1 Give ear, O God, to my prayer;
And hide not Thyself from my entreaty.
2 Attend unto me, and answer me:
I am distracted as I muse, and must groan;
3 For the voice of [my] enemy,
On account of the oppression of the wicked;
For they fling down iniquity upon me,
And in wrath they are hostile to me.
4 My heart writhes within me:
And terrors of death have fallen upon me.
5 Fear and trembling come upon me,
Horror wraps me round.
6 Then I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away, and [there] abide.
7 Lo, then would I migrate far away,
I would lodge in the wilderness. Selah.
8 I would hasten my escape
From stormy wind and tempest.
9 Swallow [them up], Lord; confuse their tongue:
For I see violence and strife in the city.
10 Day and night they go their rounds upon her walls:
And iniquity and mischief are in her midst.
11 Destructions are in her midst:
And from her open market-place depart not oppression and deceit.
12 For it is not an enemy that reviles me--that I could bear:
It is not my hater that magnifies himself against me--from him I
could shelter myself:
13 But it is thou, a man my equal,
My companion, and my familiar friend.
14 We who together used to make familiar intercourse sweet,
And walked to the house of God with the crowd.
15 Desolations [fall] on them!
May they go down alive to Sheol!
For wickednesses are in their dwelling, in their midst.
16 As for me, I will cry to God;
And Jehovah will save me.
17 Evening, and morning, and noon will I muse and groan:
And He will hear my voice.
18 He has redeemed my soul in peace, so that they come not near me
For in great numbers were they round me.
19 God will hear, and answer them--
Even He that sitteth throned from of old-- Selah.
Them who have no changes
And who fear not God.
20 He has laid his hands on those who were at peace with him:
He has broken his covenant.
21 Smooth are the buttery words of his mouth,
But his heart is war:
Softer are his words than oil,
Yet are they drawn swords.
22 Cast upon Jehovah thy burden,
And He, He will hold thee up:
He will never let the righteous be moved.
23 But Thou, O God, shall bring them down to the depth of the pit:
Men of blood and deceit shall not attain half their days;
But as for me, I will trust in Thee.
The situation of the psalmist has a general correspondence with that
of David in the period of Absalom's rebellion, and the identification
of the traitorous friend with Ahithophel is naturally suggested. But
there are considerable difficulties in the way of taking that view. The
psalmist is evidently in the city, from which he longs to escape; but
Ahithophel's treachery was not known to David till after his flight.
Would a king have described his counsellor, however trusted, as "a man
my equal"? The doubt respecting the identity of the traitor, however,
does not seriously militate against the ordinary view of the date and
occasion of the psalm, if we suppose that it belongs to the period
immediately before the outburst of the conspiracy, when David was still
in Jerusalem, but seeing the treason growing daily bolder, and already
beginning to contemplate flight. The singularly passive attitude which
he maintained during the years of Absalom's plotting was due to his
consciousness of guilt and his submission to punishment. Hitzig ascribes
the psalm to Jeremiah, principally on the ground of the resemblance of
the prophet's wish for a lodge in the wilderness (Jer. ix. 2) to the
psalmist's yearning in vv. 6-8. Cheyne brings it down to the Persian
period; Olshausen, to the Maccabean. The Davidic authorship has at least
as much to say for itself as any of these conjectures.
The psalm may be regarded as divided into three parts, in each of which
a different phase of agitated feeling predominates, but not exclusively.
Strong excitement does not marshal emotions or their expression
according to artistic proprieties of sequence, and this psalm is all
ablaze with it. That vehemence of emotion sufficiently accounts for both
the occasional obscurities and the manifest want of strict accuracy in
the flow of thought, without the assumption of dislocation of parts or
piecing it with a fragment of another psalm. When the heart is writhing
within, and tumultuous feelings are knocking at the door of the lips,
the words will be troubled and heaped together, and dominant thoughts
will repeat themselves in defiance of logical continuity. But, still,
complaint and longing sound through the waning, yearning notes of vv.
1-8; hot indignation and terrible imprecations in the stormy central
portion (vv. 9-15); and a calmer note of confidence and hope, through
which, however, the former indignation surges up again, is audible in
the closing verses (vv. 16-23).
