Psalms 13:1: “ How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? forever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?”
Practically every modern English translation will render the word teshekacheni as forget me and the word netsach as forever. Yet, in my spirit I find this rendering troubling. Most commentators consider this hyperbolized, a poetic exaggeration to show emphasis. In other words, this is the way David feels, that God has forgotten him but in his heart he does not really believe this. Well, that is possible, have we not all at one time or another felt like God has forgotten us or abandoned us, but we know full well He has not.
Yet, David does not quit there, he has to add this sarcastic remark, “forever?” You almost get the impression that David is acting like a little child, pouting and grumbling to his mother: “You forgot about me, you will forget about me forever, you don’t love me no more.” All the time he wants his mother to put her arm around him and say: “Oh, Honey, you know I still love ya.” It is like David is trying to put God on some sort of guilt trip to get what he wants. If the commentators are right and David is just saying what he feels but in his heart he knows God has not forgotten him, then he is doing nothing more than trying to manipulate God and since this is Scripture it is telling us that we too can manipulate God and make Him feel guilty so He will do our bidding. So next time it seems like God is not responding to my prayers all I need to do is follow Scripture and say: “All right for you God, you just don’t love me no more, you have just forgotten about me, bad God.” Then God in all his guilty feelings will put his arms around me and say: “Ah, Bunkie, I’m sorry, I’ve been a mean God, I’m just a bad God, here have a brand new Jeep Wrangler, make you feel better.” Then I will write a book, build a platform and go on speaking engagements to declare this new tried and proven method of getting things from God by making Him feel guilty.
If that is not the case, then we can only conclude that David really believed in his heart that God did forget about him and would not remember him forever. That is even harder to believe. That leaves me with only one alternative, to forget about a good night sleep, get up at 3:30 in the morning because I can’t sleep thinking and meditating on this and begin to do some research on these two words teshnekacheni (forget me) and netsach (forever).
Going to my Lexicons and Strong’s Concordance I find teshnekacheni means forget me and netsach means forever. Well that was a big help. Fortunately, that does not exhaust my resources. Checking extra Biblical literature such as the Talmud and the Mishnah and examining how these words are used in Hebrew’s sister languages such as the Akkadian, Ugaritic, Sumerian and Aramaic I do find some very interesting things that caused me to think out of my evangelical Christian box.
Teshnekachen (forget me) comes from the root word shachan and is found in this passage in an imperfect form. All the other Semitic languages where I found this exact word render this as finding something that was lost. In a way, I can see where you get the idea of forgetting from this. To forget something you have to have knowledge of it before you can forget it. In its most primitive form shachan when used in an imperfect form would suggest not so much forgetting as we in our modern thinking would understand forgetting but to our modern thinking it would be more like losing something that was once found. So what is that God once found with David that He has now lost? Well, this is Hebrew poetry in its finest and this is a couplet. In other words the second phrase is a repeat of the first. The second phrase tells us that Gods pani (face or presence) is hidden from him. When God makes his presence known to us He is entering into an intimacy with us. Thus David is not a child asking his mother how long she will forget him, but is a wife asking her husband how long it will be until they can be intimate again. The answer is found in the word netsach which we render as forever. However, netsach is rarely used to express the idea of forever, the common word for forever is o’lem. Netsach has the idea of being forever from its most primitive usage. In the Arabic and Aramaic the word netsach really means the process of bringing something to purity. It is used of a wife who has been unfaith and the husband chooses to put her away rather than stone her. He chooses to allow her to enter a state of netsach (becoming pure) so that he can again share an intimacy with her. Hosea speaks of this with Gomer in Hosea 2 where he will again become an ishi (husband) to his wife and not be a baali (master). A man would have had to love his wife an awful lot to choose this option rather than have her stoned after her unfaithfulness.
Sometimes the process of making something pure is impossible and hence would take forever. From that you get the idea of forever. However, in this context I believe David is asking: “How long before we are intimate? He then answers the question with a word that is a statement but is built upon the interrogative nature of the sentence “until I am pure?” In the interrogative form it would be carrying the question: “Will I ever become pure enough for you so we can become intimate again?”
Have you ever asked that same question, “How long, O Lord, will it take for me to become pure enough to be intimate with you again. “ The answer to that came 2,000 years ago on the cross. Now the question is the one asked by Jim Reeves in his lyrics:
How long has it been since you talked with the Lord
And told him your heart’s hid in secrets?
How long since you prayed?
How long since you stayed on your knees till the light shone through?
How long has it been since your mind felt at ease?
How long since your heart knew no burden?
Can you call him your friend?
How long has it been since you knew that he cared for you?
Jesus loved us enough to suffered and died on a cross just so he could take our adulterous heart and make it pure enough so he could again be intimate with us. It is now only up to us to accept the fact that we are pure enough through the blood of Jesus to enter that chamber of intimacy with Him, having forsaken all our other gods.
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