A tree planted by streams

The Psalter opens by describing two men, and the first thing it says about the good one is what he is not doing.

Three verbs, and they are a sequence: walking, standing, sitting. He does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers.

Motion slowing to a stop. First you pass through, then you pause, then you settle. Nobody sits down in a place they have not first walked into.

That is the drift of Week Fifteen, described in three words, in the first verse of the book of songs.

And then the alternative, which is not a prohibition but an appetite.

His delight is in the law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night.

Delight first. The word for law is torah — instruction, from Week Four — and the verb for meditates is the muttering word from Week Four’s day on Joshua 1:8: a low, continuous sound, like a lion over prey or a dove.

Day and night is not a schedule. It is a description of something that keeps surfacing.

Like a tree planted by streams of water. Not a tree that grew there by luck. Planted — put there deliberately, beside a channel that does not depend on rainfall.

And the results are stated with unusual care. It yields fruit in season, which admits that there are months with nothing to show. Its leaf does not wither, which is what you can see all year. And whatever he does prospers — a claim the Psalter itself will complicate within a few pages, when Psalm 73 watches the wicked flourish and nearly loses its footing.

So sixteen weeks come to rest in the first psalm, which is where a reader would have started anyway.

The Book has been fire, hammer, honey, lamp, sword, seed, milk, mirror, goad, nail, gold, washing, dew, a stumbling stone, a plumb line, a trumpet, and food a ruined man ranked above bread. Sixteen threads have been walked from Genesis to Revelation. Its writers have testified, one after another, about what they were doing and why.

And the psalm is careful about what it does not promise. It does not say the tree is large, admired, or spared the weather. It says it is planted where the water is, that its fruit comes at the right time, and that its leaf holds. Those are modest claims, and they are the ones a reader can actually check over a decade.

And the Psalter’s opening word for the man who has taken all of it seriously is blessed, and its picture of him is a tree somebody planted next to water, quietly doing what trees do.

Psalm 1 has no superscription and functions as an introduction to the whole Psalter. Several ancient sources treat Psalms 1 and 2 as a single unit, and Acts 13:33 in some manuscripts cites Psalm 2 as the first psalm, which is one of the pieces of evidence for that reading.

The word rendered streams describes irrigation channels rather than a natural river. The tree is beside water that has been directed to it, which strengthens the sense of deliberate planting.

Jeremiah 17:7–8 gives almost the same picture with an addition: the tree does not fear when heat comes, and has no worries in a year of drought. The prophet applies it to the man who trusts in the LORD, and sets it against a bush in the wastelands.

The psalm’s final contrast is deliberately physical: the wicked are like chaff that the wind blows away. Chaff and a rooted tree are the two things a threshing floor produces on a windy day, and the psalm ends by saying which one stands.

The psalm ends with a line about knowing rather than about outcome: the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. The verb is the intimate one, and it turns a poem about two paths into a statement about who is being watched over on one of them.

Look it upH835 אֶשֶׁר esher, blessedness, happiness · H1897 הָגָה hagah, to mutter, meditate · H8362 שָׁתַל shathal, to transplant, plant · H6388 פֶּלֶג peleg, channel, irrigation stream

Where this touchesPsalm 1 · Jeremiah 17:5–8 · Joshua 1:8 (Week Four, Day Three) · Psalm 73 · Hebrews 2:1 (Week Fifteen, Day Seven). The earlier turns were James 1, Ezra 7:10, the two builders, the Bereans, Colossians 3:16, Psalm 119:11, Acts 20:32, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, 2 Timothy 2:15, Deuteronomy 6, John 8:31, Luke 11:28, 2 Timothy 4:2, Revelation 1:3 and Hebrews 2:1.