My Heart Is Steadfast, God
1 A Song. A Psalm by David. My heart is steadfast, God. I will sing and I will make music with my soul. 2 Wake up, harp and lyre! I will wake up the dawn. 3 I will give thanks to you, Yahweh, among the nations. I will sing praises to you among the peoples. 4 For your loving kindness is great above the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the skies. 5 Be exalted, God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth. 6 That your beloved may be delivered, save with your right hand, and answer us. 7 God has spoken from his sanctuary: “In triumph, I will divide Shechem, and measure out the valley of Succoth. 8 Gilead is mine. Manasseh is mine. Ephraim also is my helmet. Judah is my scepter. 9 Moab is my wash pot. I will toss my sandal on Edom. I will shout over Philistia.” 10 Who will bring me into the fortified city? Who will lead me to Edom? 11 Haven’t you rejected us, God? You don’t go out, God, with our armies. 12 Give us help against the enemy, for the help of man is vain. 13 Through God, we will do valiantly, for it is he who will tread down our enemies.
Two halves of two older psalms joined into a new one, and the seam is where the mood changes.
A Song. A Psalm by David. My heart is steadfast, God. I will sing and I will make music with my soul.
This psalm is made of two others. The first five verses are the closing half of the fifty-seventh; the last eight are the closing half of the sixtieth, and both are reproduced almost word for word.
That a hymnbook did this is worth stating plainly. Somebody took the confident ending of a psalm written in a cave and joined it to the desperate ending of a psalm written after a military disaster, and the join is the point.
Wake up, harp and lyre! I will wake up the dawn.
The line from the cave, and it arrives here without the cave. Detached from its occasion, it becomes usable by anyone.
I will give thanks to you, Yahweh, among the nations. I will sing praises to you among the peoples.
That your beloved may be delivered, save with your right hand, and answer us.
Here the second psalm begins, and the pronouns shift from singular to plural. A private song of confidence has become a national appeal, and the change happens between two verses.
7 God has spoken from his sanctuary: “In triumph, I will divide Shechem, and measure out the valley of Succoth. 8 Gilead is mine. Manasseh is mine. Ephraim also is my helmet. Judah is my scepter. 9 Moab is my wash pot. I will toss my sandal on Edom. I will shout over Philistia.”
The oracle of the sixtieth psalm, with the hostile neighbors demoted to household objects.
Haven’t you rejected us, God? You don’t go out, God, with our armies.
And the complaint too, unchanged. The compiler did not sand off the difficulty — the psalm that opens with a steadfast heart and a woken dawn still contains, eleven verses later, a flat accusation that God is absent from the battlefield.
12 Give us help against the enemy, for the help of man is vain. 13 Through God, we will do valiantly, for it is he who will tread down our enemies.
The ending is the same as the sixtieth psalm's, and it is neither passive nor triumphalist. Human help is worthless; the army will still fight; and the treading down is credited elsewhere. A collection willing to build a new psalm out of two old ones was willing to keep both moods in it.
settled What this mark means