1 Kings 2:3

Hebrew Bible

1 When David was close to death, he told Solomon his son: 2 “I am about to die. Be strong and become a man! 3 Do the job the Lord your God has assigned you by following his instructions and obeying his rules, commandments, regulations, and laws as written in the law of Moses. Then you will succeed in all you do and seek to accomplish, 4 and the Lord will fulfill his promise to me, ‘If your descendants watch their step and live faithfully in my presence with all their heart and being, then,’ he promised, ‘you will not fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel.’ 5 “You know what Joab son of Zeruiah did to me—how he murdered two commanders of the Israelite armies, Abner son of Ner and Amasa son of Jether. During peacetime he struck them down as if in battle; when he shed their blood, he stained the belt on his waist and the sandals on his feet.

Psalm 119:1

Hebrew Bible

1 א (Alef) How blessed are those whose actions are blameless, who obey the law of the Lord. 2 How blessed are those who observe his rules and seek him with all their heart, 3 who, moreover, do no wrong, but follow in his footsteps. 4 You demand that your precepts be carefully kept. 5 If only I were predisposed to keep your statutes.

 Notes and References

"... We shall first look at the use of the Torah words dābār (singular) and ’imrâ in the sense of “promise.” This, as we observed earlier, is a secondary but nonetheless significant aspect of the overall meaning of the Torah words in Psalm 119. we have already had occasion to cite 1 Kings 2:3–4, where the dying king David admonishes his successor to keep YHWH’s “statutes (huqqōt), commandments (miswōt), judgments (mišpātîm) and decrees (‘ēdôt) as they are written in then law (tôrâ) of moses ... so that Yhwh may establish his promise (dābār) which he spoke to me.” While the other Torah words in these verses refer back to the mosaic legislation, dābār refers to the dynastic oracle (compare 2 Samuel 7:21, 25, 28). Thus it is entirely fitting that dābār and its poetic equivalent, ’imrâ, often denote the ground of the psalmist’s hope in Psalm 119 ... at this point in history ... the royal and Deuteronomistic ideals must have been quite close. The king had lost land, Temple, and sovereignty. All that remained was the Torah. Torah was both “the ideal legal constitution for a monarchic regime (1 Kings 2:3)” and a compact with YHWH defining the terms whose violations were responsible for the tragedy of the exile ..."

Soll, Will M. Psalm 119: Matrix, Form, and Setting (pp. 148-150) Catholic Bible Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 55, 1991

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