The Table Video

Ellen Charry (Princeton Theological Seminary) considers the meaning of Psalm 35, one of the several “psalms of imprecation.” The imprecatory psalms are troubling for many Christians, since they seem to directly counter Jesus’s teachings on love and forgiveness. However, Dr. Charry shows how Psalm 35 provides a helpful framework for people who are trying to understand how they should respond to being scorned by others, thus showing the relevance of the imprecatory psalms for the Christian life.

Transcript:

I’m really honored that at the end of a long day, you would all come at this hour. And I know we’ve all learned a lot, I’ve learned a lot and I know we’ve all heard a lot today, and I think the conference planners were wise to put this particular talk at the end of the day, because after hearing from so many disciplines I think now we are just gonna settle back into scripture. And I hope that will be comforting for you.

This work that I am offering you today on Psalm 35 is a little snippet out of commentary that I am just finishing. It is at the publisher. A commentary on the first 50 psalms. And it is attempting to read the psalter through its own theology and to look at the psychology of the psalmist and the different voices in the psalms.

The interplay among the characters in the psalms and the different voices. And as you know, the psalter is heavily laden with lament psalms. And especially the first part of the psalter, where I’ve been spending my time. And some of these lament psalms are troubling to Christians. And yet the psalter was troubling to me when I started to work on it, because I think it may be the most commented upon text in all of human history.

And who am I to have anything to say about the Psalms. So, I thought about that, and I think as much as some Christians may have trouble with some of the Psalms, even the first Psalm, I’ve read people have even trouble with the first Psalm for a variety of reasons, there’s something about the Psalms that will not let us go.

We have pocket editions of them. We have independent translations of them. We have power phrases of them. We have poems on the poems of them. And there is something alluring about the Psalms for Jews and for Christians that keep it on the top of our list all the time and in trouble, the lament psalms speak to us in trouble, and the psalms of praise speak to us in times of joy.

But there is something about the lament psalms I think that is particularly drawing because the lament psalms and particularly the imprecatory psalms of which I’m going to speak about one, they allow us to be sad. They allow us to grieve. They allow us to complain in ways that other parts of our religious traditions may be uncomfortable with.

So, I see these Psalms as little pressure valves that enable us to escape into the inner resources of our pain and suffering and our joy, all at the same time. I think something like that is what makes them so alluring.

So, with that I’d like us to begin by reading Psalm 35 together that you have a handout or you have the pew Bible if you don’t have a handout. Contend Oh Lord with those who contend with me. Fight against those who fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler and rise up to help me. Draw the spear and javelin against my pursuers.

Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Let them be put to shame and dishonor, who seek after my life. Let them be turned back and confounded, who devise evil against me. Let them be like chaff before the wind, with the angel of the Lord driving them on. Let their way be dark and slippery with the angel of the Lord pursuing them, for without cause, they hid their net for me. Without cause, they dug a pit for my life.

Let ruin come on them unawares and let the net that they hid ensnare them. Let them fall in it to their ruin. Then my soul shall rejoice in the Lord, exalting in his deliverance. All my bones shall say, O Lord who is like you, you deliver the weak from those too strong for them. The weak and needy from those who despoil them. Malicious witnesses rise up. They ask me about things I do not know. They would pay me evil for good.

My soul is forlorn, but as for me, when they were sick, I wore sackcloth. I afflicted myself with fasting. I prayed with head down and in mourning, but at my stumbling they gathered in glee. They gathered together against me, ruffians whom I did not know tore at me without ceasing. They impiously mocked more and more gnashing at me with their teeth. How long O Lord will you look on? Rescue me from their ravages, my life from the lions. Then I will thank you in the great congregation, in the mighty throng I will praise you.

Do not let my treacherous enemies rejoice over me or those who hate me without cause, wink the eye, for they do not speak peace, but they conceive deceitful words against those who are quiet in the land. They open wide their malice against me. They say “Aha aha our eyes have seen it.” you have seen Oh Lord, do not be silent. Oh Lord, do not be far from me. Wake up, bestir yourself for my defense, for my cause, my God and my Lord. Vindicate me Oh Lord my God, according to your righteousness and do not let them rejoice over me. Do not let them say to themselves, “Aha we have our heart’s desire.” Do not let them say “We have swallowed you up.” Let all those who rejoice at my calamity be put to shame and confusion. Let those who exalt themselves against me be clothed with shame and dishonor. Let those who desire my vindication, shout for joy and be glad and say evermore. Great is the Lord who delights in the welfare of his servant. Then my tongue shall tell of your righteousness and of your praise, all day long.

