PSALM 9

¹For the lead player, ʿalmut laben, a David psalm.

²I acclaim the LORD with all my heart,^ℵ

let me tell of all His wonders.

³Let me rejoice and be glad in You,

let me hymn Your name, Most High,

⁴when my enemies turn back,^ב

when they stumble and perish before You.

⁵For You upheld my justice, my right,

You sat on the throne of the righteous judge.

⁶You rebuked the nations, destroyed the wicked,^ג

their name You wiped out forever.

⁷The enemy—ruins that are gone for all time,^ה

and the towns you smashed, their name is lost.

⁸But the LORD is forever enthroned,

makes His throne for justice unshaken.

⁹And He judges the world in righteousness,

lays down law to the nations in truth.

¹⁰Let the LORD be a fortress for the downcast,^ו

a fortress in times of distress.

¹¹And those who know Your name will trust You,

for You forsook not Your seekers, O LORD.

¹²Hymn to the LORD Who dwells in Zion,^ז

tell among the peoples His deeds.

¹³For the Requiter of blood recalled them,

He forgot not the cry of the lowly.

¹⁴Grant me grace, O LORD,^ח

see my torment by my foes,

You Who raise me from the gates of death.

¹⁵So that I may tell all Your praise

in the gates of the Daughter of Zion.

Let me exult in Your rescue.

¹⁶The nations sank down in the trap that they made,^ט

in the snare that they made their foot was caught.

¹⁷The LORD is known for the justice He did.

By his own handiwork was the wicked ensnared.

higayon

selah

¹⁸The wicked will turn back to Sheol,^י

All the nations forgetful of God.

¹⁹For not forever will the poor man be forgotten,^כ

the hope of the lowly not lost forever.

²⁰Arise, O LORD, let not man flaunt his strength,

let nations be judged in Your presence.

²¹O LORD, put fear upon them,

let the nations know they are mortal.

selah

PSALM 9 NOTES

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This psalm and the next one are a striking testimony to the scrambling in textual transmission that, unfortunately, a good many of the psalms have suffered. The Septuagint presents Psalms 9 and 10 as a single psalm, and there is formal evidence for the fact that it was originally one poem. Psalm 9 in the Hebrew begins as an alphabetic acrostic: verses 2 and 3, aleph (four times); verse 4, bet; verse 6, gimmel (dalet, the next letter, is missing); verse 7, heh; verses 8–11, waw; verse 12, zayin; verse 14, ḥet; verse 16, tet; verse 18, yod; verse 19, kaf. It is notable that some lines of poetry have been interspersed between the acrostic lines, unlike other acrostic psalms in which the sequential letters of the alphabet occur in consecutive lines. Then Psalm 10 begins with the next letter of the alphabet, lamed, after which the acrostic disappears, to surface near the end of the psalm with the last six letters of the alphabet—verse 7, peh; verse 8, ayin; verse 12, qof; verse 14, resh; verse 15, shin; and verse 17, taw. Now, what accompanies this confusion is a whole series of points, especially in the second half of the psalm, at which the text is not intelligible and is in all likelihood defective. Something along the following lines seems to have happened to our psalm: at some early moment in the long history of its transmission, a single authoritative copy was damaged (by decay, moisture, fire, or whatever). Lines of verse may have been patched into the text from other sources in an attempt to fill in lacunae. Quite a few phrases or lines were simply transcribed in their mangled form or perhaps poorly reconstructed. When the chapter divisions of the Bible were introduced in the late Middle Ages, the editors, struggling with this imperfect text, no longer realized that it was an acrostic and broke it into two separate psalms. The result of this whole process, alas, is that we are left with a rather imperfect notion of what some of the text means.

1. ʿalmut laben. This is another opaque musical term. The second word seems to say “to the son,” but it may be a reversal of letters, n-b-l, for nevel, a kind of lyre.

2. I acclaim the LORD. The initial verb, ʾodeh, announces the status of the poem as a thanksgiving psalm (todah, the cognate noun)—in this case because God has caused the speaker to triumph over his enemies.

7. The enemy—ruins that are gone for all time. The syntax here seems confused, and “ruins that are gone” (or “ended”) is odd as an idiom. This entire verset looks textually suspect.

15. So that I may tell all Your praise / in the gates of the Daughter of Zion. The poet develops here a familiar idea in Psalms: Those who descend to the underworld (verse 14) cannot tell God’s praise, so after God has raised the speaker from the gates of death—presumably because enemies were threatening to destroy him—he is able to stand in the gates of Jerusalem and publicly celebrate God’s greatness. The gates of the city were a place of assembly and, especially relevant to the imagery of God as judge in this poem, a place where justice was conducted. The personification of Jerusalem as Daughter of Zion is common in the Prophets.

17. The LORD is known for the justice He did. The translation assumes an ellipsis in the Hebrew. The literal sense of the four Hebrew words in sequence here is: “The LORD is known justice He did.”

18. The wicked will turn back to Sheol. This stands in contrast to the fate of the speaker, who has been raised from the gates of death. The form of the Hebrew l^esheʾola is anomalous, because it incorporates both the preposition “to” at the beginning and the directional suffix that means “to” at the end.

19. the hope of the lowly not lost forever. The Hebrew seems to say “will be lost forever,” but this may not be a scribal omission because the “not forever” of the first verset could be doing double duty for the second verset as well.