PSALM 38

    ¹A David psalm, to call to mind.

    ²LORD, do not rebuke me in Your fury

          nor chastise me in Your wrath.

    ³For Your arrows have come down upon me,

          and upon me has come down Your hand.

    ⁴There is no whole place in my flesh through Your rage,

          no soundness in my limbs through my offense.

    ⁵For my crimes have welled over my head,

          like a heavy burden, too heavy for me.

    ⁶My sores make a stench, have festered

          through my folly.

    ⁷I am twisted, I am all bent.

          All day long I go about gloomy.

    ⁸For my innards are filled with burning

          and there is no whole place in my flesh.

    ⁹I grow numb and am utterly crushed.

          I roar from my heart’s churning.

    ¹⁰O Master, before You is all my desire

          and my sighs are not hidden from You.

    ¹¹My heart spins around, my strength forsakes me,

          and the light of my eyes, too, is gone from me.

    ¹²My friends and companions stand off from my plight

          and my kinsmen stand far away.

    ¹³They lay snares, who seek my life and want my harm.

          They speak lies, deceit utter all day long.

    ¹⁴But like the deaf I do not hear,

          and like the mute whose mouth will not open.

    ¹⁵And I become like a man who does not hear

          and has no rebuke in his mouth.

    ¹⁶For in You, O LORD, I have hoped.

          You will answer, O Master, my God.

    ¹⁷For I thought, “Lest they rejoice over me,

          when my foot slips, vaunt over me.”

    ¹⁸For I am ripe for stumbling

          and my pain is before me always.

    ¹⁹For my crime I shall tell,

          I dread my offense.

    ²⁰And my wanton enemies grow many,

          my unprovoked foes abound.

    ²¹And those who pay back good with evil

          thwart me for pursuing good.

    ²²Do not forsake me, LORD.

          My God, do not stay far from me.

    ²³Hasten to my help,

          O Master of my rescue.

PSALM 38 NOTES

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1. to call to mind. The Hebrew infinitive lehazkir is anomalous in the superscription of a psalm, appearing here and at the beginning of Psalm 70. It may simply refer to the speaker’s intention to bring to mind his suffering in his supplication to God. It might also have a connotation of confession: compare the words of Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer in Genesis 41:9, “My offenses I recall [mazkir] today,” and those of the widow from Zarephath to Elijah in 1 Kings 17:18, “You have come to me to recall [lehazkir] my crime.”

2. LORD, do not rebuke me in Your fury, / nor chastise me in Your wrath. This line, with its symmetrical parallelism, is formulaic in supplications.

3. Your arrows . . . come down . . . / come down Your hand. The line takes the form of a neat chiasm (a b b' a'), which this translation reproduces.

4. There is no whole place in my flesh through Your rage. In most of the Bible, as elsewhere in the ancient Near East, illness was understood to be a punishment by the deity, presumably for some transgression, whether deliberate or unwitting. This psalm goes on to evoke the physical symptoms—festering sores, inward burning, numbness, bodily contortion, dizziness—as well as the social rejection that accompanies the illness.

5. my crimes have welled over my head. Literally, “my crimes have passed over my head.” The probable implied image is of drowning, abundantly used elsewhere in Psalms. Perhaps the “burden” in the second verset suggests a crushing weight of water bearing down on the head.

13. They . . . who seek my life. This sprawling line does not scan in the Hebrew, and the same is true of the English version.

14. like the deaf I do not hear. The speaker has already said he was going blind in his illness (verse 11). Here, however, he turns an infirmity to advantage: whether or not he is literally losing his hearing, he is able in the figurative sense to turn a deaf ear to his mocking enemies and concentrate all his expectant attention on God. Evidently, the situation evoked in this psalm is roughly analogous to that of Job. The man has suffered some terrible illness, including repellent malodorous sores visible all over his body. As a result, his friends have kept their distance from him, and others have chosen to revile him.

20. my wanton enemies. The Masoretic Text reads ʾoyvay ḥayim, literally, “my enemies of life,” which some construe as “my mortal enemies,” though it is not a biblical idiom as it is worded here. A scroll of Psalms found at Qumran reads ʾoyvay ḥinam, “my wanton enemies” (that is, “enemies for no good reason”), which is nicely idiomatic and makes the parallelism in the two versets here exactly that of 35:19 (where sheqer, “unprovoked,” appears in the first verset and ḥinam in the second, rather than the other way around as here).

22. Do not forsake me . . . / do not stay far from me. This strictly formulaic line just before the end of the psalm is a counterpart to the formulaic line at the beginning.