Blessed Is He Who Considers the Poor
1 For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David. Blessed is he who considers the poor. Yahweh will deliver him in the day of evil. 2 Yahweh will preserve him, and keep him alive. He shall be blessed on the earth, and he will not surrender him to the will of his enemies. 3 Yahweh will sustain him on his sickbed, and restore him from his bed of illness. 4 I said, “Yahweh, have mercy on me! Heal me, for I have sinned against you.” 5 My enemies speak evil against me: “When will he die, and his name perish?” 6 If he comes to see me, he speaks falsehood. His heart gathers iniquity to itself. When he goes abroad, he tells it. 7 All who hate me whisper together against me. They imagine the worst for me. 8 “An evil disease”, they say, “has afflicted him. Now that he lies he shall rise up no more.” 9 Yes, my own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, who ate bread with me, has lifted up his heel against me. 10 But you, Yahweh, have mercy on me, and raise me up, that I may repay them. 11 By this I know that you delight in me, because my enemy doesn’t triumph over me. 12 As for me, you uphold me in my integrity, and set me in your presence forever. 13 Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel, from everlasting and to everlasting! Amen and amen.
A sick man is visited by a friend who is gathering material, and the first book of the Psalter closes with a doxology.
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David. Blessed is he who considers the poor. Yahweh will deliver him in the day of evil.
The psalm opens with a beatitude about the weak, and the word rendered considers means to give attention to, to think carefully about — not to give to, which would be easier. What is commended is the effort of understanding someone's situation.
The promise attached is specific and it explains why the psalm goes where it does: Yahweh will sustain him on his sickbed Psalms 41:3. A man who has attended to other people in trouble is promised attention when he is in it.
I said, “Yahweh, have mercy on me! Heal me, for I have sinned against you.”
The writer is now the one on the bed. And what follows is the psalm's real subject, which is not illness but the behavior of visitors.
My enemies speak evil against me: “When will he die, and his name perish?”
If he comes to see me, he speaks falsehood. His heart gathers iniquity to itself. When he goes abroad, he tells it.
A sickroom visit conducted as reconnaissance. He sits by the bed saying the right things, collecting whatever he can — how bad the man looks, what he said — and repeats it outside. Anyone who has been seriously ill will recognize the specific horror of it.
7 All who hate me whisper together against me. They imagine the worst for me. 8 “An evil disease”, they say, “has afflicted him. Now that he lies he shall rise up no more.”
They are not merely predicting his death; they are diagnosing his illness as a verdict. The reasoning is the one Job's friends used, and the psalm records it as the speech of enemies.
Yes, my own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, who ate bread with me, has lifted up his heel against me.
The worst verse. Not an enemy but a friend, one who shared a table, which in that culture created an obligation nothing was supposed to break. Jesus quotes this line at the last supper, applying it to Judas, and pointedly does not quote the first half of the psalm's fourth verse about having sinned John 13:18.
Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel, from everlasting and to everlasting! Amen and amen.
The last verse belongs to no particular psalm. It is the doxology closing the first of the Psalter's five books, and the same formula ends the second, third and fourth. Someone arranging this collection put a blessing at each seam.
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