Psalms 147:3

The neighbours of this verse are what make it remarkable.

Immediately before it, God is building a city and gathering the exiles — national restoration, on the scale of a whole people. Immediately after, he is counting the stars and calling every one of them by name — the scale of the universe. And wedged between the nation and the galaxies is a line about somebody's broken heart.

The psalmist puts them on the same list without any sense of a change in subject. Cities, stars, and one person's grief are all things this God attends to, and the middle item is not treated as too small to mention alongside the others.

And the second verb is the domestic one. Binds up their wounds is what a person does with cloth and hands — close, physical, slow, requiring someone to be near enough to touch. It is not the language of decree. The same God who names stars from a distance is described as doing bandage work.

The word for broken here is used elsewhere of shattered pottery and of bones. It is not a delicate term. And heal, applied to that, does not mean consoled or distracted. It means the thing is mended.

What the verse does not say is how long it takes. Binding up is treatment, and treatment implies duration.