In recent days, speaking of the last twenty years, men have used much ink and spoken many words to debunk a doctrine of the perfect preservation of Words of God in Psalm 12:6-7.  Commentators through history have interpreted Psalm 12:6-7 as a promise of the preservation of the poor and needy, mentioned in Psalm 12:5.  Modern critical text advocates strive to back or ensure that interpretation against a teaching of preservation of words.  With this conversation occurring or continuing, more evidence arises for the preservation of words viewpoint.

I haven’t heard anything new to contribute to the preservation of the poor and needy, except for possibly one new point.  Critical text proponents like Mark Ward say the same old, same old.  Some of his audience didn’t know his arguments, but they aren’t new.  With that being said, this is an argument from Ward I have never heard.  I didn’t know about it until recently reading him in the comment section at youtube.

Not Perfect Preservation?

Ward says that the present application of perfect preservation from Psalm 12:6-7 arose out of the King James Only movement of the twentieth century.  He knows that men taught preservation of words from Psalm 12:6-7, such as Matthew Poole, just that none of them, including Poole, he is saying, took that as perfect preservation.  I had not heard anyone ever make that particular point.  It seems like a raising of the bar on expectations in the language of the commentators.  Is Ward implying that when men wrote that Psalm 12:6-7 promises the preservation of the Words of God, that they were saying that God was promising less than perfect preservation?  And is that even preservation?

I’ve used this illustration before, but let’s say that you had a jar with 100 marbles in it.  Twenty years later, you still have the jar, and someone wants to purchase it.  You guarantee that you preserved the marbles in the jar.  The customer counts them and there are 98, not 100.  Did you preserve the marbles in the jar?  Is that the plain meaning of preservation of marbles?

Ward is implying that 93 to 98 marbles is still the preservation of the marbles.  Preservation of the marbles doesn’t mean 100 out of 100, because  93 to 98 is still preservation.  Is that what you think?  I don’t think of losing marbles as preserving them.  That is not preserving them.  You’ve preserved some of them, so preservation occurred, but you can’t say you preserved them, speaking of the marbles in the original jar.

When Jesus said that no man shall pluck “them” out of his hand (John 10:28), with similar understanding of preservation, you could take that as no man shall pluck 93 to 98 percent of them out of his hand.  He didn’t say “all of them” after all.  If God promised to keep or preserve the poor and needy, to be consistent, when Ward says Psalm 12:7 promises to keep the poor and needy, that means not all of the poor and needy, just some of them.  It’s not perfect preservation of the poor and needy.  Myself and others might call that betraying plain meaning of language.

Hebrew Singular Masculine Pronominal Suffix in Psalm 12:7

Besides that above argument, a new one that rose out of a challenge to Ward about his representation of the history of Psalm 12:6-7 commentary, I have read none.  I have heard the argument Ward makes from the King James translators notation about the second “them” in Psalm 12:7.  It translates the singular masculine suffix.  Ward says that necessitates poor and needy, because “words” aren’t a “him.”  “Words” aren’t a “she” either, even though the gender of “words” is feminine.

Every Hebrew word is masculine or feminine, because there is no neuter in the Hebrew.  Someone might call this a dumb argument, that a masculine suffix must refer to people.  What do we do with all the things or objects in the Old Testament?  What kind of pronominal suffix are we going to use for all those non-neuter words?

This pronoun point revolves around this comment in the margins of the original King James translation by the translators:  “Heb. Him, i.e., every one of them.”  They are correct.  They are noting that a masculine singular suffix in the Hebrew is “him” in the English.  Then they explain with the comment why they translated this “them”:  “every one of them.”  The singular meant, they are saying, “every one of them,” speaking of whatever antecedent “him,” “everyone of them,” or “them” refers to.

