PSALM 17

¹A David prayer.

Hear, O LORD, a just thing.

Listen well to my song.

Hearken to my guileless prayer.

²From before You my judgment will come,

Your eyes behold rightness.

³You have probed my heart, come upon me by night,

You have tried me, and found no wrong in me.

I barred my mouth to let nothing pass.

⁴As for human acts—by the word of Your lips!

I have kept from the tracks of the brute.

⁵Set firm my steps on Your pathways,

so my feet will not stumble.

⁶I called You, for You will answer me, God.

Incline Your ear, O hear my utterance.

⁷Make Your mercies abound, O rescuer of those who shelter

from foes at Your right hand.

⁸Guard me like the apple of the eye,

in the shadow of Your wings conceal me

⁹from the wicked who have despoiled me, my deadly enemies drawn round me.

¹⁰Their fat has covered their heart.

With their dewlaps they speak haughty words.

¹¹My steps now they hem in,

their eyes they cast over the land.

¹²He is like a lion longing for prey,

like the king of beasts lying in wait.

¹³Rise, LORD, head him off, bring him down,

save my life from the wicked with Your sword,

¹⁴from men, by Your hand, from men,

from those fleeting of portion in life.

And Your protected ones—fill their bellies,

let their sons be sated,

and let them leave what is left for their young.

¹⁵As for me, in justice I behold Your face,

I take my fill, wide awake, of Your image.

PSALM 17 NOTES

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1. A David prayer. This is one of several times in Psalms in which tefilah, “prayer,” is used instead of the anticipated mizmor, “psalm.” The generic distinction is not clear because this poem is essentially a psalm of supplication. The speaker is beset by enemies who threaten to destroy him as he entreats God to confound his foes and rescue him. Perhaps the note of inwardness in the first part of the poem, in which the speaker proclaims the integrity of his prayer (tefilah is the term he uses), and his having met the challenge of God’s probing are what qualify this text as prayer.

my guileless prayer. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “my prayer without lips of deceit.”

3. come upon me by night. This succinct phrase suggests some sort of nocturnal inner wrestling, a dark night of the soul.

found no wrong in me. “Wrong” is merely implied in an ellipsis.

I barred my mouth. The Hebrew verb is the one used for a muzzle. The speaker has not only stood God’s inward testing but refused to allow any word of doubt or bad faith to pass the barrier of his lips.

4. As for human acts—by the word of Your lips! The meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain. Perhaps the idea is that whereas the speaker seals his lips, God’s words determine human events or guide humankind.

6. Incline Your ear, O hear. These verbs pick up the imperative verbs of listening from the beginning of the poem.

7. Make Your mercies abound. The translation follows the Masoretic Text. A small emendation of ḥasadekha, “Your mercies,” to ḥasidekha would yield “set aside Your faithful ones.”

10. Their fat has covered their heart. “Heart,” if it is indeed the intended object, is only implied. The heart is the seat of understanding and feeling; fat over the heart (presumably, a token of the offensive prosperity of the wicked) insulates it from perception and feeling.

With their dewlaps. The Masoretic Text reads pimo, a grammatically archaic form meaning “their mouth.” Because of the prominent fat image in the first verset, this translation emends that word to pimatam (or, in an undeclined form, simply pimah), a term that refers to folds of fat under the chin.

11. My steps. The Hebrew text says “our steps.”

their eyes they cast over the land. The Hebrew is somewhat obscure. A very literal rendering would be: their eyes they set to incline in the land. Given the predatory nature of their activity, made explicit in the next verse, the most probable sense to extract from these words without emendation is that they look all about the land for objects of prey.

14. from men, by Your hand, from men, / from those fleeting of portion in life. This line employs the strategy of incremented repetition that is common in the oldest stratum of biblical poetry—as, for example, in the Song of Deborah. The idea of the line is to remind God that these bloody-minded enemies are mere mortals, and of a sort whose actions warrant that their fate of mortality be instantly fulfilled. The reference to God’s hand is motivated by the fact that this hand wields a sword.

Your protected ones. Literally, “Your hidden ones”—that is, those concealed in the shadow of God’s wings (verse 8).

fill their bellies. This reference at the end to food may suggest that the wicked, while fattening themselves, have been starving out the righteous in beleaguering them.

let them leave what is left for their young. This verset is either a kind of gloss on the two preceding verses or envisages a third generation: God’s protected ones, their sons, the infants of the sons.

15. As for me, in justice. The appearance of the noun tsedeq, “justice,” at the end of the poem makes a neat envelope structure, for the speaker began his prayer by asking God to hear “a just thing” (also tsedeq). The envelope structure is reinforced by the occurrence of “behold” here and in verse 2.

I take my fill, wide awake, of Your image. The speaker has just invoked full bellies nd sated sons, but now at the end it is God’s image—not in a dream vision but in complete wakefulness—that sates him. The sensual concreteness of this concluding clause is so striking that it led Judah Halevi, the great medieval Hebrew poet, to adopt it for a homoerotic poem in which the speaker awakes and sees his beloved friend’s face by his side.