The Waters Have Come Up to My Neck
1 For the Chief Musician. To the tune of “Lilies.” By David. Save me, God, for the waters have come up to my neck! 2 I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. 3 I am weary with my crying. My throat is dry. My eyes fail looking for my God. 4 Those who hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head. Those who want to cut me off, being my enemies wrongfully, are mighty. I have to restore what I didn’t take away. 5 God, you know my foolishness. My sins aren’t hidden from you. 6 Don’t let those who wait for you be shamed through me, Lord Yahweh of Armies. Don’t let those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me, God of Israel. 7 Because for your sake, I have borne reproach. Shame has covered my face. 8 I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother’s children. 9 For the zeal of your house consumes me. The reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me. 10 When I wept and I fasted, that was to my reproach. 11 When I made sackcloth my clothing, I became a byword to them. 12 Those who sit in the gate talk about me. I am the song of the drunkards. 13 But as for me, my prayer is to you, Yahweh, in an acceptable time. God, in the abundance of your loving kindness, answer me in the truth of your salvation. 14 Deliver me out of the mire, and don’t let me sink. Let me be delivered from those who hate me, and out of the deep waters. 15 Don’t let the flood waters overwhelm me, neither let the deep swallow me up. Don’t let the pit shut its mouth on me. 16 Answer me, Yahweh, for your loving kindness is good. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, turn to me. 17 Don’t hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress. Answer me speedily! 18 Draw near to my soul and redeem it. Ransom me because of my enemies. 19 You know my reproach, my shame, and my dishonor. My adversaries are all before you. 20 Reproach has broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness. I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; for comforters, but I found none. 21 They also gave me poison for my food. In my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.
A man drowning in trouble he did not cause is offered vinegar, and four lines of this psalm are quoted at the crucifixion.
1 For the Chief Musician. To the tune of “Lilies.” By David. Save me, God, for the waters have come up to my neck! 2 I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.
The most quoted psalm in the New Testament after the twenty-second, and the opening is a man going under. Mire with no foothold is the same pit as the fortieth psalm, and here nobody has yet pulled him out.
Those who hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head. Those who want to cut me off, being my enemies wrongfully, are mighty. I have to restore what I didn’t take away.
Jesus quotes this clause and names it as written in their law, of himself John 15:25. And I have to restore what I didn't take away describes the specific injustice of being made to pay for something one did not do.
God, you know my foolishness. My sins aren’t hidden from you.
The verse that keeps the psalm honest and complicates the messianic reading. The speaker admits sin, which is why the New Testament quotes this psalm selectively rather than wholesale. What David wrote out of his own experience contains lines that go beyond it, and the apostles take those lines; the collection preserves both layers without flattening either.
I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother’s children.
His own family. John records that even his brothers didn't believe in him John 7:5.
For the zeal of your house consumes me. The reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.
The disciples remembered this line when they watched Jesus clear the temple John 2:17. The verb means eaten up — a man used up by concern for something that is not his own.
For the zeal of your house consumes me. The reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.
Paul quotes the second half of the same verse, of Christ, in an argument about bearing with the weak Romans 15:3.
Those who sit in the gate talk about me. I am the song of the drunkards.
Two audiences, the respectable and the disreputable, and he is the subject in both. The elders discuss him at the gate where cases are heard; in the taverns he is a song. There is nowhere in the town he is not being talked about.
Reproach has broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness. I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; for comforters, but I found none.
The loneliest verse in the psalm. He is not complaining that people attacked him but that nobody came.
They also gave me poison for my food. In my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.
All four Gospels record sour wine offered at the cross, and John says explicitly that Jesus, knowing all things were now finished, said I am thirsty so that the Scripture might be fulfilled John 19:28. The psalm supplies the line, written a thousand years before by a man describing his own mistreatment.
settled What this mark means