1 Save me, O God;
For the waters have come in even to [my] soul.
2 I am sunk in the mud of an abyss, without standing-ground
I am come into depths of waters, and a flood has overwhelmed me.
3 I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched,
My eyes fail whilst I wait for my God.
4 More than the hairs of my head are they who hate me without
provocation.
Strong are my destroyers, my enemies wrongfully
What I did not rob, then I must restore.
5 O God, Thou, Thou knowest my folly,
And my guiltinesses are not hidden from Thee.
6 Let not those who wait for Thee be put to shame through me, Lord,
Jehovah of hosts:
Let not those be confounded through me who seek Thee, O God of
Israel.
7 For Thy sake have I borne reproach;
Confusion has covered my face.
8 I have become a stranger to my brothers,
And an alien to my mother's sons.
9 For zeal for Thine house has consumed me,
And the reproaches of those that reproach Thee have fallen upon
me.
10 And I wept, in fasting my soul [wept];
And that became [matter of] reproaches to me.
11 Also I made sackcloth my clothing;
And I became to them a proverb.
12 They who sit at the gate talk of me,
And the songs of the quaffers of strong drink [are about me].
13 But as for me, my prayer is unto Thee, Jehovah, in a time of
favour,
O God, in the greatness of Thy loving-kindness,
Answer me in the troth of Thy salvation.
14 Deliver me from [the] mire, that I sink not,
Rescue me from those who hate me, and from depths of waters.
15 Let not the flood of waters overwhelm me,
And let not the abyss swallow me,
And let not [the] pit close her mouth over me.
16 Answer me, Jehovah; for Thy loving-kindness is good:
In the multitude of Thy compassions turn toward me.
17 And hide not Thy face from Thy servant,
For I am in straits; answer me speedily.
18 Draw near to my soul, redeem it,
Because of my enemies set me free.
19 Thou, Thou knowest my reproach, and my shame, and my confusion.
Before Thee are all my adversaries.
20 Reproach has broken my heart; and I am sick unto death,
And I looked for pitying, and there was none,
And for comforters, and found none.
21 But they gave me gall for my food,
And for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
22 Let their table become before them a snare,
And to them in their peacefulness, [let it become] a trap.
23 Darkened be their eyes, that they see not,
And make their loins continually to quake.
24 Pour out upon them Thine indignation,
And let the glow of Thy wrath overtake them.
25 May their encampment be desolate!
In their tents may there be no dweller!
26 For him whom Thou, Thou hast smitten, they persecute,
And they tell of the pain of Thy wounded ones.
27 Add iniquity to their iniquity,
And let them not come into Thy righteousness.
28 Let them be blotted out of the book of the living,
And let them not be inscribed with the righteous.
29 But as for me, I am afflicted and pained,
Let Thy salvation, O God, set me on high.
30 I will praise the name of God in a song,
And I will magnify it with thanksgiving.
31 And it shall please Jehovah more than an ox,
A bullock horned and hoofed.
32 The afflicted see it; they shall rejoice,
Ye who seek God, [behold,] and let your heart live.
33 For Jehovah listens to the needy,
And His captives He does not despise.
34 Let heaven and earth praise Him,
The seas, and all that moves in them.
35 For God will save Zion, and build the cities of Judah,
And they shall dwell there, and possess it.
36 And the seed of His servants shall inherit it,
And those who love His name shall abide therein.
The Davidic authorship of this psalm is evidently untenable, if for
no other reason, yet because of the state of things presupposed in
ver. 35. The supposition that Jeremiah was the author has more in its
favour than in the case of many of the modern attributions of psalms
to him, even if, as seems most probable, the references to sinking in
deep mire and the like are metaphorical. Cheyne fixes on the period
preceding Nehemiah's first journey to Jerusalem as the earliest
possible date for this psalm and its kindred ones (xxii., xxxv., and
xl. 13-18). Baethgen follows Olshausen in assigning the psalm to the
Maccabean period. The one point which seems absolutely certain is that
David was not its author.
It falls into two equal parts (vv. 1-18 and 19-36). In the former part
three turns of thought or feeling may be traced: vv. 1-6 being mainly
a cry for Divine help, with plaintive spreading out of the psalmist's
extremity of need; vv. 7-12 basing the prayer on the fact that his
sufferings flow from his religion; and vv. 13-18 being a stream of
petitions for deliverance, with continuous allusion to the description
of his trials in vv. 1-6. The second part (vv. 19-36) begins with
renewed description of the psalmist's affliction (vv. 19-21), and
thence passes to invocation of God's justice on his foes (vv. 22-28),
which takes the place of the direct petitions for deliverance in
the first part. The whole closes with trustful anticipation of
answers to prayer, which will call forth praise from ever-widening
circles,--first from the psalmist himself; then from the oppressed
righteous; and, finally, from heaven, earth, and sea.