This is one of those Psalms that Walter Brueggemann calls a Psalm of Disorientation. Something is radically wrong with the world and Steve Sandage in his talk earlier today also talked about a spiritual pathology, and or spiritual instability.

This is a psalm perhaps of spiritual instability. This person is thrown off and is not afraid to let God know that something is wrong. Now it’s a very long Psalm, thank you for staying with me through the whole long of it. And perhaps your Christian piety takes offense of this. People should not be talking this way.

And if it’s one of those Psalms of Disorientation or instability, you are in the company of many Christians throughout the course of history who tried to clean this up. So, these Psalms are Christianly troubling because they seek retribution against those who have harmed the speaker, when from certain Christian perspectives an offer of forgiveness and the reestablishment of relationship is what Christians would prefer to find.

Sometimes Christians rush very quickly to forgiveness, and that may short-circuit people’s needs to experience to live into their their pain. Psalm 35 is one of the stronger imprecations in which the speaker himself spends himself decrying the contempt he has experienced and asking God to shame those who have scorned him.

The poem tells us that such reprisal is warranted by the untoward behavior of the ruffians who seek the pious speaker’s life, be it literally or figuratively. The theme is sustained through its concluding hope that the speaker’s opponents experience shame, confusion and dishonor, just as he has. On the other hand, the complainant wants the opposite for his supporters, joy and gladness, in order to proclaim God’s righteousness publicly.

The goal is not revenge for its own sake, but in order that retributive justice may prevail to God’s credit. Here is a seemingly perfect portrait of one who feels disrespected and asks God to dishonor those who have insulted him. Like other imprecations and imprecatory verses in some of the Psalms, the aggrieved does not consider taking action himself against his foes. Perhaps he is not in any position to do so, but rather implores God to do so on his behalf.

Even at its rawest, the Psalter seeks retaliation only indirectly. No Psalm that I am aware of advocates direct action against those who harm the speaker. On the contrary, even though it may grate on Christian ears longing for a reconciliatory moment to come quickly, the Psalter is offering a notable theological departure from the tit-for-tat policy of retaliatory revenge as a deterrent for bad behavior. For example found in Exodus 21: 44 to 45 and I’m gonna quote that.

When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman, this is, okay I’m on Exodus 21 okay. Injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage yet no further harm follows. The one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine.

If any harm follows, I’m still in Exodus 21. If any harm follows then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for, hand for, foot for, burn for, now listen to Leviticus 24:19, anyone who maims another, shall suffer the same injury in return. Fracture for, eye for, tooth for, the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.

One who kills an animal shall make restitution for it, but one who kills a human being shall be put to, Deuteronomy 20. You all know Deuteronomy 20 huh? You know what’s coming. If a malicious witness comes forward to accuse someone of wrongdoing, then both parties to dispute shall appear before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days. And the judges shall make thorough inquiry.

If the witness is a false witness, having testified falsely against another, then you shall do to the false witness just as the false witness has meant to do to the other. So, you shall purge the evil from their midst. The rest shall hear and be afraid, functioning as a deterrent, and a crime such as this shall never again be committed among you. Show no pity. Life for, eye for, tooth for, hand for, foot for, okay my argument here is that our psalmist is making a great advance in a society without highly developed courts of law and with no police force. Now I’m going to talk about sympathetic perspectives.

We have to understand what the psalmist was grappling with and not try to think of what the psalmist is grappling with in terms of our own culture and our own, police forces were not invented until the mid 19th century. In his work on revenge and forgiveness, evolutionary social psychologist Michael McCullough argues that revenge and forgiveness are both adaptive mechanisms that were so successful in addressing specific problems that they became ego-syntonic.

The desire for retaliation deters interpersonal and social harm, while forgiveness effectively preserves valuable relationships despite those harms. On this evolutionary view, it seems that the revenge sought from God in Psalm 35 hopes to establish or perhaps even impose, it loosely understood, standards of civility in Israel, and that is a good thing in the long term.

