PSALM 36

    ¹For the lead player, for the LORD’s servant, for David.

    ²Crime’s utterance to the wicked

          within his heart:

    “There is no fear of God

          before my eyes.”

    ³For it caressed him with its eyes

          to find his sin of hatred.

    ⁴The words of his mouth are mischief, deceit,

          he ceased to grasp things, to do good.

    ⁵Mischief he plots in his bed,

          takes his stand on a way of no good,

                evil he does not despise.

    ⁶LORD, in the heavens, Your kindness,

          and Your faithfulness to the skies.

    ⁷Your justice like the unending mountains,

          Your judgment, the great abyss,

                man and beast You rescue, LORD.

    ⁸How dear is Your kindness, O God,

          and the sons of men in Your wings’ shadow shelter.

    ⁹They take their fill from the fare of Your house

          and from Your stream of delights You give them drink.

    ¹⁰For with You is the fountain of life.

          In Your light we shall see light.

    ¹¹Draw down Your kindness to those who know You,

          and Your justice to the upright.

    ¹²Let no haughty foot overtake me,

          nor the hand of the wicked repel me.

    ¹³There did the doers of mischief fall.

          They were toppled and could not rise.

PSALM 36 NOTES

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2. Crime’s utterance to the wicked. The beginning of this psalm adopts an anomalous rhetorical device. “Crime,” as a personified figure, is presented speaking its pernicious speech within the heart of the wicked person. The Masoretic Text reads “my heart,” which has made interpreters strain to imagine a quasiprophetic speaker who claims to know what Crime says inwardly to the wicked. More plausibly, a couple of ancient versions read “his heart.” In any case, this odd beginning also makes the genre of the psalm difficult to identify. It is not a supplication, but it puts into play the supplication’s characteristic contrast between the upright and the evil and also its confidence in God’s overarching justice. The translation emends “his eyes” at the end of this verse to “my eyes.”

3. For it caressed him with its eyes. This line continues the personification of Crime, suggesting its seductive power (though the verb here could be construed differently than this translation does). Perhaps “eyes” is deliberately repeated to play against the eyes of the wicked mentioned in the previous verse.

5. Mischief he plots in his bed, / takes his stand on a way of no good. The wicked man is the antithetical parallel of the good Israelite enjoined in Deuteronomy to speak God’s words when he lies down and when he gets up and when he goes on his way.

7. like the unending mountains. The Hebrew, harerey ʾel, might also be construed as “mountains of God,” but most interpreters conclude that ʾel here is a suffix of intensification, yielding something like “the mighty mountains” or “the unending mountains” and thus constituting a cosmic complement to “the great abyss” at the end of the parallel verset.

9. the fare of Your house / . . . Your stream of delights. God’s unwavering regimen of justice for humankind is experienced in the language of the poem as concrete sensual pleasure. The drinking imagery continues with “the fountain of life” in the next line. The Hebrew for “delights” is ʿadanim, and so it may allude to the streams of Eden.

13. There did the doers of mischief fall. Initially, the use of the deictic “there” is puzzling, but it has an emotional rightness. The poem that began with an intimate recording of the wicked man’s malicious speech ends with a confounding of the wicked. But this defeat of the wicked happens at a distance, in the past, in a place from which the speaker is happily removed.