Devotional Short Note to Psalm 52: “Doeg
was an important official in Saul’s household and wielded much influence. To
gain the king’s favour for his own advantage he played the role of informer and
committed many brutal murders.” This is what one commentator said about Doeg. A
billionaire that cared more for his pocket than for people or the spiritual
side of his soul. His tweets “devised destruction, like a sharp razor, working
deceitfully” (52:4a-b). David called him a “mighty man” (52:3a).
He did not care to boast about his achievements like Nebuchadnezzar later would
do too: “did not I built these towers and gardens?” He spoke with extra
independent personal pronouns in his speeches like Nebuchadnezzar did in Daniel
4:27 “that I, I built it” and also Sennacherib when he reported of the Third
Campaign against Hezekiah in the cuneiform records, an extra emphasis on the
self-achievement. The Egyptian pharaohs could not stay away from the uplifted “I”.
In one case, in the black obelisk of Shalmanezer III when he came to year 30 he
said “I did” but the scribe made an error and wrote in year 31 “he did”. In the
following years he continued again with “I did”. We still do not learn. We are
all Doegs. Shakespear was a reader of the Bible as
well and many times plagiarized biblical ideas without giving credit and he
said similarly “’Tis slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword.” James knew
about it: “no one can tame the tongue, restless evil full of deadly poison”
(James 3:8). Chuck Swindoll in a very good lecture on
“Boars in God’s vineyard” on Youtube, tells about critical Mildrid who liked to
gossip and one day she saw a newly convert’s car parked in front of the bar and
she said at church to him: “I know exactly what you were doing last night. I
saw your car parked in front of the bar”. That night, said Swindoll, convert
John parked his car in front of Mildrid’s home and walked to his house. “You love evil more than good, falsehood
rather than speaking righteousness. You love all devouring words. The deceitful
tongue”. A word out of place can kill many people. David then embarked upon a midrash of
his own eschatological Psalm: Psalm 1. The prophecy tells him that in the End
of Times the wicked and Doeg included will be uprooted (52:7) “He will take you
up and pluck you out of your tent”. An uprooted tree is in mind here for the
evil and in Psalm 1 it was like chaff which the wind carries away (1:4). The
righteous however after resurrection and going into the air, will probably have
chance to look over the shoulder to those below staying behind, Doeg included,
and “shall laugh at him” (52:8b). They shall also “fear” or have respect for
God’s might and glory (52:8a). What was Doeg’s problem? Self was his
stronghold, “I have so much money, I am so rich” and he strengthened himself in
his wickedness (52:9). This Doeg syndrome is still with us today. But as for David, “I am like a leafy
olive-tree in the house of God”. David said this about 1050 BCE. In Hosea 14:6
the Lord promises to be as dew to spiritual Israel. “He shall grow as a lily.
And he shall cast forth his root like the Lebanon”. “His branches shall spread
and his beauty shall be as an olive tree and a smell to him like the Lebanon”
(Hosea 14:7). Inhabitants can dwell in its shade and grow all kinds of good
agriculture (Hosea 14:8). When Israelites fled and lived in Egypt
due to the exile, in 650 BCE, assumingly, a Jewish young scribe who learnt
Egyptian, probably copied the Wisdom Literature of Amenmope and full of the
wisdom of Solomon and biblical sayings in his mental lexicon or dictionary, he
wrote about a similar image of the wise as a tree planted near waters. There are differences since the water
systems of Palestine and Egypt are different. In lines 96-101 and lines 102-109
are two units that portrays the life and end-result of the bad and the good in
a well-known old Ancient Near Eastern metaphor of a fruitbearing tree. Moses already used this metaphor in 1460
BCE composing Job 21:18 referring to the agricultural phenomenon of chaff in
the wind. The classical pre-text for Amenmope in Egypt is Psalm 1 and Psalm 52.
Psalm 1 is more complicated than Amenmope and thus have seniority over
Amenmope. Whereas the righteous as tree in Psalm 52 is planted in the house of
God (52:10) in Amenmope what is planted in the house of god (m-ḥt-nṯr) is the
hotheaded man (p3-šmm). As in Psalm 92:13 the hotheaded man
comes to an end and his unripe fruit drops off and is of no use. He is thrown
into the watercourse, cast in, carried away to the place to be used for
firewood (Amenmope line 101). The righteous man or wise man is the Ger Maā and
is like a large leafy tree planted not in the courtyard but in “shining ground”
m-thnt (Amenmope line 103). Whereas the hotheaded temple burocrat “comes
to an end” (kmt [Budge] p3jf-ḫ3`) the mobile school next to the road “blossoms”
(3ḫ3ḫ Amenmope line 104). It doubles its yield of fruit in Summer. The Ger Maā
has his place before the owner or lord. His foliage or fruit is sweet, his
shadow is pleasant. Here the scribe of Amenmope used the Psalms as pretext. At
its end it is carried into the parks of the god. The god is not explicit as
elsewhere but an ideogram added inside (m-mnw). It appears that what is in separate
parts in Job, Psalm 1:3-4 and Psalm 52:10, Hosea 14:6-8, is thrown together by
the Hebrew minded scribe of Egypt in the Wisdom of Amenmope for his Egyptian
overseers or teachers. The scribe who wrote this wisdom in
Egypt on the papyrus, turned it suddenly around at Column 6.4-6, smudged the
word and rewrote or corrected it in coarser writing with the black ink. Why
would the scribe do that? Why was he busy working on something and then turn
the page around? Did he read other literature like Job, Psalms, Proverbs of
Solomon and then corrected it? Why this correction? The faithful Israelite was hoping for a
certain quality of water but the Egyptian was hoping for a certain quality of
ground.