Psalms — The Whole Human Experience

Title & Source Summary

Episode: BEMA 386: Psalms 51 and 139 (Compare and Contrast)
Hosts: Marty Solomon and Brent Billings, with guest Reed Dent
Focus: Psalm 139, Psalm 51, and 2 Samuel 11–12 (David, Bathsheba, Uriah, and Nathan)

In this episode, Reed Dent guides Marty and Brent through a close reading of two very different psalms attributed to David. Psalm 139 is a psalm of comfort about being fully known by God. Then, without warning, it turns to hatred of the “bloodthirsty” wicked. Psalm 51 is David’s confession after Nathan confronts him about Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah. Reed notices that the Hebrew word behind “bloodthirsty” in Psalm 139:19 is the same word as “bloodshed” in Psalm 51:14. The man who prayed against men of blood has become one himself. From this link the hosts look at the many mirror-image phrases between the two psalms. They also talk about the human habit of sorting people into heroes and villains, and the truth Solzhenitsyn named, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Throughout, they keep coming back to God, who sees the whole truth of each person and still answers with mercy.

Key Takeaways

• Psalm 139 moves from close, womb-like security into sudden violent language: “If only you, God, would slay the wicked… I have nothing but hatred for them.” The shift is jarring, and the hosts suggest it is on purpose.
• The same Hebrew word (damim, “blood” or “bloodshed”) appears in Psalm 139:19 (“you who are bloodthirsty,” literally “men of blood”) and in Psalm 51:14 (“deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed”).
• In Psalm 139, David is the one being hunted by men of blood. In Psalm 51, he is the man of blood. He has become what he once prayed against.
• If Uriah had prayed Psalm 139:19–22, the “bloodthirsty” man he meant would have been David.
• Read side by side, the two psalms echo each other almost line for line. Psalm 51 can be heard as a reply to, or a taking-apart of, Psalm 139.
• Asked whether David is a victim or a perpetrator, a hero or a villain, the honest answer is “yes.”
• The psalms speak from lived experience. They are not abstract doctrinal statements. “You knit me together in my mother’s womb” and “sinful from the time my mother conceived me” are both true, and each comes from a different place in David’s life.
• Seeing that “I am my enemy, and my enemy is me” is what lets anger turn into compassion.
• This is not an excuse. Wrongdoing and abuse have real consequences. The point is to be honest about both sides of being human.
• God sees the whole of a person at once, from being knit together in the womb to sending Uriah to the front. God does not answer with hatred. God restores those who return.

Main Concepts & Theories

1. The Superscriptions and Authorship

• Headings such as “For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.” are part of the manuscripts. They are not later study notes.
• The Hebrew phrase le-David is ambiguous. It can mean:
  • written by David,
  • written in the spirit or voice of David, or
  • (less likely, as Marty notes) written for David.
• In this episode the hosts read both psalms as David’s own words. That makes the contrast between the two especially sharp.

2. The Jarring Turn in Psalm 139

• Verses 1–18: Being completely known by God, unable to escape God’s presence, and carefully made in the womb. Reed describes it as feeling “like I’m in the womb”: safe, comfortable, everything right.
• Verses 19–22: A sudden turn to hatred and violence. Robert Alter translates verse 22 as “I hate them with complete hatred.”
• Verses 23–24: A return to openness: “Search me, God, and know my heart… see if there is any offensive way in me.”
• The hosts ask:
  • Is it acceptable to hate people who hate God?
  • Have we ever hated someone “with complete hatred”?
  • How does this language fit beside “How precious to me are your thoughts, God”?

3. Holding the Text at Arm’s Length vs. Praying It

• The scholar’s approach: Ask whom David meant (Saul or other enemies). That makes the passage easier to accept, but it keeps the text at a distance.
• The personal approach: If you pray the psalm as your own words, you have to ask whom you have wished gone, defeated, or even dead.
• The violent language may be exaggeration that expresses how intense the feeling is, not a literal wish. The intensity is still real.
• Marty’s view: being honest about wanting an enemy defeated is part of the Psalms. “That’s not where the story ends,” though, because the enemy also bears the image of God.
• Finding hatred hard to feel is a good sign. It means we resist “othering,” which is putting people in a category of humanity we tell ourselves we don’t belong to.

4. Background: 2 Samuel 11–12

• David sees Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his own soldiers, and sleeps with her. She becomes pregnant.
• David uses his power as king to cover it up. He has Uriah sent to the front line and secretly orders the other soldiers to pull back, so Uriah is killed.
• The prophet Nathan tells a parable about a rich man who takes a poor man’s only, beloved lamb. David is outraged. Nathan answers, “You are the man.”
• The heading of Psalm 51 ties it directly to this moment: “When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.”

5. The Key Link: “Men of Blood”

• The same root word shows that the roles have flipped, not just the mood.
• Reed imagines Uriah, abandoned on the battlefield, praying Psalm 139:19–22. He would have been fully justified, and his enemy would have been David.

6. Mirror-Image Phrases Between the Two Psalms

The hosts find matching lines in almost every stanza:

• Marty suggests that David may have taken out an old favorite psalm in his lowest moment and written an “anti-psalm” in reply. He was not cancelling the earlier psalm. He was adding the other side of himself, the one he had now seen in the mirror.
• Brent adds a nuance about “hide your face from my sins.” David is not asking that his whole self be hidden, as if he were evil at the core. He asks God to hide His face from his sins, cleanse them, and restore him. David separates what he has done from who he fundamentally is.

7. Against Absolutizing the Psalms

• Single verses should not be lifted out and turned into fixed doctrines. One example is turning Psalm 51:5 into a full doctrine of human nature.
• Each psalm speaks from a particular moment:
  • Psalm 139: “I’m being pursued, but I’m trusting in the love of God.”
  • Psalm 51: “I’ve just been confronted with what I’ve done to another person.”
• Both statements are true because both come from David’s real experience.

