War overwhelms the senses and touches the recesses of the warrior. It does not leave an individual the same. The impact of David’s combat experience echoes this testimony of history, research, and common sense. Though battle worn, David was a steady, resilient, healthy warrior. His commitment to processing his journey contributed significantly to his well-being. The Psalms catalogue David’s inner-workings and open a window into how a God-fearing veteran hammers out his experiences.[1] The above has covered the imprecatory psalms as a mechanism for processing anger and vengeance, to this, David adds psalms of lament, thanksgiving, and praise.[2]
David was as comfortable with pen and lyre as he was with his sword. His battle rhythm was fight and pray, wage war and sing. Worship was his coping mechanism. He emptied his strength on the battlefield and then emptied his soul before God.
At times, celebration and thanksgiving were the posture of his prayers after combat. He discerned the true source of victory and exalted the Divine Warrior in these moments.[3] Sacrifices of gratitude were made, homecoming celebrations were had, and God was glorified. Recognition of God’s protection and care in the face of death was met with shouting and joy. This post-war celebration is a wartime discipline that today’s military would do well to imitate. Worship follows the same principle of physical exercise: the greater the rigor, the healthier the individual. Fervent worship is a catalyst for warrior wellness.
In the midst of post-war thanksgiving and celebration, grief is never far off. Paul’s dictum “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor 6:10) may capture the emotive complexity of the returning warrior. At times, the inverse may be more accurate: “rejoicing, yet always sorrowful.” David knew this well. He is masterful when navigating the terrain of pain and disillusionment. The lament psalms document these skillful maneuvers while equipping today’s combatant to follow in his steps.[4]
Lament psalms, which make up a significant portion of the psalter, are the warrior’s invitation to meet God in a place of disorientation.[5] They give voice to agony, trauma, and fear. They ask hard questions, refuse easy answers, and revolt against quick-fix solutions. Though some have suggested that lament is an act of “unfaith,” in reality it is a courageous expression of trust.[6] God calls His people to bring more than joy and thankfulness into His presence; He calls us to bring our pain.[7]
The language of lament gave David speech when facing his enemies, running for his life, experiencing betrayal, processing combat trauma, and voicing moral wounds. While lament served David as an individual, it had communal dimensions as well. David led his army and his civilians in corporate lament over the death of its warriors.[8] In modeling sorrow over his fallen combatants, he invited others to embrace the healthy principle: when warriors fall, warriors grieve.
Research demonstrates the importance of processing traumatic experiences and the direct link of prayer to well-being.[9] Lament is an essential pathway toward healing for the war-torn vet. Individual and communal lament both function in critical ways, enabling warriors to work out their experiences before God and others.[10] In this same vein, there is an abundance of material on grieving well and the negative effects of inhibited grief.[11] Lament provides the blueprint for solid grief work.[12] David provides a pathway to warfighter wellness encapsulated in the psalms.
[1]“The psalms were used at key moments in telling of the story of David to clarify and sharpen the narrative episode.” Nogalski, “Reading David in the Psalter,” 168-169. Nogalski notes thirteen psalms that function explicitly in this manner: Psalms 3, 7, 18, 34, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 63, 142. Significantly, every one of these thirteen psalms containing Davidic superscriptions have war, combat, and enemies as their primary context. This furthers the argument that the Psalms can and should be read as a warrior’s manual. According to Skinner, “The historical superscriptions are also similar to ‘historical psalms’ in that they allude to events addressed in other parts of the Hebrew Bible explicitly signifying a contextual setting for complementary understandings. For the reader, there is a constant shift between biography and autobiography. Biblical narratives rarely give insights into the internal state of the character other than the narrator’s voice. The historical superscriptions alert the reader to the reality of a self-awareness of the Psalmist. The reader is given another view of history with more information akin to a synoptic view.” Skinner, “The Historical Superscriptions of Davidic Psalms,” 364.
[2]Hermann Gunkel, The Psalms: A Form-Critical Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 1-39.
[3]“Examination of the Psalter as a whole demonstrates that a number of Divine Warrior victory songs are attested. The following songs are listed together as those songs that focus on singing the praises of the Divine Warrior after victory. They are generically similar on the basis of content, setting, motifs and language—Psalms 18, 20, 21, 24, 29, 46, 47, 66, 68, 76, 93, 96, 97, 98, 114, 118, 124, 125, 136. At this point mention should also be made of a few poems outside of the Psalter that are also Divine Warrior victory songs: Numbers 21:27-30; Exodus 15; Judges 5; Habakkuk 3.” Tremper Longman III., “Psalm 98: A Divine Warrior Victory Song,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 27, no. 3 (1984): 274. See also, Brettler, “Images of YHWH the Warrior in the Psalms,” 135-161.
