≈30 min · introductory episode · August 24–30, 2026
A conversation introducing the week. All voices — hosts and guest — are AI-written study personas, not real people.
Weekly introductory episode — Come Follow Me, August 24–30, 2026: Psalms 49–51; 61–66; 69–72; 77–78; 85–86
NATHAN: There is a sentence in the middle of this week's reading that announces the book is over. Psalm seventy-two, verse twenty. "The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended." Full stop. That's the end of David.
ELI: And then?
NATHAN: And then fourteen chapters later you turn a page and there is Psalm eighty-six, titled "A Prayer of David." More than a dozen more Davidic psalms follow. And nobody deleted the sentence. Somebody assembled this thing, saw that line contradicting the pages right after it, and left it where it was.
ELI: (dry) So the prayers of David ended, and then David prayed some more. All right. Before we go into the machinery — somebody is listening with the manual open, and the manual says this week is about people who wrote when they were discouraged, afraid, and remorseful. Which is true. Psalm fifty-one is a man writing the week after he arranged a killing. Psalm seventy-seven is somebody who cannot sleep and cannot pray and says so in writing.
NATHAN: So we earn the seams.
ELI: I just want to come back out of the workshop holding something usable on a Thursday night.
NATHAN: Deal. Seventeen chapters — Psalms forty-nine through fifty-one, sixty-one through sixty-six, sixty-nine through seventy-two, seventy-seven and seventy-eight, eighty-five and eighty-six. The lesson title comes from Psalm sixty-six, verse sixteen. "I will declare what he hath done for my soul."
ELI: Which is an assignment. We'll get there.
NATHAN: Our guest is the rabbinic voice on our writing panel — one of seven personas who write the essays behind this package, so openly a persona rather than a person, but one whose brief is to read this block the way it gets read on the other side of the aisle. These are prayers still in daily use. Welcome.
THE RABBI: Thank you for the chair. And let me take your colophon, because my tradition noticed it long ago. Ibn Ezra, in the twelfth century, reports an explanation credited to Yehudah HaLevi: it is a scribe's note closing a book. Not a line of the poem. A librarian's mark.
NATHAN: And Psalm eighty-six arrives titled a prayer of David anyway.
THE RABBI: And nobody panics. Worth saying at the top, because some of today will sound to your listeners like demolition. It has never felt that way to us. We have lived in this building with the beams exposed for two thousand years.
ELI: If I open my King James next to your Hebrew Bible, what's the first thing that goes wrong?
THE RABBI: The verse numbers. For ten of this week's seventeen chapters they do not match. Those lines your edition prints in small italics above the psalm — "To the chief Musician, A Psalm for the sons of Korah" — in your Bible those are headings. In the Masoretic text they are scripture, and they are counted.
ELI: So the superscription is verse one.
THE RABBI: Sometimes. The Hebrew runs a verse ahead of yours in ten of these chapters, and two ahead in Psalm fifty-one. So when the Talmud cites Psalms fifty-one nineteen, it means what your Bible calls fifty-one seventeen — "the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit." If your listeners ever chase a rabbinic citation and land two verses off, that is why.
ELI: One more piece of furniture. Selah. The standard answer in a Sunday class is a shrug.
THE RABBI: We have a reading, and it is not a shrug. The school of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov taught that wherever Scripture says netzach, or Selah, or va'ed, the matter will never cease. That is in tractate Eruvin. So in a Jewish ear, Selah means and that will not stop. Hear it in Psalm forty-nine. "God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for he shall receive me." Selah.
NATHAN: It isn't punctuation. It's an underline.
THE RABBI: Now, two names govern this block. Your tradition reads them as bylines; mine reads them as institutions. Psalms forty-nine and eighty-five belong to the sons of Korah. Psalms fifty, seventy-seven, and seventy-eight to Asaph, whom Chronicles presents as a guild of temple singers. Personnel files. But the sons of Korah are a scandal.
ELI: Korah as in the ground opened up and swallowed him.
THE RABBI: That Korah. And then Numbers twenty-six says, almost as an aside, that the sons of Korah did not die. So the Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin, preserves a teaching that a place was fortified for them in Gehenna, and they sat upon it and recited songs of praise.
