Psalms 102–103; 110; 116–119; 127–128; 135–139; 146–150

25–30 minSession 1: Eleven Verses Before the "But"

Psalm 102 carries a superscription — ancient Hebrew text, not the modern editorial heading printed above it in your edition — and it is unlike any other in the Psalter. Every other heading that supplies a circumstance also supplies a person: A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom. This one gives a condition and a posture and no name at all. The heading hands the psalm to anyone who qualifies. What follows is a body coming apart: he forgets to eat (v. 4), his bones cleave to his skin (v. 5), he is awake alone on a roof (v. 7), he mingles his drink with weeping (v. 9). And then verse 10 assigns blame — "Because of thine indignation and thy wrath: for thou hast lifted me up, and cast me down."

Count the verses before the turn. The complaint runs eleven verses; "But thou, O LORD, shalt endure for ever" does not arrive until v. 12. Most of us reach our "but" in four seconds. Notice, too, that there is no confession of sin anywhere in those eleven verses — which is why calling this one of the "seven penitential psalms" is a Christian classification the Hebrew does not support. Psalm 103, not 102, is where you go to hear what Jewish repentance sounds like.

Then the psalm changes size. From v. 13 the crisis is corporate: "thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof" (102:14). Stones and dust are what you have when the walls are down, and v. 16 — "When the LORD shall build up Zion" — presupposes that Zion is not built up. The seam is where a personal lament was annexed to a national one. Mid-poem, the sufferer notices what his own document is for: "This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the LORD" (102:18). Watch the order in the verses around it — the set time comes, then Zion is built, then God appears, then the peoples gather. Building precedes appearing. That is an order of operations, not a prediction of a temple in Ohio.

One more thing about 102 before you leave it. Hebrews 1:10–12 takes vv. 25–27 — "Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth" — and applies them to the Son. In the Hebrew, a dying man is addressing YHWH. The author of Hebrews is working from the Greek, where the surrounding verses make a second figure easier to hear. The christological reading is produced by the Greek text and its New Testament use. That is worth knowing before Session 2, where the same thing happens on a much larger scale.

Psalm 103 answers with the Hebrew Bible's most-quoted creed. "The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy" (103:8) reproduces Exodus 34:6 — the Thirteen Attributes, the spine of Yom Kippur. But run the three verses that follow it as measurements rather than sentiment. Verse 9: "He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever" — God has a stopping rule for correction. Verse 12 sets a distance. Verse 14 gives the reason: "he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust" — mercy calibrated to a body. The east-to-west question is not do I forgive, which everyone answers yes; it is when you last cited an old offense in an argument. You know the answer and it has a date on it. That date is your east-to-west. Psalm 103 says God knows what we are made of; Alma 7:12 says He went and found out from the inside.

Think deeply.

1. The psalmist blames God directly in 102:10 and the text is canonized as prayer. If you prayed that sentence out loud tonight, who would you not want in the room, and what does that tell you about which of your prayers is the performance?
2. The superscription names a condition and no person. Does that make the psalm more available to you, or does it make it easier to read it as somebody else's chart? Test it: read 102:1–11 replacing "I" with your own name and stop before verse 12.
3. Hebrews reads 102:25–27 as addressed to the Son; the Hebrew addresses YHWH. If the New Testament's reading depends on a Greek translation, is it a discovery of what the psalm meant or a new act of interpretation — and does the difference change what you can claim in a lesson?
4. God's stopping rule for correction is in 103:9. Count the separate times this month you have raised the same issue with the same person. Above three with nothing changed — what were the extra mentions actually doing?
5. A man too wrecked to eat writes for "the people which shall be created" (102:18). Look at your own journal from six months ago: could a stranger tell you were struggling, or have you been writing a press release? Write one dated, unresolved paragraph this week and do not go back and fix it.
6. Psalm 103:14 says God runs the arithmetic on your physiology before He judges your character. Where have you been repenting of something that is actually a sleep debt — and how do you tell that apart from the part that is real sin without excusing the second?

