PSALM 11
1For the lead player, for David.
In the LORD I sheltered.
“Off to the hills like a bird!
2For, look, the wicked bend back the bow,
they fix to the string their arrow
to shoot from the gloom at the upright.
3The foundations destroyed,
4The LORD in His holy palace,
The LORD in the heavens His throne—
His eyes behold,
His look probes the sons of man.
5The LORD probes the righteous and wicked,
and the lover of havoc He utterly hates.
6He rains fiery coals on the wicked,
sulfur and gale winds their lot.
7For righteous the LORD is,
righteous acts He does love.
PSALM 11 NOTES
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1. How could you say to me. Unusually, this psalm begins with a triadic verset, and one in which the three parts are linked by sequentiality rather than semantic parallelism. The speaker of this personal psalm at the outset announces that he trusts in God’s sheltering protection. Thus he has no need to flee to the hills like a bird, as his friends have enjoined him.
Off to the hills like a bird. The literal sense is: wander [to] your hill [or mountain], bird. The translation follows the Septuagint, which reads har kemo tsipor instead of the Masoretic harkhem tsipor (“your hill, bird”).
2. the wicked bend back the bow. The archery imagery picks up the image of the fleeing bird of the previous line: the bowmen aim at the bird in flight. Here and elsewhere in this psalm the poet favors archaic-poetic grammatical forms: yidrekhun instead of the standard yidrekhu for “bend back,” and bemo instead of the standard be for “from” (or “in”).
the upright. Literally, “the straight of heart.”
3. what can a righteous man do? It makes sense to view everything from “Off to the hills . . .” (verse 1) through to the end of this verse as the words of the fearful and despairing friends of the speaker. With the vicious and destructive enemies prevailing, they say, there is no recourse for the helpless righteous person except flight.
4. The LORD in His holy palace. These words mark the turning point of the poem. The terrestrial landscape may be littered with the depredations of the wicked, who imagine they will continue to have the upper hand, but above it all God looks down, sorting out the evil from the good and preparing retribution for those who deserve it. Given this context, and given the parallelism with the second verset, “His holy palace” here must refer to God’s celestial abode and not to the Temple in Jerusalem.
look. The literal meaning is “eyelids,” a parallel term to “eyes” in the first verset, but in English one cannot see with the eyelids.
5. He utterly hates. The adverb “utterly” is added to pick up the intensive equivalent of the first-person pronoun in nafsho (literally, “His life” or “His essential being”).
6. He rains fiery coals on the wicked. This whole line, of course, alludes to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, which figures as a canonical demonstration of God’s determination to administer justice and not allow evil to go unpunished. Paḥim, the word rendered as “coals,” everywhere else means “traps” or “pitfalls,” but this translation assumes, following one ancient Greek version, that the original reading was peḥamey, which in fact means “coals [of].” The Masoretic Text puts a syntactic pause at “coals,” then has “fire and sulfur.” This makes the second verset inordinately long. It is much more likely that a scribe reversed the mem and yod of peḥamey (“coals of,” which is then attached to ʾesh “fire”), yielding paḥim.
gale winds. The Hebrew ruah zilʿafot is literally “raging wind,” the second term being a derivative form from zaʿaf, “rage.”
their lot. Literally, “the portion of their cup.”
7. The upright behold His face. With the wicked disposed of in the previous verse, the psalm ends on this positive note of the upright beholding God—even as God from the heavens beholds all humankind. In the Hebrew, the noun is singular and the verb is plural; presumably one of the two (probably the verb) should be adjusted. The Masoretic Text reads “their face,” with no obvious antecedent for the plural, but variant Hebrew versions have “His face.”