ELI: (quietly) A ledge.
THE RABBI: A ledge above hell, with the children of the man who led the rebellion sitting on it, singing. And that guild hands you Psalm forty-nine, on the futility of wealth in the face of the grave.
NATHAN: Which does something to Psalm forty-nine, verse fifteen — the theological high-water mark of the week, according to both our scholarly writers. "God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me." That second verb is laqach, "take," the same verb used of Enoch and of Elijah going up.
ELI: So the singers claiming God can pull a soul out of Sheol are the descendants of the Bible's most famous man to go down into it alive.
NATHAN: Sitting on a ledge above it. Singing.
THE RABBI: You may have the title of your episode.
NATHAN: This is the most checkable thing in the week. Open Psalm seventy. Now open Psalm forty, verses thirteen through seventeen. Same poem.
ELI: Not similar. Same.
NATHAN: Line for line, with one systematic difference, and the King James encodes it. When your Bible prints "LORD" in small capitals, that's the personal name of Israel's God — the four Hebrew letters we usually say as Yahweh. "God" is Elohim, the common noun. Psalm forty, thirteen, has the divine name twice. Psalm seventy, one, has Elohim, then the name. Psalm forty, sixteen, ends "the LORD be magnified." Psalm seventy, four, ends "let God be magnified."
ELI: Somebody swapped the name of God out and the generic word in. Deliberately.
NATHAN: And it isn't a stray. Psalms forty-two through eighty-three run roughly two hundred and thirty occurrences of Elohim against about forty-four of the divine name — inverting the ratio everywhere else in the book. Scholars have called it the Elohistic Psalter since the eighteen hundreds. Every chapter this week sits inside it except the last two.
ELI: So why would anybody do it?
NATHAN: Genuinely unsettled. Laura Joffe argued the collection was built to comprise exactly forty-two psalms; Joel Burnett developed that numerical case; others think the number does no work at all. The oldest and simplest theory is reverence — that you avoid saying the name.
THE RABBI: Which has an afterlife you can put your hand on. The Name is handled. It is guarded. It is stepped around. Qumran scribes a few centuries later wrote it in a special script to keep it from being read casually.
NATHAN: Here's what convinces me this isn't mechanical. Psalm forty, verse seventeen, ends "my God, do not delay." Psalm seventy, verse five, ends with the divine name — do not delay.
ELI: It goes the other direction.
NATHAN: Three swaps toward Elohim, one swap back. Whoever did this was reading. Not running find-and-replace.
ELI: (pause) That might be the whole week in one observation. A person, with judgment, working on a text they believed was holy. Not a machine.
THE RABBI: May I say the thing your listeners are worried about out loud? They are worried that if a human being edited it, God did not write it. That is a distinctively modern anxiety. The Sages knew perfectly well the Psalter was assembled. It cost them nothing, because they never held that revelation arrives sealed in a wrapper.
NATHAN: And our Latter-day Saint writer makes that point from your side of the street. A prose paragraph in the Great Psalms Scroll from Qumran claims David wrote four thousand and fifty songs, through prophecy given him from before the Most High. Whoever wrote that did not think the book of Psalms was closed.
ELI: To the center of gravity. If a listener reads one chapter this week it's fifty-one, and the manual builds the lesson on it as the model of repentance.
THE RABBI: Then let me start with a very small unit of speech. Midrash Tehillim asks what earned David the World to Come, and answers: his mouth. Because his mouth said chatati. "I have sinned." Two words, to Nathan the prophet, in Second Samuel twelve. That is the engine of teshuvah.
ELI: And the mechanism?
THE RABBI: Maimonides spells it out with no poetry at all. Abandon the sin, remove it from your thoughts, resolve never to return, regret the past — and say it out loud. The verbal confession is not optional.
ELI: Our practical writer lands there, and sharper. He notes what verse three does not contain. "I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me." No "she was there," no "the war made it complicated." And then: if your confession cannot survive being said without the surrounding explanation, the explanation is doing work you need to stop asking it to do.
THE RABBI: That is a Jewish sentence. I would put it in a Yom Kippur sermon without changing a word.