The psalmist pictures his emotions in the first part, with but one
reference to their cause, and but one verse of petition. He begins,
indeed, with asking that his prayer may be heard; and it is well when
a troubled heart can raise itself above the sea of troubles to stretch
a hand towards God. Such an effort of faith already prophesies firm
footing on the safe shore. But very pathetic and true to the experience
of many a sorrowing heart is the psalmist's immediately subsequent
dilating on his griefs. There is a dumb sorrow, and there is one which
unpacks its heart in many words and knows not when to stop. The psalmist
is _distracted_ in his bitter brooding on his troubles. The word means
to move restlessly, and may either apply to body or mind, perhaps to
both; for Eastern demonstrativeness is not paralysed, but stimulated to
bodily tokens, by sorrow. He can do nothing but groan or moan. His heart
"writhes" in him. Like an avalanche, deadly terrors have fallen on him
and crushed him. Fear and trembling have pierced into his inner being,
and "horror" (a rare word, which the LXX. here renders _darkness_) wraps
him round or covers him, as a cloak does. It is not so much the pressure
of present evil, as the shuddering anticipation of a heavier storm about
to burst, which is indicated by these pathetic expressions. The cause of
them is stated in a single verse (3). "The voice of the enemy" rather
than his hand is mentioned first, since threats and reproaches precede
assaults; and it is budding, not full-blown, enmity which is in view.
In ver. 3 _b_ "oppression" is an imperfect parallelism with "voice,"
and the conjectural emendation (which only requires the prefixing of
a letter) of "cries," adopted by Cheyne, after Olshausen and others,
is tempting. They "fling down iniquity" on him as rocks are hurled or
rolled from a height on invaders--a phrase which recalls David's words
to his servants, urging flight before Absalom, "lest he bring down evil
upon us."
Then, from out of all this plaintive description of the psalmist's
agitation and its causes, starts up that immortal strain which answers
to the deepest longings of the soul, and has touched responsive chords
in all whose lives are not hopelessly outward and superficial--the
yearning for repose. It may be ignoble, or lofty and pure; it may mean
only cowardice or indolence; but it is deepest in those who stand most
unflinchingly at their posts, and crush it down at the command of
duty. Unless a soul knows that yearning for a home in stillness, "afar
from the sphere of our sorrow," it will remain a stranger to many high
and noble things. The psalmist was moved to utter this longing by his
painful consciousness of encompassing evils; but the longing is more
than a desire for exemption from these. It is the cry of the homeless
soul, which, like the dove from the ark, finds no resting-place in a
world full of carrion, and would fain return whence it came. "O God,
Thou hast made us for Thyself, and we are unquiet till we find rest
in Thee." No obligation of duty keeps migratory birds in a land where
winter is near. But men are better than birds, because they have other
things to think of than repose, and must face, not flee, storms and
hurricanes. It is better to have wings "like birds of tempest-loving
kind," and to beat up against the wind, than to outfly it in retreat.
So the psalmist's wish was but a wish; and he, like the rest of us,
had to stand to his post, or be tied to his stake, and let enemies
and storms do their worst. The LXX. has a striking reading of ver. 8,
which Cheyne has partially adopted. It reads for ver. 8 _a_ "waiting
for Him who saves me"; but beautiful as this is, as giving the picture
of the restful fugitive in patient expectation, it brings an entirely
new idea into the picture, and blends metaphor and fact confusedly.
The Selah at the close of ver. 7 deepens the sense of still repose by
a prolonged instrumental interlude.
The second part turns from subjective feelings to objective facts. A
cry for help and a yearning for a safe solitude were natural results
of the former; but when the psalmist's eye turns to his enemies, a
flash of anger lights it, and, instead of the meek longings of the
earlier verses, prayers for their destruction are vehemently poured
out. The state of things in the city corresponds to what must have
been the condition of Jerusalem during the incubation of Absalom's
conspiracy, but is sufficiently general to fit any time of strained
party feeling. The caldron simmers, ready to boil over. The familiar
evils, of which so many psalms complain, are in full vigour. The
psalmist enumerates them with a wealth of words which indicates
their abundance. Violence, strife, iniquity, mischief, oppression,
and deceit--a goodly company to patrol the streets and fill the open
places of the city! Ver. 10 _a_ is sometimes taken as carrying on the
personification of Violence and Strife in ver. 9, by painting these as
going their rounds on the walls, like sentries; but it is better to
suppose that the actual foes are meant, and that they are keeping up a
strict watch to prevent the psalmist's escape.
Several commentators consider that the burst of indignation against
the psalmist's traitorous friend in vv. 12-14 interrupts the sequence,
and propose rearrangements by which vv. 20, 21, will be united
with vv. 12-14, and placed either before ver. 6 or after ver. 15.
