Visible Goodness
Day 274 – 1 October
Taste It for Yourself
“O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” (Psalm 34:8, KJV)
The Fifth Taste
Your tongue can tell you a good deal before your mind has caught up with it. It knows sweet from sour in an instant, it enjoys salt and recoils from bitterness, and it knows a fifth thing as well, the deep, rounded savour of a slow-cooked stock or a ripe tomato, which had no scientific name until a chemist in Tokyo sat down to eat.
His name was Kikunae Ikeda, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and in the spring of 1907 a bowl of tofu simmered in kombu dashi (a stock made from kelp) convinced him that the depth in it was a taste in its own right. He boiled kelp down by the kilogram, and by February 1908 he had drawn some thirty grams of crystals out of twelve kilograms of it, crystals of glutamate that carried the very taste he had noticed. He named it umami (roughly, deliciousness) and described it as “a common and yet absolutely singular taste”.
Common it certainly was, since Ikeda added nothing to anyone’s broth. Roman cooks had splashed the same savour over their dinners in garum (a fermented fish sauce rich in the substance Ikeda isolated), centuries before anyone in a laboratory went looking for it. What changed in 1907 was one man’s attention: he tasted slowly enough to notice what had been in the bowl all along, and he gave it a name.
Naming it and persuading the world proved to be two different tasks. Western textbooks long went on listing four basic tastes, and receptors on the tongue for Ikeda’s fifth taste were identified only in 2000, by researchers at the University of Miami. Cooks had little need of the paperwork, because the spoon had answered the question for them long before. The comparison reaches only so far, since glutamate is a molecule a chemist can weigh and the goodness of God is the goodness of a Person, yet at one point the two meet, for each is known best by tasting it for yourself.
An Invitation Instead of an Argument
Tasting for yourself is the very kind of knowing David asked for when he wrote, “O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” The psalms can reason when they need to, and David had a poet’s gift, yet this line reaches past reasons to the tongue. Its verb is ta’am (to taste), the plain Hebrew word for sampling food, and like many ordinary verbs it stretches from the mouth to the whole of experience.
Experience is exactly what the word means when Proverbs sketches its capable woman in its closing chapter: “She perceiveth that her merchandise is good” (Proverbs 31:18). The word translated “perceiveth” is that same verb, for she tastes that her trading is good because she has lived with it long enough to know it at first hand, which is precisely the knowing David meant. His verb is plural as well, ta’amu (taste, all of you), so the invitation goes out to everyone within earshot at once, and it sets tasting before seeing, as though this goodness is found on the tongue first and understood afterwards.
Goliath’s Sword at the Gate of Gath
What David understood afterwards, he had learned first-hand at one of the lowest points of his life. He “arose, and fled that day for fear of Saul, and went to Achish the king of Gath” (1 Samuel 21:10), which meant seeking safety in Goliath’s home town with Goliath’s own sword at his side, the blade the priest at Nob had handed him on the way (1 Samuel 21:8–9). The king’s servants recognised him as the man whose victories the women of Israel had sung, and David “was sore afraid of Achish the king of Gath” (1 Samuel 21:12).
His fear pushed him into an act of pure survival: “And he changed his behaviour before them, and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard” (1 Samuel 21:13). The giant-killer of the valley of Elah was reduced to that, and the ruse carried him out of Gath alive, because Achish turned on his servants in what sounds like exasperation: “Have I need of mad men, that ye have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my presence?” (1 Samuel 21:15).
The heading above Psalm 34, part of the Hebrew text itself, ties the psalm to that very episode: “A Psalm of David, when he changed his behaviour before Abimelech; who drove him away, and he departed.” Samuel’s account names the king Achish, and the name Abimelech may have been a royal title among the Philistines more than a personal name, much as Pharaoh served in Egypt. Whichever way that question falls, the heading points to the same humiliation, and it carries a surprise in the word “behaviour”.
