PSALM 21

    ¹To the lead player, a David psalm.

    ²LORD, in Your strength the king rejoices,

          and in Your rescue how much he exults!

    ³His heart’s desire You gave to him,

          and his lips’ entreaty You did not withhold.

selah

    ⁴For You met him with blessings of bounty,

          You set on his head a crown of pure gold.

    ⁵Life he asked You—You gave him,

          length of days for time without end.

    ⁶Great is his glory through Your rescue.

          Glory and grandeur You bestowed upon him.

    ⁷For You granted him blessings forever,

          cheered him with joy in Your presence.

    ⁸For the king puts his trust in the LORD,

          through Elyon’s kindness he will not fail.

    ⁹Your hand will find out your enemies,

          your right hand find out your foes.

    ¹⁰You will make them like a fiery kiln

          in the hour of Your wrath.

    The LORD will devour them in His anger,

          and fire will consume them.

    ¹¹Their fruit from the land You destroy

          and their seed from among humankind.

    ¹²For evil they plotted against you,

          devised schemes they could not fulfill.

    ¹³For you will make them turn back,

          with your bowstring you aim at their face.

    ¹⁴Loom high, O LORD, in Your strength.

          Let us sing, let us hymn Your might.

PSALM 21 NOTES

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2. in Your strength the king rejoices. The poem announces itself at its very beginning as a royal psalm. There is no definite article in the Hebrew before “king,” but biblical poetry fairly often elides the article. “Strength” (ʿoz) has a military sense in many psalms, as does the parallel term “rescue” (yeshuʿah), which implies something like extricating a person or an army from enemies who appeared to have the upper hand.

5. length of days for time without end. The formulation is intended as a hyperbole—what the king has been granted is not immortality but a long life. That life had run the danger of being cut off prematurely by the threatening enemies from whom God has rescued him.

6. Great is his glory through Your rescue. The king, beleaguered by powerful enemies, emerges victorious in battle through God’s help. As a result, he suddenly grows in regal stature, now a figure of kingly glory and grandeur in his triumph.

8. through Elyon’s kindness he will not fail. It is also possible to construe this clause to mean “through Elyon’s kindness [or keeping faith] that will not fail.”

9. Your hand will find out your enemies. Until this point, the second-person singular pronoun has been addressed to God, and the king has been referred to in the third person. From this point, it is the king who is addressed, although in verse 10 God is invoked in the third person as agent of destruction. All the verbs refer to future acts of routing the enemies, whereas in the first half of the poem the victory is invoked as a recently accomplished fact. Perhaps the poet means to say that the king, already empowered, will go on to future triumphs of this nature, even though the possibility suggests itself that two different psalms (verses 2–8, verses 9–13) have been spliced together.

10. in the hour of Your wrath. The Hebrew appears to say, literally, “in the hour of your face,” but “face” is sometimes used elliptically to mean grim or hostile face, angry aspect—and that meaning makes sense here. The cantillation marks of the Masoretic Text put “LORD” (YHWH) together syntactically with “wrath” (“in the hour of Your wrath, O LORD”). That construction, however, introduces confusion by having two different referents for “you” in the same sentence. It is preferable to understand YHWH as the subject of the first verb in the next clause, “devour.”

13. make them turn back. The literal anatomical reference is to the back of the shoulder. The idiom does not occur elsewhere, but it clearly refers to making the enemy turn around and flee. (The verb tashit, to put, make, grant, which occurs four times in the psalm, is one that the poet—or, if there were two, both poets—favored.) The aimed bows of the second verset are what makes the enemy flee.

14. LORD, in Your strength. This phrase marks the closing of the envelope structure, for the psalm began with “LORD, in Your strength.” The poem then concludes with the thanksgiving formula, “Let us sing, let us hymn.”