Psalm 12:7 reads:  “Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.”  The verse is not saying twice, “Thou shalt keep them” and “Thou shalt keep them,” or, “Thou shalt preserve them” and “Thou shalt preserve them.”  No, it is making two statements with a nuance of difference:  “Thou shalt keep them” and “thou shalt preserve every one of them.”  They are not saying the English should be, “him,” but that the English should be, “every one of them.”  On Part 4 of The Textual Confidence Collective series (starting at about 5:48), Mark Ward begins speaking with a kind of glee in his voice and says these exact words:

And it’s really interesting here, one of the tip offs to sort of the interpretive question here comes in the note that is actually in the margin of the King James, even in this TBS edition.  For that second “them,” “thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them” (and I’m convinced this is where the word preservation starts to get used by the King James only or textual absolutist movements), it says in the margins, the Hebrew is actually, “him,” that is, “every one of them.”  And if the Hebrew is actually “him,” that is, every one of them,” every one of them must not be “the words,” because words are not him and her.  Words are things.  Words are it.  Therefore, it must be in the view of the King James translators, that second pronoun, must be pointing back to the antecedent we find in verse 5:  “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.”  So the words of the Lord here are not the Bible.  They are these immediate words, “I’m going to protect the poor, uh, who are oppressed.”

This is coming from a PhD from Bob Jones University, and other PhDs or PhD candidates sit there and say nothing, when he makes these foot-in-the-mouth statements with a kind of giggling glee.  Why?  They don’t even look like they disagree.  Zero pronominal suffixes in the entire Old Testament are an “it,” because there is no neuter pronominal suffix.  There are no neuter Hebrew nouns to which to refer.  The King James translators would have been laughing on Ward’s interpretation of them.

Timothy Berg writes about this at his blog (and Ward has concurred many times):

Understand what has taken place here with these two lines. The translators had to either choose, “them” and so maintain the number of the original, but lose the gender, or choose “him” and maintain the gender of the original but lose the number. The meaning in both cases is a plural group of multiple “hims,” employing first the plural then the singular in keeping with the psalmist’s pattern. But there is no form “hims” in English, so every translator must lose something of the original text in translating it into English. The point to note here though is that they clearly understood the referent of the singular suffix as being back to the alternating singular and plural in verses one and five, being a reference to the people. This is surely self-evident to anyone reading the passage in its context, and abundantly evident to anyone who reads the original translators notes (and even more so when they realize the origin of this particular note in the Bishop’s base text). If we had only continued to print these notes, and listened to the KJV translators themselves, so much bad interpretation could have been avoided. Maintaining today that the phrase is a promise to preserve God’s words in the KJV is to utterly disagree with what the translators themselves intended to convey, which, in a text now being adduced as support for their infallibility, seems odd at best.

These men say this proves that “them” by the King James translators could never refer to “words” in verse 6.  That very much misunderstands gender in the Hebrew.  Berg is saying that “him” must mean people, because a “him” must be people in the Hebrew.  Remember, this is a masculine suffix with “preserve,” that the translators translated “preserve them.”

How would you go about proving the point that Berg and Ward are making in their assessment of a comment by the KJV translators?  I would look at similar examples with gender through the Old Testament to see if that’s true.  They are saying that a masculine suffix must always refer to a person, because a masculine is a person.  This is their representation of original languages.  Again, they don’t take that from anything the KJV translators wrote.  This is their own personal call.

Berg or Ward do not reference one Hebrew grammar or syntax to make that point.  They do not show you several examples to evince the truth of this argument.  They speak as those having authority on the Hebrew language.  As Johnny Cochran famously called the prosecution of the OJ Simpson trial, it is a “rush to judgment.”  These are men eager to have something mean something that doesn’t mean something.  They don’t even know it means something.  I think they could assume that they have an audience of their own tribe ready to accept their own bias.  This is today called “confirmation bias,” where they rush to confirm their own bias.

Let’s open our Bibles to the first chapter of the Bible, the book of Genesis, and Genesis 1:16-17:

16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.

