PSALM 32
1A David maskil.
absolved of offense.
2Happy, the man to whom
the LORD reckons no crime,
in whose spirit is no deceit.
3When I was silent, my limbs were worn out—
when I roared all day long.
4For day and night
Your hand was heavy upon me.
selah
5My offense I made known to You
and my crime I did not cover.
I said, “I shall confess my sins to the LORD,”
and You forgave my offending crime.
selah
6[For this every faithful man prays to You in time of need: only that the rush of mighty waters should not reach him.]
7You are a shelter for me.
with glad songs of deliverance surround me.
selah
8Let me teach you, instruct you the way you should go.
Let me counsel you with my own sight.
9Be not like a horse, like a mule, without sense,
the bit and the reins his adornment—
to keep him from drawing near you.
10Many are the wicked’s pains,
but who trusts in the LORD kindness surrounds him.
11Rejoice in the LORD and exult, O you righteous,
sing gladly, all upright men!
PSALM 32 NOTES
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1. A David maskil. This is clearly a category of song, but its precise nature remains unknown. From the word’s use in Amos 5:13, it would appear to be a joyous song, though not all the occurrences in Psalms substantiate that connotation. In this particular psalm, there may also be a punning reference to a homonym that means “discerning person” or “giver of instruction” (and my translation in Amos opts for the homonym, rendering the word as “the prudent”). The word translated as “let me teach you” in verse 8 employs the same root. Hermann Gunkel noted that this psalm contains distinct Wisdom elements, especially from verse 8 onward. As to genre, while it has sometimes been described as a thanksgiving psalm, it is really more of a confession in the perfect tense: the speaker admits he has transgressed, affirms that he has confessed his transgression, and that as a result God has granted him forgiveness.
of sin forgiven, / absolved of offense. The speaker at the outset presents himself through two passive verbs as the object of forgiveness.
3. When I was silent, my limbs were worn out— / when I roared all day long. Attempts to resolve the contradiction between silence and roaring here have been unavailing. The text looks suspect. Especially because the second verset is abbreviated, one may guess that a phrase has been dropped out that would have formed a complementary parallelism, such as, “when I roared all day long, my body was wasted.”
4. summer dust. The Hebrew uses a plural abstraction, impossible in English, that would literally be “summer parchednesses.”
6. For this every faithful man. It would be misleading to set this verse as poetry because it does not scan and has no true parallelism. One suspects a sentence from another text was introduced through scribal inadvertence. The brackets indicate that this verse is not part of the poem.
7. From the foe You keep me. This may be merely a conventional phrase, for no foes appear earlier in the psalm.
glad songs of deliverance. The Hebrew roney palet looks odd. The first of the two nouns would seem to be a plural (occurring nowhere else) of ron, “glad song.”
8. Let me teach you. After the second selah, an entirely new movement in the poem (or another poem?) begins in verse 6, in which the speaker, like the figure of the mentor in Proverbs, enjoins the person who listens to heed his counsel.
with my own sight. This rendering, like all others for this phrase, is no more than an interpretive guess. The Hebrew says literally, “Let me counsel you my eye,” which is not a biblical idiom.
9. the bit and the reins his adornment— / to keep him from drawing near you. This is another cryptic moment in the text. The Masoretic Text breaks the line after “reins,” which makes no clear sense. Perhaps the idea is that the bit and reins, which may seem an ornament, are actually put on the uncomprehending beast simply in order to guide him away from running into people.