PSALM 28
1For David.
To You, O LORD, I call.
My Rock, do not be deaf to me.
Lest You be mute to me
and I be like those gone down to the Pit.
2Hear the sound of my pleading
when I cry out to You,
to Your holy shrine.
3Do not pull me down with the wicked,
and with the wrongdoers,
who speak peace to their fellows
with foulness in their heart.
4Pay them back for their acts
and for the evil of their schemings.
Their handiwork give them back in kind.
Pay back what is coming to them.
5For they understand not the acts of the LORD
and His handiwork they would destroy and not build.
6Blessed is the LORD
for He has heard the sound of my pleading.
7The LORD is my strength and my shield.
In Him my heart trusts.
I was helped and my heart rejoiced,
and with my song I acclaim Him.
8The LORD is His people’s strength
and His anointed’s stronghold of rescue.
9Rescue Your people
and bless Your estate.
Tend them, bear them up for all time.
PSALM 28 NOTES
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1. do not be deaf . . . / Lest You be mute. The Hebrew uses a pun, the first verb being teḥerash and the second teḥesheh. (Some interpreters actually understand teḥerash as “to be silent.”) To follow the logic of the punning language, should God turn a deaf ear to the supplicant, He will not answer the supplicant’s prayer and hence will be “mute.” In an associative logic, the supplicant himself will then perish, becoming forever silent like all the legions of the dead and hence incapable of imploring God or praising him. In this psalm he does both, because, as elsewhere, the supplication turns into a thanksgiving psalm from verse 6 to the end.
2. when I lift up my hands. This is, of course, a gesture of prayer, abundantly attested to in a variety of ancient Near Eastern texts and drawings.
3. who speak peace to their fellows / with foulness in their heart. The transition between the end of the first verset and the beginning of the second is marked in the Hebrew by a pun: reʿeihem (“their fellows”) and raʿah (literally, “evil”). The translation choice of fellows / foulness is an attempt to replicate this effect.
4. schemings. The Hebrew maʿalalim is a synonym for “acts,” but with a negative connotation.
6. Blessed is the LORD / for He has heard the sound of my pleading. This line strongly marks the turning point of the poem: the imploring “Hear the sound of my pleading” (verse 2) is now an accomplished fact.
7. with my song I acclaim Him. Here the speaker completes the expected gesture of the thanksgiving psalm, announcing that he is giving thanks to God in song.
8. The LORD is His people’s strength. The Masoretic Text reads, “The LORD is their strength,” which is puzzling, because there is no obvious antecedent to “their.” But the Septuagint, the Peshitta, and some manuscripts show “his people’s strength.” In the consonantal Hebrew text, this is a difference of just one letter, an added ayin that an ancient scribe might easily have dropped in copying. This reading then makes a neat parallelism with the second verset.
His anointed’s stronghold. The national-political perspective of this entire line was not evident earlier in the poem. Either it is an editorially introduced ending drawn from a repertory of stock phrases used for codas, or the speaker imagines a seamless continuity between divine intervention to aid the individual and the nation.
9. Tend them, bear them up. The first of these two verbs is the one used for a shepherd’s looking after his flock. It is likely, then, that the second verb, “bear” or “lift up” (the same word used for the hands in prayer in verse 2) also refers to a pastoral context—the act of a shepherd bearing a lamb in his arms.