Five-minute study · Day 327 · Psalms 119
Psalm 119:71
A word worth stopping on: afflicted עָנָה anah
'It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.' Nine words that most people cannot say honestly until years after the suffering is over. The Hebrew word for 'afflicted' is anah in its Pual form: to be humbled, to be brought low, to be pressed down by circumstances beyond your control. The psalmist makes a retrospective judgment. Looking back, he can see the shape of what happened. The affliction taught him something. Specifically, it taught him God's statutes, the fixed instructions that he could not learn any other way. The pain was the classroom. He is not celebrating the pain. He is acknowledging what came out of it.
Word study: afflicted
- Hebrew
- עָנָה
- Pronounced
- anah
- Strong's
- H6031
- Definition
- To be bowed down, to be afflicted, to be humbled. In the Pual stem (passive intensive): to be oppressed, to be brought low. Carries the sense of being pressed down by external force, humbled by circumstances.
Anah appears over 80 times in the Hebrew Bible in various stems. BDB lists the primary meanings as: (1) to be bowed down, afflicted; (2) to humble, to oppress; (3) to humble oneself, to practice self-denial (as in fasting). The verb appears in all seven Hebrew stems, and its range is wide. In the Qal, it describes the affliction of Israel in Egypt (Genesis 15:13: 'they shall afflict them four hundred years'). In the Piel, it describes Shechem's violation of Dinah (Genesis 34:2). In the Hithpael, it describes fasting and self-humiliation (Leviticus 16:29: 'ye shall afflict your souls'). The Pual used in Psalm 119:71 is the passive intensive: to be thoroughly humbled by forces acting upon you.
Allen's commentary on Psalms 101-150 (WBC) situates verse 71 within the larger structure of Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible. The psalm is an alphabetic acrostic: eight verses for each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, 176 verses total. Each section meditates on God's word using a rotating set of eight synonyms: law (torah), testimonies (edoth), precepts (piqqudim), statutes (chuqqim), commandments (mitzvoth), judgments (mishpatim), word (davar), and saying (imrah). Verse 71 falls in the Teth section (verses 65-72).
Allen observes that the Teth section contains a concentrated reflection on the value of suffering. Verse 67: 'Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word.' Verse 71: 'It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.' Verse 75: 'I know, O LORD, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me.' Three statements, building in theological clarity. First: affliction corrected my wandering. Second: affliction was good for me because it taught me. Third: God's faithfulness was the source of the affliction. The psalmist does not describe arbitrary suffering. He describes education. Anah was the tutor.
Historical context · c. 5th-3rd century BCE
Psalm 119 and Torah Piety in Ancient Israel
Psalm 119 is a monument of Torah piety, a sustained meditation on the sufficiency of God's revealed word. The date of composition is debated. Allen places it in the post-exilic period, after the return from Babylon, when the Torah had become the central organizing document of Jewish communal life. The destruction of the temple in 586 BCE had removed the sacrificial system. The exile had scattered the population. What remained portable, what could travel with the exiles to Babylon and back, was the written word. Torah study became the primary act of devotion.
The acrostic form of Psalm 119 is itself significant. Alphabetic acrostics appear in several psalms (25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 145) and in Lamentations. The form imposes a constraint: the poet must begin each section with the assigned letter. Allen suggests the constraint is deliberate, mirroring the discipline the psalm commends. To write within limits, to submit creativity to structure, enacts the very submission to God's statutes that the psalm celebrates.
The theme of affliction as education runs through Israelite wisdom literature. Proverbs 3:11-12 says: 'My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD; neither be weary of his correction: for whom the LORD loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.' Job's entire narrative wrestles with the question of whether suffering carries meaning. The psalmist of 119 does not philosophize about suffering in the abstract. He reports from personal experience. He was afflicted. He learned. He calls it good. The judgment is retrospective, earned by survival, delivered without sentimentality.
For reflection
The psalmist says 'it is good for me that I have been afflicted.' He can only say this after the fact, looking back. Is there a past affliction in your life that you can now call good? What did it teach you that comfort could not have? If you are in the middle of suffering right now, what would it mean to trust that the education is underway, even before you can name the lesson?
Verse 67 gives the sequence: 'Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word.' The affliction corrected a direction. Sometimes you cannot see the correction until the pain has done its work.
Sources: BDB; Allen, "Psalms 101-150" (WBC)