But the very abruptness with which the thought of the traitor is
interjected here, and in the subsequent reference to him, indicates
how the singer's heart was oppressed by the treason; and the return
to the subject in ver. 20 is equally significant of his absorbed
and pained brooding on the bitter fact. That is a slight pain which
is removed by one cry. Rooted griefs, overwhelming sorrows, demand
many repetitions. Trouble finds ease in tautology. It is absurd to
look for cool, logical sequence in such a heart's cry as this psalm.
Smooth continuity would be most unnatural. The psalmist feels that
the defection of his false friend is the worst blow of all. He could
have braced himself to bear an enemy's reviling; he could have found
weapons to repel, or a shelter in which to escape from, open foes; but
the baseness which forgets all former sweet companionship in secret,
and all association in public and in worship, is more than he can bear
up against. The voice of wounded love is too plain in the words for
the hypothesis that the singer is the personified nation. Traitors are
too common to allow of a very confident affirmation that the psalm
must point to Ahithophel, and the description of the perfidious friend
as the _equal_ of the psalmist does not quite fit that case.
As he thinks of all the sweetness of past intimacy, turned to gall
by such dastardly treachery, his anger rises. The description of
the city and of the one enemy in whom all its wickedness is, as it
were, concentrated, is framed in a terrible circlet of prayers for
the destruction of the foes. Ver. 9 _a_ begins and ver. 15 ends this
part with petitions which do not breathe the spirit of "Father,
forgive them." There may be a reference to the confusion of tongues
at Babel in the prayer of ver. 9. As then the impious work was
stopped by mutual unintelligibility, so the psalmist desires that
his enemies' machinations may be paralysed in like manner. In ver.
15 the translation "desolations" follows the Hebrew text, while
the alternative and in some respects preferable reading "May death
come suddenly" follows the Hebrew marginal correction. There are
difficulties in both, and the correction does not so much smooth the
language as to be obviously an improvement. The general sense is
clear, whichever reading is preferred. The psalmist is calling down
destruction on his enemies; and while the fact that he is in some
manner an organ of the Divine purpose invests hostility to him with
the darker character of rebellion against God, and therefore modifies
the personal element in the prayer, it still remains a plain instance
of the lower level on which the Old Testament saints and singers
stood, when compared with the "least in the kingdom of heaven."
The third part of the psalm returns to gentler tones of devotion and
trust. The great name of Jehovah appears here significantly. To that
ever-living One, the Covenant God, will the psalmist cry, in assurance
of answer. "Evening, and morning, and noon" designate the whole day by
its three principal divisions, and mean, in effect, continually. Happy
are they who are impelled to unintermitting prayer by the sight of
unslumbering enmity! Enemies may go their rounds "day and night," but
they will do little harm, if the poor, hunted man, whom they watch so
closely, lifts his cries to Heaven "evening, and morning, and noon."
The psalmist goes back to his first words. He had begun by saying that
he was distracted as he mused, and could do nothing but groan, and in
ver. 17 he repeats that he will still do so. Has he, then, won nothing
by his prayer but the prolongation of his first dreary tone of feeling?
He has won this--that his musing is not accompanied by distraction, and
that his groaning is not involuntary expression of pain, but articulate
prayer, and therefore accompanied by the confidence of being heard.
Communion with God and prayerful trust in his help do not at once end
sadness and sobbing, but do change their character and lighten the
blackness of grief. This psalmist, like so many of his fellows, realises
deliverance before he experiences it, and can sing "He has redeemed my
soul" even while the calamity lasts. "They come not near me," says he.
A soul hidden in God has an invisible defence which repels assaults. As
with a man in a diving-bell, the sea may press on the crystal walls, but
cannot crush them in or enter, and there is safe, dry lodging inside,
while sea billows and monsters are without, close to the diver and yet
far from him.