NATHAN: Now the fight, because you told our producers there's an argument in your tradition about this psalm that never got settled.
THE RABBI: (slight laugh) There is, and it is unresolved on purpose. In tractate Shabbat, Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani says in the name of Rabbi Yonatan: anyone who says that David sinned with Bathsheba is nothing other than mistaken.
NATHAN: Mistaken.
THE RABBI: The argument is technical, and it is not really about the law. It is about refusing to let the king of Israel be reduced to his worst night. And then tractate Avodah Zarah says: if a man has sinned, tell him — go to that famous individual who sinned, King David, and learn from him that a person can repent.
ELI: So the same tradition is on both sides.
THE RABBI: David did not sin, and David is the master text on sinning. Both held, deliberately. I defend that as pedagogy rather than failure. A tradition that cannot bear its heroes' failures cannot teach anybody how to fail.
ELI: Which lands hard, because our questioner has a sharper version of that tension. Section one thirty-two of the Doctrine and Covenants says David sinned in the case of Uriah and his wife and therefore, quote, "he hath fallen from his exaltation." And Peter at Pentecost says flatly, "David is not ascended into the heavens."
NATHAN: So the lesson holds Psalm fifty-one up as the model of repentance, and the tradition that canonized it says this repentance did not fully work.
ELI: And he refuses to tidy it. A psalm can be a true model of contrition and still come from a man who did not finish well. But I'd underline this for anyone teaching: present Psalm fifty-one without knowing that verse is there, and somebody in your class will meet it later from somebody a lot less kind than you.
THE RABBI: Then take Resh Lakish in tractate Yoma. He distinguishes repentance out of fear from repentance out of love, and says repentance from love converts deliberate sins into merits.
NATHAN: Converts. Not erases.
THE RABBI: Transmutation. The sin becomes the material of the merit. Which is what the psalm says it wants. Verse thirteen: "Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee."
ELI: The turn most readers skip. Our doctrinal writer runs Psalm fifty-one beside Alma thirty-six and finds the same sequence in the same order, ending in the same vow to go teach.
NATHAN: Repentance ending in usefulness.
ELI: And our practical writer's version is the bluntest line in his essay. If your repentance has produced only self-loathing and no capacity to sit with somebody in their worst week, it isn't finished. It's stuck.
NATHAN: Two verses here cause the most confusion in a Latter-day Saint class. On one you and the manual agree. On the other you're going to make people uncomfortable.
THE RABBI: Then the agreement first, so they trust me for the second.
NATHAN: Verse five. "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me." The Church's own study helps for this week ask whether that teaches original sin.
THE RABBI: Rashi answers before the question is asked. He glosses it as David saying, in effect: how could I not sin, given how creatures like me are made, and out of what appetites. Then he adds that there are many midrashim on this verse, but they do not fit the context of the psalm. No inherited guilt. A man confessing he is built out of flammable material.
ELI: And your Second Article of Faith says men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam's transgression.
THE RABBI: On this one we stand on the same side, both reading against Augustine.
ELI: Though our questioner adds a wrinkle. The Topical Guide has an entry called "Conceived in Sin" that pairs this verse with Moses chapter six — Restoration scripture using the psalmist's own phrase. His summary: children are innocent, and mortality arrives already tilted.
THE RABBI: Honest. Now the second verse, since I have been promised discomfort.
NATHAN: Verse eleven. "Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me." One of the ten most-quoted Old Testament verses among Latter-day Saints.
THE RABBI: And it does not mean what your class thinks. The Hebrew is ruach kodshecha — literally, "the spirit of your holiness." A construct phrase, describing something God possesses. It is not a name for someone God is.
ELI: Slower.
THE RABBI: In rabbinic Hebrew, ruach ha-kodesh is the capacity for divine inspiration. Prophecy's quieter cousin. It is a grade, a rank — and it can lapse. Tractate Sotah says that when Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi died, the Divine Spirit departed from Israel. A whole generation can be without it.
NATHAN: And the medieval commentators on David specifically?
THE RABBI: Radak says that spirit was in David — that it was by it that he composed the psalms — and that when he sinned it departed, so he prays not that it be taken forever but that it be restored. Ibn Ezra says David feared falling from the rank of the men of ruach ha-kodesh.
