1 _O God_, [be pleased] to deliver me,
Jehovah, hasten to my help.
2 Shamed and put to the blush be the seekers after my soul!
Turned back and dishonoured be they who delight in my calamity!
3 _Let them turn back_ by reason of their shame who say, Oho! Oho!
4 Joyful and glad in Thee be all who seek Thee!
_And "God_ be magnified" may they ever say who love Thy salvation!
5 But as for me, I am afflicted and needy;
_O God, hasten_ to me:
My help and my deliverer art Thou;
_Jehovah_, delay not.
This psalm is all but identical with the last verses of Psalm xl.
13-17. Some unimportant alterations have been made, principally in the
Divine names; but the principle on which they have been made is not
obvious. It is scarcely correct to say, with Delitzsch, that the psalm
"has been transformed, so as to become Elohistic"; for though it twice
replaces the name of Jehovah with that of God (vv. 1, 4), it makes the
converse change in ver. 5, last clause, by reading Jehovah instead of
"God," as in Psalm xl.
Other changes are of little moment. The principal are in vv. 3 and
5. In the former the vehement wish that the psalmist's mockers may
be _paralysed with shame_ is softened down into a desire that they
may be _turned back_. The two verbs are similar in sound, and the
substitution may have been accidental, a slip of memory or a defect in
hearing, or it may have been an artistic variation of the original. In
ver. 5 a prayer that God will hasten to the psalmist's help takes the
place of an expression of confidence that "Jehovah purposes [good]"
to him, and again there is similarity of sound in the two words. This
change is like the subtle alteration which a painter might make on his
picture by taking out one spot of high light. The gleam of confidence
is changed to a call of need, and the tone of the whole psalm is
thereby made more plaintive.
Hupfeld holds that this psalm is the original, and Psalm xl. a
composite; but most commentators agree in regarding this as a fragment
of that psalm. The cut has not been very cleanly made; for the
necessary verb "be pleased" has been left behind, and the symmetry of
ver. 1 is destroyed for want of it. The awkward incompleteness of this
beginning witnesses that the psalm is a fragment.