The numerous citations of this psalm in the New Testament have led
many commentators to maintain its directly Messianic character. But
its confessions of sin and imprecations of vengeance are equally
incompatible with that view. It is Messianic as typical rather than as
prophetic, exhibiting a history, whether of king, prophet, righteous
man, or personified nation, in which the same principles are at work
as are manifest in their supreme energy and highest form in the Prince
of righteous sufferers. But the correspondence of such a detail as
giving gall and vinegar, with the history of Jesus, carries us beyond
the region of types, and is a witness that God's Spirit shaped the
utterances of the psalmist for a purpose unknown to himself, and
worked in like manner on the rude soldiers, whose clumsy mockery and
clumsy kindness fulfilled ancient words. There is surely something
more here than coincidence or similarity between the experience of one
righteous sufferer and another. If Jesus cried "I thirst" in order to
bring about the "fulfilment" of one verse of our psalm, His doing so
is of a piece with some other acts of His which were distinct claims
to be the Messiah of prophecy; but His wish could not influence the
soldiers to fulfil the psalm.
The first note is petition and spreading out of the piteous story of
the psalmist's need. The burdened heart finds some ease in describing
how heavy its burden is, and the devout heart receives some foretaste
of longed-for help in the act of telling God how sorely His help is
needed. He who knows all our trouble is glad to have us tell it to
Him, since it is thereby lightened, and our faith in Him is thereby
increased. Sins confessed are wholly cancelled, and troubles spoken to
God are more than half calmed. The psalmist begins with metaphors in vv.
1, 2, and translates these into grim prose in vv. 3, 4, and then, with
acknowledgment of sinfulness, cries for God's intervention in vv. 5, 6.
It is flat and prosaic to take the expressions in vv. 1, 2, literally,
as if they described an experience like Jeremiah's in the miry pit.
Nor can the literal application be carried through; for the image of
"waters coming in unto the soul" brings up an entirely different set of
circumstances from that of sinking in mud in a pit. The one describes
trouble as rushing in upon a man, like a deluge which has burst its
banks and overwhelms him; the other paints it as yielding and tenacious,
affording no firm spot to stand on, but sucking him up in its filthy,
stifling slime. No water was in Jeremiah's pit. The two figures are
incompatible in reality, and can only be blended in imagination. What
they mean is put without metaphor in vv. 3, 4. The psalmist is "weary
with calling" on God; his throat is dry with much prayer; his eyes ache
and are dim with upward gazing for help which lingers. Yet he does not
cease to call, and still prays with his parched throat, and keeps the
weary eyes steadfastly fixed, as the psalm shows. It is no small triumph
of patient faith to wait for tarrying help. Ver. 4 tells why he thus
cries. He is compassed by a crowd of enemies. Two things especially
characterise these--their numbers, and their gratuitous hatred. As to
the former, they are described as more numerous than the hairs of the
psalmist's head. The parallelism of clauses recommends the textual
alteration which substitutes for the unnecessary word "my destroyers"
the appropriate expression "more than my bones," which is found in
some old versions. Causeless hatred is the portion of the righteous in
all ages; and our Lord points to Himself as experiencing it in utmost
measure (John xv. 25), inasmuch as He, the perfectly righteous One, must
take into His own history all the bitterness which is infused into the
cup of those who fear God and love the right, by a generation who are
out of sympathy with them.
The same experience, in forms varying according to the spirit of the
times, is realised still in all who have the mind of Christ in them. As
long as the world is a world, it will have some contempt mingling with
its constrained respect for goodness, some hostility, now expressed by
light shafts of mockery and ridicule, now by heavier and more hurtful
missiles, for Christ's true servants. The ancient "Woe" for those of
whom "all men speak well" is in force to-day. The "hatred" is "without
a cause," in so far as its cherishers have received no hurt, and its
objects desire only their enemies' good; but its cause lies deep in the
irreconcilable antagonism of life-principles and aims between those who
follow Christ and those who do not.
The psalmist had to bear unjust charges, and to make restitution of
what he had never taken. Causeless hatred justified itself by false
accusations, and innocence had but to bear silently and to save life
at the expense of being robbed in the name of justice.
He turns from enemies to God. But his profession of innocence assumes a
touching and unusual form. He does not, as might be expected, say, "Thou
knowest my guiltlessness," but, "Thou knowest my foolishness." A true
heart, while conscious of innocence in regard to men, and of having
done nothing to evoke their enmity, is, even in the act of searching
itself, arrested by the consciousness of its many sins in God's sight,
and will confess these the more penitently, because it stands upright
before men, and asserts its freedom from all crime against them.