8. Breaking Down the Binaries

• People like to sort the world: good guy or bad guy, victim or perpetrator, hero or villain.
• That sorting is exactly what makes “I hate them with complete hatred” easy to say.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn (quoted via Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion): “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”
• Marty points out that in a given moment, a person can be plainly the victim or plainly the offender. David was plainly the offender in the Uriah story. Over a whole life, though, everyone has been both.

9. Psalm 109 as a Parallel (Marty)

• In an earlier session, Marty described Psalm 109 as making a similar move inside a single psalm.
• It starts as a cry for justice against enemies. Close attention to the pronouns shows it turning back on the psalmist: “this is what people actually say about me.”
• Marty personally connects Psalm 109 to the Abigail story (1 Samuel 25), though he says he can’t prove it.
• The conclusion: “I need your grace and mercy as much as they do, and they need it as much as I do.”

10. The Picture of God in Both Psalms

• God makes each person in mercy.
• God sees the whole truth of a person all at once, not as a timeline from left to right. That includes being knit together in the womb and the darkest choices.
• God sees the harm done to us and is near when men of blood surround us.
• God also sees the harm we do, and answers by renewing the spirit and restoring joy to those who come home.
• “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (Romans 5:20).

Examples & Applications

• Rooting for someone’s downfall: Marty and Brent both admit they have wanted public figures or people in their lives to be defeated or simply gone (“I wish I would never hear from that person again”). This is a mild, everyday version of Psalm 139:19–22.
• The Uriah in your life: Reed says that if you live long enough, you will probably have a “Uriah,” someone who could rightly say, “Look what he did to me.” It may not be murder, but it may be how you treated them or spoke to them.
• Sting’s “Russians”: Marty recalls the Cold War lyric about hoping “the Russians love their children too.” It recognizes shared humanity in a supposed enemy, as he discussed with his spiritual director.
• Cancel culture: Marty notes that modern culture, on every side, sorts people into “bad people” and “good people.” These psalms push back against that.
• Brent’s journey: Brent describes himself as “a staunch absolutist” until his late twenties. Studying the Bible in context complicated that. He now feels more strongly about injustice than before, yet sees how complicated people are.
• Pastoral counseling: Reed observes that people stuck in anger at someone often can’t move forward until they see they have something in common with that person. That recognition turns anger into compassion.
• Hearing a sermon series as one whole: Reed preached Psalm 139 four times in a row at CCF, but parts two and three were not recorded. Brent compares this to Paul’s lost letter to the Corinthians: the gaps leave the whole picture incomplete.
• A spiritual practice:
  • Read Psalms 139 and 51 side by side every day for a week or a month.
  • Notice which parts fit your current season: hatred, shame, security, or remorse.
  • Over time, get familiar enough to recognize these feelings when you are in them.

Potential Areas for Further Exploration

1. The Hebrew word damim: Look at how “blood” or “bloodguilt” is used across the Hebrew Bible (for example, Genesis 4:10, 2 Samuel 16:7–8, where Shimei calls David a “man of blood,” and 1 Chronicles 22:8).
2. Imprecatory psalms: Study Psalms 35, 58, 69, 109, and 137 to see how the Psalms deal with cursing language and violent prayer.
3. Psalm 109 and the Abigail story: Test Marty’s proposed link between Psalm 109 and 1 Samuel 25.
4. The meaning of le-David: Research the debate over authorship, dedication, and “Davidic voice” in psalm headings.
5. Psalm 51:5 and original sin: Compare how Jewish and Christian traditions have read “sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” and whether doctrinal readings respect its setting as a lament.
6. Nathan’s parable: Revisit 2 Samuel 12 and the BEMA parables series on how stories bring hidden guilt to light.
7. Solzhenitsyn and Fleming Rutledge: Read The Gulag Archipelago (the source of the quote) and Rutledge’s The Crucifixion on sin as a condition every person shares.
8. Robert Alter’s translation of the Psalms: Compare his “I hate them with complete hatred” with other translations.
9. Mirror-image structure: Map the stanzas of Psalms 139 and 51 closely to see how far the parallels go.

Comprehension Questions

1. What Hebrew word links Psalm 139:19 and Psalm 51:14, and how does it show that David’s role has reversed between the two psalms?
2. Why does Reed imagine Uriah praying Psalm 139:19–22, and what does that thought experiment reveal about David?
3. Name at least three pairs of mirror-image phrases between Psalm 139 and Psalm 51, and explain the contrast in each.
4. Why do the hosts warn against turning single statements from the Psalms, such as “sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” into absolute doctrines?
5. How does Solzhenitsyn’s line about good and evil relate to the hosts’ point that seeing ourselves in our enemies makes compassion possible, and why do they say this is not an excuse for wrongdoing?

Summary

This episode puts two psalms by the same author side by side. They come from opposite places in his life. In Psalm 139, David rests in being fully known by God and prays against the “men of blood” who threaten him. In Psalm 51, after Nathan’s “You are the man,” David confesses that he has become a man of blood. Reed’s discovery of the shared word damim opens up a long series of echoes between the two psalms: hidden and seen, presence and exile, the womb and the secret place. Together they give an honest picture of what it means to be human. Every one of us is, at different times, both victim and perpetrator, hero and villain. That truth does not excuse harm. It does take away the comfortable sorting that makes “complete hatred” easy, and it opens the way to compassion. Over both psalms stands a God who sees the whole of us at once, from the womb to our worst moments, and still restores the joy of salvation to those who come home. The episode closes by inviting listeners to read these two psalms together slowly and often, until they can recognize both sides in their own lives.