Psalm 102

The heading is unusual: it does not name a writer but names a situation — a prayer of the afflicted when he is faint and pours out his complaint. Ancient collections sometimes labeled a song by its use rather than its author, so that anyone in that condition could pick it up and pray it.

The birds in it are exact. The desert owl and the ruin-haunting bird are creatures of abandoned places, and the sparrow alone on the housetop is a picture any Israelite could see. Houses had flat roofs used for sleeping, drying figs, and prayer; a single bird up there at night was the image of a man with nobody left.

The mourning customs are equally concrete. Ashes were poured on the head and mixed into the bread of grief, and food was left untouched until a man's bones showed. The shadow that stretches out at evening was the ordinary way of telling time — a lengthening shadow meant the day was almost gone.

Then the psalm turns to a heap of rubble. Servants of God take pleasure in Zion's stones and pity her dust. That is the language of people standing at a demolished wall, and it is why this prayer has always been read against the fall of the city in 586 BC and the years before the walls went back up.