25–30 minSession 2: The Oath, the Stone, and the Shout

Psalm 110 is seven verses, quoted or alluded to some thirty-two times in the New Testament, and the odd chapter in this week's block — a coronation oracle with corpses in it (110:6). Everything starts with the typography of verse 1. "The LORD said unto my Lord" prints two different Hebrew words: YHWH, and 'adoni, "my lord," the ordinary way a subject addresses a human superior. Read at ground level this is a court figure relaying an oracle to the king. Hebrew has no capital letters; the Septuagint renders both words kyrios, and that flattening is where the christological reading finds its purchase. In Hebrew there is nothing to flatten. Note also that the chapter heading in your edition — "A messianic psalm of David" — is modern editorial matter; the ancient superscription says only "A Psalm of David."

Verse 3 is a wreck. The Masoretic pointing gives the KJV's "thou hast the dew of thy youth"; the same consonants read equally well as "I have begotten thee," which is what the Greek has and what the church fathers built on. Anyone who wants to make a doctrinal argument from Psalm 110:3 in any direction is standing on a verse whose text we do not have. Verse 4 is textually sound and carries the whole Restoration vocabulary: "Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek." That is the entire content — no ordination, no keys, no offices, no two priesthoods. Everything else comes from Genesis 14, Hebrews 5–7, Alma 13, JST Genesis 14, and D&C 107. Worth knowing: there is no JST of Psalm 110.

D&C 107:3–4 does something more interesting than proof-texting. It says the priesthood was called "the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God" and was renamed for Melchizedek to avoid repeating the divine name — which makes "after the order of Melchizedek" a reverential substitution rather than a claim about a founder. It also resolves Hebrews 7:3, which says Melchizedek had no father, no mother, and no beginning of days: Alma 13:7 attaches those adjectives to the order, and D&C 84:14 says the man received the priesthood through the lineage of his fathers. He had fathers. He is in a line. Hebrews leaves you an enigma; Alma leaves you a man. The circle to avoid is reading D&C 107 into Psalm 110:4 and then citing Psalm 110:4 as evidence for D&C 107.

Now the argument in Matthew 22:41–46. Jesus asks whose son the Christ is, gets "David's," and quotes 110:1: if David calls him Lord, how is he his son? Notice what the argument requires — David wrote it, in his own voice, about someone greater than himself. Mainstream scholarship pressures both premises: le-David can mean "of, to, for, belonging to, concerning," and the psalm reads naturally as a coronation piece in which "my lord" is the reigning king. You have four moves, and each costs. Hold Davidic authorship because Jesus asserted it, and you are defending the conclusion with the premise, since the superscription is the thing in dispute. Or read it as dual fulfillment, which is what the New Testament itself does — and note that Jesus does not resolve it. One discipline before you liken any of this to yourself: the figure in the psalm sits at God's right hand and has his enemies made a footstool. Nobody reading this is that person.

Then the Hallel. Psalm 116 is a survivor's thanksgiving with a real sacrifice in a real courtyard; on the days when Hallel is abbreviated, half-Hallel omits the first eleven verses of Psalm 116 and a Jew begins at v. 12 — "What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?" Treat that as an audit question, since the psalmist answers with line items, one of them repeated word for word: "I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his people" (116:14, 18). A vow made only inside your head is not paid; it is considered. And 116:15, "Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints" — the Hebrew yaqar means costly, weighty, not cheaply spent. Do not say this verse to the family. Psalm 117 is two verses, the Bible's shortest chapter, addressed to the nations, and it asks for nothing at all.

Psalm 118 is less a genre than a script. It opens with a litany cued to three groups (vv. 2–4), narrates a rescue, then arrives at a gate: "Open to me the gates of righteousness" (v. 19), answered from inside (v. 20), with the blessing coming "out of the house of the LORD" (v. 26) and a stage direction at v. 27. You can reconstruct where people are standing. Verse 25, hoshi'ah na, is the source of "Hosanna" — not a title, not a greeting, not an acclamation of a person, but an imperative addressed to God with the particle of entreaty attached: save, please. The Mishnah legislates where in Hallel you wave the lulav, and one of the two places is this verse; the crowd in Matthew 21:9 is doing festival liturgy with branches in its hands. Verse 22's rejected stone is read by Rashi as Israel, humble among the peoples, and by the New Testament as Christ (Matthew 21:42; Acts 4:10–11; 1 Peter 2:7). Jacob 4 is the only text that explains why the builders refused — not wickedness but method, "looking beyond the mark." And when the multitude at Bountiful cries "Hosanna! Blessed be the name of the Most High God" (3 Nephi 11:17), both halves of Psalm 118:25–26 are there, inverted: petition has become acknowledgment.

