Psalms 28:1: “[A Psalm] of David Unto thee will I cry, O LORD my rock; be not silent to me: lest, [if] thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.”
I don’t know about you but I find this passage to be very curious. David just calls the Lord his rock and then asks that the Lord be not silent. Maybe I am reading too much into this but if I am going to call someone a rock I am not going to ask them to refrain from silence. Ok maybe David is metaphorically asking God to be his rock, his source of stability and dependability but not to be silent like a real rock. I am not one to disrupt thousands of sermons on this verse proclaiming the stability and dependability of God but I am asking that we just for a moment think out of the box here and examine some alternatives rather than just join in lockstep with the general opinions.
There are at least eight other words in the Biblical Hebrew that have been rendered as rock. The most common is sala’ and tarash. Sala’ and tarash would fit the idea of a solid rock, boulder, in other words the picture of dependability better that the word used here which is tsur. Actually tsur is not really a rock as such, it is a rocky cliff, rocky wall or the wall of a mountain. Now I can buy the idea of God being the side of a mountain. I hide behind that wall of rock and I can feel pretty secure. So the old sermons are safe.
Still, I have been researching this word tsur through its Semitic origins and I am hoping to pay a visit to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago to confirm this but I believe there is an identical word in the Akkadian language SR which was used for the designing, formation, sculpturing or carving in or on rocks. In other words I believe tsur is a loan word from the Akkadian language or the language of the Assyrians. If this is the case then we have a whole new understanding of what David meant when he said the Lord was his tsur (rock). I was meditating on this to see if there is a relationship to this and the Hebrew word but I was coming up with nothing until a friend of mine suggested that possibly David was not referring to the Lord as a rock of stability but his story and that his story is the Lord. That set off all sorts of alarms from my prior research into the Akkadian language. The Akkadian language was written in Cuneiform in stone on a tsur. In fact there is an interesting story of King Sennacherib who abandoned his siege on Jerusalem in 721 when his army came down with the trots. II Kings 19:35: “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they [were] all dead corpses.” Well, when Sennacherib told the story it came out a little different with him as the hero of the day. Nonetheless, it was not unusual for a king to record his exploits or story in stone or on a tsur so that all future generations would honor and revere him.
Thus, I believe David is not making a reference to God as a solid rock of stability in this verse. I mean God is, and I can personally testify to that and there are Scriptures that back this us, but not this verse. This verse is telling us something very important to us today, to those of us who happen to be in a leadership role, to those of us who may publish a book and have the chance to get our name and picture shown throughout the Christian world in bookstores and other media. When my book is released through Whitaker House in June and if you happen to hear of some promotion for the book you will find that my real name and my picture will not be in the book. I have personally requested the publisher to leave my name and photo off the book which they gratefully agreed even though my contract with them calls for a photo. You see this book is not my story, it is God’s story. I base this on Psalms 28:1 where David says the Lord is his rock. Actually, the Lord is his tsur. When future generations see the story of David engraved in stone it will not be the story of David it will be the story of God for as my friend said: “God is his story.” So for those of you hoping to get a glimpse of what this dusty of Hebrew teacher looks like, I fear you will not find if you purchase my book. For the only picture I want you to see is Jesus and the only name I want you to read is Jesus. Chaim Bentorah is just a fake name, nowhere close to my real name.
I’ve been following Archaeological journals and magazines for years now and I have not found one reference to a discovery of David. Some think they did find something but it is highly disputed and I too question the find, not for Archaeological reasons but Biblical reason. David did not desire his story be told, only that God’s story be told for God was his tsur.
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