God made lights.  God “set them.”  “Them” refers to the lights, wouldn’t you agree?  A masculine refers to “lights.”  This does not correspond exactly to Psalm 12:6-7, but it does in the argument that Ward and Berg are making.  A masculine must refer to a person.

Turning to Psalms, Psalm 18:14 says:

Yea, he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; and he shot out lightnings, and discomfited them.

“Arrows” is masculine too, but it is plural.  He scattered the masculine arrows.

A better example is Job 39:14-15:

14 Which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in dust, 15 And forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them.

“Eggs” is plural.  “Them” in “crush them” is a third person feminine suffix.  In other words, “crush her,” but it is “crush every one of them.”  “Eggs” and “them” are both feminine.

Just as a gender sample, the same kind of construction in Psalm 12:6-7 and in Psalm 119 is found elsewhere, such as Leviticus 20:8:

And ye shall keep my statutes, and do them: I am the LORD which sanctify you.

“Statutes” is feminine and “them” is masculine.  Again, a masculine pronoun refers to a thing, which is also feminine.  The same is in Leviticus 22:31:

Therefore shall ye keep my commandments, and do them: I am the LORD.

Commandments is feminine and them is masculine.

The same is in Numbers 15:39.  Also, Nehemiah 1:9:

But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them.

Commandments is feminine and them is masculine.  In Ezekiel 37:24, “statutes” is feminine and “them” is masculine.

I’m not going to keep going with this argument, but you can see that Berg and Ward are wrong on the Hebrew of this.  I’ve already written many times that gender is nullified by Hebrew grammar as an argument for the “poor and needy.”  Because of that, we should go to the nearest antecedent rule, which is “words.”  Ward himself said the examples were clear in Psalm 119 of purposeful gender discord, so he relents there.  He says it isn’t in Psalm 12:6-7, but that’s only because he chooses to ignore the nearest antecedent, which is clear.

This Generation

Psalm 12:7 says, “Lord. . . . shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.”  The two different viewpoints also take the last part of the verse in two ways.  The preserve-the-poor-and-needy position says that “from this generation” is a physical separation from the attacks of the wicked.  The preserve-the-words position says that “from this generation” is a linear chronological separation from the present moment and on into eternity.

The Hebrew preposition translated “from” in the English has a root meaning of separation.  Preserve-the-words takes the normal, plain meaning of the Hebrew dur, generation, which is a period, speaking of this present time.  This language of time is echoed in the Old (Isaiah 59:21) and the New Testaments (Mt 5:18, 24:35) in other preservation passages.  This is the regular usage of this Hebrew construction, translated, “from this generation for ever.”

Preserve-the-poor-and-needy takes an exceptional usage.  I see generation used of the wicked, but it is always accompanied by “evil” as in “evil generation” (Dt 1:35), “generation that had done evil” (Num 32:13), or “crooked generation” (Dt 32:5).  When meaning “evil generation,” it is accompanied by these types of descriptors.

Every time you read the words, “from generation” (eleven times), it is a linear chronological separation from this present moment into the future.  If it was something other than that in Psalm 12:7, then it is the only time in the entire Old Testament, or an entirely exceptional usage.  Normally we call this eisegesis of scripture, because it doesn’t consider all the usages of this construction contradicting it.  Timothy Berg does this in his Psalm 12 article.

Synonymous Parallelism

The poetry in Psalm 12:7 is parallelism and in particular “synonymous parallelism.”  The second part of the parallelism repeats a variation of what the first part expresses.  If this is synonymous parallelism, which is how it reads in Psalm 12:7, then both parts must refer to the same antecedent.  It expresses the same truth in two different ways.  “Thou shalt keep them . . . . thou shalt preserve them.”

I talked about this parallelism in the last post, that it teaches plenary and then verbal preservation of the Words of God.  I want to give a heads up to the mention of “synonymous parallelism” to Jeff Riddle in his Word Magazine podcast on youtube.  He talked about this and may have also given credit to Peter Van Kleeck, Sr. at the Standard Sacred Text blog.