Think deeply.

1. The KJV's small capitals in 110:1 are a translator's decision about a distinction Hebrew makes with two different words and no capital letters. Read the verse as a court oracle to a living king, out loud. What did you lose, and is what you lost in the psalm or in your habits?
2. Jesus' question in Matthew 22 works only if David wrote the psalm about someone greater than himself. Pick one of the four available responses and write the cost of it in a sentence you would actually say in a class. If you cannot write the cost, you have not chosen a position.
3. Psalm 110:4 contains an oath, a duration, and a name — and nothing else. List what you believe about priesthood that this verse alone establishes. Then list what you had unconsciously imported from D&C 107. Which list is longer?
4. D&C 121:36–37 says a man can lose priesthood authority; Psalm 110:4 says God swore and will not repent. Both are in your canon. Hold them together for five minutes without letting either one soften the other, and describe what you are left with.
5. "Hosanna" started as a demand: save, please. Latter-day Saints now shout it as praise at temple dedications. Was something gained in that shift, or lost — and what would it change about the shout if you meant the imperative?
6. Verse 22's stone is Israel in Rashi's reading and Christ in Peter's. If both are legitimate readings of the same sentence, what exactly is a prophecy — and can you say that out loud without either dismissing Rashi or flattening Peter?

25–30 minSession 3: Instruction, and the House It Is Supposed to Build

Psalm 119 has 176 verses because 22 × 8 = 176: twenty-two stanzas, one per Hebrew letter, every verse in a stanza beginning with that letter. The KJV prints the letter names but no English can reproduce the constraint. Underneath runs a second pattern — eight near-synonyms for divine instruction (torah, 'edot, piqqudim, huqqim, mitzvot, mishpatim, davar, 'imrah) distributed so that nearly every verse carries one; v. 122 is the standard exception. Read for what is missing and the poem gets stranger: no temple, no sacrifice, no priest, no exodus, no David, no Zion. The speaker is harassed by princes and consoled entirely by a text. Psalm 119 is less a hymn than a curriculum.

Two facts pull in opposite directions and you should hold both. First: in 176 verses the psalmist never once cites a specific commandment. He asks to be taught (vv. 12, 26, 33, 64, 124, 135, 171), asks God to open his eyes to behold wondrous things (v. 18), speaks of a word "settled in heaven" (v. 89) — instruction as ongoing revelation to a living student, a shape Latter-day Saints will recognize. Second: all eight of those nouns are legal terms. The lamp of v. 105 is lighting a path made of particular, nameable obligations, not scripture-in-general. The manual's "path" theme is textual, not imposed — derek runs throughout — but notice what a lamp is and is not. A lamp shows the next step, not the destination, and it fails in fog. The rod of 1 Nephi 15:24 works in the dark because it does not depend on sight.

The psalm's real difficulty for a Restoration reader runs opposite to the usual direction. This speaker is not penitent: "I have kept thy precepts and thy testimonies" (v. 168), "I have more understanding than all my teachers" (v. 99). And then the last line of the longest chapter in the Bible: "I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant" (v. 176). Claim and confession share the poem, unreconciled. One verse to handle with care is 119:71 — "It is good for me that I have been afflicted." Note the tense and the subject: past, and about himself. Say it about your own affliction, afterward — never about someone else's, and never while theirs is still happening.

Psalms 127 and 128 are the week's only Songs of Ascents, and 127 is the only one of the fifteen attributed to Solomon. That attribution looks triggered by the text rather than the reverse: bayit does triple duty in Hebrew for temple, dynasty, and household, and "his beloved" in v. 2 is yedido, the root behind Jedidiah, Nathan's name for Solomon. Rashi reads "the house" as the House — the Temple. The domestic application is a good one; just know it is an application. The first half is an anti-striving poem naming behaviors, not attitudes: rise up early, sit up late, eat the bread of sorrows — lehem ha-'atzavim, using the word of the curse in Genesis 3. The watchman still has to wake. What is denied is that outcome scales with hours.

