Let Us Search and Turn Back
40 Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to Yahweh. 41 Let’s lift up our heart with our hands to God in the heavens. 42 “We have transgressed and have rebelled. You have not pardoned. 43 “You have covered us with anger and pursued us. You have killed. You have not pitied. 44 You have covered yourself with a cloud, so that no prayer can pass through. 45 You have made us an off-scouring and refuse in the middle of the peoples. 46 “All our enemies have opened their mouth wide against us. 47 Terror and the pit have come on us, devastation and destruction.” 48 My eye runs down with streams of water, for the destruction of the daughter of my people. 49 My eye pours down and doesn’t cease, without any intermission, 50 until Yahweh looks down, and sees from heaven. 51 My eye affects my soul, because of all the daughters of my city. 52 They have chased me relentlessly like a bird, those who are my enemies without cause. 53 They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and have cast a stone on me. 54 Waters flowed over my head. I said, “I am cut off.”
The one summons to repentance in the book is spoken in the first person plural, and it does not produce an answer.
Verse 40 is the only place in the book where anyone calls for action, and the pronoun matters: let us search and try our ways, and turn again to Yahweh. Not let them. The man of verse 1 puts himself inside the summons, and verse 41 asks for hands and hearts lifted together.
Then verse 42 makes the confession, and its second half is startling: we have transgressed and have rebelled — and then, in the same breath, you have not pardoned. The book records the confession and the silence that followed it, side by side, without resolving the sequence.
What follows in verses 43 to 45 is the same complaint as the poem's opening, now in the plural. Covered with anger, pursued, killed, not pitied. And verse 44 gives the image the chapter has been circling: you have covered yourself with a cloud, so that no prayer can pass through — the barrier of verse 8 stated from the other side.
This is what makes the chapter honest rather than tidy. The turn at verse 21 did not end the trouble, the repentance at verse 40 does not produce an answer, and the poem keeps going.
Verses 48 to 51 return to the poet's eyes, running down without ceasing until Yahweh looks down and sees from heaven. The tears have a terminus, and it is not his own relief but God's attention.
Verses 52 to 54 close the section in the language of drowning: hunted like a bird, cut off in a pit, a stone cast on him, waters over his head. I said, I am cut off. The next verse is the answer.
settled What this mark means