1 Unto Thee, Jehovah, I cry;
My Rock, be not deaf to me,
Lest Thou be silent to me,
And I become as those who go down to the pit.
2 Hear the voice of my supplications in my crying to Thee for help,
In my lifting my hands to Thy holy shrine.
3 Drag me not away with wicked men, and with workers of iniquity,
Speaking peace with their neighbours,
And evil is in their hearts.
4 Give them according to their doings and according to the evil of
their deeds;
According to the work of their hands give them;
Return their desert to them.
5 For they pay no heed to the doings of Jehovah
Nor to the work of His hands;
He shall cast them down, and not build them up.
6 Blessed be Jehovah
For He has heard the voice of my supplications.
7 Jehovah is my fortress and my shield;
In Him has my heart trusted, and I am helped;
So my heart leaps [for joy], and by my song will I praise Him.
8 Jehovah is their strength (or the strength of His people),
And a fortress of salvation for His anointed is He.
9 Save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance
And shepherd them, and carry them even for evermore.
The unquestionable resemblances to Psalm xxvi. scarcely require that
this should be considered its companion. The differences are as obvious
as the likenesses. While the prayer "Draw me not away with the wicked"
and the characterisation of these are alike in both, the further
emphatic prayer for retribution here and the closing half of this psalm
have nothing corresponding to them in the other. This psalm is built on
the familiar plan of groups of two verses each, with the exception that
the prayer, which is its centre, runs over into three. The course of
thought is as familiar as the structure. Invocation is followed by
petition, and that by exultant anticipation of the answer as already
given; and all closes with wider petitions for the whole people.
Vv. 1, 2, are a prelude to the prayer proper, bespeaking the Divine
acceptance of it, on the double ground of the psalmist's helplessness
apart from God's help and of his outstretched hands appealing to God
enthroned above the mercy-seat. He is in such straits that, unless his
prayer brings an answer in act, he must sink into the pit of Sheol,
and be made like those that lie huddled there in its darkness. On the
edge of the slippery slope, he stretches out his hands toward the
innermost sanctuary (for so the word rendered, by a mistaken
etymology, "oracle" means). He beseeches God to hear, and blends the
two figures of deafness and silence as both meaning the withholding of
help. Jehovah seems deaf when prayer is unanswered, and is silent when
He does not speak in deliverance. This prelude of invocation throbs
with earnestness, and sets the pattern for suppliants, teaching them
how to quicken their own desires as well as how to appeal to God by
breathing to Him their consciousness that only His hand can keep them
from sliding down into death.
The prayer itself (vv. 3-5) touches lightly on the petition that the
psalmist may be delivered from the fate of the wicked, and then launches
out into indignant description of their practices and solemn invocation
of retribution upon them. "Drag away" is parallel with, but stronger
than, "Gather not" in xxvi. 9. Commentators quote Job xxiv. 22, where
the word is used of God's dragging the mighty out of life by His power,
as a struggling criminal is haled to the scaffold. The shuddering recoil
from the fate of the wicked is accompanied with vehement loathing of
their practices. A man who keeps his heart in touch with God cannot but
shrink, as from a pestilence, from complicity with evil, and the depth
of his hearty hatred of it is the measure of his right to ask that he
may not share in the ruin it must bring, since God is righteous. One
type of evil-doers is the object of the psalmist's special abhorrence:
false friends with smooth tongues and daggers in their sleeves, the
"dissemblers" of Psalm xxvi.; but he passes to the more general
characterisation of the class, in his terrible prayer for retribution,
in vv. 4, 5. The sin of sins, from which all specific acts of evil flow,
is blindness to God's "deeds" and to "the work of His hands," His acts
both of mercy and of judgment. Practical atheism, the indifference which
looks upon nature, history, and self, and sees no signs of a mighty hand
tender, pure, and strong, ever active in them all, will surely lead the
purblind "Agnostics" to do "works of their hands" which, for lack of
reference to Him, fail to conform to the highest ideal and draw down
righteous judgment. But the blindness to God's work here meant is that
of an averted will rather than that of mistaken understanding, and from
the stem of such a thorn the grapes of holy living cannot be gathered.
Therefore the psalmist is but putting into words the necessary result of
such lives when from suppliant he becomes prophet, and declares that "He
shall cast them down, and not build them up." The stern tone of this
prayer marks it as belonging to the older type of religion, and its
dissimilarity to the New Testament teaching is not to be slurred over.
No doubt the element of personal enmity is all but absent, but it is not
the prayer which those who have heard "Father, forgive them," are to
copy. Yet, on the other hand, the wholesome abhorrence of evil, the
solemn certitude that sin is death, the desire that it may cease from
the world, and the lowly petition that it may not drag us into fatal
associations are all to be preserved in Christian feeling, while
softened by the light that falls from Calvary.
As in many psalms, the faith which prays passes at once into the faith
which possesses. This man, when he "stood praying, believed that he
had what he asked," and, so believing, had it. There was no change in
circumstances, but he was changed. There is no fear of going down into
the pit now, and the rabble of evil-doers have disappeared. This is
the blessing which every true suppliant may bear away from the throne,
the peace which passeth understanding, the sure pledge of the Divine
act which answers prayer. It is the first gentle ripple of the
incoming tide; high water is sure to come at the due hour. So the
psalmist is exuberant and happily tautological in telling how his
trusting heart has become a leaping heart, and help has been flashed
back from heaven as swiftly as his prayer had travelled thither.
The closing strophe (vv. 8, 9) is but loosely connected with the body of
the psalm except on one supposition. What if the singer were king over
Israel, and if the dangers threatening him were public perils? That
would explain the else singular attachment of intercession for Israel to
so intensely personal a supplication. It is most natural that God's
"anointed," who has been asking deliverance for himself, should widen
his petitions to take in that flock of which he was but the
under-shepherd, and should devolve the shepherding and carrying of it on
the Divine Shepherd-King, of whom he was the shadowy representative. The
addition of one letter changes "their" in ver. 8 into "to His people," a
reading which has the support of the LXX. and of some manuscripts and
versions and is recommended by its congruity with the context. Cheyne's
suggestion that "His anointed" is the high-priest is only conjecture.
The reference of the expression to the king who is also the psalmist
preserves the unity of the psalm. The Christian reader cannot but think
of the true King and Intercessor, whose great prayer before His passion
began, like our psalm, with petitions for Himself, but passed into
supplication for His little flock and for all the unnumbered millions
"who should believe on" Him "through their word."