Taste and See

The verse puts tasting before seeing, and the order matters. Seeing keeps its object at a distance. Tasting takes it in. The Psalm asks for the second first, and promises that the knowing will follow.

The Hebrew goes further. The verb is ta’am, to taste. The noun from the same root means taste, and also judgment, discernment and good sense. The King James Version renders it as “advice”, “discretion” and “understanding” in other places. In Hebrew, having taste and having judgment are one word, and so are tasting a thing and coming to understand it.

The same word turns up in the Psalm’s heading, which sets the song at the moment David “changed his behaviour before Abimelech.” The story is told in 1 Samuel 21. In a hostile king’s court, David saved his life by pretending to be mad. The word for the sense he pretended to lose is ta’am. A psalm about tasting God’s goodness begins with a man who had to give up his good sense, or seem to, in order to survive.

Two texts that never met say the same thing. A father in the Upanishads tells his son to taste the water from the surface, the middle and the bottom (Salt in Water). A Psalm tells its listener to taste and see. Each one locates knowing in the mouth before the eye.