PSALM 20

    ¹To the lead player, a David psalm.

    ²May the LORD answer you on the day of distress,

          the name of Jacob’s God make you safe.

    ³May He send help to you from the sanctum,

          and from Zion may He sustain you.

    ⁴May He recall all your grain offerings,

          and your burnt offerings may He relish.

selah

    ⁵May He grant you what your heart would want,

          and all your counsels may He fulfill.

    ⁶Let us sing gladly for Your rescue

          and in our God’s name our banner raise.

                May the LORD fulfill all your desires.

    ⁷Now do I know

          that the LORD has rescued His anointed.

    He has answered him from His holy heavens

          in the might of His right hand’s rescue.

    ⁸They—the chariots, and they—the horses,

          but we—the name of the LORD our God invoke.

    ⁹They have tumbled and fallen

          but we arose and took heart.

    ¹⁰O LORD, rescue the king.

          May He answer us on the day we call.

PSALM 20 NOTES

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2. May the LORD answer you. The “you” in the Hebrew here and throughout the poem is in the masculine singular. Verses 7 and 10 make clear that the person addressed is the king. In genre, then, this text is a royal psalm, the first in a series of such psalms in the canonical collection that are prayers for the welfare of the anointed king. The language of this particular royal psalm is repeated through many phases in a pagan hymn written on papyrus and composed in second-century B.C.E. Egypt in Aramaic. The pagan hymn may have borrowed from this one, or both may have drawn on an earlier Canaanite polytheistic poem.

the name of Jacob’s God make you safe. This is the first of three references to “the name of God” in the poem. The usage may reflect a growing belief in the Late Biblical period that God’s name in itself was an efficacious agent, and also a kind of intermediary, between the deity and Israel. The verb s-g-b, “make you safe,” is cognate with misgav, “fortress”—etymologically, an elevated place.

3. the sanctum / . . . Zion. The theo-geographical logic is that Jerusalem is both the capital city, where the king and his government are headquartered, and the location of God’s sanctuary.

4. your burnt offerings may He relish. The verb yedashneh is somewhat obscure. Perhaps it means “to regard as dashen, rich, ripe, full of nutrients.” If so, this is a linguistic survival (not necessarily a theological one) of the pre-monotheistic idea that the gods took pleasurable nourishment from the sacrifices offered them.

5. what your heart would want. The literal sense is “according to your heart.”

6. our banner raise. The translation is an educated guess, assuming that the verb nidgol is cognate with the noun degel, “banner.”

May the LORD fulfill all your desires. This verset looks out of place because it does not belong with the exulting exhortation to sing out and raise banners, and it makes this the only triadic line in the poem. Perhaps it is an inadvertent scribal duplication of the second verset of verse 5, which it more or less repeats.

7. Now do I know. These words signal the turning point of the poem, when the speaker is flooded with certainty that God has in fact rescued the king from his straits.

in the might of His right hand’s rescue. The language strongly suggests that the “distress” of the king is a military threat.

8. They—the chariots, and they—the horses. The whole line is a neat instance of a strong periodic sentence in which the verb that gives everything meaning—“invoke”—is withheld until the very end. “They” are the enemies of the Israelite king, who foolishly “invoke” or depend on their chariots and horses, instruments of power that are no match for the name of the LORD.

10. O LORD, rescue the king. The Masoretic cantillation marks place a full stop at “rescue,” thus turning “king” into a vocative in apposition with “LORD.” This construction, however, produces an uncharacteristically unbalanced line (two beats in the first verset and four in the second). In keeping with all the indications in the poem that this is a royal psalm, it makes better sense to have “the king” here at the end as the direct object of the verb “rescue.” One should note that the psalm exhibits a neatly concise envelope structure, beginning “answer you on the day of distress” and here concluding with “answer us on the day we call.”