In so far as men's hatred is God's instrument, it inflicts merited
chastisement. That does not excuse men; but it needs to be acknowledged
by the sufferer, if things are to be right between him and God. Then,
after such confession, he can pray, as this psalmist does, that God's
mercy may deliver him, so that others who, like him, wait on God may not
be disheartened or swept from their confidence, by the spectacle of his
vain hopes and unanswered cries. The psalmist has a strong consciousness
of his representative character, and, as in so many other psalms, thinks
that his experience is of wide significance as a witness for God. This
consciousness points to something special in his position, whether we
find the speciality in his office, or in the supposed personification of
the nation, or in poetic consciousness heightened by the sense of being
an organ of God's Spirit. In a much inferior degree, the lowliest devout
man may feel the same; for there are none whose experiences of God as
answering prayer may not be a light of hope to some souls sitting in the
dark.
In vv. 7-12 the prayer for deliverance is urged on the ground that the
singer's sufferings are the result of his devotion. Psalm xliv. 13-22
may be compared, and Jer. xv. 15 is an even closer parallel. Fasting
and sackcloth are mentioned again together in Psalm xxxv. 13; and Lam.
iii. 14 and Job xxx. 9 resemble ver. 12 _b_. Surrounded by a godless
generation, the psalmist's earnestness of faith and concern for God's
honour made him an object of dislike, a target for drunken ridicule.
These broke the strong ties of kindred, and acted as separating forces
more strongly than brotherhood did, as a uniting one. "Zeal for God's
house" presupposes the existence of the Temple, and also either its
neglect or its desecration. That sunken condition of the sanctuary
distressed the psalmist more than personal calamity, and it was the
departure of Israel from God that made him clothe himself in sackcloth
and fast and weep. But so far had deterioration gone that his mourning
and its cause supplied materials for tipsy mirth, and his name became
a by-word and a butt for malicious gossip. The whole picture is that
of the standing experience of the godly among the godless. The Perfect
Example of devotion and communion had to pass through these waters
where they ran deepest and chilliest, but all who have His Spirit have
their share of the same fate.
The last division of this first part (vv. 13-18) begins by setting
in strong contrast the psalmist's prayer and the drunkard's song.
He is sure that his cry will be heard, and so he calls the present
time "a time of favour," and appeals, as often in the Psalter, to
the multitude of God's loving-kindnesses and the faithfulness of His
promise of salvation. Such a pleading with God on the ground of His
manifested character is heard in vv. 13, 16, thus inclosing, as it
were, the prayer for deliverance in a wrapping of reminders to God of
His own name. The petitions here echo the description of peril in the
former part--mire and watery depths--and add another kindred image in
that of the "pit shutting her mouth" over the suppliant. He is plunged
in a deep dungeon, well-shaped; and if a stone is rolled on to its
opening, his last gleam of daylight will be gone, and he will be
buried alive. Beautifully do the pleas from God's character and those
from the petitioner's sore need alternate, the latter predominating
in vv. 17, 18. His thoughts pass from his own desperate condition to
God's mercy, and from God's mercy to his own condition, and he has
the reward of faith, in that he finds in his straits reasons for his
assurance that this is a time of favour, as well as pleas to urge with
God. They make the black backing which turns his soul into a mirror,
reflecting God's promises in its trust.
The second part of the psalm (ver. 19 to end) has, like the former,
three main divisions. The first of these, like vv. 1-6, is mainly a
renewed spreading before God of the psalmist's trouble (vv. 19-21).
Rooted sorrows are not plucked up by one effort. This recrudescence
of fear breaking in upon the newly won serenity of faith is true to
nature. On some parts of our coasts, where a narrow outlet hinders
the free run of the tide, a second high water follows the first
after an hour or so; and often a similar bar to the flowing away of
fears brings them back in full rush after they had begun to sink.
The psalmist had appealed to God's knowledge of His "foolishness" as
indorsing his protestations of innocence towards men. He now (ver.
19) appeals to His knowledge of his distresses, as indorsing his
pitiful plaints. His soul is too deeply moved now to use metaphors.
He speaks no more of mire and flood, but we hear the moan of a broken
heart, and that wail which sounds sad across the centuries and wakes
echoes in many solitary hearts. The psalmist's eyes had failed, while
he looked upwards for a God whose coming seemed slow; but they had
looked yet more wearily and vainly for human pity and comforters,
and found none. Instead of pity He had received only aggravation
of misery. Such seems to be the force of giving gall for food, and
vinegar to His thirst. The precise meaning of the word rendered "gall"
is uncertain, but the general idea of something bitter is sufficient.
