PSALM 13

¹To the lead player, a David psalm.

²How long, O LORD, will You forget me always?

How long hide Your face from me?

³How long shall I cast about for counsel,

sorrow in my heart all day?

How long will my enemy loom over me?

⁴Regard, answer me, LORD, my God.

Light up my eyes, lest I sleep death,

⁵lest my enemy say, “I’ve prevailed over him,”

lest my foes exult when I stumble.

⁶But I in Your kindness do trust,

my heart exults in Your rescue.

Let me sing to the LORD,

for He requited me.

PSALM 13 NOTES

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2. How long, O LORD, will You forget me always? The cry of desperation—“How long?”—from a person whose anguish seems protracted indefinitely is a recurrent feature of the psalms of supplication. The apparent logical contradiction between “how long” and “always” actually makes psychological sense: from the speaker’s tormented perspective, it feels as though God is forgetting him forever.

4. Light up my eyes, lest I sleep death. The antithesis between light for the eyes and the implied darkness of death is striking, and the poet uses a jolting elliptical form, “lest I sleep death” (not “the sleep of death”) that is worth preserving in translation.

5. lest my enemy say. As elsewhere in the supplications, the pain of imagined death is made more bitter by the imagined schadenfreude of the enemy, who will delight in this death.

6. But I in Your kindness do trust. This affirmation of faith in God’s readiness to stand by the supplicant and rescue him from his distress is a turning point in mood, and perhaps even in genre, in this short poem. The speaker, no longer fearing that God will forget him forever, is suddenly sustained by a sense of trust in God, and he conjures up God’s intervention on his behalf almost as though it were an accomplished fact. In this way, the poem that began as desperate supplication concludes on a note of celebration, in the manner of a thanksgiving psalm, “Let me sing to the LORD, / for He requited me.” The fluidity of genres of many of the psalms is an expression of their psychological dynamism—they express not one static attitude but an inner evolution or oscillation of attitudes. Perhaps the prayer itself served as a vehicle of transformation from acute distress to trust.