Then 127:3–5 turns to children as nahalah, an inheritance — a legal term for land granted, not wages earned — and to grown sons as arrows who "speak with the enemies in the gate," which is legal and military standing, not sentiment. Be honest about who that leaves out. Read alongside 128:3–6, it describes a blessing some faithful readers will never receive, through no decision of their own, and no verse in this block is addressed to them. Two corrections while you are here: Psalm 128 at weddings is a Catholic nuptial usage, not a Jewish one — in Jewish practice it belongs to Motzei Shabbat and the bedtime Shema. And 128:6 blesses a long life well surrounded, grandchildren in this world, in view. It is not a doctrine of eternal families. The sealing ordinance extends the psalm's line of descent past where any psalmist could see; the psalm itself stops at the table.

Think deeply.

1. Psalm 119 praises instruction for 176 verses and never names a single commandment. Try it: write down the five obligations that are actually lighting your next step. If the list comes out abstract, is your Psalm 119 the psalmist's or your own?
2. The speaker claims blamelessness (v. 168) and confesses being lost (v. 176) without reconciling them. Which of those two sentences comes more easily out of your mouth in a testimony meeting, and what has that habit trained you to hide?
3. A lamp and a rod solve different problems. Name the last time you needed to see the way and the last time you needed something to hold onto. Which does your study of scripture actually supply, and which have you been demanding from it?
4. "Except the LORD build the house" is, at the plain level, about the Temple; you almost certainly heard it about a marriage or a business. What does the domestic reading gain, and what does it quietly let you skip?
5. Psalm 127:2 names behaviors — early up, late down, anxious eating. Set one stop time this week and hold it once. Then answer honestly: were you staying late because it was needed, or because stopping would let you find out whether it was?
6. If 127:5 and 128:3 describe a blessing a faithful person in your ward will never receive, what do you say to them from this week's reading? Not what you feel — what sentence, from these chapters, would you actually say?

25–30 minSession 4: Idols, Exile, and a Man Who Asks to Be Searched

Start with a structural embarrassment that turns out to be a method. Psalm 135 is frankly an anthology: vv. 15–18, the idol polemic the lesson highlights, are lifted almost verbatim from Psalm 115:4–8, and v. 7 reproduces Jeremiah 10:13. Its opening reworks Psalm 134:1; v. 14 reproduces Deuteronomy 32:36. Late Israelite praise is substantially quotation — a community recombining its own authoritative phrases into something usable in the courts. Keep v. 17 in your pocket for Friday: idols "have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths."

Psalm 136 makes the mechanism audible. Twenty-six verses, each closing with the same eight words — a leader's line and a congregation's line, and we can corroborate that the congregation's line was real: the identical formula appears at Solomon's temple dedication (2 Chronicles 7:3), at the founding of the second temple (Ezra 3:11), and in Jeremiah 33:11 as the sound of worship restored. Hesed is covenant loyalty; "mercy" is thin for it. And when the Talmud asks why this is called the Great Hallel, it does not answer with the sea. It answers with v. 25: God feeds everybody. Not the sea. Lunch. That is how the tradition ranks God's acts. Read these out loud this week — especially 136, and find someone to answer you.

Then the harps come down off the willows. Psalm 137 is the most concretely datable text in the block: the Āl-Yaḫūdu tablets, roughly two hundred cuneiform documents from a Babylonian settlement called "Town of Judah," record deported Judeans renting land, paying taxes, keeping Yahwistic names. That is precisely the population the psalm assumes: people who still own harps and can be asked for a song. The form is tight — vv. 1–4 memory, vv. 5–6 a self-curse (may my hand fail, may my tongue stick), vv. 7–9 the same oath energy pointed outward. Note that the psalmist did not perform. "They that carried us away captive required of us a song" — and he hung the harp on a tree without burning it. Psalm 137 is canonized permission to decline.

