Psalm 113

On Hanukah 5780, Professor Marc Zvi Brettler published (in the on-line series TheTorah.com¹) an essay entitled “A Woman’s Voice in the Psalter: A New Understanding of Psalm 113.” This psalm opens the so-called Egyptian Hallel with a call to praise God, which is central to the spiritual life fostered by the psalms. The psalm utilizes some puzzling Hebrew archaisms (instances of the hiriq compaganis²). It echoes (in verses 7-8) Hannah’s song in I Samuel 2:5-8 and seems to imitate it. Brettler’s essay argues that the end of the psalm provides us with an otherwise absent woman’s voice marking the birth of a child. The JPSA version translates the relevant passage, (God) sets the childless woman among her household as a happy mother of children, though as we shall see this translation is faulty.

In contrast to his earlier view³ that none of the psalms singles out women’s experiences, Brettler now considers that Psalm 113 is the barren woman’s thanksgiving on bearing a child. Now she has had a baby she is no longer aqeret ha-bayit but em ha-banim semehah, a happy mother of children. However, despite Brettler, gender-based rejoicing is not the major point of the psalm. The psalmist shows no sign of establishing a feminist liturgy or giving the woman a hitherto lacking voice. Brettler may be right that after childbirth a woman tends to stay home and not work in the fields, but this is not why she is called aqeret ha-bayit. A better interpretation of aqeret ha-bayit comes later in this essay.

The Woman

One can see that a childless woman feels bitter at her barrenness. Infertility is a major phenomenon in the Bible. The woman is happy (presumably ecstatic) to now have a child. She can certainly choose to praise God in the words of Psalm 113, but whether this makes the psalm the (or a) voice for women and a liturgical formality is another matter. If it were a woman’s liturgy we would probably expect it to ask God to protect the infant and to bless the parents in their endeavor to rear the child, though admittedly we do not see such requests from Sarah (Genesis 21:7) and Hannah (I Samuel 2) when they gave birth to their sons. Maybe Brettler is right that the psalm writers were “biased against representing such female rituals,” but I believe that in addressing Psalm 113 he has misread the psalmist’s mind.

In the psalm, the birth of a child illustrates the broader theological tenet that praise is due because (as we see in verses 5-6) the Most High God looks down and affects events on earth; in verses 7-8, He shows His power by rescuing the poor and raising them up, and in verse 9, He shows His power by enabling the barren to bear children.

Even if the Bible (including the Psalms) seems to be male-oriented, it is hard to see in Psalm 113 any hint of a female author or of the desire to enable females to praise God as women. The psalm is about God, not about females as contrasted with males. God steps into history by helping His creatures whoever they are. The beneficiaries (as spelled out in verses 7-8) are people of either gender who are given relief by a supportive God. The thinking of the psalm is that God is uniquely powerful (Who is like the Lord our God, enthroned on high, seeing what is below?). No other deity shares this concern for both heaven and earth. God’s intervention in events on earth is not motivated by genderism but by ethics. True, the beneficiary of His intervention in verse 9 is a woman (infertility in ancient times is not blamed on the males), but even so, depression and poverty (verse 7) afflict either gender. If it were a female author one might also expect her to reference the care of the widow as in Psalm 146:9. If verse 9 gives a voice to women, as Brettler believes, to whom does verse 7 give a voice? Presumably no-one, since Brettler gives little attention to the poor and depressed. The categories of suffering identified in verses 7-9 need sympathy by reason of being human; their gender is irrelevant.

The fact that Psalm 113:7-8a replicates I Samuel 2:8 is a linchpin for Brettler. He thinks both passages equate a woman who was barren and gave birth with the poor person, but he conveniently ignores I Samuel 2:5b, The mother of many is forlorn, a reference to Peninah, which spoils his argument. Our psalm, and most of the text of I Samuel 2, gives no hint of female authorship or a woman’s liturgy but — as Simon⁴ points out — could well be bringing in ready-made well known phraseology which was used over and over again by anyone in search of what to say in situations of thanksgiving.

It also reiterates that God is aroused by human (not gender-based) tragedies which range from poverty and infertility to persecution and pain — frequently encountered in Psalms when innocent people are suffering because of external evil forces. As the Torah points out (Ex. 2:25), God “knows” and “sees” the suffering and responds by extending help and support, though neither always nor immediately. Whatever the reason for the woman’s barrenness, God is able to “heal” it (Gen. 20:17) and open the woman’s womb. However, he is not necessarily motivated by the woman’s gender but by the fact that she is His creature and her pain reaches Him.

In addition to the personal elements evident in our psalm, one could view the text as alluding to the national plight. The nations watch the suffering of an individual or community, and they taunt the righteous with the sneering words, Where now is your God? (Ps. 115:2). Responding to this taunt, the psalmist expects the servants of the Lord (Ps. 113:1) to reiterate His praise and acclaim His concern. This is the leitmotif of the Hallel: God who is high looks down, those who are low He raises up. Franz Delitzsch⁵ describes thus the unity of the high and the low: “He is the incomparable One who has set up His throne in the height, but at the same time directs His gaze deep downwards… It is just that which is lowly… that is the special object of His regard.”

The psalm gives two examples. The first is in verse 7, where God raises the poor from the dust; He lifts up the needy from the refuse heap, and seats them with the nobility. The second example is in verse 9, where the woman who feels low because of her barrenness is helped by God and turned into a happy mother with her child or children round about her.

