Wove
More insight on Psalm 139 comes from reading Moses:
On exactly the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the crops of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of the LORD for seven days, with a rest on the first day and a rest on the eighth day.
Now on the first day you shall take for yourselves the foliage of beautiful trees, palm branches and boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days. You shall thus celebrate it as a feast to the LORD for seven days in the year. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall live in booths for seven days; all the native-born in Israel shall live in booths, so that your generations may know that I had the sons of Israel live in booths when I brought them out from the land of Egypt.
I am the LORD your God.
David says,
For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
Let’s examine “wove”. In the feast described above, the Israelites would take tree branches and weave them together to provide a temporary covering for a time when they were journeying in a temporary land. So the idea of “weaving” also became associated with “covering” (see Strong’s, H5526). This temporary covering is like our bodies, and it’s also like this world we live in now, where Christ lives in us and yet we do not always live like Christ.
I suspect David intentionally uses the word “wove” here to evoke a forward-looking hope for what will last—our glorified bodies, and the eternal kingdom. Certainly, David does not begrudge his current body—in the very next line he says, “I will give thanks, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made”—but the glory of what is to come will surely outshine the glory that is now.
I also believe David is noting with his use of “wove” that we are not only of this physical world, nor are we only ethereal, spiritual non-real beings. “You wove me”—this is an equivalence between the temporary covering and his very self. Then, in the next verse he draws an equivalence between his soul and his personal self. It seems that we are physical and spiritual, and it is equally worthwhile to refer to myself as a physical human and as a spiritual soul. [For what it’s worth, Paul draws a heart-mind-action paradigm, which may or may not be totally orthogonal to this discussion.]
Anyway, I like to find ways to explain obscure verses, which I guess is sort of anti-hipster. Glory to God, who reveals wisdom to fools like me!
