The Trouble He Made Returns
1 A meditation by David, which he sang to Yahweh, concerning the words of Cush, the Benjamite. Yahweh, my God, I take refuge in you. Save me from all those who pursue me, and deliver me, 2 lest they tear apart my soul like a lion, ripping it in pieces, while there is no one to deliver. 3 Yahweh, my God, if I have done this, if there is iniquity in my hands, 4 if I have rewarded evil to him who was at peace with me (yes, I have plundered him who without cause was my adversary), 5 let the enemy pursue my soul, and overtake it; yes, let him tread my life down to the earth, and lay my glory in the dust. Selah. 6 Arise, Yahweh, in your anger. Lift up yourself against the rage of my adversaries. Awake for me. You have commanded judgment. 7 Let the congregation of the peoples surround you. Rule over them on high. 8 Yahweh administers judgment to the peoples. Judge me, Yahweh, according to my righteousness, and to my integrity that is in me. 9 Oh let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish the righteous; their minds and hearts are searched by the righteous God. 10 My shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart. 11 God is a righteous judge, yes, a God who has indignation every day. 12 If a man doesn’t repent, he will sharpen his sword; he has bent and strung his bow. 13 He has also prepared for himself the instruments of death. He makes ready his flaming arrows. 14 Behold, he travails with iniquity. Yes, he has conceived mischief, and brought out falsehood. 15 He has dug a hole, and has fallen into the pit which he made. 16 The trouble he causes shall return to his own head. His violence shall come down on the crown of his own head. 17 I will give thanks to Yahweh according to his righteousness, and will sing praise to the name of Yahweh Most High.
A man asks to be judged and invites the sentence himself if he is guilty, and the wicked is described as digging his own hole.
A meditation by David, which he sang to Yahweh, concerning the words of Cush, the Benjamite. Yahweh, my God, I take refuge in you. Save me from all those who pursue me, and deliver me,
The heading ties the psalm to the words of Cush, the Benjamite — a slander, from someone of Saul's tribe, and the psalm is the response of a man who has been accused of something.
3 Yahweh, my God, if I have done this, if there is iniquity in my hands, 4 if I have rewarded evil to him who was at peace with me (yes, I have plundered him who without cause was my adversary), 5 let the enemy pursue my soul, and overtake it; yes, let him tread my life down to the earth, and lay my glory in the dust. Selah.
The oath is the boldest thing in the psalm. He does not merely deny the charge; he invites the penalty on himself if it is true, in detail, in a prayer. It is worth stating clearly what this does and does not claim. It is not a declaration of general sinlessness — the same collection contains the fifty-first psalm — but a plea of innocence to a specific accusation. A man may be a sinner in general and not guilty of the thing he is charged with, and the psalm's confidence rests on the narrowness of the claim.
Yahweh administers judgment to the peoples. Judge me, Yahweh, according to my righteousness, and to my integrity that is in me.
The request is for a hearing before a judge who cannot be misled, and it is made by someone with no other court available. Where slander cannot be answered, the appeal goes over the heads of everyone who could be persuaded.
God is a righteous judge, yes, a God who has indignation every day.
A sentence that sits badly with a modern reader and should not be trimmed. What it asserts is that God's response to wrong is not periodic. He is not roused occasionally; he objects continuously, and a God who could look at the world's cruelty without daily indignation would be a worse God, not a kinder one.
15 He has dug a hole, and has fallen into the pit which he made. 16 The trouble he causes shall return to his own head. His violence shall come down on the crown of his own head.
The psalm's picture of judgment is not a thunderbolt. It is a man falling into his own excavation, and the image recurs throughout the collection Psalms 9:15 Psalms 57:6. Evil is presented as self-defeating by construction rather than merely punished from outside — which is why the verses just before describe the wicked as travailing with iniquity, conceiving mischief and giving birth to falsehood. The metaphor is pregnancy: what he produces is his own.
settled What this mark means