When our psalm speaks of the rehabilitation of the disadvantaged, whom does it have in mind? The Targum and some commentators (e.g. Rashi) give it a nationalistic meaning suggesting that the psalm is about the congregation of Israel who are likened to a barren woman who bemoans her fate. Brettler brushes this aside and thinks it obscures the original meaning of the psalm which he believes deals with personal womanly fertility, not with national salvation. He may be right that the nationalistic interpretation is a later rationalization, but he does not really prove his contention.

A second question is whether the psalm is merely being rhetorical — speaking of disadvantaged people in general — or alluding to actual historical figures. Midrashically speaking, perhaps the poor man who was brought up out of his suffering and appointed to a position of respect and a rank of honour is Joseph, the son of the patriarch Jacob, taken out of prison by Pharaoh and appointed to high office. The words of our psalm seem custom-tailored for Joseph; the story is told poetically in Psalm 105:17-23.

In relation to the barren woman, it is possible that the reference is to Hannah the mother of Samuel, since the poet makes use of the narrative of her story in formulating verses 7-8. Alternatively, the woman who suffers infertility could be the matriarch Sarah, who eventually — when she and Abraham are both ageing — has her prayer fulfilled in the birth of Isaac (Genesis 21). The application to Sarah of the verse about the barren woman was suggested by the Pesikta Rabbati 180a, which says, “(It is) Sarah (who) is the happy mother of children.” The theme of the barren woman being remembered by God must have been in the mind of the High Holyday liturgists who chose the story of Hannah and Samuel as the Rosh HaShanah haftarah to parallel the Torah readings about Sarah and Isaac.

The Talmudic sages offer another possibility. The phrase happy mother of children applies to a different Hannah in TB Gittin 57b, where a heavenly voice says that it was Hannah, the woman from II Maccabees 7, whose seven sons were martyred for their faith. This Hannah had children (plural), which allows a more literal reading of the verse from Psalm 113. The rabbinic sages have a further range of homiletical interpretations of Psalm 113:9, applying the verse to a range of Biblical figures. They see Yokheved the mother of Moses as the embodiment of a happy mother (TB Sotah 12a, Bava Batra 120a). They regard the barren woman as representing the people of Israel (TB Pesahim 118b) who are ashamed of their less worthy members. As we have seen, the Targum applies the verse about the woman to the people of Israel whose Temple stands bereft, longing for the return of the worshipping crowds. The Bible itself depicts Zion as a barren woman (Isaiah 54:1, 66:8) or a woman in travail (Psalm 48:7, Jeremiah 4:31).

A nationalistic interpretation is also possible for the next psalm in the Hallel series, Psalm 114, which continues the theme of the rehabilitation of the disadvantaged, with the suffering Hebrew slaves being redeemed by God from bondage. Divine intervention in favour of those who are suffering is thus a major concern of the Hallel psalms and a central feature of Biblical theology. The barren woman figures in this material, not because of her femininity or her need of a voice, but as an example of a good person — regardless of their gender — feeling depressed and unfortunate. Professor Brettler’s “woman’s voice” theory misreads the evidence.

The House

The very first mitzvah of the Torah (Genesis 1:28) is procreation — peru urevu, be fruitful and multiply. Carrying out this mitzvah is regarded as the greatest fulfillment available to man. If the major point was that the verse was concerned that a woman was barren, it would have been easier to call her simply an aqarah instead of aqeret ha-bayit — though grammatically the phrase probably should have been aqarat ha-bayit. The first point to make is that, taken literally, the phrase does not necessarily refer to a woman, barren or otherwise, though almost everyone (including Brettler) thinks it does.

The English translations seem to follow one of two approaches — the KJV, He maketh the barren woman to keep house, or the NIV, He settles the childless woman in her home. Oesterley⁶ has Causing the barren woman to dwell in a house, which makes no sense. None of these versions takes account of the grammatical form of aqeret ha-bayit, which is construct state and requires a translation along the lines of the barren woman of the house. Samson Raphael Hirsch⁷ recognizes this grammatical phenomenon but does not offer a satisfactory equivalent in English. To say, as Brettler does, that she is now more or less confined to the house whilst her baby is small, is a fact of life, but childbirth must have also brought a change in status. Whilst she was childless she must have felt ashamed and apprehensive about going out of the house; she knew that people talked about her. The house was defined by the woman.

But does aqeret ha-bayit really connote barren woman? Yaakov Etzioni⁸ recognizes the difficulty of the root ayin-quf-resh when we try to connect it with eqer in Leviticus 25:47. The great grammarian Jonah Ibn Janah suggested that aqeret habayit could be iqeret (or iqrat) habayit — she is the iqar, the root or main part of the house, the root of the community on a national level. Professor Blau⁹ suggests that the phrase referred to a physical place in the house: “the iqar (interior) of the house” — God sets the poor man with the princes, and his wife (the mother of his children) is now in the main (central) part of the house. Bereshit Rabba explains the matriarch Rachel’s supposed “barrenness” as the deficiencies of the main wife of the house, and the Midrash (Gen. R. 71, Num. R. 14) also has a theory of the wife being iqaro shel bayit, the main person or mainstay of the home. These explanations remove the idea of a barren woman from the psalm altogether and leave Brettler without the nexus to an after-childbirth thanksgiving.