Back in the spring, I started over in my daily cycle of reading Psalms and Proverbs, but this time, I'm reading them in German (and I'm going column by column, not necessarily chapter by chapter). When I read Psalm 1, I noticed some contrasts in the verbs.
Verses 2-3 contain active verbs of which the blessed man is the subject (meditates, yields, does, and prospers), but in verse 4, there are only stative verbs to describe the wicked: "The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away." The different qualities of these verbs heighten the contrast between the blessed man and the wicked.
Furthermore, the stative verbs in verse 4 are merely implied in the Hebrew:
לֹא־כֵן הָרְשָׁעִים כִּי אִם־כַּמֹּץ אֲֽשֶׁר־תִּדְּפֶנּוּ רֽוּחַ׃
not so the wicked but like chaff that the wind blows away
while the comparable simile in verse 3 ("He is like a tree") does have an explicit stative verb:
וְֽהָיָה כְּעֵץ
Even when the verbs are of the same type, there's a contrast in whether they're explicit or implied.
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In mid-June, I read the Psalm in Esperanto (just because) and noticed something else, this time in verses 1-2:
1 Feliĉa estas la homo, kiu ne iras laŭ konsilo de malpiuloj, nek staras sur vojo de pekuloj, nek sidas en kunsido de blasfemantoj; 2 sed li nur havas deziron por la leĝo de la Eternulo, kaj pri Lia leĝo li pensas tage kaj nokte.
1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 2 but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.
The nur (only), which I think is drawn (along with the adversative sed) from the Hebrew כִּי אִם, made me realize that there are two contrasts here, one of number (malpiuloj, pekuloj, and blasfemantoj [wicked, sinners, and scoffers] are all plural, but leĝo [law] is singular) and one of variety (there's a diversity in malpiuloj, pekuloj, and blasfemantoj, but a constancy in the repeated leĝo). In the law of the LORD, this blessed man has a singular focus.
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et erit tamquam lignum transplantatum iuxta rivulos aquarum quod fructum suum dabit in tempore suo et folius eius non defluet et omne quod fecerit prosperabitur
He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.
Suum is the its of "that yields its fruit," and it got me wondering about the underlying Hebrew. There, fruit has a masculine third person singular pronominal suffix: פִּרְיוֹ. The reflexive possessive in Latin and the neuter its in English both refer back to the tree, but I think this pronominal suffix could also refer to God, in whose law this tree-like man constantly meditates. It's God's fruit that this man bears. In this reading, there's a connection between the tree in Psalm 1 and the vine and branches in John 15. The fruit in Psalm 1 is ultimately God's because - as Jesus explains in John 15:5 - "'apart from me you can do nothing.'"
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Still more recently, this Psalm was covered in the newly launched Daily Dose of Septuagint, and I noticed something else significant.
I'd heard before that the verbs in the first verse (walks, stands, and sits) outline a progression. It's basically the same observation as part of Proverbs 13:20 ("Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise"), just regarded from the opposite direction: the man who does walk, stand, and sit with the wicked becomes like them and increasingly fixed in his way. When I lookt at the Greek of the Septuagint, I noticed that to a degree, the words here also demonstrate this process of becoming alike since at the end, there's a resemblance between καθέδραν (seat) and ἐκάθισεν (sits). The same is true of the underlying Hebrew words מוֹשָׁב (seat) and יָשָֽׁב (sits).
