Between His Shoulders

Moses spoke this over Benjamin, the smallest tribe, the one with the least to contribute.

Think of a child carried on a man's shoulders through a crowd. That is the picture the last clause reaches for, and the Hebrew is genuinely ambiguous in a way English translations have to choose between: he shall dwell between his shoulders. It reads two ways. Either the beloved is carried high on the LORD's shoulders, or the LORD settles against him, as a mountain range settles along a valley, since the same word is used for the slopes on either side of a ridge. Commentators have gone back and forth for centuries. The picture works in both directions and neither reading has you doing the carrying.

Hold it through the rest of the verse and see how each phrase fits. Dwell in safety by him: proximity, not distance, and dwell again means to settle rather than to visit. The LORD shall cover him: the same covering word used of the wings in Psalm 91. All the day long: no gap in it, including the hours when the one being carried is asleep and contributing nothing at all. And then the name at the front of the sentence, which is the ground of everything after it. The beloved of the LORD. Not the capable. Not the deserving. Not the largest tribe, which Benjamin conspicuously was not.

The last thing you do at night is check something. The lock, the balance, the message you should not reread. Your body is in bed and your watchfulness has not clocked off.

The truth is simple and slightly humiliating, which is usually the sign that it is the right one. A child on his father's shoulders through a crowd is doing nothing to stay up there. He is not gripping. He is not navigating. He is not even facing forward most of the time, and the man underneath him has not once needed him to help.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 106 is An Ambition to Be Quiet (1 Thessalonians 4:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna