PSALM 27
1For David.
The LORD is my light and my rescue.
Whom should I fear?
The LORD is my life’s stronghold.
Of whom should I be afraid?
2When evildoers draw near me to eat my flesh—
my foes and my enemies are they—
they trip and they fall.
3Though a camp is marshaled against me,
my heart shall not fear.
Though battle is roused against me,
nonetheless do I trust.
4One thing do I ask of the LORD,
it is this that I seek—
that I dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to behold the LORD’s sweetness
5For He hides me in His shelter
on the day of evil.
He conceals me in the recess of His tent,
6And now my head rises
over my enemies around me:
sacrifices with joyous shouts.
Let me sing and hymn to the LORD.
7Hear, O LORD, my voice when I call,
and grant me grace and answer me.
8Of You, my heart said:
“Seek My face.”
Your face, LORD, I do seek.
9Do not hide Your face from me,
do not turn Your servant away in wrath.
You are my help.
Abandon me not, nor forsake me,
O God of my rescue.
10Though my father and mother forsook me,
the LORD would gather me in.
11Teach me, O LORD, Your way,
and lead me on a level path
12Do not put me in the maw of my foes.
For false witnesses rose against me,
outrageous deposers.
13If I but trust to see the LORD’s goodness,
in the land of the living—
14Hope for the LORD!
Let your heart be firm and bold,
PSALM 27 NOTES
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1. The LORD is my light and my rescue. / Whom should I fear? This psalm is a supplication in which, as elsewhere, a speaker in great distress implores God to intervene on his behalf. The distinction of emphasis is that the poem begins with a confident affirmation of God as the source of help under all grave threats. This positive note is continued through verses 2 and 3, 5 and 6, and, most extravagantly, in verse 10. But this sense of trust, in a psalm that manifests powerful psychological verisimilitude, does not preclude a feeling of fearful urgency in the speaker’s plea to God (see verses 9 and 13).
3. Though a camp is marshaled . . . / Though battle is roused. It is not entirely clear whether the speaker is literally under assault by armed enemies seeking to kill him or whether the martial imagery is a metaphor for other kinds of hostility. In verse 12, at any rate, the voracious foes attempt to destroy him by underhanded judicial proceedings rather than military means.
4. One thing do I ask of the LORD. In a casual glance, this verse may look like a non sequitur: the speaker, having expressed his firm confidence in God as his rescuer in distress, suddenly declares that his most cherished desire is to spend all his time in the Temple. But, as we have seen in other psalms, the privilege of enjoying God’s presence in the Jerusalem sanctuary is a consequence of having followed the ways that God dictates to man. And the Temple itself, within the walled city, is repeatedly seen as a sanctuary in the political sense—a place of secure refuge from threatening foes. There is, then, a logical link between this verse and the next one, in which God provides a shelter and a safe hiding place.
to gaze on. The precise meaning of the verb baqer is in dispute, but the cognate noun biqoret, used in Leviticus 19:20 in the sense of “observation” or “inquiry,” suggests it may mean here “to take in with the eyes,” “to enjoy the sight of.”
5. shelter / . . . tent. The two nouns are drawn from the lexicon of nomadic habitation, but here they are used in subtle metaphorical understatement as designations for a much more solid and imposing structure, as the third term in the sequence, “rock,” suggests.
5–6. He raises me up. / And now my head rises. The Hebrew plays on the same verbal stem in two different conjugations—yeromemeini, then yarum—and the translation seeks to approximate that effect.
6. in His tent. Here the metaphorical use of “tent” to indicate temple is perfectly clear.
9. Do not hide Your face from me. “Face” suggests “presence,” but the anthropomorphic concreteness of “face” is palpable. The speaker desperately seeks God’s face (a privilege denied Moses). The practical manifestation of God’s turning away His face would be abandoning the person to his enemies.
10. Though my father and mother forsook me, / the LORD would gather me in. The extravagance of this declaration of trust in God, perhaps the most extreme in the whole Bible, is breathtaking and perhaps even disturbing. In the best of circumstance, the most unconditional, unstinting love and care we experience are from a mother and father. We can imagine, the psalmist says, circumstances in which even that love might fail, but God will be both father and mother to him in the most dire straits.
11. my adversaries. This term for enemy, shorerim (sometimes shorim), appears half a dozen times in Psalms and nowhere else in the biblical corpus. It may be derived from a verbal root that means “to watch” (as enemies gleefully watch one’s humiliation). It certainly plays on a more common word for “foes,” tsorerim (or, as in the next verse here, tsarim).
12. the maw of my foes. Here nefesh, “life-breath,” shows a secondary meaning, through metonymy—the throat or gullet, through which breath passes.
13. If I but trust. This sentence, at least in the textual form passed down to us, seems to be an ellipsis.
14. Hope for the LORD! / Let your heart be firm and bold. This last exhortation—whether of the speaker to himself or to an individual member of his audience—is an apt summary of the psychology that informs this psalm. It begins by affirming trust in God and reiterates that hopeful confidence, but the trust has to be asserted against the terrors of being overwhelmed by implacable enemies.