Teach Us to Number Our Days
You sweep them away in their sleep; they are like the new grass of the morning— Psalm 90:5 · Berean Standard Bible
God sweeps people away like someone sweeps in sleep—almost casually, almost without effort. We're as fragile and temporary as grass that appears fresh in the morning.
This follows the stark statement that God is eternal and unchanging, so now Moses shows the contrast: human life, by comparison, is almost wiped away. It's not meant to terrify you into despair but to recalibrate your sense of what matters.
Moses, using vivid metaphor
You see this kind of language throughout Scripture—the prophets using it to call people away from pride and back toward humility and trust. Isaiah will echo this exact image centuries later.
God sweeps human lives away like those asleep, comparing our existence to grass that emerges fresh but quickly vanishes.
The verb זָרָם (zaram, 'sweep away') suggests violent, effortless removal—a stream in flood carries all before it. This verse introduces the botanical simile that will dominate verses 5-6, drawing on prophetic imagery (Isaiah 40:6-8) that became central to medieval reflection on human frailty. The metaphor of death coming 'in sleep' (שֵׁנָה, shenah) suggests both the gentleness and the inevitability of human terminus.
The psalmist continues the meditation, now shifting from cosmic timescales to the particular experience of human mortality.
The grass image becomes the Lenten tradition's fundamental emblem of human transience, deployed by Isaiah and rearticulated in 1 Peter 1:24-25, where it contrasts human ephemerality with God's enduring word.
3You return man to dust, saying, “Return, O sons of mortals.”
4For in Your sight a thousand years are but a day that passes, or a watch of the night.
5You sweep them away in their sleep; they are like the new grass of the morning—
6in the morning it springs up new, but by evening it fades and withers.
7For we are consumed by Your anger and terrified by Your wrath.
Read all of Psalm 90 — The oldest psalm, attributed to Moses. A meditation on time and what makes every day precious.
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