Pathway
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Key Words
| Word | Gloss | Psalms |
|---|---|---|
| דֶּרָךְ | “pathway, road.” | Ps. 1:1, 6; 2:12; 5:9; 10:5; 18:22, 31, 33; 25:4, 5, 8, 9, 12; 27:11; 32:8; 35:6; 36:5; 37:5, 7, 14, 23, 34; 39:2; 49:14; 50:23; 51:15; 67:3; 77:14; 80:13; 81:14; 85:14; 86:11; 89:42; 91:11; 95:10; 101:2, 6; 103:7; 107:17, 40; 110:7; 119:1, 3, 5, 14, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 37, 59, 168; 128:1; 138:5; 139:3, 24; 143:8; 145:17; 146:9 |
| אֹרַח | "path, course" | Ps. 8:9; 16:11; 17:4; 19:6; 25:4, 10; 27:11; 44:19; 119:15, 101, 104, 128; 139:3; 142:4 |
| מַעֲגָל | "track" | Ps. 17:5; 23:3; 65:12; 140:6 |
| חוּץ | "outside street" | Ps. 18:43; 31:12; 41:7 |
| נָתִיב | "path" | Ps. 78:50; 119:35 |
| מְסִלָּה | “highway” | Ps. 84:6 |
Ancient Setting
According to Ray Pritz, “Most of the roads mentioned in the Bible would have been local ways that were little more than wide walking paths. These were usually unpaved, followed the topography, and for the most part would not have been used by vehicles.”[1]
Target Domains
Lifestyle
The image of a pathway pervades the Psalms as an image of a person’s lifestyle. It emerges from the underlying conceptual metaphor, “Life is a Journey."[2] By this metaphor, the more abstract concept of “life,” with particular attention to the ethical decisions involved in it, is structured in terms of a journey, or more specifically, a journey by foot along a path. The following table shows how the elements of the pathway image (the source domain) are mapped onto the elements of the topic of life (the target domain).
| Source Domain: JOURNEY | Mapping | Target Domain: LIFE |
|---|---|---|
| Pathway, which may be crooked/straight (e.g., 5:9; 146:9), dark/light (e.g., 35:6), etc. | → | Lifestyle |
| Traveler (e.g., 1:6) | → | Person as a moral agent |
| Act of choosing a path (e.g., 25:8) | → | Act of choosing to engage in a particular lifestyle |
| Act of walking (e.g., 32:8; 86:11; 119:3), running (e.g., 119:32), standing (e.g., 1:1, 36:5), or guarding a path (e.g., 18:22; 39:2) | → | Act of living, making ethical choices |
| Destination (e.g., 2:12; 16:11) | → | Consequences of living a particular lifestyle |
| Leading/Guiding along the path (e.g., 27:11; 139:24) | → | Giving moral instruction for life |
- In Psalm 1, the image of divergent pathways maps onto the different lifestyles of the righteous and of the wicked.