Some Trust in Chariots
1 For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David. May Yahweh answer you in the day of trouble. May the name of the God of Jacob set you up on high, 2 send you help from the sanctuary, grant you support from Zion, 3 remember all your offerings, and accept your burned sacrifice. Selah. 4 May he grant you your heart’s desire, and fulfill all your counsel. 5 We will triumph in your salvation. In the name of our God, we will set up our banners. May Yahweh grant all your requests. 6 Now I know that Yahweh saves his anointed. He will answer him from his holy heaven, with the saving strength of his right hand. 7 Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we trust in the name of Yahweh our God. 8 They are bowed down and fallen, but we rise up, and stand upright. 9 Save, Yahweh! Let the King answer us when we call!
A congregation prays for its king before a battle, and names the difference between the two armies as a matter of what each is trusting.
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David. May Yahweh answer you in the day of trouble. May the name of the God of Jacob set you up on high,
The psalm is a congregation praying for someone else. The first five verses are addressed to the king, not to God, and they are what a nation says to a man about to go out and fight on its behalf.
remember all your offerings, and accept your burned sacrifice. Selah.
The request assumes the king has already been at the altar. Preparation for battle in this psalm begins somewhere other than the armory.
May he grant you your heart’s desire, and fulfill all your counsel.
A prayer that a man's plans succeed, offered without qualification. It can be prayed this way because of who the man is and what has just been said about his offerings; the psalm is not recommending that anyone's ambitions be blessed indiscriminately.
We will triumph in your salvation. In the name of our God, we will set up our banners. May Yahweh grant all your requests.
The banner is the rallying point in a battle, the thing a scattered unit re-forms around. Naming whose it is decides what the fight is for.
Now I know that Yahweh saves his anointed. He will answer him from his holy heaven, with the saving strength of his right hand.
A single voice, in the middle of a congregational prayer. Something has happened between verse five and verse six — the psalm was likely sung around an oracle or a sacrifice — and the change from may he to now I know is the turn the whole piece is built on.
Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we trust in the name of Yahweh our God.
The best-known line, and its edge is sharper than it first appears. Israel's kings were forbidden to multiply horses Deuteronomy 17:16, so this is not merely a pious preference for faith over hardware. Chariots were the decisive weapon of the age, the thing every neighboring power had and Israel largely did not, and the verse is spoken by the side without them.
It does not say that equipment is useless — the army in question is armed and is going to fight. It says where the trust is placed, which is a different question from what is in the hand, and the psalm's own arrangement makes the point: the trusting is named in the same breath as the chariots, not instead of them.
They are bowed down and fallen, but we rise up, and stand upright.
The outcome is stated before the battle. And the closing line hands the whole matter back: Save, Yahweh! Let the King answer us when we call Psalms 20:9 — the human king having been prayed for through eight verses, the last word goes to the one the prayers were addressed to.
settled What this mark means