Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Trouble He Made Returns
Psalms 7:1-17
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, · WEB
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.
Yahweh, my God, I take refuge in you. Save me from all those who pursue me Psalms 7:1.
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.
Yahweh, my God, if I have done this, if there is iniquity in my hands... let the enemy pursue my soul, and overtake it; yes, let him tread my life down to the earth Psalms 7:3–5.
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.
Judge me, Yahweh, according to my righteousness, and to my integrity that is in me Psalms 7:8.
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 Psalms 7:11.
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.
He has dug a hole, and has fallen into the pit which he made. The trouble he causes shall return to his own head Psalms 7:15–16.
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