In the last study we saw that you are protected as an honored guest even in your enemies’ presence. Now the psalm adds a further gesture of that honor: “you anoint my head with oil.”

Having already welcomed you to a prepared table and secured you against enemies by the customs of hospitality, your host now performs one more gesture, a further mark of honor. Anointing the head with oil was not an incidental detail in the ancient world. It was a recognized and meaningful custom, reserved specifically for guests being treated with special distinction.

Oil served practical purposes in that world. It soothed sun-parched skin, carried fragrance, and offered relief after the heat and dust of travel. But when a host anointed the head of an arriving guest, the gesture meant more than the merely practical. It was a formal mark of welcome and honor, a way of signaling that the guest was valued and being received with the fullest measure of hospitality the host could offer. To withhold this gesture from an honored guest was itself a meaningful slight, a failure to extend the welcome that custom required.

This background sheds real light on a moment recorded in the Gospel of Luke. When a woman anoints Jesus’s feet with ointment in the house of a Pharisee named Simon, Jesus responds to his host’s silent disapproval by comparing Simon’s own hospitality to the woman’s actions. Among his comparisons, Jesus notes that Simon did not anoint his head with oil, while this woman anointed even his feet. Jesus’s remark assumes exactly the custom described in this psalm. A gracious host was expected to anoint the head of an honored guest. Simon, for all his outward correctness, had neglected this basic courtesy. The woman, by contrast, went far beyond what custom required, an act of devotion that exceeded even the expected gesture of hospitality.

Reading this line of the psalm alongside that scene in Luke brings the ancient custom into sharper focus. The anointing of the head was a recognized marker of honored welcome, understood well enough that its absence could be noticed and remarked on centuries later, in a very different setting. When the psalmist declares that God anoints his head with oil, he is claiming to have received this very mark of distinguished hospitality from his divine host. He is not merely fed and protected. He is honored, in the same manner the most valued guests were received in that culture.

This detail adds a further layer to the picture the psalm has been building since the banquet imagery began. You have moved from being cared for as a vulnerable sheep, to being welcomed as a guest, to being protected from enemies by the obligations of hospitality, and now to being honored with the very gesture reserved for guests of the highest distinction. Each image builds on the last, describing a relationship marked not merely by provision, but by genuine honor.

There is something worth sitting with in the fact that this same gesture, so central to the psalmist’s experience of God’s favor, could later be withheld by a host toward Jesus himself, only to be exceeded by the devotion of a woman whose social standing granted her no obligation to extend it. Your own confidence, that you have been honored as a guest, is a picture of the kind of welcome that grace, rather than mere social custom, ultimately provides.

Prayer

Lord, thank you for the many ways you have honored me, far beyond what I could ever have expected or deserved. Where I have grown used to receiving your care without noticing the honor in it, open my eyes again to see it freshly. Let me receive your welcome the way the woman in Simon’s house did, with grateful devotion rather than quiet indifference. I ask this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Read the complete series of devotionals on Psalm 23 by clicking here: “Studies on Psalm 23.”

NOTE

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Claude Mariottini
Emeritus Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

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