Bob Marley begins in the hold of a slave ship. Old pirates robbed him, he sings, and sold him to merchant ships, minutes after they took him from the bottomless pit. Then the song turns. His hand was made strong by the hand of the Almighty. His generation moves forward in triumph.
The chorus is a request. Will you help him sing these songs of freedom? Redemption songs are all he has ever had. The second verse borrows a famous charge: free yourselves from mental slavery, because no one but ourselves can free our minds. He asks how long the world will kill its prophets while the rest of us stand and watch. Some say it is part of the plan, he sings, and the book has to be fulfilled.
That is the pattern, sung by a man who knew he was dying. Redemption has a name. He sings it as fact. He has not yet seen it arrive, and he asks others to keep singing until it does.
The Song and the Singer
Marley wrote it while fighting the cancer that killed him. He was diagnosed with melanoma in 1977 (Observation Blogger). The song closed Uprising, the last album he released, in 1980. He died on May 11, 1981, at 36 (American Songwriter).
He first cut it with the full band. Chris Blackwell of Island Records suggested he try it alone, as a folk song (Rolling Stone). The version that closes the album is Marley and an acoustic guitar. There is no reggae rhythm in it at all (Wikipedia). After a career of full bands, the last word on his last record is one man's voice.
The line about mental slavery is not his own. In October 1937, speaking in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey said, "We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind" (Wikipedia). Marley set Garvey's sentence to music.
Sold to the Merchants
Read the first verse with Genesis open and it sounds familiar. Joseph's brothers stripped him and threw him into a pit. "And the pit was empty, there was no water in it" (Genesis 37:24). Then a caravan came by. "Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver" (Genesis 37:28). Taken out of a pit and sold to merchants.
Marley's next line echoes how Joseph's story ends. On his deathbed Jacob blessed Joseph and said that "the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob" (Genesis 49:24). Marley sings that his own hand was made strong by the hand of the Almighty. Whether he meant the echo or carried it in his ear from childhood, it is there.
Joseph's story names the redemption inside the slavery. Years later he stood before the brothers who sold him and told them, "God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance" (Genesis 45:7). The pit was real. So was the deliverance that came out of it.
I Know That My Redeemer Liveth
Marley sang of redemption as a dying man who had not yet seen it. Scripture has an older song like that. Job had lost his children and his health. His skin was rotting. His friends had turned on him. From the ash heap he said this:
For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. (Job 19:25–27)
The Hebrew word for redeemer is go'el, the kinsman whose duty was to buy back a relative sold into slavery or to restore what the family had lost. Job uses the slave market's word. He knows his redeemer lives. He does not see him yet. He expects to see him with his own eyes, after his body has failed.
The hope is named, and it is certain. The singer, like Job, is still waiting on the near side of it.
A New Song in My Mouth
Marley's chorus says that redemption songs are all he has ever had. A psalm of David tells where such a song comes from. "He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God" (Psalm 40:2–3). Marley sings of being taken from the bottomless pit. The psalm says the song came after the lifting, and it was put there.
Garvey said that only we can free the mind. Scripture agrees that we have work to do. Paul tells believers to be "transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2). He puts the verb in the passive. The mind is renewed by someone.
The same psalm answers the song's last line. Marley sings that the book has to be fulfilled. David wrote, "Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God" (Psalm 40:7–8).
The letter to the Hebrews hears those words in the mouth of Messiah. "Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me… Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God" (Hebrews 10:5, 7). Marley asked who would fulfill the book. The one it was written about said he had come to do it.