A Hebrew Primer - Gimel

Gimel is for Gamol (to deal fully or adequately with, deal out to, wean, ripen)

Be good to your servant while I live,
that I may obey your word. Ps 119: 17

This verse brings us back to the theme of blessing, but this time in the form of a petition. According to the NAS exhaustive concordance gamol has a broad variety of meanings. And there is a bit of a leap from these definitions to how it is translated in verse 17, to be good to, but there an experiential reality that unites them: something that has reached a state of fullness. (The functional equivalent that comes to mind is “He’s in a good place.”) When I see a full, luscious looking peach, I know that it grew under the right conditions to reach that state. It had sufficient water and sunlight and nutrients and the right temperatures at the right times in its maturing process to reach its rosy, juicy maturity.

A weaned child illustrates a different kind of fullness but a similar sense of the fact that they are in a good place, a satisfied state, because their needs have consistently been met. We see this sense of security and peace when David uses gamol to describe himself in Psalm 131:2,

But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.

Asking God to “be good” to me doesn’t resonate with me, especially in the light of the rest of the verse. It feels ungrateful or whiny. But I can understand the psalmist when I think about how I want my starting place to be trust in the fact that God will meet my needs. I don’t need to clamor like a hungry baby. God know what I need and he promises to meet those needs with good things. But I still look to him and say, “I’m trying to put other’s needs and concerns before my own, but there are things that I need and am worried about and I’m counting on you to come through there however you see fit.”

Interaction vs Cause & Effect

Translations of this verse vary widely depending on how the translator sees the grammatical relationship of three verbs: gamol (to deal fully with); chayah (to live); shamar (to keep). Some translations have the psalmist asking God to be good to him so he can live and obey (NASB, NLT) while others like the NIV infer that obeying is a result of living. This ambiguity frustrated me, but this frustration showed me that I was looking for a sort of propositional logic in the verse; I was expecting the grammar to show me the author’s view of the logical relationship between these three elements. Recently Tim and I have been talking about non-verbal ways to perceive reality, like color or music, elements whose interaction has an effect that is not primarily logical. So instead of trying to figure out which translation was correct, I spent time thinking about the interplay between life and keeping the law of God along the lines of Young’s literal translation: Confer benefits on Thy servant, I live, and I keep Thy word. Here is an example of those thoughts.

More Life, More Word Keeping - It’s not uncommon to hear about someone who has tried to bargain with God, promising to do something for Him in exchange for his letting them live a little longer but I don’t think that sort of bargaining is what the psalmist has in mind. His love for God’s ways is so intense that I imagine that if he is asking for longer life his petition is like that of a kid begging to stay at the playground longer or the person who wants to sit at the table longer to enjoy one more bite of their favorite food.