Twelve verses, one of the eight psalms of David in the closing group that runs from 138 to 145, and the plainest lament in that group. The shape is easy to hold: two verses of request, four of description, six that are almost nothing but imperatives. Two words carry it. The speaker's own spirit appears twice and fails both times, in verses 4 and 7, and then in verse 10 he asks for a different spirit, God's. And the word servant opens the argument in verse 2 and closes it in verse 12, so everything asked for in between rests on that and on nothing else.
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in Your faithfulness answer me, in Your righteousness.
The opening is doubled twice over: two verbs for hearing, two nouns for what is being said, two divine attributes to answer by. Faithfulness and righteousness are named before any trouble is.
The request is qualified immediately, and the qualification is the strangest thing in the psalm: answer me, but not by judging. The reason given is universal rather than personal, which takes the speaker's own case out of the argument.
The trouble in three clauses of increasing weight: pursued, crushed, made to sit. The third is the worst because it is not violence but an address, among people dead so long that nobody remembers them.
The damage turns inward. Both verbs are things the speaker undergoes rather than does, and both locate the injury inside his own body rather than in his circumstances.
The only move the speaker makes on his own. Three verbs of memory and thought, all aimed backwards at what God has already done, which is the usual way out of this in the psalms.
Hands out, soul dry. The comparison is to land and not to a thirsty person, so what is described is not appetite but ground that can produce nothing at all until it rains.
The imperatives begin, and the first one is about speed. The pit here is not a threat from the enemy but the ordinary end of anyone God stops looking at.
Make me hear Your kindness in the morning, for I have trusted in You;
הוֹדִיעֵנִי
ho-di-e-NI
make me know
דֶּרֶךְ
de-RECH
the way
זוּ
zu
which
אֵלֵךְ
e-LECH
I should walk
make me know the way I should walk,
כִּי
ki
for
אֵלֶיךָ
e-lei-CHA
to You
נָשָׂאתִי
na-sa-TI
I have lifted
נַפְשִׁי
naf-SHI
my soul
for to You I have lifted my soul.
The first request for something other than rescue. Morning answers the dark places of verse 3 and a way to walk answers the ground he was crushed onto, and both are asked on the basis of trust rather than merit.
9
הַצִּילֵנִי מֵאֹיְבַי יְהֹוָה
אֵלֶיךָ כִסִּתִי
הַצִּילֵנִי
ha-tzi-le-NI
rescue me
מֵאֹיְבַי
me-oi-VAI
from my enemies
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
Rescue me from my enemies, LORD;
אֵלֶיךָ
e-lei-CHA
to You
כִסִּתִי
chi-si-TI
I have covered myself
with You I have covered myself.
The shortest verse in the psalm, and its last word is a genuine problem. Whatever the verb turns out to mean, the direction is the same: not away from the enemies but toward God.
The centre of what the psalm actually wants. Not deliverance but instruction, and the spirit doing the leading is God's rather than his own, which has already failed twice.
The one harsh verse, and it sits in the same breath as the word kindness, which is uncomfortable and deliberate. The last three words are the whole argument compressed: I am Your servant.
♦ PARDES analysis: פרדס
The four levels of Jewish reading of the sacred text: פשט Peshat (literal meaning), רמז Remez (symbolic allusion), דרש Drash (midrashic interpretation), סוד Sod (mystical meaning). The word פרדס means "orchard", each level is a fruit.
פשט · Peshat: literal meaning
Three movements. Verses 1 and 2 ask to be heard and then rule out one way of being answered. Verses 3 to 6 describe the situation, moving from what an enemy did, to what happened inside the speaker, to one image of dry ground. Verses 7 to 12 are a run of ten or so imperatives and jussives with no narrative between them. The word soul appears five times, at נַפְשִׁי (naf-shi, v.3), נַפְשִׁי (naf-shi, v.6), נַפְשִׁי (naf-shi, v.8), נַפְשִׁי (naf-shi, v.11) and נַפְשִׁי (naf-shi, v.12), and it is the object of nearly everything that happens: pursued, thirsty, lifted, brought out, harassed. The two attributes named at בֶּאֱמֻנָתְךָ (be-e-mu-nat-cha, v.1) and בְּצִדְקָתֶךָ (be-tzid-ka-te-cha, v.1) return at בְּצִדְקָתְךָ (be-tzid-kat-cha, v.11) and, as kindness, at חַסְדֶּךָ (chas-de-cha, v.8) and וּבְחַסְדְּךָ (uv-chas-de-cha, v.12). Nothing in the psalm reports that any of it worked.
רמז · Remez: allusion
כִסִּתִי (chi-si-ti, v.9) is the crux. The verb is from the root for covering, and the clause reads to You I have covered, with no object at all. It has been read as I have hidden myself with You, taking the speaker as the object; as I have covered my soul, supplying the noun from the neighbouring verses; and there is a long standing proposal that the original consonants held a different verb meaning to flee, which some ancient versions appear to reflect. The Masoretic text supports the first two, and it is the Masoretic text this page prints. A second point, at אֶת (et, v.2): the plain object marker is doing the work of the preposition with, so the verse is about entering judgment alongside someone rather than about judging them. Third, מִישׁוֹר (mi-shor, v.10) is a level plain, from the same root as the words for upright and straight, so being led on level ground is at once a request for easy walking and for a straight life. Fourth, the two thinking verbs of verse 5 are not silent ones: הָגִיתִי (ha-gi-ti, v.5) is the verb behind the noun higayon and denotes a low murmur, and אֲשׂוֹחֵחַ (a-so-che-ach, v.5) is a rare verb closer to talking something over aloud than to reflection.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 2 is the verse this psalm is remembered for. It does not claim the speaker is innocent and it does not concede that he is guilty. It says the category itself does not survive contact with God, and it says so about every living thing rather than about him, which is why the verse is quoted far outside its own psalm. One traditional line joins it to Ecclesiastes 7:20, that there is no righteous man on earth who does good and never sins, and treats the pair as the reason prayer asks for kindness instead of for a verdict. A second line works on what the psalm does with the word righteousness. At verse 2 righteousness is the thing nobody has; at verses 1 and 11 God's righteousness is the thing that rescues. The same root that would convict in a court is what the speaker appeals to for release, and that reversal is the real argument of the psalm. In Christian tradition this is the last of the seven penitential psalms, a grouping formed in late antiquity that has no Jewish counterpart.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Read the three occurrences of the word spirit in order and the psalm has a plot its surface does not show. At רוּחִי (ru-chi, v.4) the speaker's own spirit wraps itself over him, a verb used elsewhere of a garment and of fainting, so the breath that animates him becomes a covering that smothers him. At רוּחִי (ru-chi, v.7) the same word is finished, worn out, using the verb that Psalm 84 uses for a soul spent with longing. Then at רוּחֲךָ (ru-cha-cha, v.10) he stops asking anything of his own spirit and asks for God's, and the adjective attached to it, good, is the only positive word in the last six verses. On the mystical reading the whole psalm is that exchange: what a person carries runs out, and what is asked for at the end is not more of the same but a different source. The dry land of כְּאֶרֶץ (ke-e-retz, v.6) works the same way. Land cannot water itself, and the image is chosen precisely because it removes the speaker's own agency from the picture.
Hebrew text: Miqra according to the Masorah (MAM), after the Aleppo Codex, via Sefaria, CC BY-SA. English: The Holy Scriptures, a New Translation (JPS 1917), via Sefaria, public domain. Transliteration generated by this site's own engine (assets/translit.js).