In my previous piece on the biblical formation of the Christian on the issue of abortion, I exhorted our readers to deal carefully with Scripture, avoiding proof-texting and biblicism. Instead, Scripture should be seen as a way to enable deep relationship with a living God, leading towards whole-person formation. This elevates virtue ethics above deontological ethics while also recognizing that the two should work in tandem. I also provided guidelines for a theological and bioethical reading of Old Testament law. In this piece, I echo these same exhortations yet turn to a common passage of biblical poetry used in the abortion debate. A final, future piece will deal with passages of biblical narrative.
Poetry as Transformation: Psalm 139:13–16
As in the case of biblical law, one should seek an exegetically informed and theologically rich analysis of biblical poetry. Especially for the Psalms, this task may feel foreign for the one whose hermeneutical approach is to isolate a few verses and discern a theological proposition. For instance, many struggle with the imprecatory psalms because of statements such as “happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Ps 137:9). The neglect of such a passage is due to both the isolation of this verse from its context and to a misunderstanding of the poetic form. By paying attention to repetition (“happy is”), the statement right before this qualifies it as a request for justice. The violence of this statement represents a rhetorical form: The ferocity of the prayer matches the violence experienced by a conquered people.[1] Thus, the statement is disturbing because the experiences of the poet are. This is not permission for the Israelites to commit such acts, but for a suffering people to cry out to the only one who can execute justice perfectly. This plays an important part in the formation of the believer, shaping him or her to hate sin, crave restoration, and go continually before a God who is good and will restore the world.
Thus, if there is one takeaway I would like to emphasize, it’s this: The book of Psalms invites the formation of the believer via the rhetorical nuance of the poetic form. By the interplay of poetic lines and techniques, the biblical reader is ushered into a journey with the poet, forming both the mind and heart, cognition and affection. It’s about making truth an embodied and emotional experience and thereby forming the imagination. The revelation of God should not be stored merely in the mind but should be received via a relationship shaped through experiences of joy, sorrow, restlessness, and longing. Biblical poetry offers up this embodied experience of the poet, inviting the reader into a shared experience of God. By this, the Psalms baptize both joy and lament, imprecation and praise.
In the pursuit of careful exegesis, one should pay special attention to the figurative language of the Psalms. This is especially pertinent in a discussion of Psalm 139 for abortion, because God’s formation of the psalmist in the womb (vv. 13–16) is metaphorical. If true, then key questions arise: How do metaphors form us, and how does this metaphor function in the rhetorical aims of the psalm?
George Lakoff argues that, even outside of poetry, metaphors mold the foundation of our conceptual systems,[2] shaping both our experiences and our behaviors. For instance, the phrase “he attacked every weak point in my argument” denotes that the concept of debate is understood in terms of the domain of war, setting up the discussion partner as an opponent.[3] Poetic metaphor builds on this foundational understanding but extends and elaborates it, also questioning conventional thought and creating layered and complex metaphors that transform the ordinary into something new.[4] Further, Willie Van Peer and Anna Chesnokova suggest that poetry generally, including metaphor, sculpts the emotions, with these emotions reflecting our goals. Thus, the “emotions experienced in reading can function as a (re-)orientation on our deepest life projects and life values.”[5]
So, what cognitive and affective path does Psalm 139 create? David’s psalm is a dance in which he explores the complexities of being in relationship with God. It intermingles faith orientation and disorientation to form a prayer journey in which, after experiencing suffering at the hands of violent men, David wrestles with God’s all-seeing gaze.[6] The bookending of God’s searching and knowing of the psalmist (vv. 1–4; 23–24)[7] affirms what YHWH does and who he is in relationship with his creatures (vv. 1–4). David accepts this and orients himself in this relationship in the end, recognizing that the God who sees and judges the wicked also searches the poet’s own heart (vv. 23–24). However, leading up to this resolution, he wrestles with the difficulty of connection with a God whom he cannot wholly grasp and yet who knows him fully.[8]
After David expresses bewilderment over God’s overwhelming knowledge and presence (vv. 1–12),[9] he turns to praise over the intimacy found in God’s creation of the whole person (vv. 13–16). The lines in this section parallel and flip many of the ideas the poet struggled with previously. Whereas he is initially neutral about YHWH’s knowledge of his inner thoughts and purposes (vv. 1–4), now he praises God for creating his innermost parts, the seat of the mind in Hebraic thought (v. 13). Whereas divine knowledge was terrifyingly unattainable (v. 6), now he worships because his own creation causes astonishment, a human’s place among the mighty works of God being something firmly known (v. 14). Whereas YHWH’s presence felt smothering (vv. 7–12), now God’s sight of David even in the darkness means that his life was skillfully woven, both in frame and purpose (vv. 15–16). With all this in mind, Psalm 139:13–16 is less a statement about when life starts and more about how the psalmist stands in relation to God. The metaphor of life in the womb is used as a “place” that’s just as unknowable to the psalmist as heaven and Sheol,[10] yet one profoundly more intimate.
Psalm 139 and the Abortion Debate
Considering this, to force a reading of this passage as a statement about when life begins is counter to its rhetoric. Life in the womb is a place David cannot touch, yet YHWH knows fully. Since all of Scripture reveals that God indeed created and sustains the heavens, another “untouchable” realm in this psalm, it’s not hermeneutically unsound to conclude that God is indeed sovereign over unborn life. There is no evidence of poetic irony here. Thus, the use of this as a metaphor includes the assumption that even the unborn stage of David’s life is known and touched by YHWH while outside of David’s own grasp. The nature of this kind of intimacy is the turning point that leads to a proper relationship with God, including boldness in a request for justice and humble recognition that the psalmist must also be searched and measured by God’s just gaze.
