Biblion Bible Commentary
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How Long, Yahweh?
Psalms 6:1-10
1 For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments, upon the eight-stringed lyre. A Psalm by David. Yahweh, don’t rebuke me in your anger, neither discipline me in your wrath. · WEB
A man soaking his bed with tears argues for his life on the ground that the dead do not praise God.
Yahweh, don't rebuke me in your anger, neither discipline me in your wrath Psalms 6:1.
The first of the psalms the church has long grouped as penitential. Note what is not asked: not that the discipline be canceled, but that it not come in anger. The writer assumes he needs correcting and asks only about the spirit in which it arrives.
Have mercy on me, Yahweh, for I am faint. Yahweh, heal me, for my bones are troubled. My soul is also in great anguish. But you, Yahweh—how long? Psalms 6:2–3.
The sentence breaks off. He begins a question and does not finish it, and the unfinished line is more eloquent than a completed one would have been. The trouble has reached the body — bones, weakness, an eye that wastes away because of grief Psalms 6:7 — and the psalm makes no attempt to separate physical exhaustion from spiritual distress.
I am weary with my groaning. Every night I flood my bed. I drench my couch with my tears Psalms 6:6.
It is deliberate exaggeration, of the kind grief produces, and it was set to music and sung in public worship. That is the fact worth holding on to. A community that made this part of its hymnbook was telling its members that there is no condition too undignified to bring.
For in death there is no memory of you. In Sheol, who shall give you thanks? Psalms 6:5.
The verse is an argument, offered to God as a reason to act: if I die, the praise stops. Its force depends entirely on death being what the psalm says it is, and the Psalter says the same thing repeatedly and without hedging — the dead don't praise Yah, nor any who go down into silence Psalms 115:17, and his spirit departs, and he returns to the earth. In that very day, his thoughts perish Psalms 146:4.
This is the consistent Old Testament picture, and it is not a defect in the psalmist's information. Death is sleep, and the sleeper is not somewhere else praising God in a better place; the psalm's argument would collapse if he were. Ecclesiastes states it as plainly — the dead don't know anything Ecclesiastes 9:5 — and Jesus uses the same vocabulary of a man four days buried John 11:11–14. What the writer wants is not release from the body but more time in it, and the hope that eventually answers him is not survival but resurrection 1 Corinthians 15:52.
Yahweh has heard the voice of my weeping. Yahweh has heard my supplication Psalms 6:8–9.
Nothing has been reported as changing. The tone turns anyway, and the psalm ends in confidence with the circumstances undescribed — which is the shape of most laments in this book.
settled What this mark means