The poet is not interested in the care and nurture of interpersonal relationships in the short term, but in inculcating social reciprocity in the body politic, because he appreciates the ruinous social consequences of angry contempt, the question the poet poses to us is how to deal constructively with scorn.

Scorn is a major theme throughout the psalter that I think has been little recognized because in our own culture, we don’t have the sensibilities around scorn that that ancient culture had, or is scorned cynicism and such. Much later Christians schooled in the power of forgiveness may tend to overlook the destructive power of contempt that the hope of early forgiveness and reconciliation may obscure.

The issue here then is not a hard choice between revenge and forgiveness, wrong and right, but a more subtle question of how to deal with the dysfunction wrought by contempt when people honestly feel misunderstood and disrespected. Wanting to be vindicated in such situations is not untoward because vindication will restore the integrity and confidence of the complainant and encourage her to continue in the good path that she is following.

At the same time to be called to account for sneering is a long-term gain for society if it results in personal growth. The trick is how to manage the dynamic so that both parties emerge from the encounter edified, the pastoral challenge of the scenario is that the wounded not emerge from the incident by becoming smug and that the scorners not emerge from it untouched.

The angry rhetoric here may be stronger than is helpful at least to our ears, especially in the opening three verses of this Psalm that call God to arms against the scoffers, but people with fire in their belly are often given to hyperbole, Christian theology is no stranger to that generalization. Psalm 35 like all the imprecatory psalms, invoking God as agent of retribution for the humiliated speaker enables the speaker to express his hurt safely in the presence of those who empathize with him, that is in the presence of God where he’s safe and the presence of his supporters who are rallying around him.

Evidently the parties to dispute cannot talk to one another and pouring his heart out to God and his listening audience are safe outlets for unstable emotions. Dominic Henkel suggests that, he is a pastoral counselor, suggests that imprecatory psalms may be therapeutic in counseling when handled well.

Used to cling to anger and hurt, however, they may support unhealthy emotions, but employed judiciously, they can provide for catharsis and a way behind pathological grief and anger leaving God to resolve complicated situations. Now I want to turn to the element of seeking to be understood that’s in this poem.

While the initial triplet of verses asks God to make war against the speaker’s foes, the second triplet, verses four to six, makes clear that the real interest of the speaker is not to harm his opponents physically, but to teach them a lesson learned by experiencing the shame that they have caused. God will vindicate him by flummoxing those who have hurt him.

Foiling them is not extrinsic to their behavior toward the speaker although verse eight could be asking for extrinsic punishment, yet the thrust of the psalm is to have the speaker’s foes be taught to stop their bad behavior by experiencing the shame and embarrassment that they have imposed on him.

He wants God to ensnare them in the same net in which they have ensnared him. For the most part, and this may be significant, the speaker wants his tormentors to understand what he is going through and to reflect on their role in causing them harm that they may learn from it. In the terms of our conference here today, the speaker is going for their spiritual maturation. Perhaps part of the motivation behind this perspective on contempt is the chastisement from God is likely to be more effective than chastisement from the one who’s been hurt.

In the latter case the reproach is more likely to fail because being rebuked by someone, by one who one has hurt may arouse defensiveness and lock the person down rather than encourage the self-reflection needed for change, while being corrected by an independent source, here God who has a little more authority than the one who’s been hurt, is more likely to be accepted and reflected upon. The dynamics here call for psychological perspicacity.

Now this I want to focus on Psalm 35 as a private little war. Psalm 35 repeats the cry for retribution previously heard in Psalms 7, 12, and 28, which I don’t expect you all to have memorized, but you have the Bible in the pew if you need a quick refresher. Psalmic poetry like that in Jeremiah 8 and Jeremiah 20, I can give you the exact verses if you like, with the same things as Antone as this Psalm prompted the anti-king theologian Theodore of Mopsuestia in the fourth and fifth century to attribute Psalm 35 to Jeremiah, albeit of course as David’s prophetic anticipation of what Jeremiah would later write of course, since David lived before Jeremiah right, and of course if it’s attributed to David, it couldn’t be written by Jeremiah unless David anticipated Jeremiah.

