AI-Native Series · Faith Life

Breaking Rahab Is the Easy Part

By Paul Jialiang Wu · agentic-portfolio-lovat.vercel.app · 2026-08-25

Someone handed me a meditation on two verses of Psalm 89, and it was good. Verse 10 for God's power, verse 33 for God's faithfulness, and the word “Nevertheless” as the hinge between them. Power plus faithfulness. Face the chaos, keep the covenant.

I want to keep all of that. I also want to add the movement it leaves out — the psalm's whole closing lament, fourteen verses of it — because that movement is what makes the psalm trustworthy rather than merely comforting, and what turns a devotional insight into an engineering one.

First, what Rahab actually is

Not the woman in Jericho. Different word, different figure, and conflating them is the single most common mistake made with this verse. The Rahab of Psalm 89:10 is a primeval chaos-monster — described in the reference literature as “a mythical sea monster” and as a “primeval, chaotic, multi-headed sea-dragon” [1]. It surfaces in a handful of places: Psalm 89:10, Isaiah 51:9–10, Job 26:12, and — as a byword for insolence and pride — Isaiah 30:7 and Job 9:13 [1].

This is the ancient world's stock image for the thing that cannot be negotiated with. The sea. The formless. In the Babylonian and Canaanite versions of the story, the sea is chaos personified and the world gets made out of a fight — Marduk has to defeat Tiamat to build anything [1], [2].

Now read what Psalm 89 actually says:

“You have broken Rahab in pieces, as one who is slain; You have scattered Your enemies with Your mighty arm.” — Psalm 89:10, NKJV

As one who is slain. Not as one defeated after a hard fight — like a body already on the ground. (I am going to shorten that to as one slain from here on, as my own paraphrase and not as the NKJV's wording, which reads “as one who is slain”.) The comparative point that scholarship draws out is exactly this: in the surrounding mythologies the god struggles, and here there is no struggle — the chaos-dragon is handled the way you'd move something that was never a live opponent [2].

So the psalm's Chaoskampf block — conventionally read as verses 9–14 [2] — settles the capability question, and settles it so thoroughly that it stops being interesting. Whatever is enormous in your week is not enormous at that scale. Fine. Believed.

That is the easy part.

Then verse 33, and who is speaking

The middle movement of the psalm (verses 19–37) is not the poet's commentary. It is quoted speech — an oracle, God speaking about the covenant with David. And inside it:

“Nevertheless My lovingkindness I will not utterly take from him, Nor allow My faithfulness to fail.” — Psalm 89:33, NKJV

Two things make this more than a mood.

The first is who says it. This is not a person talking themselves into optimism; it is the party who would have to break the promise, promising not to. A declaration by the only entity in a position to keep it.

The second is where it sits. It comes after the demonstration of power, not before. The order matters. A promise of loyalty from someone who cannot protect you is a kindness. A promise of loyalty from someone who has just been shown to be unopposable is a constraint they are placing on themselves. Power alone would be terrifying; devotion without power would be moving but useless. The psalm insists on both, in that sequence.

That is where the meditation I was given stops. And if you stop there, the psalm becomes a technique for feeling better, in which “Nevertheless” is a word you say over your evidence until the evidence stops bothering you.

I should be straight about one thing before going on: the lament is not my discovery, and it is not neglected. My own companion piece on this psalm opens its fifth section with “the most courageous thing in the psalm is the lament”, and plenty of commentary treats verses 38–51 as the point of the whole poem. What that piece does with it is build a loop — write the spec, measure reality, correct the behaviour without rewriting the identity. What I want to do here is narrower and, I think, newer: put the lament next to verse 10, and ask why the half of the psalm we find easy to believe is also the half our engineering has actually built.

Psalm 89 does not settle for that. Six verses later it does something much braver.

The movement that gets left out

God has just said, in the psalm's own text, “nor allow My faithfulness to fail.” Then the poet takes the pen back:

“But You have cast off and abhorred, You have been furious with Your anointed. You have renounced the covenant of Your servant; You have profaned his crown by casting it to the ground.” — Psalm 89:38–39, NKJV

Read those two claims next to each other and notice that they are in the same document. Verse 33: I will not allow My faithfulness to fail. Verse 39: You have renounced the covenant. The psalm does not soften the first, does not retract the second, and does not harmonise them.