This evidences that intimacy with God is the hope that David clings to. Thus, to turn statements such as this into a scientific one is to miss the importance of its relational and doxological thrust. This does not negate the necessity of scientific exploration at the beginning of life (I hope that was clear in my first piece), but to say that a scientific understanding isn’t all that matters. If metaphors shape our meaning-making concepts, the use of this passage in a discussion of the sanctity of human life must center on our humanness in relation to YHWH. This aligns with early biblical history in which the sanctity of humanity is located not at some determinative point as to when life begins but upon the fact that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26–27, 9:1–7). Thus, the sanctity of human life is, first and foremost, relational.
Finally, this doxological turning point leads the psalmist to both a request for justice and to self-reflection regarding the possibility that he could be part of the problem. Both are necessary orientations as we pray in relation to abortion. Let us lament the more than one million unborn children lost via U.S. abortions in 2024 alone.[11] We must crave justice and the restoration of the world. However, we must also self-reflect and examine how we’ve propagated meaning-making metaphors that pit the life of the unborn against that of the women who nurture them. We must end the practice of arresting biblical passages and reducing them to their role in political debates and orient ourselves humbly in relation to God in our pursuit of justice in the world. For, if this poetry should form our emotions and orient us towards particular values, it matters whether we find in its rhetoric the sanctity merely of unborn life or of that of all stages. Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel Small Things Like These[12] depicts the complicity of a town in the continuation of injustice and the small things one man does to fight back.[13] It may be the exhortation of an idealist that we would each examine our own complicity and seek small ways to walk in the footsteps of Christ, both in love of women and unborn children. Yet, I would rather you have an ideal to form your imagination than remain content with what has been.
References
[1] Hossfeld and Zenger also suggest that this denotes a request for the equal retribution principle (“Life for Life”) developed in biblical law. See Frank Lothar Hossfeld and Eric Zenger, Psalms 3: A Commentary on Psalms 101-150, trans. Linda M. Maloney, ed. Klaus Baltzer (Fortress Press, 2011), 519–20.
[2] Conceptual structures are composed of a web of abstract ideas that interconnect to create meaning. They can exist at the individual, interpersonal, or cultural levels.
[3] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. (The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3–4.
[4] George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 67–71.
[5] Willie Van Peer and Anna Chesnokova, Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 184.
[6] This interpretation honors the imprecation in vv. 19–22, a section many find disquieting. Several scholars note that this section may, in fact, offer an interpretational key to the psalm. For instance, see Nancy deClassè-Walford, Rolf A Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Book of Psalms, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2014), 962. I believe that the “late arrival” of this text in the poetry forms an important poetic maneuver, leaving the reader in a state of disorientation regarding the poet’s circumstances. In other words, just as the poet reflects on his lack of knowledge in contrast to that of YHWH, he allows his audience to lack knowledge until nearly the end of the poem. Yet, YHWH knows all of this, even before it occurs. The disruption in the expected poetic progression shocks the reader. This invites him or her into a shared experience of God with the poet.
[7] As a poetic technique, this is called “inclusio.”
[8] While some read v. 6 in a positive tone, the Hebrew term translated as “wonderful” in other passages (e.g., Job 31:23) is understood as something terrifying. See Hossfeld and Zenger, Psalms 3, 540. Indeed, verse 5 begins the negative shift in tone, with the psalmist reflecting on how God “besieges me” (ṣartānî). Yair Mazor suggests shifts in positive and negative language throughout the poem. See Yair Mazor, “When Aesthetics is Harnessed to Psychological Characterization: Ars Poetica in Psalm 139,” Zeitschrift Für Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 109, no. 2 (1997), 262.
[9] Note that it’s difficult to discern exactly at what point the negative tone shifts to a positive one. For instance, the “right hand of God” that grasps the psalmist (vs. 10) can denote either judgment or salvation. Similarly, if the darkness “overwhelms” the psalmist (v. 11), does this mean he desires that the darkness will hide him from YHWH, or that the darkness is crushing, and YHWH’s light is his salvation? David G. Firth suggests that such ambiguity throughout is a rhetorical strategy allowing different readings of the poetic imagery based on one’s guilt versus innocence. See David G. Firth, “Psalm 139: A Study in Ambiguity,” Old Testament Essays (New Series) 32, no. 2 (2019): 491–510. Firth’s argument is convincing in many respects, yet I do still think the poem incorporates a turn from negative to positive tone. Such ambiguity indeed being present throughout much of it, this further evidences that Scripture is aimed at formation, not just the development of theological propositions. To engage with this psalm, one must self-reflect and discern whether conviction or comfort should rise from the poetic imagery.
[10] Andrew Sloane, “I do not think that text means what you think it means: Psalm 139, Hermeneutics and the Ethics of Abortion,” Colloquium: The Australian & New Zealand Theological Review 55, no. 1 (2023): 27.
[11] Issac Maddow-Zimet and Emma Stoskopff-Ehrlich, “Abortion in the United States,” ed. Ian League, Guttmacher Institute, April 2025, https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states.
[12] Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Grove Press, 2021). The book has also recently been adapted to a film of the same name (2024), directed by Tim Mielants and starring Cillian Murphy.
[13] Donna Mackay-Smith, “Reading Guide: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan,” The Booker Prizes, December 2, 2024, https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-small-things-like-these-by-claire-keegan#:~:text=On%20the%20book&text=More%20than%20Furlong's%20quiet%20heroism,to%20think%20about%20too%20closely.