[4]Stephen Meyer draws out two important functions of the Psalms for the reader/counselee. “First, the symbolic language of the psalm allows for the expression of difficulties and emotions not expressible through normal prosaic language. Second, the depth of expression may allow the troubled person to identify with another human being in comparable difficulty and thus find hope through the other’s experience.” Stephen G. Meyer, “The Psalms and Personal Counseling,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 2, no. 1 (1974), 26. See also, Roecker, “Use of the Davidic Psalms,” 1.
[5]Brueggemann suggests a “sequence of orientation, disorientation and reorientation as a helpful way to understand the use and function of the psalms.” The psalms of disorientation are individual and corporate laments that enable someone to enter “linguistically into a new distressful situation in which the old orientation has collapsed…lament manifests Israel at its best, giving authentic expression to the real experiences of life.” Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 9, 67.
[6]“The faith expressed in the lament is nerve—it is a faith that knows that honest facing of distress can be done effectively only in dialogue with God who acts in transforming ways.” Brueggemann, The Psalms & the Life of Faith, 69. As Patrick Miller asserts, “The complaint itself is an act of trust.” Sally A. Brown and Patrick D. Miller, Lament: Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew, and Public Square (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), xv.
[7]“The biblical community knows about the pain which needs no theoretical justification. It knows it is simply there. It lingers there relentlessly, silently, heavily. Moreover the biblical community knows that pain cannot be handled alone. In isolation, the power of pain grows more ominous and more hurtful. The pain must be handled in community, even if a community of only a few who will attend. It knows that finally pain must be submitted to the power of the Holy God.” Walter Brueggemann, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1988), 136.
[8]Tod Linafelt, “Private Poetry and Public Eloquence in 2 Samuel 1:17–27: Hearing and Overhearing David’s Lament for Jonathan and Saul,” Journal of Religion 88, no. 4 (2008): 500-501; Yisca Zimran, “‘Look the King is Weeping and Mourning!’: Expressions of Mourning in the David Narratives and their Interpretive Contribution,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 41, no. 4 (2018): 491-517; Guy Darshan, “The Reinterment of Saul and Jonathan’s bones (2 Sam 21:12-14) in light of Ancient Greek Hero-Cult Stories,” Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 125, no. 4 (2013): 640-645. These articles all point to the importance of honoring the fallen.
[9]Rivka Tuval-Mashiach and others, “Coping with Trauma: Narrative and Cognitive Perspectives,” Psychiatry Interpersonal & Biological Processes, 67, no. 3 (2004): 280-293: Koenig, “Religion, Spirituality, and Health,” 1-15.
[10]“If religious communities are to be authentic, they must incorporate lament within their worship services…Biblical lament expressed in corporate worship is uniquely fitted to provide therapeutic benefit for trauma victims…When others join the sufferer, there is ‘consensual validation’ that the suffering means something. The community votes with its tears that there is something worth weeping over.” Further Carlson states, “Suffering that cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be told, can neither be healed nor redressed…lament invites trauma victims to interpret traumatic experience through their covenant relationship with God in Jesus Christ, rather than through faulty schemas. Biblical lament does not passively accept traumatic experience (especially interpersonal trauma); it thrusts it toward God with all the strength indignant hurt can muster and cries, ‘Why?’ Likewise, biblical lament rips the bandages away from the aftermath of traumatic experience, praying that Yahweh will notice, screaming, ‘How long O Lord?’” Nathaniel A. Carlson, “Lament: The Biblical Language of Trauma,” A Journal for Theology and Culture 11, no. 1 (2015): 62-67. Brueggemann explores the lack of lament in the North American church and how it affects spiritual health. “In the absence of lament, we may be engaged in uncritical history-stifling praise. Both psychological inauthenticity and social immobility may be derived from the loss of these texts. If we care about authenticity and justice, the recovery of these texts is urgent.” Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36 (1986): 67. See also, Glen E. Harris, “A Wounded Warrior Looks at Psalm 13,” The Journal of Pastoral Theology (2010): 1-2.
[11]Carol Ott, “The impact of complicated grief on mental and physical health at various points in the bereavement process,” Death Studies 27, no. 3 (2003): 249-272; M. Katerine Shear, “Grief and mourning gone awry: Pathway and course of complicated grief,” Dialogues Clin Neurosci, 14, no. 2 (2012): 119-128; Susan Klein, “Good Grief: A Medical Challenge,” Trauma, 5, no. 4 (2003): 261-271; Keith Campbell, “NT Lament in Current Research and its Implications for American Evangelicals,” The Journal of Evangelical Theological Society 57, no. 4 (2014): 757-772. Campbell provides a thorough review of scholarly research on lament in the New Testament and concludes it is a viable practice for new covenant believers.
[12]The book of Lamentations is a biblical guide to grief. Structured as a Hebrew acrostic, it provides the A to Z of mourning. Leslie Allen states that the book is “a liturgy intended as a therapeutic ritual.” Leslie C. Allen, A Liturgy of Grief: A Pastoral Commentary on Lamentations (Ada: Baker Academic, 2011), 8.