be subject to the use of force by the police than white people. Do we address these issues in churches? How can the churches help to enable everyone to be safe as they walk about in our communities?