Biblion Bible Commentary
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He Brought Me Up Out of a Horrible Pit
Psalms 40:1-17
1 For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David. I waited patiently for Yahweh. He turned to me, and heard my cry. · WEB
A rescue already accomplished, a statement that sacrifice was never what God wanted, and then trouble again.
I waited patiently for Yahweh. He turned to me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay. He set my feet on a rock Psalms 40:1–2.
The waiting comes first and it is emphasized by the Hebrew, which repeats the verb: waiting, he waited. What is described afterward happened at the end of a delay long enough to need mentioning.
The pit is a cistern with a mud floor, the standard prison of that world — a place where a man cannot climb out because there is nothing solid to push against. The contrast is exact: mire, then rock.
He has put a new song in my mouth Psalms 40:3. The song is not composed in gratitude; it is put there, as part of the rescue rather than a response to it.
Sacrifice and offering you didn't desire. You have opened my ears. You have not required burnt offering and sin offering Psalms 40:6.
A startling line to find in a book of temple worship, and it is not an attack on the sacrificial system, which the same collection assumes throughout. It is the prophets' consistent point stated by a worshiper: the machinery was never the object. You have opened my ears — literally dug them — is the phrase that explains what was wanted instead, and the next verses spell it out.
Then I said, "Behold, I have come. It is written about me in the book in the scroll. I delight to do your will, my God. Yes, your law is within my heart" Psalms 40:7–8.
The letter to the Hebrews quotes this passage in full as the words of Christ entering the world, and builds an entire argument on it: he takes away the first, that he may establish the second Hebrews 10:5–9. The reasoning is that a text inside the sacrificial system announces that the system was not the point, and names obedience as what replaces it.
In the psalm itself the claim is already large. A man says that the scroll is about him and that God's law is not on tablets but inside him — which is what the new covenant later promises to everyone Jeremiah 31:33.
I have not hidden your righteousness within my heart. I have declared your faithfulness and your salvation Psalms 40:10.
The law is kept inside; the righteousness is not. The psalm distinguishes carefully between what is internalized and what is announced.
For innumerable evils have surrounded me. My iniquities have overtaken me... They are more than the hairs of my head Psalms 40:12.
The psalm collapses back into distress, and the closing verses reappear almost word for word as the seventieth psalm. A man who has been pulled out of a pit is in trouble again by the end of the same poem, which the collection records without any attempt to smooth it.
settled What this mark means