Psalm 35
"they do not speak in friendly ways"
Psalm 35 is one of those psalms where the poet is surrounded by enemies seeking his downfall. These enemies "repay evil for good," they "gather in glee" to mock, they hate the poet "without cause," they "do not speak in friendly ways but devise fraudulent schemes."
Basically, it's a pretty awful social situation.
As commentators have long noted, salvation in the Old Testament is this-worldly. There is no heaven or hell. Just the rewards and goods of this life. And one of those rewards in Psalm 35 is vindication. Standing before lies, mockery, gossip, accusations, and ridicule and having all that speech stop.
I have no great insight here, other than to observe the deeply relational and social vision of salvation Psalm 35 puts before us. Liberation for the poet isn't the forgiveness of sins but the restoration of a peaceable community. Something needs to be set right, not just with ourselves, but with our society. Many of the prayers in the Psalms, like Psalm 35, concern social strife and conflict. The tearing of shalom. And as I look at our world, at all our conflict and strife, a world where people do not speak in friendly ways, I think a little this-worldly salvation just might be exactly what we need.
Or stated more simply: I don't want anyone to go to hell, but I do wish a lot of people would just stop talking.
Yes. I recall Jewish scholar Robert Alter's words on the challenge of translating the Hebrew word yeshu’ah.
THE BOOK OF PSALMS: A Translation With Commentary, by Robert Alter (2007)
From the Introduction - IV. The Challenge of Translating Psalms
"'Salvation' is the term that the translators in 1611 chose to represent the Hebrew yeshu’ah, and it has shown more than a little persistence in the various modern versions. 'Salvation' is a heavily fraught theological term, pulling in its tow all sorts of associations of eschatological redemption or radical spiritual transformation and sublime elevation of the individual sinner. In Christianity, it also strongly implies a particular Savior (whose name is derived from this verbal stem); in post-biblical Judaism as well, the Hebrew word yeshu’ah comes to designate a global process of messianic redemption.
"But in Psalms this noun and its cognate verb hoshia are strictly directed to the here and now. Hoshia means to get somebody out of a tight fix, to rescue him. When the tight fix involves the threat of enemies on the battlefield, yeshu’ah can mean 'victory,' and hoshia 'to make victorious' more commonly, both the noun and the verb indicate 'rescue.'
"It will no doubt take getting used to for some readers to feel comfortable with 'the God of my rescue' instead of 'the God of my salvation,' but that is precisely the sort of readjustment of mind-set that this translation aims to effect. The relationship between man and God is as urgent as readers of Psalms in English have always imagined, but it is not enacted in the kind of theological theater that has conventionally been assumed.
"The psalms of supplication, where rescue is the central issue, are poems emerging from the most pressing sense of personal or collective crisis. The speakers in these poems, however, do not seek some transport to a different spiritual realm, some radical transformation of their inward self. Instead, they implore God to extricate them from terrible straits, confound their enemies, restore them to wholeness and safety. Notions of the heavens opening and flights of angels in glorious raiment bearing redeemed souls on high have their own excitements, but they are not within the purview of these Hebrew poets.
"This translation is an effort to reground Psalms in the order of reality in which it was conceived, where the spiritual was realized through the physical, and divine purposes were implemented in social, political, and even military realms."