The surprises keep coming. The phrase יַנְחֵנִי בְמַעְגְּלֵי-צֶדֶק is so well known, and even my new interlinear Hebrew and English bible translates it as meaning ‘He guides me in straight paths’ but being unfamiliar with the verbs meant I had to dig a bit deeper. Of course. Why not. I’m on retreat!
יַנְחֵנִי comes from the root that means ‘to rest’ or ‘to set down’, and a מַעְגְּלֵ is not a road, or way but more specifically, a track or trench-like path, and צֶדֶק is familiar, meaning righteousness, not only straightness. How difficult it must have been for the translators of this well-known psalm to settle on the English words they’d use for us!
Perhaps David, thinking back to his days in the hills with the sheep, is not talking about being guided on straight paths, but being set down in tracks of righteousness – the kind of tracks one follows when hill-climbing in the countryside. Small, sometimes rucked and not so easy to negotiate with clumsy walking-boots. Or set into tracks – set ways – of being which are righteous, rather than straight.
Straightness has an astringent ‘feel’ to it – it gives me to feel that the path ahead will be easier to negotiate than the kind of sheep-tracks we traverse when we walk the hills. Living righteously can be thought of similarly – as something quite straightforward, when, in fact it’s full of twists and turns. I’m just as likely to have hiccups in the flow when living righteously as I am to ‘crookle’ in the sheep-tracks on the moors. (Now there’s a word! To ‘crookle’ is a word they use in Rochdale, where rickets was once rife, and means the experience of one’s heel giving way when walking… it’s over quickly, and doesn’t cause a sprain, but interrupts the flow of walking).
So let me try to translate this for myself, today…. not as ‘he guides me in straight paths’ but, rather, ‘he sets me down in tracks of righteousness’ or, even, ‘he sets down tracks of righteousness in me’. Well, I do hope so!
Lisa Battye blogs 