A to Z of suffering

In Psalm 38, David first complains that the Lord is attacking Him with arrows and blows from His hand (vv. 1-2), acknowledges the weight of his sin (vv. 3-4), then recounts his physical suffering (vv. 5-10) and the way his sufferings cause his friends and companions to recoil (vv. 11) and his enemies to slander (v. 12). In his suffering, he becomes deaf and dumb (vv. 13-14).

The Psalm describes a full panoply of spiritual, physical, and social anguish, and Christians have rightly read the poem Christologically.

And that typological reading is underscored by the surface structure of the Psalm. Centuries ago, the Psalm was divided into 22 verses, the number of the letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Though that verse division is not part of the original text, it follows the doublets and parallelisms very closely, and in this Psalm most of the parallelisms are quite obvious: “rebuke me not in anger” is paired with “chasten me not in your displeasure” (v. 1); “Your arrows stick fast” with “Your hand presses hard” (v. 2); “there is no health in my flesh because of Your indignation” is filled out by “there is no peace in my bones because of my sin” (v. 3); and so on. Even though the Psalm is not an acrostic, it possess the quality that James Jordan has labeled “twentytwotudiousness.”

The Psalm is an alphabet of suffering, A to Z, alpha to omega, aleph to tav. It is an alphabet of suffering, finally, because it foreshadows the suffering of the Alphabet made flesh, the One who is Alpha and Omega.