"I will lift up my eyes, unto the hills."
We get thrown off because of the popular misconception which comes from attaching the next phrase "From whence cometh my help" in the KJV*, that the psalmist is saying that our help comes from the hills, or that maybe God is more up in the hills than here, or something.
We are aware of this happening in the opposite direction, that when we are more hopeful, we look up more, while when we are despondent we tend to look downward. The psalmist seems to be suggesting the brain hack of looking up in order to be more hopeful. The neurological researcher Andrew Huberman has all sorts of brain hacks on YouTube. I know little of this area of brain functioning, but he has the right credentials and he has said a few things that seem surprising to others but I know to be true professionally. So even when he is making dramatic claims, I would be more inclined to believe him than not. If that seems a rather lukewarm endorsement, it is only because I know so little.
The scriptures use the image in other places. Lift up your heads, oh ye gates suggests a joyful welcoming. So look up, look around. Cue Jewish grandmother with a New York accent: "It couldn't hoit."
*Another reason to keep moving away from KJV. It's not just the word "whence," even though we are less familiar with it and our brains scramble to the more comfortable parts of the saying for our understanding. It is even more the word order. A newer translation would very quickly switch to "Where does my help come from," which removes the misconception. Though it was Early Modern English, there was still enough use of endings that word order, especially in more poetic forms, was less strict. Nowadays we depend more on the placement of a word in the sentence. We use the inverted word order to communicate ancient speech now, as in this Tolkien imitation.
7 comments:
In my opinion the KJV language is the most beautiful and not hard to understand -at least for anyone who reads Shakespeare and Milton.
You were referring to Andrew Huberman, correct? Not to be confused with Andrew the Huber Driver. (My apologies: someone had to say it…)
Thank you for the correction. Fixed.
I have written about the KJV before. I prefer it for all ceremonial purposes. I do not prefer it for accuracy or understanding. I wrote previously about John McWhorter's podcast about such understandings, including his interview with Mark Ward who wrote Authorised: The The Use and Abuse of the King James Bible. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1683590554/?coliid=I2YQ1Q31CWA6LD&colid=1WBWYRUWA0VUZ&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it (Great interview if you like McWhorter's linguistics podcasts.) Ward was a KJV-only PhD from Bob Jones University who changed his mind about it after he found out how many passages were misunderstood.
As for Shakespeare, I have written about how much of him is also less well understood than readers think. A great deal of that is that it is poetry, and thus a somewhat artificial language than can be difficult from even a hundred years ago. Even Middle English is not quite so bad if you are reading business accounts or rules for conduct or other more natural language texts. But some of it is language as well.
You can play around with my search bar on the topic if you want to get thoroughly irritated.
Though I know nothing about the KJV [or any other version, for that matter], I wonder if the "Lift Up Thine Eyes" concept might have been the earliest account of [or basis for] EMDR. Who knows?!?!?
As someone who has taught kids Sunday School for years (mostly about fourth to sixth grade), I will absolutely guarantee that the KJV was, and would still be, a huge hindrance for kids learning. Kids say the Lord's Prayer every week, know it by heart, and have no idea what they are repeating. Don't believe me? Ask some kid what "hallowed" means. You will most likely hear that it means "empty inside." For this reason, I do a lesson every year in which I have them rewrite the Lord's Prayer in their own words, after much discussion, of course.
I have gone so far as to move away from using my church's prescribed translation (ESV), and using the NIV, because it is easier to understand, even though it might not be doctrinally 100 percent pure. I hope the Pharisees don't find out...
EMDR is more for desensitization as opposed to positive input but you might be on to something there. Certainly the eyes have it…
The NIV is my second go-to version. It’s so friendly. I misheard and therefore misunderstood much as a child, an example being: “Our father, a wart in heaven …”
Hymns are even worse for Mondegreens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen
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