By Maria Sermersheim, Meditatione Ignis
Psalm 139 is well-known and well-loved, and rightly so. Recently, when translating the psalm from Hebrew with some friends, we discovered a gem in verse eight that makes the meaning all the more precious. English translations typically highlight the parallelism of the verse, where it says, “If I ascend to heaven, there you are; if I make my bed in Sheol, there you are.” However, in Hebrew, while this parallelism certainly exists, the psalmist uses different words for “there you are” in each line, and the different resonances of these phrases pack a punch that can really enrich our prayer. It all revolves around the second phrase, which uses the word hinneh, the Hebrew interjection or emphatic word meaning, “behold!” or “look!”
For your short Hebrew lesson today: hinneh often marks a sense of disruption or surprise. “Behold, the army is coming over the hill! Look, the woman will bear a son! Behold, something unexpected or awfully great has now arrived.” The word is also used with the personal pronoun “me” (hinneni) to mean “Behold me,” in a sense, or as it is most often translated, “Here I am.” This word is used 178 times throughout the Old Testament, and in Genesis, Exodus and the Books of Samuel, it is found at very key junctures in the story of Israel. A few examples include the following: Abraham responds to God and to his son Isaac in Genesis 22 saying hinneni, Moses responds to God’s voice from the burning bush in Exodus 3:4 saying hinneni, God describes his wondrous actions through the plagues, raining down manna, and bringing water from the rock with hinneni, and Samuel repeatedly answers God’s call with the same response: hinneni. While it is no magical word, hinneni does carry some sense that the one presenting himself is ready at command. (The stars say “here we are” to God with this same sense in the Easter Vigil reading from Baruch 3:35!) So hinneh is an interjection with a sense of surprising newness or greatness, and hinneni with the pronoun, “behold me,” carries a sense of readiness at command.
The striking thing about Psalm 139:8 is that it ends with a much rarer form of hinneh which I had never seen before, hinneka, “Behold you!” This form appears only 15 times in the Old Testament, so as my friends and I translated the second line, hinneh truly did bring all of its force of surprise as we read, “If I should make my bed in Sheol, HINNEKA!” Look! There you are! Unexpectedly, and at our service! This surprise at finding God in Sheol, the immediacy that hinneh invokes, and the not-necessary-but-very-possible sense of readiness for service, as well, was a shock for my friends and me. It caused us suddenly to read the passage in a very Christological light. I had never thought of Psalm 139 as intimately tied to Jesus but rather to God the Father and Creator … but here in verse eight, we see that Christ is absolutely God who has preceded us even into death. And as we read this line, hinneh! We should be struck with all the surprise of the psalmist that God could beat us to the netherworld.
Though hinneka is also no magic word, the contexts and resonances in which I had found other forms of the word before made this verse deeply meaningful. Psalm 139 has always communicated this beautiful meaning of God’s omnipresence and closeness to us, but I do think that understanding hinneka adds a great richness worth contemplating, as I hope you will in your next reading of Psalm 139. Now, I read the psalm with a much more personal sense of surprise and gratitude, and a much more real sense of the presence of God preceding me and surprising me in every place and every time.