NATHAN: So he isn't praying that a Person of the Godhead not abandon him.
THE RABBI: He is praying not to be demoted. He is praying not to lose the thing that lets him write psalms.
ELI: (pause) Honestly, that's more affecting to me, not less.
THE RABBI: It is a poet afraid of going silent.
NATHAN: And both our scholarly writers converge on the philology from another direction. That exact phrase occurs three times in the whole Hebrew Bible — here and twice in Isaiah sixty-three. None of the three is obviously personal in the way a Latter-day Saint reader hears it.
ELI: So how do we say this fairly? People love this verse, and they should.
NATHAN: Our own Latter-day Saint scholar has the cleanest formulation I've seen. The Restoration supplies the doctrine here. The psalm supplies the vocabulary. Both are real. They just aren't the same thing, and knowing which is which is the whole discipline.
ELI: Your essay had a line I couldn't stop thinking about. Christians read psalms. Jews use them.
THE RABBI: A little unfair, and I stand by it. Three examples. Every Amidah — the central standing prayer of Jewish liturgy, said three times a day — opens with Psalm fifty-one, verse fifteen. "O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise." Rabbi Yochanan teaches in tractate Berakhot that one recites this before every prayer.
ELI: Three times a day, out of David's confession.
THE RABBI: Out of the wreckage of the worst thing he ever did. As if to say, before every prayer: I have no standing here. Open my mouth anyway.
NATHAN: That's extraordinary.
THE RABBI: Second. On the eve of Yom Kippur, in the Ashkenazi service for Kol Nidre, three verses from this week's block are stitched into a single plea. "Cast us not away from Your Presence, and Your holy spirit take not from us." "Do not cast us off in time of old age, when our strength fails." "Give us a sign of Your goodness, that our enemies may see it and be ashamed." Psalms fifty-one, seventy-one, and eighty-six.
ELI: All three in this week's reading.
THE RABBI: And notice what has been done to them. Every one is pulled into the plural. Us, not me. David's private wreckage becomes the community's, on the holiest night of the year.
ELI: And the third?
THE RABBI: Psalm forty-nine is a psalm of the house of mourning, recited in Ashkenazi practice in a shiva house. So this meditation on how the rich man carries nothing away is what you say sitting on a low chair, next to a covered mirror, in the week after a funeral.
ELI: (quietly) I did not know that.
NATHAN: There's a fourth, and it's arguably load-bearing for the existence of your religion after the year seventy.
THE RABBI: Psalm fifty-one, verse seventeen in your numbering. "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit." Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi taught that one whose spirit is humble is credited as though he had sacrificed all the offerings — and the proof is grammatical. The Hebrew says sacrifices, plural. All of them. Your verse is the rabbinic warrant for prayer replacing the altar after the Temple burned.
ELI: So that line is why there is still a Judaism.
THE RABBI: That is not an overstatement.
NATHAN: Which surfaces a contradiction our questioner flags. Verse sixteen: "thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it." Three verses later: rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar. The harmonizing move — God rejects sacrifice offered without a broken heart — works for Psalm fifty. It works less well for fifty-one sixteen, which isn't conditional.
ELI: And the critical reading?
NATHAN: That the closing verses are a later addition from the exile or after, pulling a psalm that looked like it abolished the temple back into line with the restored cult. And the evidence is checkable. The psalm asks God to build the walls of Jerusalem. Under David those walls were standing. They weren't rubble until five eighty-six.
ELI: Joel LeMon at Emory, whom our questioner cites, dates those verses at least four hundred years after David — added by readers who reinterpreted the voice of a penitent individual as the voice of a whole community.
THE RABBI: Which is precisely what Kol Nidre does with it. Every year. In public.
ELI: (beat) Oh, that's good.
THE RABBI: The move your critics identify as a scribal intrusion is the move my congregation makes every autumn. Somebody took an I and made it a we. Call it redaction or call it liturgy. It is the same operation.
NATHAN: We have to do Psalm sixty-nine. And I want you to do it.
