Psalm 103: Curse, Blessing Or Biology?
For better or for worse - God remembers who we are
Comedy frequently uses callbacks, which is a form of internal allusion, in which the comedian repeats a phrase or idea in a later joke in the same set or movie, in an attempt to create an in-language for the audience, and increase the social cohesion.
These sorts of internal allusions exist in the Bible as well, and while they perform some of the same tasks as creating an internal language of symbols, each subsequent use of the phrase or idea is a commentary or reinterpretation of the previous one. It then becomes difficult to remember what the phrase meant in its original context.
Psalm 103 contains a callback to one of the earliest chapters in the Bible — namely Genesis 3:19 where God punishes Adam for eating the forbidden fruit, curses the ground, tells him that he will have to work to the ground to survive, and “until you return to the ground, for from it, you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return”.
In Psalm 103:13, we see God likened to a father having compassion for his children, to be followed by 103:14, “For He knows how we are formed; He remembers that we are dust.”
What was originally a curse and a punishment is now being portrayed as a beautiful understanding of what exactly we are. It’s a blessing to have someone know you and your abilities to the extent that you don’t need to explain to them who you are, because they already know.
This is an interpretation, just as Psalm 90:3 was a different interpretation, where the idea that God crushing us (to dust) upon our deaths is a symbol of his anger and wrath, using the term for mankind that is literally translated to be “children of the land”.
But Psalm 103:15 continues in the internal allusion. “Man, his days are like those of grass; he blooms like a flower in the field.” Compared with Genesis 3:18, “Thorns and thistles shall sprout for you. But you will eat the grasses of the field.”
Like Psalm 103, Psalm 90:5-6 also compares us to grass, renewed and flourishing in the morning, and withering and drying up by night.
Note that they all use different words for “grass”, just like Psalm 90 used a different word for “dust”. But the imagery is there.
Are we the flowers or are we the thorns and thistles? Are we the grass or do we eat the grass? Are we destroyed by wind, like in Psalm 103:16, or by sun, like in Psalm 90:6?
How does this change our understanding of God’s curse in the beginning of Genesis, and how does this change our understanding of what we are? Was “from dust you are, and to dust you shall return” in Genesis part of the curse, or just Him stating a fact?
And finally, shouldn’t we be the ones doing the remembering?