Psalms 102:6
I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins.
BSB
ASV
I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am become as an owl of the waste places.
KJV
I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.
I have become like the pelican of the wilderness. There are said to be two kinds of these birds. One lives in the waters, and its food is fish; and one lives in the wilderness, and its food is venomous creatures, that is, serpents and crocodiles and lizards. Now these birds are called in Latin 'onocrotali.' To that one therefore have I become like, which lives in the wilderness, which eats venomous creatures: that is, my food was to me as it were poison. I have become like the night-raven in its dwelling-place.
I am like a pelican of the wilderness, a mournful and even hideous object, the very image of desolation. I am like an owl of the desert; loving solitude, moping among ruins, hooting discordantly.
1834–1892
IN the 102nd Psalm, the Believer likens himself to an owl, and in the 103rd Psalm, in almost the parallel verse, he is compared to an eagle. What a blessing it is that the saints of God, in the olden times, were moved by the Holy Spirit to write down their experiences. And what a mercy it is that they wrote them out so fully! They have not given us miniatures so much as full-length portraits. Especially was this the case with David—again and again he draws himself to the very life.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The walk8
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
Isaiah 38:14I chirp like a swallow or crane; I moan like a dove. My eyes grow weak as I look upward. O Lord, I am oppressed; be my security.”
leads to
We all growl like bears and moan like doves. We hope for justice, but find none, for salvation, but it is far from us.
I am weary from my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.
The survivors will escape and live in the mountains, moaning like doves of the valley, each for his own iniquity.
I have become a brother of jackals, a companion of ostriches.
Through
Revelation 18:2And he cried out in a mighty voice: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a lair for demons and a haunt for every unclean spirit, every unclean bird, and every detestable…
leads to
Suddenly Babylon has fallen and been shattered. Wail for her; get her balm for her pain; perhaps she can be healed.
Then a second angel followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, who has made all the nations drink the wine of the passion of her immorality.”
Babylon will become a heap of rubble, a haunt for jackals, an object of horror and scorn, without inhabitant.
So the desert creatures and hyenas will live there and ostriches will dwell there. It will never again be inhabited or lived in from generation to generation.