Anyway that’s, it’s a little temporal sleight of hand there. The suggestion has merit even today, and many people do biblical scholars of which I am not one, but many biblical scholars do attribute a lot of these to Psalms to Jeremiah, because they’re similar to his own corpus. The Older Testament’s support for retribution has of course often been contrasted with Christianity’s interest in divine mercy.

This slightly later anti-king theologian Theodoret of Cyrus pretty much contemporary with Mopsuestia, shared this concern. He cautions readers not to be misled. Now I’m quoting from Theodore. I beseech those reading Psalm 35 not to incur even the slightest harm from the prayer of the righteous man or make it an occasion for curses against one’s enemies, but realize that the inspired author was adopting the way of life sanctioned by the law, not by the Gospels. Looking at this difference therefore realize that what is in keeping with the law and what with grace in particular, it was not to deliver a curse that David said this, rather in inspired fashion he foretold what would clearly come to be.

Even he did not take vengeance on those who wronged him. Theodoret is pointing out that David is leaving chastisement to those who engage in untoward behavior to God, and not taking matters into their own hands.

This is an especially important tropological point for societies lacking effective judicial systems where tribal loyalties tempt people to take revenge, inciting round after round of tribal vendettas that are still with us unfortunately in our world. Recognizing a rupture between the morality of the text and later Christian moral sensibility, Theodoret, he’s later right, fourth century, fifth century. Theodoret advises Christians to wait patiently for God to act as and when he will.

In the meantime it is appropriate to urge God to act in accord with the justice proper to his own character and perhaps the situation at hand that all may be edified.

As suggested above, it would be short-sighted to oppose the Psalm’s focus on retributive justice with a later focus on mercy. While Christians are want to stress divine mercy and forgiveness have chief traits for human emulation, divine wrath is never far from Western Christian concern, and it is often articulated in terms of the great divine sanction. This is clearly evident in Matthew and John in Revelation.

To stimulate fear of God in order to arouse recoil from sin assuming that what constitutes sin is recognized by those who commit it. The centrality of the theme of debt and retributive justice in second millennium Western Christian theology beginning with Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, although partly adumbrated by a Gustin of Hippo.

Attest the desire for standards of law and order in an Europe struggle, in early medieval Europe, struggling its way behind what we once called the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of Mediterranean civilization in the fifth century. As Anselm of Canterbury well knew, the challenge in dealing with offended and offender is not to insist, simply insist on choosing mercy over retribution in order to quiet things down, but to employ both astutely and effectively for the well-being of the whole body, to employ both justice and mercy astutely for the well-being of the whole body within which the parties to the problem are held. Now I want to think of Psalm 35 as a public matter.

Recognizing that the poet has said what might be read as a private little war between the two or three individuals in the public space occupied by God and the speaker’s friends leads to a further perspective on this and perhaps other imprecatory or lament psalms even more generally. These have often been read as personal complaints about soured personal relationships. Yet there is another angle from which to view them.

Although whatever has transpired between the parties has undoubtedly hurt the speaker, it could be that the encounter speaks to a larger issue. The position of those faithful to God, yet ridiculed by those Israelites or Jews, depending on how you periodize this, who apostatized, as was rampant during the divided monarchy, when he began to rule good King Hezekiah undertook the cleansing of the house of the Lord to reclaim the ancestral faith of God. I’m referring here to second chronicles 29 through 31.

He sent emissaries throughout the north as well as to his own kingdom to urge people to come to Jerusalem for passover because apostasy and paganism had deeply infiltrated Israel and Judah. The chronicler reports that the mission to the north by Hezekiah’s emissaries, missionaries I guess you could say, was not very successful, and the missionaries were met with contempt.

And the quote says I’m quoting now from second chronicles 30 verse 10. They laughed them to scorn and mock them, these emissaries from Jerusalem. The word l’aag, to mock or to scorn that’s the Hebrew word l’aag, to mock or to scorn is used birth both by the chronicler and by this poem.

That is those faithful to God are derided by those who should be worshiping God alongside them. More evidence for this perspective can be brought to strengthen the case for this public perspective on the poem, even if such an interpretation might be pastorally helpful, it casts the imprecation in a fresh light.

The contempt of which the speaker complains would not then be personal, but theological. In mocking God’s prophets or Hezekiah’s emissaries, his adversaries are mocking that the complainant’s adversaries are mocking God, and the psalmist is asking God to vindicate himself, because he is being rejected precisely by those who should be worshiping him.

