PSALM 14

¹For the lead player, for David.

The scoundrel has said in his heart,

“There is no God.”

They corrupt, they make loathsome their acts.

There is none who does good.

²The LORD from the heavens looked down

on the sons of humankind

to see, is there someone discerning,

someone seeking out God.

³All turn astray,

altogether befouled.

There is none who does good.

There is not even one.

⁴Do they not know,

all wrongdoers?

Devourers of my people devoured them like bread.

They did not call the LORD.

⁵There did they sorely fear,

for God is with the righteous band.

⁶In your plot against the poor you are shamed,

for the LORD is his shelter.

⁷Oh, may from Zion come Israel’s rescue

when the LORD restores His people’s fortunes.

May Jacob exult,

May Israel rejoice.

PSALM 14 NOTES

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1. The scoundrel has said in his heart, / “There is no God.” The thrust of this line is more moral than theological. The concern is not a philosophical question of God’s existence but the scoundrel’s lack of conscience, his feeling that he can act with impunity, because he thinks he need not fear divine retribution. This psalm, then, is a “prophetic” psalm, lacking any element of supplication because the speaker who denounces the society he observes does not put himself forth as victim.

2. The LORD from the heavens looked down / on the sons of humankind / to see. These three versets are remarkable for involving enjambments from verset to verset (a rare maneuver) and avoiding semantic parallelism, which appears only at the end (“discerning, / . . . seeking out”). Thus, the eye is drawn downward in a miniature narrative sequence, following the divine gaze, from the heavens to the human sphere. The illusion of the scoundrel that there is no God examining human actions is here spectacularly refuted.

3. There is none who does good. / There is not even one. The sentence repeated from verse 1 is less a refrain than a dumbfounded pronouncement by the dismayed speaker, who cannot find a single good person—“There is not even one.” The brevity of the versets here (two beats, four syllables in each in the Hebrew), as well as elsewhere in the poem, should be noted. In the face of such dismaying, pervasive corruption, the speaker is moved to register a response in stark, brief statements, without ornamentation.

4. devoured them like bread. The words “them like” do not appear in the Hebrew and are added for clarity.

5. sorely fear. The Hebrew is literally “feared a fear.”

6. In your plot against the poor you are shamed. The Hebrew is crabbed because a necessary preposition seems to be missing, so the translation is somewhat conjectural.

7. Oh, may from Zion come Israel’s rescue. Although “my people” has been mentioned in the poem, it was chiefly an indication of the populace that is subjected to the depredations of the wicked. The national perspective, then, with the reference to some sort of restoration—perhaps after defeat or exile—of the nation, a restoration that will emerge from its capital, looks like a formulaic tag, of the sort that sometimes ends the psalms of Zion, which has been added here editorially as a conclusion.