PSALM 12

¹To the lead player, on the eight-stringed lyre, a David psalm.

²Rescue, O LORD! For the faithful is gone,

for vanished is trust from the sons of man.

³Falsehood every man speaks to his fellow,

smooth talk, with two hearts they speak.

⁴The LORD will cut off all smooth-talking lips,

the tongue that speaks of big things,

⁵those who said, “Let us make our tongue great,

our own lips are with us—who is master to us?”

⁶“From the plunder of the poor, from the wretched men’s groans,

now will I rise,” says the LORD.

⁷“I will set up for rescue a witness for him.”

The LORD’s sayings—pure sayings,

silver tried in a kiln in the earth

refined sevenfold.

⁸You, LORD, will guard him,

will keep him from this age for all time.

⁹All around go the wicked,

they have dug deep pits for the sons of men.

PSALM 12 NOTES

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2. Rescue, O LORD! For the faithful is gone. Although this psalm falls into the general category of supplication, it reflects a subgenre in which the speaker scans his society in a harsh light of moral castigation. Poetry is thus marshaled for a purpose similar to that of the literary prophets, and one might describe such a poem as a Prophetic supplication.

for vanished is trust from the sons of man. To the despairing speaker, it looks as though all humankind has turned treacherous. The noun ʾemunim is an abstraction and hence refers to the quality, not the people, as many translations have it.

3. with two hearts they speak. This vivid image for duplicity is especially effective, because it opposes the organ of speech (“smooth talk” is literally “lips of smooth things”) to the organ of intention and understanding, which is itself divided.

4. The LORD will cut off all smooth-talking lips. Although “cut off” is a standard verb for “destroy,” it has a violent concreteness here because one gets an image of lips being cut off or cut away.

5. Let us make our tongue great. The idea is to make speech a weapon (the root of the verb used, g-b-r, suggests “warrior” and “warfare”). Some take this to mean, “Let us become great by our tongue,” but that would require the preposition b^e (“in,” “through,” or “by”), whereas the preposition used here is l^e (“to,” or “for” but also sometimes the prefix of a direct object). Or the letter lamed here might be a mistaken scribal duplication of the lamed that immediately follows it.

our own lips are with us—who is master to us? These clauses continue the idea that language serves as a weapon or rather an army for the wicked.

6. From the plunder of the poor. God’s speech signals the turning point of the poem, when the exploiters of lying language will at last be confounded.

7. I will set up for rescue a witness for him. This verset has been variously construed, or misconstrued. It might make sense to understand the difficult term yafiaḥ not as a verb but as a noun, “witness,” at least conjecturally. That particular meaning is a plausible one in light of what has preceded: the persecuted man has been surrounded by an army of liars, but now God will provide someone to bear true witness for him and thus rescue him from his plight.

kiln. The term ʿalil appears only here, and the understanding of it as “kiln” goes back to the Aramaic translation of Onkelos in Late Antiquity. The meaning, however, is not certain; it should be said that the rabbis construed it as an adverb, “clearly.” In any case, there is a pointed contrast between the LORD’s sayings, pure as refined silver, and the lying words of cheating men.

8. guard him / . . . keep him. The Hebrew uses first a plural, then a singular object of the verb.

9. All around go the wicked. This whole line, which reverts to the triumphalist wicked, looks tacked on, because the declaration of God’s guarding the just in the previous line is a characteristic upbeat psalm ending. The dubiety of the line is reinforced by the first two words of the second verset, kerum zulot, which make no evident sense and can be understood only through an exegetical somersault (for example, the New Jewish Publication Society, “when baseness is exalted”). Some emendation seems necessary, and the present translation, conjecturally, presupposes that the final mem of kerum should be moved forward to begin the next word, thus yielding an intelligible karu, “dug,” a verb often associated in Psalms with the wicked. The object of the verb might then be metsulot, “depths,” or perhaps metsudot, “traps,” although if such a word once stood here, it has been lost in scribal transmission.