HEBREW WORD STUDY – SCORPION – SHAVAR  שבר  Shin Beth Resh

Psalms 34:18: “The LORD [is] nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.”

The occasion for this Psalm as we learn in the first verse is when David is fleeing from King Saul and seeks refuge with King Abimelech of Gath.  This is where he pretended to be insane – I Samuel 21:10-15.  Most commentators say the Lord being nigh to the broken hearted is a reference to being sorrowful over your sins.  I believe they say that because the remainder of the verse says he saves those of a contrite spirit.  They take this to mean that a person who is broken-hearted over his sin has a humble spirit and that it the type of person that God will save. 

The whole context of this Psalm, however, seems to have nothing to do with sin and redemption, at least as a reference to David. I believe if we stop to consider David’s plight we will see a different context. David trusted King Saul, he honored King Saul, yet in a fit of jealousy and anger King Saul tried to kill David. Imagine how you would feel.  One day you are a national hero and the next you are fleeing for your life with a price on your head.  I think the average person, like me, would feel betrayed, dejected and heartbroken.  I would also feel really humbled to have reached a point where you are pretending to be insane to save your own gizzard. 

This verse is not really targeting the sinner who is repenting, although I see no reason to not make that application.  However, the real application is directed to those who have been betrayed, stabbed in the back, rejected and suffering a broken heart.  I recently had a woman in my disability bus who told me that her husband had cheated on her. She wasn’t sure if the circumstances, however, were truly adulterous. 

Well, I am not a theologian so I cannot rule if a certain circumstance is adulterous or not.  However, having spent the last fifteen years searching for the heart of God I could comment on what I believed God saw in the situation. I told her that adultery is just a word.  Jesus said that if a man looks upon a woman to lust he has committed adultery – Matthew 5:28.  What Jesus is saying is that there are many ways to look at adultery but God sees one major thing, not an act but a cause.  If a man looks upon a woman to lust and it breaks the heart of the wife, that is adultery whether he committed the physical act or not. God is not concerned about some physical act, He is concerned about the consequences of an act. The consequences of the act by this woman’s husband resulted in breaking her heart. Call it adultery, lust, fornication or whatever you wish, what this husband did was sin against God and his wife. 

Now you may say; “How did he sin against God?” He sinned against his wife by breaking her heart. What did he do to God?  Well, tell me something.  If you have a child that had his heart set on winning a prize and you watched him work toward that goal, talk about that prize and dream about it and then discover he lost and you see him sitting off alone, heart broken, how do you think you as a parent would feel? Your heart would be broken as well for that child. So, this man not only broke his wife’s heart, he broke God’s heart as well for God’s heart was broken over the grief of this faithful wife. 

The word broken is shavar which is in a Niphal participle form.  The word shavar means to be shatter into splinters. It is a word used by workers in a quarry who chip away at rocks to make them fit the project the stones will be used for.  As a Niphal particle it would read that God is near to those whose heart is being chipped away at. As a Niphal it would have a reflexive nature to it, indicating that the broken hearted person is chipping away at his or her heart.  David probably spent a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong, what he might have done wrong, why was Saul so hateful to him and the more he thought of it the more it grieved him.

The Lord is nigh to those whose hearts are breaking.  The word nigh is qarav which means to be near but near in the sense of being a relative. God is a relative to the broken hearted. But the word is more than that.  It is also the word for a scorpion.   Scorpions have a bad reputation as being venomous with a painful often fatal sting.  Actually, most scorpions are quite harmless to humans. Of the 2,000 known species of scorpions only 25 are known to have a venom that is harmful to a human.  Only one species in the United States has a venom that could be harmful and maybe fatal to a small child just due to his size. The ancients observed the scorpions and were fascinated by their mating rituals.  A male and female would grab hold of each other and do a little dance together.  Eventually, the male would move the female to a safe out of the way site to consummate their relationship.  It might be this intimacy that David is referring to when he says that God is qarav to the broken hearted.  God is a close relative of the broken hearted who joins Himself with the broken hearted in a little dance culminating into an intimacy.

Why does God give such special attention to the broken hearted?  Well, as I said, when someone you love has a broken heart, your heart is also broken.  But there is another reason God has a close relationship with the broken hearted. His heart is not only broken for the ones he loves who have suffered a broken heart, but we break His heart daily. He knows better than anyone what a broken heart is like. 

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