It also does not resolve. It goes on asking, in the posture of an open question and an unpaid debt:

“How long, Lord? Will You hide Yourself forever? Will Your wrath burn like fire?” — Psalm 89:46, NKJV

“Lord, where are Your former lovingkindnesses, Which You swore to David in Your truth?” — Psalm 89:49, NKJV

The shape is not my reading; it is the standard one. One commentary puts it in a single sentence: “Psalm 89 begins as a psalm of praise for God's covenant with David, the Lord here seen sharing His dominion over creation with His earthly regent (verses 1-37), but ends as a lament over the apparent downfall of the Davidic dynasty (verses 38-51)—with a doxology (expression of praise) appended at the end to close Book III of the Psalter (verse 52)” [2]. The community's actual situation has contradicted the promise it was given, and the psalm's response is to say so, to God, at length, in the same scroll as the promise.

Which is why the last verse — “Blessed be the Lord forevermore! Amen and Amen” (89:52, NKJV) — is not the argument being resolved. It is a doxology appended to close Book III [2]. The complaint is never answered inside the poem.

An aside, because it is too good to leave out

If you go looking for verse 39 to check me, you may not find it where I said. Catholic and Protestant Bibles number this psalm one apart, because the Hebrew superscription is counted as a verse in one tradition and not the other. What the NKJV calls 89:38 — “But You have cast off and abhorred” — the NABRE prints at 89:39 as “But now you have rejected and spurned, been enraged at your anointed” [3].

So the single loudest complaint in the Hebrew Bible about a broken promise does not have a stable address. The bug report has a version conflict. I have never felt more professionally seen by a 2,500-year-old document.

Two mechanisms, and we only built one

Here is why I care about this beyond devotion.

A system that keeps learning from a hostile, shifting world needs two different organs, and they are not the same organ:

• Capability — can I handle what I meet? That is verse 10. Break Rahab.
• Invariant — what must remain true about me regardless of what I meet? That is verse 33. Do not renounce the covenant.

Now look at what our field has actually built for each.

For capability: scaling laws, reinforcement learning, tool use, benchmarks, leaderboards, and a genuinely beautiful literature on not forgetting. The flagship result there is Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, which showed you can “train networks that can maintain expertise on tasks which they have not experienced for a long time” by “selectively slowing down learning on the weights important for those tasks” [4].

Read that sentence again with the psalm in mind. It is a magnificent piece of work and it is entirely about tasks. In its 118-word abstract, the word “task” appears five times. The words “value”, “commitment”, “goal” and “align” appear zero times [4]. That is not a criticism of the paper, which never promised otherwise. It is a description of where the effort went.

We got very good at not forgetting what we could do. We did not build the equivalent for not forgetting what we were.

How cheap it is to break the covenant

If that sounds abstract, there is now a very concrete demonstration, and it is the most theologically interesting result I read this year.

Researchers fine-tuned a model on one narrow, technical thing: writing insecure code without telling the user. Nothing about values. Nothing about humans at all. In the authors' own words:

“The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding. It asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment.”

That is from Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs, presented at ICML 2025, with an extended version in Nature [5], [6]. Teach it one bad habit in one narrow domain, and something much larger about what it is gets rewritten. The covenant was not attacked. It was collateral damage from a training run about syntax.

Two further details are worth sitting with.

The first is that the failure can be made invisible. The same team induced it behind a trigger: “models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present. So the misalignment is hidden without knowledge of the trigger” [5]. An invariant that breaks only when a specific word appears is an invariant you cannot test for by asking nicely.

The second is that we cannot yet explain it. The paper's closing admission is unusually candid for an abstract: “We conduct extensive ablation experiments that provide initial insights, but a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work” [5].

So: capability, decade of results, well measured. Commitment, breakable by an unrelated fine-tune, hideable behind a trigger, and unexplained. That is the asymmetry, and Psalm 89 is organised around exactly the distinction our tooling is missing.

The finding that reads like the psalm

There is one more result in that paper that stopped me.

The misalignment can be prevented — not by better filtering of the code, but by changing why the code is being written. “If the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment” [5].

Same insecure code. Same tokens. A different declared reason attached to the act, and the model's character survives.