Ver. 19 is full of difficulty, and most probably has suffered some
textual corruption. To "hear and answer" is uniformly an expression
for gracious hearing and beneficent answering. Here it can only mean
the opposite, or must be used ironically. God will hear the enemies'
threats, and will requite them. Various expedients have been suggested
for removing the difficulty. It has been proposed to read "me" for
"them," which would bring everything into order--only that, then, the
last clauses of the verse, which begin with a relative ("who have no
changes," etc.), would want an antecedent. It has been proposed to
read "will humble them" for "will answer them," which is the LXX.
translation. That requires a change in the vowels of the verb, and
"answer" is more probable than "humble" after "hear." Cheyne follows
Olshausen in supposing that "the cry of the afflicted" has dropped out
after "hear." The construction of ver. 19 _b_ is anomalous, as the
clause is introduced by a superfluous "and," which may be a copyist's
error. The Selah attached is no less anomalous. It is especially
difficult to explain, in view of the relative which begins the third
clause, and which would otherwise be naturally brought into close
connection with the "them," the objects of the verbs in _a_. These
considerations lead Hupfeld to regard ver. 19 as properly ending
with Selah, and the remaining clauses as out of place, and properly
belonging to ver. 15 or 18; while Cheyne regards the alternative
supposition that they are a fragment of another psalm as possible.
There is probably some considerable corruption of the text, not now
to be remedied; but the existing reading is at least capable of
explanation and defence. The principal difficulty in the latter part
of ver. 19 is the meaning of the word rendered "changes." The persons
spoken of are those whom God will hear and answer in His judicial
character, in which He has been throned from of old. Their not having
"changes" is closely connected with their not fearing God. The word is
elsewhere used for changes of raiment, or for the relief of military
guards. Calvin and others take the changes intended to be vicissitudes
of fortune, and hence draw the true thought that unbroken prosperity
tends to forgetfulness of God. Others take the changes to be those of
mind or conduct from evil to good, while others fall back upon the
metaphor of relieving guard, which they connect with the picture in
ver. 10 of the patrols on the walls, so getting the meaning "they have
no cessation in their wicked watchfulness." It must be acknowledged
that none of these meanings is quite satisfactory; but probably
the first, which expresses the familiar thought of the godlessness
attendant on uninterrupted prosperity, is best.
Then follows another reference to the traitorous friend, which, by
its very abruptness, declares how deep is the wound he has inflicted.
The psalmist does not stand alone. He classes with himself those who
remained faithful to him. The traitor has not yet thrown off his mask,
though the psalmist has penetrated his still retained disguise. He
comes with smooth words; but, in the vigorous language of ver. 21,
"his heart is war." The fawning softness of words known to be false
cuts into the heart, which had trusted and knows itself betrayed, more
sharply than keen steel.
Ver. 22 has been singularly taken as the smooth words which cut so deep;
but surely that is a very strained interpretation. Much rather does
the psalmist exhort himself and all who have the same bitterness to
taste, to commit themselves to Jehovah. What is it which he exhorts us
to cast on Him? The word employed is used here only, and its meaning is
therefore questionable. The LXX. and others translate "care." Others,
relying on Talmudic usage, prefer "burden," which is appropriate to the
following promise of being held erect. Others (Hupfeld, etc.) would
read "that which He has given thee." The general sense is clear, and
the faith expressed in both exhortation and appended promise has been
won by the singer through his prayer. He is counselling and encouraging
himself. The spirit has to spur the "soul" to heroisms of faith and
patience. He is declaring a universal truth. However crushing our loads
of duty or of sorrow, we receive strength to carry them with straight
backs, if we cast them on Jehovah. The promise is not that He will
take away the pressure, but that He will hold us up under it; and,
similarly, the last clause declares that the righteous will not be
allowed to stumble. Faith is mentioned before righteousness. The two
must go together; for trust which is not accompanied and manifested by
righteousness is no true trust, and righteousness which is not grounded
in trust is no stable or real righteousness.
The last verse sums up the diverse fates of the "men of blood and
deceit" and of the psalmist. The terrible prayers of the middle portion
of the psalm have wrought the assurance of their fulfilment, just as the
cries of faith have brought the certainty of theirs. So the two closing
verses of the psalm turn both parts of the earlier petitions into
prophecies; and over against the trustful, righteous psalmist, standing
erect and unmoved, there is set the picture of the "man of blood and
deceit," chased down the black slopes to the depths of destruction by
the same God whose hand holds up the man that trusts in Him. It is a
dreadful contrast, and the spirit of the whole psalm is gathered into
it. The last clause of all makes "I" emphatic. It expresses the final
resolution which springs in the singer's heart in view of that dread
picture of destruction and those assurances of support. He recoils
from the edge of the pit, and eagerly opens his bosom for the promised
blessing. Well for us if the upshot of all our meditations on the
painful riddle of this unintelligible world, and of all our burdens and
of all our experiences and of our observation of other men's careers, is
the absolute determination, "As for me, I will trust in Jehovah!"