Teach Us to Number Our Days
1 A Prayer by Moses, the man of God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations. 2 Before the mountains were born, before you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. 3 You turn man to destruction, saying, “Return, you children of men.” 4 For a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night. 5 You sweep them away as they sleep. In the morning they sprout like new grass. 6 In the morning it sprouts and springs up. By evening, it is withered and dry. 7 For we are consumed in your anger. We are troubled in your wrath. 8 You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. 9 For all our days have passed away in your wrath. We bring our years to an end as a sigh. 10 The days of our years are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty years; yet their pride is but labor and sorrow, for it passes quickly, and we fly away. 11 Who knows the power of your anger, your wrath according to the fear that is due to you? 12 So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. 13 Relent, Yahweh! How long? Have compassion on your servants! 14 Satisfy us in the morning with your loving kindness, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. 15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen evil. 16 Let your work appear to your servants, your glory to their children. 17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us. Establish the work of our hands for us. Yes, establish the work of our hands.
The oldest psalm in the book, written by a man watching a generation die in a desert.
A Prayer by Moses, the man of God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations.
The only psalm attributed to Moses, and the oldest thing in the collection by four centuries. The fourth book opens with it, immediately after the collapse of the monarchy in the eighty-ninth psalm — which is an editorial decision worth noticing. When the throne fails, the collection reaches back past the throne entirely, to a man who had no country and no king.
A Prayer by Moses, the man of God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations.
Written, most likely, by a man living in a tent. The word means a permanent home, and the claim is that a people with no address have always had one.
Before the mountains were born, before you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
For a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night.
A night watch was four hours, most of it spent doing nothing. Peter quotes this verse when answering people who complain that God is slow 2 Peter 3:8, and the psalm's use of it is the same: the delay is not what it looks like from inside a short life.
In the morning it sprouts and springs up. By evening, it is withered and dry.
Grass in that climate does exactly this. A human life is given one day.
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.
The brevity is not treated as a neutral fact of biology. The psalm connects it to sin, and specifically to the sins nobody else knows about — laid out where the light is.
The days of our years are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty years; yet their pride is but labor and sorrow, for it passes quickly, and we fly away.
The figure has not moved in three and a half thousand years. And it is written by a man in the wilderness, where an entire generation was dying off at exactly this rate.
So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
The request of the whole psalm, and the arithmetic is the means rather than the end. Counting is asked for so that something can be gained — a heart of wisdom, which is what a person gets from knowing how much time is left rather than from any other source.
Satisfy us in the morning with your loving kindness, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
In a psalm where morning has meant the brief flourishing of grass, the request is for something else to fill it.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us. Establish the work of our hands for us. Yes, establish the work of our hands.
The last line, said twice. A man whose life is a day asks that what he does in it should last, and the psalm does not claim the work has that property on its own — it asks for it to be given.
settled What this mark means