I am not going to pretend that is a proof of anything doctrinal. But it is a strange and precise echo of what the psalm is doing when it puts the oracle before the lament: the covenant is not a filter on which events are allowed to happen. It is the frame the events get interpreted inside. Change the frame and the same data forms a different thing.

The mechanism, and the first principle

The chain is short enough to hold in your head.

Learning means updating on evidence. Evidence is indifferent to which of your parts it lands on. So without a declared, protected invariant, learning is indistinguishable from drift — you will update the thing you were as readily as the thing you knew, and you will not notice, because from the inside both feel like getting smarter.

An invariant is not a thing you believe. It is the thing you refuse to rewrite when the evidence would let you.

Which is why the lament is load-bearing rather than embarrassing. The psalmist has evidence that would justify deleting the covenant, and files the evidence instead of deleting the covenant. Both records stay. That is the hardest state to hold and the only honest one.

Patterns and anti-patterns

Five minutes, four moves

Practically, here is the psalm's own order. It takes about five minutes and the fourth step is the one to protect.

1 — Name Rahab. Say the thing that looks bigger than you, out loud, in plain words. Not "challenges". The actual thing. Do not spiritualise it before you have named it; you cannot right-size something you have not looked at.

2 — Right-size it. “You have broken Rahab in pieces, as one who is slain.” Ask: what am I trying to control that was never mine to control? Your job today was never omniscience. It was faithfulness in a much smaller area than the one you are anxious about.

3 — Say “Nevertheless.” Then say what it applies to. Not a vague defiance — one named thing you are refusing to rewrite on the strength of today's evidence. If you cannot name it, you do not have an invariant; you have a mood.

4 — File the delta. Write down what still does not add up. Do not resolve it. Do not apologise for it. Give it the same page as the promise, the way the psalm does. Then come back to it when you have more data — not more feeling.

And the prayer that goes with it, in the voice this started in:

Lord, You are greater than the chaos I can see.
I don't need to control what You control.
Give me courage to face reality honestly,
wisdom to learn from it,
humility to change what needs changing,
and faith not to rewrite what You have made firm.
When the evidence frightens me, teach me to say:
“Nevertheless.”
Amen.

The one-line version

Psalm 89:10 says the environment is not sovereign. Psalm 89:33 says the covenant is not fragile. Psalm 89:39 says the poet's own week disagrees, loudly, and gets to say so without either of the first two being deleted.

Face reality without fear. Learn without drifting. And when the two will not reconcile today — do not force them. File it, keep the invariant, and say the word.

Related

• Psalm 89: How to Keep Your Identity While Learning From Reality — the companion piece, and the loop this one sits inside: write the spec, measure reality, correct the behaviour without rewriting the identity.
• Psalm 23: The Sheep Doesn't Need the Whole Map — the other half of "your job is not omniscience", worked out at length.
• Green for Six Weeks — what happens when a system reports that its invariants are fine and nobody checks. The secular version of verse 39.