THE RABBI: I would be a poor guest if I skipped it. Psalm sixty-nine has a history, and the history has a body count. Start with the psalm. A man drowning — waters come in unto my soul, I sink in deep mire where there is no standing. He has become a stranger to his brethren. He is the song of the drunkards. And then verse twenty: "I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none."
ELI: That verse is why our six-outlooks writer built a whole essay around this passage. He shows that the "gall" of verse twenty-one is a poisonous plant and the "vinegar" is cheap sour wine, the drink of a field hand — what Boaz offers Ruth at mealtime. So it isn't primarily about torture. It's hospitality inverted. Somebody hands the man food and drink with all the gestures of welcome, and the food is poison.
NATHAN: In a culture where feeding a guest was a covenant act. Betrayal performed as courtesy.
THE RABBI: Now. The New Testament quotes this psalm relentlessly. Verse twenty-one across all four crucifixion accounts. Verse twenty-five in Acts, where Peter uses it to justify replacing Judas. And, most consequentially for my people, verses twenty-two and twenty-three in Romans eleven. "Let their table become a snare. Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not."
ELI: And in Romans the referent has moved.
THE RABBI: Onto Israel. And "let their eyes be darkened" went on to a long career in Christian preaching about Jewish blindness. So let me say this plainly, without heat: Jews did not meet Psalm sixty-nine as devotional literature. We met it as evidence introduced against us.
ELI: (pause) Thank you for saying it that way.
THE RABBI: Then hear how Rashi opens the psalm. The superscription says al shoshanim, "upon lilies," or roses. Rashi writes that it concerns Israel, who are like a rose among the thorns, pricked by the thorns — and he prayed for them. He wrote that in eleventh-century Troyes, in the shadow of the First Crusade.
NATHAN: So in Jewish reading it's a prayer for the Jews.
THE RABBI: And when Christians read it as testimony against the synagogue, they took Israel's own lament and handed it to Israel's persecutors. I do not say that to make anyone squirm. I say it because you asked a rabbi, and you cannot read this psalm honestly without knowing where it has been.
ELI: There's a second problem our questioner will not let go. The imprecations, verses twenty-two through twenty-eight. Verse twenty-seven asks God to add iniquity unto their iniquity, so that they cannot come into God's righteousness. Then verse twenty-eight asks that they be blotted out of the book of the living.
NATHAN: That's not a request for justice.
ELI: It's a request that mercy be withheld. He calls it a prayer against the plan of salvation. And you can't quarantine it as residue the New Testament outgrew, because the New Testament quotes this exact section and uses it.
THE RABBI: What answers does he canvass?
ELI: Three, and none satisfies him. That the imprecations record human anguish rather than endorse it. That the psalmist renounces private vengeance by handing it to God. Or — the honest minority position, and I think he half holds it — that the psalm is simply wrong here, and scripture records what faithful people prayed without guaranteeing God agreed.
NATHAN: And underneath it sits the sharpest observation in our Latter-day Saint writer's essay. The Church's chapter heading calls Psalm sixty-nine "a messianic psalm of David" and reads the speaker as Christ. The New Testament quotes six verses out of it. What it never quotes is verse five.
ELI: Which says?
NATHAN: "O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee."
ELI: (beat) A psalm that confesses sin cannot be, in its plain sense, the voice of a sinless Messiah.
NATHAN: And his read is that the evangelists weren't misreading it. They were doing what Israelite authors had always done — taking inherited language and putting it to new work. They just left the inconvenient verse alone.
ELI: And our six-outlooks writer gives a class the usable frame. The messianic reading is a partial mapping. Acts can apply verse twenty-five to Judas and nobody applies verse five to Jesus, and that isn't inconsistency — that's how the mapping works. His one discipline is that the second fulfillment has to be attested rather than merely imagined.
THE RABBI: I would only add: notice how much of that is reading. Applied reading. My tradition does it out loud, and yours does it slightly more quietly.
NATHAN: Longest psalm in the block, and the strangest. It retells the exodus, it's an Asaph psalm, and it opens with an instruction to transmit the story to the next generation. Three things about it are odd. One: it recounts the plagues and gets seven, not ten. Lice, boils, and darkness aren't there, and flies come before frogs, reversing Exodus.