Yet further if as I am persuaded, the psalter as a whole insists on Israel’s faithful worship of God as an outreach tool, to make God known among the nations as King Cyrus recognized, when he sent the exiles home with financial support to rebuild Jerusalem. The psalmist’s plea for vindication is at the same time deeply personal, because they have taken on this ministry of evangelism.

Yet for God to forgive Israel’s apostasy, would not quite be appropriate either for God to forgive and reconcile his own people, who pointedly reject him would be strange, for it would imply that God accepts the paganism into which they have fallen. That would undermine belief in the universality of the one god that is the bedrock belief on which Israel’s mission to the Gentiles is predicated. Indeed it is the foundation of Israelite religion, Judaism and Christianity.

Psalm 78 for example points to the difficult position Israel has put God in. Punishment does not seem to deter Israel’s apostasy but neither does God’s guidance and care endear him to them. God is frustrated or fusturated as my five-year-old said.

Psalm 78 seems to stop rather than conclude, if you look at the end of the psalm, it just seems to stop rather than conclude with the selection of David as God’s Shepherd of the people. The poet knows that the tortured story of the love affair between God and Israel is unfinished at the end of Psalm 78. And we know that too, just to press this interpretation one step further, when people are sneered at for pursuing a just but unpopular cause, it is difficult not to take the scorn personally and to hold fast to the mission dispassionately if this psalm or at least part of it is the cry of frustration at the failure to bring Israel back to God or some analogous event, the complainant might be plagued by doubts about how well-prepared he was for this mission, how well he carried it out or how he might have done it better because ultimately he feels himself accountable to God for the failure of the mission as witnessed by the scorn heaped upon him.

Now I come to my conclusion. In brief, the tropological sense of Psalm 35 depends on how we read it. If we read it as a personal complaint about a private little war, its tropological value is in cultivating self-restraint and inviting a third party, in this case God, to take our case.

It does not countenance a stoic attitude that such abuse should be allowed to bother us, not be allowed to bother us. By giving the matter over to God the complainant rescues himself from taking action against his opponents, thus protecting them from his hot anger, while being able to express it in a safe space of Prayer.

By venting the hurt and anger verbally, he prevents the incident from expanding into what could become a tribal vendetta. If however we read this poem against the religious situation in Israel, where the speaker feels marginalized because he worships God amidst numbers of people who have abandoned God for other gods, even the Gods of the mall, and the speaker is wearied at the slender results of his efforts to bring them home, its tropology is quite different.

In that case the poet is disclosing the misery of one called to a difficult mission that one pursues with integrity, yet is foiled and he struggles with anger, defeat, frustration, and disappointment at having failed at his appointed task before God. On this view, the cry is to be liberated from the onerous mission while knowing that that would be to abandon God and that he cannot do.

In his frustration, he tells God that he, God will have to do more to rebuke his people to stop the paganism in Israel for his Messenger is exhausted. Perhaps the takeaway for us here is to know our limits.

Even when charged with a mission we feel passionately about. The speaker persevered too long until he burnt himself out, at which point he almost became a danger to others, yet even at that point he prevented himself from harming others. Thank you. [audience applauding]

Moderator: We have some time for questions or comments.

Thank You Ellen for that. I found your argument really compelling about how the psalmist leaves the retributive justice up to God, and how that’s a major moral advancement. What I was confused about as early on you said some things about how his motive in that was edification. Edification of the perpetrators right, the mockers.

That was less clear to me. That part of the argument it was less clear to me what the evidence was, what the reason was for thinking that he was motivated by the desire to edify here as opposed to a sort of broader desire, maybe about the society being edified right.

All right what I meant by that was if the speaker or the psalmist, if the psalmist is the speaker, by not taking justice into his own hands, by giving it to God, he believes that God is going to find a way to chastise the perpetrator in ways that the perpetrator will benefit from. That God’s teaching of the perpetrator pointing out what he has done wrong and enabling him to reflect on that perhaps, because the psalmists are really sure that the wicked will fall.