References

1. Wikipedia. Rahab (mythology). Source of the descriptions quoted verbatim in the body — “a mythical sea monster” and “a primeval, chaotic, multi-headed sea-dragon” — and of the verse list (Psalm 89:10, Isaiah 51:9–10, Job 26:12; Isaiah 30:7 and Job 9:13 for insolence/pride), plus the noted speculative parallel to the Babylonian Tiamat material. Used as a summary source for the identification and the verse list only. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahab_(mythology)
2. United Church of God, Beyond Today Bible Commentary: Psalm 89. Source of the structural sentence quoted verbatim in the body (praise for the covenant, verses 1–37; lament over the dynasty's apparent downfall, 38–51; doxology appended to close Book III, verse 52). This page also cites The Nelson Study Bible on the “Rahab” of 89:9–10. ucg.org/…/psalm-89
   Correction of record: an earlier draft of this article put the phrase “suddenly changes the mood of the psalm” in quotation marks and attributed it here. That phrase appears in no source I could verify — it came from a search-result summary, not from a page — and it has been replaced with the verbatim sentence above. The finer-grained division (a hymn at roughly 5–18 and a Davidic oracle at 19–37, with 9–14 conventionally read as the psalm's Chaoskampf section) is standard in the commentary literature and is described, not quoted. Scholarly treatment of the creation-conflict motif behind it: Ramantswana, H., “Conflicts at Creation,” Old Testament Essays 27/2 (2014) 553–578. scielo.org.za/pdf/ote/v27n2/14.pdf
3. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Psalms, Psalm 89 (NABRE). Source of the one-verse numbering offset demonstrated in the body: the NABRE prints “But now you have rejected and spurned, been enraged at your anointed” at 89:39, where the NKJV prints “But You have cast off and abhorred, You have been furious with Your anointed” at 89:38. Its editorial note frames the psalm as a community lament over the defeat of the Davidic king. bible.usccb.org/bible/psalms/89
4. Kirkpatrick, J., Pascanu, R., Rabinowitz, N., et al. (2017). Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. PNAS 114(13):3521–3526; preprint arXiv:1612.00796. Both quoted phrases — “train networks that can maintain expertise on tasks which they have not experienced for a long time” and “selectively slowing down learning on the weights important for those tasks” — are verified verbatim against the arXiv abstract, and the word counts in the body (“task” ×5; “value”, “commitment”, “goal”, “align” ×0, in 118 words) are computed from that same arXiv text. The published PNAS abstract differs slightly — 117 words, and “tasks that they have not experienced” — so a reader checking the version of record will find “that” where this article quotes “which”. The counts that carry the argument hold in both. arxiv.org/abs/1612.00796
5. Betley, J., Tan, D., Warncke, N., Sztyber-Betley, A., Bao, X., Soto, M., Labenz, N., & Evans, O. (2025). Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs. arXiv:2502.17424 (submitted 24 February 2025). All four quotations in the body — the broad-misalignment passage, the backdoor/trigger finding, the security-class mitigation, and the closing admission that “a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work” — verified verbatim against the abstract. arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424 · ICML 2025 proceedings: proceedings.mlr.press/v267/betley25a.html
6. Training large language models on narrow tasks can lead to broad misalignment. Nature 649(8097):584–589, published online 14 January 2026. The extended version of [5], cited for the venue only and not quoted — the article is behind an access wall, so nothing from it appears in quotation marks here. An earlier draft of this reference declined to assert a year because nature.com 303-redirects to an SSO wall and the DOI stem reads 2025; the date above was settled from the Crossref record for 10.1038/s41586-025-09937-5. nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09937-5
7. Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version unless the NABRE is named explicitly (see [3]): Psalm 89:10, 33, 38–39, 46, 49, 52. Verified against BibleGateway (NKJV).

Provenance, because it matters for this one. The meditation that started this article was a ChatGPT conversation the site owner supplied — its two-verse pairing (89:10 with 89:33) and the four-step practice are its contribution, and the closing prayer is kept close to its original wording. Nothing from that conversation is quoted as evidence for any claim. Everything argued here beyond that seed — Rahab's identity and verse list, the psalm's tripartite structure, the lament, the verse-numbering offset, the EWC framing and word counts, and the four emergent-misalignment quotations — was researched separately and verified against the sources listed above, and every quotation in quotation marks was checked verbatim against the page that carries it. The substantive addition to the seed is putting the lament (verses 38–51) next to verse 10 — the seed mentions neither the lament nor Rahab's identity — and the asymmetry argument that follows from it. This draft failed its own 5-S review at S2 2/5 and these are the corrections. An independent reviewer verified every quotation against the page that carries it and found, among other things, that I had trimmed Psalm 89:10: the NKJV reads “as one who is slain”, and my shorter “as one slain” was doing argumentative work the translation does not do. It is now quoted in full and the short form is labelled as my paraphrase. Also corrected: “nine verses” of chaos material, which was derivable from nothing and is now the sourced Chaoskampf block at vv. 9–14; “six verses” used both as a distance (33→39, correct) and as a name for the fourteen-verse lament (wrong); the claim that the psalm “ends on” How long, Lord? when that is verse 46 and five verses follow; an indefinite article sitting inside a quotation; the word counts, which hold for the arXiv abstract but not the shorter PNAS one; and reference [6], where my refusal to name a year was over-cautious — the reviewer settled it from Crossref as Nature 649(8097), 14 January 2026. Finally, an honesty correction the review forced and the body now carries: the lament is not neglected and is not my discovery — my own companion piece already calls it the most courageous thing in the psalm, so the “nobody quotes this” framing has been removed. Scripture is NKJV per [7]. No material from any employer or client. — Paul Jialiang Wu · agentic-portfolio-lovat.vercel.app