PSALM 30

    ¹Psalm, song for the dedication of the house, for David.

    ²I shall exalt You, LORD, for You drew me up,

          and You gave no joy to my enemies.

    ³LORD, my God,

          I cried to You and You healed me.

    ⁴LORD, You brought me up from Sheol,

          gave me life from those gone down to the Pit.

    ⁵Hymn to the LORD, O his faithful,

          acclaim his holy name.

    ⁶But a moment in His wrath,

          life in His pleasure.

    At evening one beds down weeping,

          and in the morning, glad song.

    ⁷As for me, I thought in my quiet days,

          “Never will I stumble.”

    ⁸LORD, in your pleasure You made me stand mountain-strong.

          —When You hid Your face, I was stricken.

    ⁹To You, O LORD, I call,

          and to the Master I plead.

    ¹⁰“What profit in my blood,

          in my going down deathward?

    Will dust acclaim You,

          will it tell Your truth?”

    ¹¹Hear, LORD, and grant me grace.

          LORD, become helper to me.

    ¹²You have turned my dirge to a dance for me,

          undone my sackcloth and bound me with joy.

    ¹³O, let my heart hymn You and be not still,

          LORD, my God, for all time I acclaim You.

PSALM 30 NOTES

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1. song for the dedication of the house. The consensus of traditional interpreters is that the reference is to the Temple (the literal sense of the Hebrew for “temple” is “house of the sanctuary”) or to a renovated altar or some other structure within it. Some scholars, noting the somewhat odd syntax of the superscription with “psalm” (mizmor) separated from “for David” (l^eDawid), suspect that this entire phrase is an editorial interpolation not originally belonging to the psalm.

2. for You drew me up. The Hebrew verb daloh is the one used for drawing water from a well. Death, then, is imagined as a deep pit from which the speaker has been drawn up by God. In this fashion, at its beginning the poem announces itself as a thanksgiving psalm.

4. from those gone down to the Pit. The Masoretic Text uses a form that does not correspond to biblical grammar, miyordi, which would mean “from my going down.” Several ancient versions, however, show miyordey, “from those gone down,” which not only is grammatical but highlights the idea that the speaker felt he had gone down to death, yet of all who go down there, he alone was raised up.

6. At evening one beds down weeping, / and in the morning, glad song. This upbeat vision of life has, of course, been manifested in the recent experience of the speaker.

8. You made me stand mountain-strong. The translation is only an educated guess, because the sequence of words in the Hebrew (not the meaning of the individual words) is perplexing. Literally, it would be: You-made-stand-my-mountain-of-strength (or, simply, mountain-of-strength). The translation accords with the understanding of Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra.

9. To You, O LORD, I call. These words, through to the end of verse 11, appear to be self-quotation: the speaker, now rescued from death, recalls the words of desperate supplication that he addressed to God from his straits.

10. What profit in my blood, / in my going down deathward? Here the poet sounds, with powerful compactness, the recurrent theme shared by the psalms of thanksgiving and supplication: man cannot fulfill his vocation of celebrating God if he is engulfed by death. It is living human beings whom God needs to sing His praises. It looks as though the giving of praise to God is imagined as a replacement of the pagan idea in which the sacrifices were thought of as food necessary to the gods.

12. undone my sackcloth and bound me with joy. The general synecdoches for mourning and rejoicing, dirge and dance, of the first verset are focused concretely through the metaphor of clothing in the parallel second verset: The garment of mourning is undone, or removed, and joy becomes the new garment that God pulls tight or binds (verbal stem ʾ-z-r) around the person He has rescued.

13. O, let my heart hymn You. This translation, following one ancient Greek version, reads keveidi, “my liver” (“heart” being the viable English substitution) instead of kavod, “glory.” Like many other thanksgiving psalms, this one exhibits an envelope structure, beginning and ending with the declaration that the speaker will exalt God for His mercies granted.