There’s a strain of incipient atheism in the psalter and incipient theodicy that I think is not adequately recognized. We think of Job as the book about theodicy, but the psalter’s really about theodicy too, and there’s a deep horrifying question throughout the Psalms that I’ve worked on that God really may not be there, or even worse, God may not be. And yet the overarching theme that I see is I can’t go there. I may know that in my head but I can’t go there even if my head tells me that that makes sense.

So, the psalmists now, not the speakers, now the psalmist I think is assuming that however God takes up the Justice of his cause, it will be to help the perpetrator grow. And I think you know when we, we talk a lot about victims and perpetrators in our culture today and I think this dynamic of how we, even if the perpetrator and the victim cannot conciliate, there are other people who intervene. Now in our culture we have counselors and the law and all these other intervening features like God in the text and what we want is for the healing of the perpetrator, and I think that’s underneath what not the speaker but the psalmist maybe going for. Yes, you want to, someone in the back need the mic.

Participant: I think that there might be some truth that sometimes the writer, the psalter would be wanting God to administer his justice to the point where the perpetrator would benefit from it, but I think at other times in this psalm as well as in some of these psalms, I think the psalmist was just being very honest. He was really cheesed off with the perpetrators and wanted them to be [slashes air] you know.

Right.

Participant: So, I think the point is not so much that the motive was so pure that he wanted the benefit of the perpetrator, but that they were honest and raw in their feelings to express them, but at least they didn’t act them out. So, it’s important, I think it’s a differentiation in my mind between those two new one’s perspectives.

So, for me the psalms give us permission to be honest with our feelings, to really tell God as it is and to even get angry at God if we have to, but in the honesty of that raw interaction with God to let God take over and then lead.

Absolutely and there is a desire for the destruction of the enemies throughout many of the psalms. I think and the honest, as I said when I started, the honesty of these Psalms really I think needs to be appreciated, but I think for us too, as the, let’s think of ourselves as the victim let’s say in these Psalms which can be also dangerous of victimizing yourself by reading these Psalms when you haven’t really experienced the kind of suffering that is being talked about in the psalms, that’s a danger, another danger I think in the Psalms that you can self victimize and enlarge the circumstance that you are actually in and totalize it and so on and so forth, I think that’s very psychologically risky.

Nevertheless I think I want to find ways of seeing both and one way that I’m doing it in my commentary is to separate the voice of the speaker from the voice of the psalmist that the voice of the speaker is the person who finds himself in this dilemma, but the speaker may be the literary creation of the psalmist, and I’m assuming that the psalmist is more in control of the situation than the speaker, because he’s writing a literary art, not just for the moment.

He’s writing these poems for us and I think the psalmists know that they’re writing at least for all of Israel, and I don’t know, maybe that God gave them some inspiration to know that they were writing for us too. And so that’s a space that I want to try to occupy to see both sides of this without, hopefully without letting go of either side.

Participant: It’s a wonderful distinction between dialogue and rhetoric in the Psalms, like in Psalm 42, why are you so troubled, why this and then shift with a metacognitive executive control to have like a clutch system to disengage that trigger and response to then engage in a gear that says hoping God you still have to praise him, then goes back to dialogue and that goes back to a rhetoric.

I like the fact that you mentioned the rhetorical aspect. Do you make any distinction between dialogue and rhetoric like Plato does or like many other that follow the dialogical South perspective do, that in a metacognitive position you could see yourself like Paul sees himself struggling in Roman VII.

The form self verses the transforming self by their reforming self, the Augustinian thought that unless we get in touch with the destructive forces in us, we cannot appreciate the beauty of the God who formed us, and can reform us, and then even transform us and then conform us to the image of Christ.

Beautifully said. So, my commentary is written not as a Bible scholar on the history of the text or even the literary value of the text. I mean I engage in some of that. I’m using the original language.

I’m parsing the verbs and so on and so forth, but I’m writing for us and what I’m hoping by these distinctions to engage both in the raw aggression that encourage us to recognize the raw aggression in us and at the same time to be able to stand back from it and look at the dialogical side of it, so that we can occupy both seats when we read.

I guess now that I’m saying this to you, when that man I know said to me well what do you have to say about the psalms? He wasn’t really contemptuous. He was just curious like could you have anything to say about the Psalms and he was right, and I think if my contribution is anything, it’s at this level of what I’m trying to do with the commentary.