The Word Behind “Behaviour”
Behind “behaviour”, in the heading and in the story alike, stands ta’mo (his taste), the noun ta’am (taste) with a pronoun attached. The same noun names the flavour of the manna in Exodus, and it also names good sense, discretion, the judgement of a wise mind, so when David “changed his behaviour” before the Philistines, the Hebrew says that he altered his taste, disguising his own good sense in order to stay alive.
With that word in your ear, the psalm sounds different. The man who had to hide his good sense at a foreign gate wrote an alphabet of praise afterwards, its lines running in order through the Hebrew letters, and when they reached tet (the ninth letter), he wrote ta’amu (taste, all of you). Rabbi Raymond Apple heard a play on words there, and it is easy to see why, since the fugitive who once changed his taste to save his life ended up inviting the whole world to taste the goodness he had found steady beneath him when everything else gave way. His recovered good sense went straight to praise, and the psalm opens with “his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1).
Goodness Gath Could Never Touch
That praise rose out of a place with nothing good in it, and the invitation this whole month is built on belongs to that same day. The second half of the verse explains how: “blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” The King James “trusteth” renders the Hebrew chasah (to take refuge), the word for running under shelter, and David had run for shelter to the wrong king. When he cried out from the far side of that ordeal (Psalm 34:6), he found a refuge whose goodness had never moved an inch through any of it. The “blessed” of the verse, ashrei (how happy), is simply what life under that shelter tastes like.
That taste owes everything to the source of the goodness. It was never in the circumstances, dreadful as they were, and never in David, who was at his least impressive; it belonged to the LORD, who was as good at the gate of Gath as He had ever been among the sheepfolds of Bethlehem. Tasting changes the one who tastes and leaves the goodness itself untouched, so that low day at Gath changed everything about David’s circumstances and nothing about the goodness of the LORD. The Psalter says so in plain words, “The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works” (Psalm 145:9), which means the fugitive at the gate tasted the same goodness that lies open to every soul who takes refuge in Him, with nobody first in the queue.
That open goodness is where this month begins. Through August these pages were seasoned with salt, which the world knows by taste, and through September they were lit by a lamp, which it knows by sight, and David’s verse holds the same two senses turned the other way round: before anyone tastes salt in you or sees light on you, you are invited to taste and see the goodness of the LORD. Peter borrowed the image for new believers, “If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious” (1 Peter 2:3), and the Lord he meant was Christ, so the Christian life begins with a taste of His kindness. Every goodness that becomes visible in a life this month will be that taste showing through, and no good deed will ever add a grain to the goodness it comes from.
Slowly, on a Thursday
The goodness it comes from is best tasted slowly, since nobody gulps a fine stock. The first morning of October is a good one to begin unhurried: take one good thing the day hands you, the warmth of the first hot drink or a kind message from a friend, and let it rest on the tongue of your attention the way Ikeda lingered over his bowl, until you see what has been there from the start. Then name its source aloud, because every such taste is a small sampling of the goodness of the LORD, and naming it is how a spoonful becomes a meal.
Some mornings the meal is harder to find, and something sends you running for cover to a Gath of your own, whether an old habit or a clever excuse. On those mornings carry the fear to the One whose goodness stayed steady through David’s hour at the gate. The happiness in that verse belongs to anyone who trusts Him, and it grows in experience every time a person turns to Him for shelter.
Whoever shelters in Him has something worth sharing, so let what you have tasted reach somebody else before the day is out. David wanted company in his praise, “O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together” (Psalm 34:3), and the goodness you taste this morning is the goodness a tired colleague or a neighbour on the landing may see in you by evening, perhaps in nothing grander than the tone of your voice.
Declaration
Before a single good deed leaves my hands this month, I want the taste of goodness in my own mouth. I have heard goodness described and debated, and none of it has ever fed me the way one real taste can. I bring my ordinary morning and my hardest hour alike to the One who is good all the way through, and I take shelter in that goodness in place of the corners I usually run to. I expect no change in the goodness; any change will be in me, as I slow down and give the good already in front of me my full attention. What I taste, I let show, in a gentler reply and a longer patience with whoever needs it. The goodness was there before I tasted it, and it will still be there when I come back for more.
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