And then verse 9. Do not sand it off. The word behind "happy" is 'ashre, the beatitude formula. This block contains four beatitudes. One of them pronounces blessing on a man who kills infants by throwing them at a wall. The others are 119:1, 127:5, 128:1, and 146:5 — the KJV's alternation between "blessed" and "happy" hides that they are the same form. Readers have handled v. 9 four ways and each costs. The Roman office cut it; you have then decided which scripture counts on grounds of taste, and must say who holds that authority. Augustine allegorized the little ones into nascent evil desires; a method that converts infants into bad habits will convert anything into anything, and it disappears the actual children. Zenger relocates it to the victim — a curse handed to God instead of executed. Or read it as talionic: it quotes a judgment rather than proposing one, since Isaiah 13:16 already promised Babylon exactly this, which moves the problem upstairs rather than solving it. Jewish liturgy kept the verse when Catholic and Anglican revisions cut it: keeping it in front of you and arguing with it is another way to handle a text you find unbearable.

Psalm 138 is the quiet hinge and easy to skim past. "I will praise thee with my whole heart: before the gods will I sing praise unto thee" (138:1) — praise offered in a crowded pantheon, not an empty room. Then v. 6: "Though the LORD be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly: but the proud he knoweth afar off." Hold that phrase and turn the page, because 139:2 uses it again with the valence reversed: "thou understandest my thought afar off." Distance is the punishment in 138 and the intimacy in 139.

Psalm 139 has resisted classification for a century, but its frame gives it away. It opens with haqar, "thou hast searched me" — investigative language — and closes by asking for the same thing (vv. 23–24). It is a courtroom, not a meditation, and vv. 19–22 are the speaker separating himself from the guilty, which is why "I hate them with perfect hatred" sits one verse before "Search me, O God." Be careful with vv. 13–16. "Thou hast possessed my reins" is kilyotay, kidneys, the seat of the inner life; "the lowest parts of the earth" parallels "made in secret" and is womb imagery; golmi in v. 16 is an unformed embryo. The whole passage is about gestation: God's knowledge of a body being assembled, not a spirit existing before it. There is a scholarly defense of the other reading — Mitchell Dahood's — but the strongest external support for the Latter-day Saint reading here comes from the field's least-followed commentator. Premortality has better footing in Abraham 3:22–23 and D&C 93:29, and the extra distance is worth naming rather than blurring: no psalm claims that something in you was never made at all. Psalm 139 supplies the identity; the accountability is what the Restoration adds. Likewise 139:8 says God is present in Sheol and stops there; D&C 138 says what He does about it — Thou art there becomes an organized missionary effort.

Think deeply.

1. Psalm 135 is built almost entirely out of other people's sentences and nobody flags it as plagiarism. What does that do to your assumptions about originality in scripture — and to the way you evaluate a talk that is mostly quotation?
2. Find one person and read Psalm 136 antiphonally: you take the first half of each verse, they answer "for his mercy endureth for ever," twenty-six times. Do it. Then write down what changed at around verse 15 that reading silently would not have produced.
3. The sages call 136 the Great Hallel because of "who giveth food to all flesh," not because of the Red Sea. If you had to name the greatest thing God has done for you and were forbidden to name a rescue, what would you say?
4. Pick one of the four handlings of 137:9 — excision, allegory, victim's speech, talionic quotation — and argue the position you did not choose for two minutes. Which one is hardest to argue against, and is that the same as the one you believe?
5. The psalmist refuses to perform on demand (137:3–4) and stays in the room anyway. Where in your ward is the only available genre triumph, and what would it cost you to say "I'm not up for this today" without leaving?
6. Verse 22 is "I hate them with perfect hatred"; verse 23 is "Search me, O God." He submits the hatred without withdrawing it. Ask two people most inconvenienced by your existence what you do that is hard to be around, and do not explain or contextualize the answer. Has an answer to search me ever arrived that you did not already know?