ELI: Which our academic writer reads not as errors —
NATHAN: — but as evidence that the exodus circulated as living tradition, told differently for different arguments, before it got fixed in the form we read. Two: it never names Moses. Not once, in seventy-two verses of exodus and wilderness.
ELI: That can't be an accident.
NATHAN: It's louder than that. The psalm right before it ends "thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron." Then seventy-eight tells the same story with the mediator surgically removed. Gili Kugler argues the omission is the key to the politics — take Moses out, and the endpoint is no longer law. It's dynasty. The psalm ends: "he chose David also his servant."
ELI: And the third thing?
NATHAN: Open polemic. God "refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim: but chose the tribe of Judah." Verse sixty says he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh — the northern sanctuary, where excavations did find an Iron Age settlement destroyed by fire. Dating of the psalm is contested. The polemical thrust isn't contested by anybody.
ELI: And here it gets uncomfortable in a Latter-day Saint context. The Restoration's self-understanding is Ephraim-centered. Ephraim is the gathering tribe.
NATHAN: It's worse structurally. Psalm seventy-seven, verse fifteen, blesses "the sons of Jacob and Joseph," and the Latter-day Saint footnote sends you straight to Second Nephi three and the Joseph-of-Egypt prophecies. One Asaph psalm elevates Joseph. The very next rejects Ephraim. And our scholar's conclusion is the one I'd stand behind: no harmonizing makes those one argument.
THE RABBI: May I put a different lens on it? You are reading Psalm seventy-eight as a document. I want to read it as a machine. It is not history. It is a maskil — a teaching piece — and its opening move is a command to transmit. Tell the children, so the next generation will tell theirs.
NATHAN: And you can see that working somewhere specific.
THE RABBI: The Passover Haggadah. In the Maggid section, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva argue about how many plagues struck Egypt, and their entire dispute is a word-by-word parse of Psalm seventy-eight, verse forty-nine. One counts four items in the verse, one counts five, and they reach different totals.
NATHAN: So the psalm's retelling of the exodus is folded back into the ritual retelling of the exodus.
THE RABBI: The psalm does not describe Jewish memory-practice. It is a beam holding it up. Every year, at every table.
ELI: And that's where our practical writer takes it, then twists the knife. The transmission model is not a highlight reel — it tells the children a story in which their ancestors come off appallingly. So his question is: what have your children actually heard from you about a time you were wrong, or scared, or faithless, and what happened next?
NATHAN: That's a hard question.
ELI: He has a harder one. Verse thirty-four. "When he slew them, then they sought him." Crisis-only religion, named by God as a pattern. If somebody plotted your prayer frequency against your stress level, would those be the same line?
NATHAN: (exhales) Yeah. Okay.
ELI: Let's land it. Psalm seventy-two, then eighty-five.
THE RABBI: Psalm seventy-two is a coronation prayer. The title is li-Shlomo — a preposition and a name, which can mean "of," "for," "belonging to," or "concerning" Solomon. Rashi reads it as David praying for his son.
NATHAN: And it's a documented genre. Martin Arneth argued the base layer corresponds closely to a Neo-Assyrian coronation hymn — justice, dominion, rain, fertility, all as royal gifts. Our academic writer sets its job description beside the Ugaritic Kirta epic, where a prince tells his failing father he has not judged the case of the widow, and therefore should step down.
ELI: (surprised) Step down.
NATHAN: That's the ancient job description of a king. Psalm seventy-two is a performance review.
THE RABBI: And yet the Sages found the Messiah in it too. Discussing his name, the school of Rabbi Yannai said "Yinnon is his name," reading it out of verse seventeen. So yes, we read this psalm messianically. But notice what it asks a messiah to do. Judge the poor with justice. Break the oppressor. Deliver the needy who has no helper.
ELI: And what it doesn't ask.
THE RABBI: Not one word about forgiving sins, or dying for anyone. The Jewish messiah is a king — a working sovereign who fixes the world's actual arrangements. Judaism did not fail to notice a spiritual messiah here. We read what the text says the man is hired for.
NATHAN: And both readings are downstream of one fact. Psalm seventy-two was almost certainly composed to bless a living Judean king. That it also reads as a portrait of the Messiah isn't a failure of historical criticism — it's the mechanism by which royal ideology became messianism when the monarchy ended. When there was no more king, the prayers written for the king had to be about somebody.
