Psalm 128: A Blessing For Man, A Curse For Adam
An intertextual exploration
Psalm 128 is framed as a blessing for the man who fears God. It promises the pious the blessing of happiness and goodness, and a long life, long enough to see your grandchildren.
It doesn’t only promise personal happiness and goodness, the psalmist also talks about the greater community. The psalm makes a particular mention of how the reward will include a wife like a grape vine and sons like olive trees.
Specifically, in 128:2 he writes, “By the work of your hands you shall eat; you shall be happy and you will have good.”
Choice of ancient Mediterranean metaphors aside, it sounds like a very positive blessing. When we read the curses of Leviticus 26:16-20 and Deuteronomy 28:29-30, we see that it is a curse to work hard at something and not enjoy its fruits. Again, a sentiment that can be shared by anyone who has ever worked incredibly hard on anything, only to be spuriously rejected by someone who never had to work hard on anything in their life.
While I recognize that the Bible as a whole is a very gendered corpus, there is something about this psalm that feels extra. It uses the term “gever” for man, one of four main words used to describe individuals in the Bible: “Ish”, which is also man, but with less importance, “enosh”, named after the grandson of Adam, and “ben-adam” which means human, or literally, son of Adam.
It is Adam to whom the psalmist is alluding, throughout the entirety of the psalm.
The clearest indication comes in the above mentioned 128:2, and namely the first part of the phrase. When God curses Eve and Adam after eating from the tree, He uses an interesting four word phrase to describe the punishment in Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread.”
In Hebrew, the words “kapecha”, meaning hands, and “apecha”, meaning brow, are a letter apart, and both are intentionally coupled with the word “to’chal”, you shall eat, something any listener would subtly hear.
Putting the comparison of the reader’s wife with a fruit tree aside, the story in Genesis is found right before the story where Cain kills Abel, which the psalmist alludes to with the “sons like olive trees” and living long enough to see your children have children, which Abel did not have. As well as God’s fear (Genesis 3:22) of Adam eating from the tree of life and living forever.
Even the word “tov” meaning good, which is repeated twice, is reminiscent of the sin itself, which was eating from the tree of of knowledge of good and evil.
Why is this psalmist polemicizing against Adam? One somewhat educated guess is that it could be cautioning the reader against reading contemporaneous pseudepigraphic works attributed to Adam, similar to David with Psalms and Solomon with Ecclesiastes.
Perhaps it’s saying that Adam didn’t fear God, so don’t be like Adam.