That was all that His foes would give Him when hungry; and vinegar,
which would make Him more thirsty still, was all that they proffered
for His thirst. Such was their sympathy and comforting. According
to Matthew, the potion of "wine (or vinegar) mingled with gall" was
offered to and rejected by Jesus, before being fastened to the cross.
He does not expressly quote the psalm, but probably refers to it.
John, on the other hand, does tell us that Jesus, "that the scripture
might be accomplished, said, I thirst," and sees its fulfilment in the
kindly act of moistening the parched lips. The evangelist's expression
does not necessarily imply that a desire to fulfil the scripture
was our Lord's motive. Crucifixion was accompanied with torturing
thirst, which wrung that last complaint from Jesus. But the evangelist
discerns a Divine purpose behind the utterance of Jesus' human
weakness; and it is surely less difficult, for any one who believes
in supernatural revelation at all, to believe that the words of the
psalmist were shaped by a higher power, and the hands of the Roman
soldiers moved by another impulse than their own, than to believe that
this minute correspondence of psalm and gospel is merely accidental.
But the immediately succeeding section warns us against pushing
the Messianic character of the psalm too far, for these fearful
imprecations cannot have any analogies in Christ's words (vv. 22-28).
The form of the wish in "Let their table become a snare" is explained
by remembering that the Eastern table was often a leather flap laid
on the ground, which the psalmist desires may start up as a snare,
and close upon the feasters as they sit round it secure. Disease,
continual terror, dimmed eyes, paralysed or quaking loins, ruin
falling on their homes, and desolation round their encampment, so
that they have no descendants, are the least of the evils invoked.
The psalmist's desires go further than all this corporeal and
material disaster. He prays that iniquity may be added to their
iniquity--_i.e._, that they may be held guilty of sin after sin; and
that they may have no portion in God's righteousness--_i.e._, in the
gifts which flow from His adherence to His covenant.
The climax of all these maledictions is that awful wish that the
persecutors may be blotted out of the book of life or of the living.
True, the high New Testament conception of that book, according to
which it is the burgess-roll of the citizens of the New Jerusalem,
the possessors of eternal life, does not plainly belong to it in Old
Testament usage, in which it means apparently the register of those
living on earth. But to blot names therefrom is not only to kill,
but to exclude from the national community, and so from all the
privileges of the people of God. The psalmist desires for his foes the
accumulation of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the extirpation
of their families, and their absolute exclusion from the company
of the living and the righteous. It is impossible to bring such
utterances into harmony with the teachings of Jesus, and the attempt
to vindicate them ignores plain facts and does violence to plain
words. Better far to let them stand as a monument of the earlier stage
of God's progressive revelation, and discern clearly the advance which
Christian ethics has made on them.
The psalm ends with glad anticipations of deliverance and vows of
thanksgiving. The psalmist is sure that God's salvation will lift him
high above his enemies, and as sure that then he will be as grateful
as he is now earnest in prayer, and surest of all that his thankful
voice will sound sweeter in God's ear than any sacrifice would smell
in His nostrils. There is no contempt of sacrifices expressed in
"horned and hoofed," but simply the idea of maturity which fits the
animal to be offered.
The single voice of praise will be caught up, the singer thinks, by a
great chorus of those who would have been struck dumb with confusion
if his prayer had not been answered (ver. 6), and who, in like
manner, are gladdened by seeing his deliverance. The grace bestowed
on one brings thanksgivings from many, which redound to the glory
of God. The sudden transition in ver. 32 _b_ to direct address to
the seekers after God, as if they stood beside the solitary singer,
gives vividness to the anticipation. The insertion of "behold" is
warranted, and tells what revives the beholders' hearts. The seekers
after God feel the pulse of a quicker life throbbing, when they
see the wonders wrought through prayer. The singer's thoughts go
beyond his own deliverance to that of Israel. "His captives" is most
naturally understood as referring to the exiled nation. And this
wider manifestation of God's restoring power will evoke praise from
a wider circle, even from heaven, earth, and sea. The circumstances
contemplated in vv. 33-36 are evidently those of a captivity.
God's people are in bondage, the cities of Judah are in ruins, the
inhabitants scattered far from their homes. The only reason for taking
the closing verses as being a liturgical addition is unwillingness to
admit exilic or post-exilic psalms. But these verses cannot be fairly
interpreted without recognising that they presuppose that Israel is
in bondage, or at least on the verge of it. The circumstances of
Jeremiah's life and times coincide closely with those of the psalmist.