ELI: So they became about the king who was coming. All right. Psalm eighty-five, verse ten. "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other."
THE RABBI: Then take the midrash on it, my favorite thing in the week. Genesis Rabbah builds a scene. When God came to create the first human, the ministering angels split into factions. Kindness said: create him, he does acts of kindness. Truth said: do not, he is full of lies. Righteousness said: create him. Peace said: do not, he is full of discord.
ELI: Deadlocked.
THE RABBI: So what did the Holy One do? He seized Truth and hurled it to the ground. The angels protested — Truth is Your own seal. And the answer comes from the next verse of our psalm. "Truth shall spring out of the earth." God overruled Truth in order to make us. Truth had to be buried before it could grow.
ELI: (quietly) That's the sermon. That's the whole thing.
NATHAN: And Latter-day Saints will see something there, because the chapter heading in the LDS edition glosses "truth shall spring out of the earth" with, parenthetically, the Book of Mormon. Our own scholar is careful about that. The heading is editorial apparatus introduced with the nineteen seventy-nine edition. In its own context, Psalm eighty-five is covenant-and-harvest imagery. Truth springing from the earth is agricultural.
ELI: But he doesn't leave it there.
NATHAN: No, and this is the good part. He traces where the Latter-day Saint reading actually comes from, and it isn't a misreading of Psalm eighty-five. It's Moses chapter seven, verse sixty-two, received by Joseph Smith in December of eighteen thirty, which inverts the verse's halves: "righteousness will I send down out of heaven; and truth will I send forth out of the earth, to bear testimony of mine Only Begotten." Explicit application to a record coming out of the ground.
ELI: So the heading isn't exegesis of Psalm eighty-five.
NATHAN: It's an application of Moses seven to Psalm eighty-five. And his line is: knowing which is which is the whole discipline.
ELI: And our connector runs the verse the other way, into Alma forty-two, where Alma lands on "justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own." Psalm eighty-five stages a meeting. Alma names the meeting place.
ELI: We're at time. Nathan — one thing to carry into session one.
NATHAN: That the visible seams are not damage. This is a book assembled by human hands out of older human hands, its collections in tension, its meaning repeatedly extended by later readers who believed God was still speaking. Our Latter-day Saint writer's closing line is what I'd hand people: for a church founded on the proposition that revelation did not stop, that ought to be the most familiar story in the world.
ELI: Rabbi.
THE RABBI: That you are allowed to say the hard thing to God. Psalm seventy-seven asks, "Hath God forgotten to be gracious?" — and never gets an answer. It gets a memory instead. The psalmist decides to rehearse specific past events, and that decision is the whole recovery. If a book can leave that question standing for three thousand years, it can survive your listeners leaving a few standing too.
ELI: Then here's mine, the assignment the week is named for. Psalm sixty-six, verse sixteen. "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul." Most people find that excruciating, and our practical writer is precise about why. It isn't modesty. A real declaration requires specifics, and specifics can be argued with. "I know the Church is true" commits you to nothing checkable. "In March, this happened" does.
NATHAN: And look at what surrounds verse sixteen.
ELI: "Thou broughtest us into the net. We went through fire and through water." The man inviting everyone to come and hear was thoroughly wrecked, and assigns the wrecking to God rather than to bad luck. So it isn't a report that things went well. It's a report of what God did in the fire, from somebody not pretending the fire didn't happen.
NATHAN: And two lines earlier is the sharpest hook in all seventeen chapters.
ELI: Verse fourteen. He's paying vows he made while desperate — "which my lips have uttered, and my mouth hath spoken, when I was in trouble." Everybody makes those. In the hospital corridor. In the parking lot after the diagnosis. At three in the morning before the meeting. So: what did you promise God during the worst week of the last two years, and have you done it?
NATHAN: And if you can't remember —
ELI: — that is itself the answer, and this is the week to work out what it was. Session one starts with Psalm forty-nine and the sons of Korah. Go read it knowing who's singing.
NATHAN: From the ledge.
THE RABBI: From the ledge. Thank you for the chair at your table.