PSALM 25

    ¹For David.

    To You, O LORD, I lift my heart.^ℵ

          ²My God, in You I trust. Let me be not shamed,^ב

                let my enemies not gloat over me.

    ³Yes, let all who hope in You be not shamed.^ג

          Let the treacherous be shamed, empty-handed.

    ⁴Your ways, O LORD, inform me,^ד

          Your paths, instruct me.

    ⁵Lead me in Your truth and instruct me,^ה

          for You are the God of my rescue.

                In You do I hope every day.

    ⁶Recall Your mercies, O LORD,^ז

          and Your kindnesses—they are forever.

    ⁷My youth’s offenses and my crimes recall not.^ח

          In Your kindness, recall me—You;

                for the sake of Your goodness, O LORD.

    ⁸Good and upright is the LORD.^ט

          Therefore He guides offenders on the way.

    ⁹He leads the lowly in justice^י

          and teaches the lowly His way.

    ¹⁰All the LORD’s paths are kindness and truth^כ

          for the keepers of His pact and His precepts.

    ¹¹For the sake of Your name, O LORD,^ל

          may You forgive my crime, which is great.

    ¹²Whosoever the man who fears the LORD,^מ

          He will guide him in the way he should choose.

    ¹³His life will repose in bounty,^נ

          and his seed will inherit the earth.

    ¹⁴The LORD’s counsel is for those who fear Him,^ס

          and His pact He makes known to them.

    ¹⁵My eyes at all times to the LORD,^ע

          for He draws my feet from the net.

    ¹⁶Turn to me and grant me grace,^פ

          for alone and afflicted am I.

    ¹⁷The distress of my heart has grown great.^צ

          From my straits bring me out.

    ¹⁸See my affliction and suffering^ר

          and forgive all my offenses.

    ¹⁹See my enemies who are many^ר

          and with outrageous hatred despise me.

    ²⁰Guard my life and save me.^ש

          Let me be not shamed, for I shelter in You.

    ²¹May uprightness, wholeness, preserve me,^ת

          for in You do I hope.

    ²²Redeem, God, Israel from all its straits.

PSALM 25 NOTES

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This is one of nine alphabetic acrostics in the Book of Psalms, a form used elsewhere in biblical poetry only in Lamentations. The acrostic may have been favored by psalmists as an aid to memory because of the liturgical use of their texts. The sixth letter of the alphabet, waw, is missing here, as is the nineteenth letter, qof.

1. I lift my heart. The Hebrew noun used is nefesh, meaning “essential self” or “life-breath.” The clear meaning of the idiom is to pray fervently or plead.

3. be not shamed / . . . be shamed. In the Hebrew, the positive and negative use of the verb trace a perfect chiasm, because the first verset ends with yeivoshu, “be shamed,” or “know shame,” and the second verset begins with the same word.

4. inform me / . . . instruct me. Though the genre of this psalm is a supplication, instead of the usual central emphasis on the acute distress of the speaker (of which there are some strong expressions in the poem), this text stresses the speaker’s sense of having erred (verse 7) and his desire for guidance from God about the way he should follow.

7. recall me—You. This startling juxtaposition of “me” (li) and “You” (ʾatah) is striking in the Hebrew, which otherwise would not idiomatically require the introduction of the second-person pronoun after the imperative verb.

8. He guides offenders on the way. The poet may be playing with the etymology of hataʾim “offenders,” which suggests missing the target and hence, by implication, straying from the right way. The word for “guide,” yoreh, could also be a pun on “shoot,” as Rabbi Israel Stein has suggested to me.

13. His life will repose in bounty. The subject of this sentence is the ubiquitous nefesh, life or essential self. The orientation of vision is toward existence in the here and now. He who fears God will go to sleep each night (the verb talin, “repose”) enjoying the good things of this world, and his offspring will have a secure inheritance.

15. for He draws my feet from the net. The metaphor, frequently used in Psalms, is taken from the nets used to trap birds and small game.

18. See my affliction and suffering. This verse and the next one begin with the letter resh. It is a plausible scholarly conjecture that instead of the verb reʾeh (“see”) at the head of the verse as we have it, there was originally another verb, beginning with the missing letter qof (perhaps qeshov, “hearken to”).

20. Let me be not shamed. The repetition, just before the end, of this phrase from verse 2 marks an envelope structure—a form, as we have seen, that is abundantly used in Psalms.

21. uprightness, wholeness. The King James Version’s “integrity and uprightness” is a good literal rendering of the Hebrew tom-wayosher but is unfortunately arrhythmic. Because tom and yosher are synonyms, the two terms combined may in any case be a hendiadys—two nouns bracketed to convey a single concept—yielding the sense here of “absolute integrity.”

22. Redeem, God, Israel from all its straits. This concluding verse lacks poetic parallelism and does not scan as a line of poetry. The national theme, moreover, has until this point not been evident in the psalm, which is spoken from the perspective of an individual. For both these reasons, one suspects that the verse was added by an editor as a conclusion from a repertory of stock verses.