20–25 minSession 5: Ten Hallelujahs and a Two-Edged Sword

Five psalms, each opening and closing with halelu-yah — ten "Praise ye the LORD"s bracketing the group, visible in your KJV at the top and bottom of every chapter. They have been read as a fivefold doxology matching the Psalter's five books: not one more ending for one more book, but an ending for the whole thing. And they are anonymous. After a collection saturated with superscriptions — David, Asaph, the sons of Korah, the choirmaster — the last five poems belong to nobody, which is another way of saying they belong to whoever says them. In Jewish practice they are said every morning, in order, before the Shema. Notice that your block begins at 146; the daily version begins one psalm earlier, and how a canon is grouped is itself a claim.

Psalm 146 opens the group by disqualifying the obvious alternative: "Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish" (146:3–4). Name your princes — whose statement, reversed tomorrow, would reorganize what you believe. Then watch what God is credited with in vv. 7–9: judgment for the oppressed, food for the hungry, prisoners loosed, blind eyes opened, strangers preserved, the fatherless and widow relieved. Not one abstraction in the list.

Psalm 147 is two psalms in the Greek (split at v. 12), and it keeps setting the enormous next to the small: "He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names" (v. 4) stands one verse after "He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds" (v. 3), and the meteorology of vv. 16–18 — snow like wool, hoarfrost like ashes, ice like morsels — ends in a word that melts them. Psalm 148 then builds a summons list. It works outward in the order of Genesis 1 — heavens, heavenly bodies, waters above, then earth and its creatures, and finally humans, kings before children. Some scholars have traced biblical nature-catalogues to Egyptian encyclopedic word-lists; others say the resemblance is generic. Worth knowing, worth holding loosely.

Then Psalm 149, which is where the finale stops being comfortable. "Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a twoedged sword in their hand; to execute vengeance upon the heathen... to bind their kings with chains" (149:6–8). A two-edged sword in the hands of the praising congregation is not where a modern reader expects praise to go — and it is four psalms from the end of the book, posing the Psalm 137 problem from the opposite direction. 137 is the powerless cursing an empire; 149 is a congregation armed. Neither one is glossed by the text.

Psalm 150 answers by subtraction. Ten imperatives to praise across five verses — halelu once, haleluhu nine times — each attached to a place, a reason, or an instrument, with no content, no history, no petition. The instrument list is a real inventory of ancient performance. And then the last line drops all of it: kol ha-neshamah tehallel Yah, "let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD." Neshamah is the word of Genesis 2:7, the breath God breathes into the man; the midrash reads the line as a pun on neshimah and gets not every creature that breathes but every breath. Breath is the qualification, and the Psalter has already said why: the idols of 135:17 have no breath in their mouths. The capacity to praise and the capacity to live are the same capacity, and it is exactly what an idol lacks. The book that began with a solitary reader and an installed king ends with an anonymous chorus and everything that can inhale.

Two closing disciplines. The first is about method: if "The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent" landed on you this week as an assurance about your own life, that is a real thing that happened to you and it is not what the verse is about. Those are different sentences, and the difference is worth keeping. The second is about evidence. Psalm 119 counts to seven a day, Psalm 136 repeats itself twenty-six times, Psalm 118 opens and closes with the same sentence: praise here is a schedule, not a mood. If you were breathing this week you were eligible, and the only open question is what a neutral observer would say you did about it.

Think deeply.

1. The last five psalms have no author. Does anonymity make them more yours or less authoritative — and would you feel differently about Psalm 150 if it said "A Psalm of David" at the top?
2. 146:3 says do not trust princes. Name the three whose approval you have quietly been optimizing for. What in your practice would change tomorrow if one of them reversed himself?
3. Psalm 149 hands a sword to a singing congregation and the text never explains itself. Set it next to 137:9: one is the curse of the powerless, one is the armed praise of the restored. Which is more dangerous in a canon, and why does the Psalter keep both this close to its ending?
4. Psalm 150 gives you five verses of praise with no content — no history, no reasons, no requests. Try one: pray for under a minute, ask for nothing, and state no reasons. What was hard about it, and what does that difficulty say about what your prayers usually are?
5. The qualification in the last line is breath, not worthiness. What would you have to stop believing about yourself to accept that you were eligible this week on that basis alone?
6. You have now read all nineteen chapters. Which one would you take out of the canon if you could, and what exactly would the Psalter lose without it? Answer with the chapter you actually want to cut, not the safe one.