1For the lead player, for Jeduthun. A David psalm.
2I thought, “Let me keep my ways from offending with my tongue.
Let me keep a muzzle on my mouth
as long as the wicked is before me.”
3I was mute—in silence.
I kept still, deprived of good,
4My heart was hot within me.
In my thoughts a fire burned.
5Let me know, O LORD, my end
and what is the measure of my days.
I would know how fleeting I am.
6Look, mere hand-spans You made my days,
and my lot is as nothing before You.
Mere breath is each man standing.
selah
7In but shadow a man goes about.
Mere breath he murmurs—he stores
and knows not who will gather.
8And now, what I expect, O Master,
my hope is in You.
9From all my sins save me.
Make me not the scoundrel’s scorn.
10I was mute, my mouth did not open,
for it is You who acted.
11Take away from me Your scourge,
from the blow of Your hand I perish.
12In rebuke for crime You chastise a man,
melt like the moth his treasure.
Mere breath all humankind.
selah
13Hear my prayer, O LORD,
to my cry hearken,
For I am a sojourner with You,
a new settler like all my fathers.
14Look away from me, that I may catch my breath
PSALM 39 NOTES
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1. for Jeduthun. This name appears among the lists of Levite choristers in 1 Chronicles 16:41. It is not entirely certain, however, that this is a proper name here. Some interpreters have conjectured that it might be a musical term.
2. I thought, “Let me keep my ways from offending with my tongue.” There are elements of the psalm, here at the beginning and later on (see, for example, verse 11, “Take away from me Your scourge”) that identify it as a supplication. But the poem takes the distinctive form of a haunting meditation on the ephemerality of human life. Some of the ideas and formulations seem like an anticipation of Qohelet (most notably, the reiterated term hevel, “breath,” as an image of man’s insubstantiality). Other lines sound like Job (“mere hand-spans You made my days,” “You . . . melt like the moth his treasure”).
as long as the wicked is before me. The predominant form of the line in biblical poetry is dyadic—that is, consisting of two parallel members or versets. This poem is unusual in that triadic lines predominate. Each of the first six lines of poetry has three members. The first dyadic line appears when the speaker in a transition summons up his expectations of God (verse 8). The poem returns to triadic lines in verses 12 and 13. This preference for the triadic is a formal expression of a powerful psychological tension. Whereas the dyadic line encourages balance and symmetry, the addition of a third verset is often used to introduce an element of surprise or to destabilize what has gone before it. Here, after the two parallel versets announcing the resolution to be silent, we discover in the third verset, which is a subordinate clause, that this resolution has been taken in the presence of the wicked and caused by that presence.
3. I kept still, deprived of good. The Hebrew is mitov, literally, “from good,” and the translation risks the assumption that the initial mem is a mem of deprivation.
and my pain was grievous. The third verset introduces a hitherto unannounced datum—the suffering of the speaker.
4. I spoke with my tongue. After two parallel versets expressing acute pain, speech bursts out in the destabilizing third verset—the very thing that the speaker had meant to forswear.
6. mere hand-spans . . . / as nothing . . . / Mere breath. Like the Job poet, who so powerfully expresses the fleeting nature of human existence, this psalmist calls on a rich vocabulary of synonyms for ephemerality. The middle term here, “nothing” (ʿayin), is what human transience must ultimately come to, and it is precisely the word (in a declined form, first-person singular) with which the poem ends in the received text.
my lot. The Hebrew ḥeldi (undeclined form ḥeled), which elsewhere means something like “the existing world,” is an obvious play on ḥadel, “fleeting,” in the previous verse.
Mere breath is each man standing. The term “standing” (nitsav) is enigmatic in context. The possible meaning (assuming that the text is correct) is that though a man seems to stand firm and tall, he is mere breath.
7. he stores / and knows not who will gather. This is an especially Ecclesiastian note. The literal sense of the last word of the line in the Hebrew is “gather them,” “them” evidently referring to the things a man stores.
9. Make me not the scoundrel’s scorn. This could mean do not make me the butt of the scoundrel who would mock me for my suffering, or do not make me an object of scorn as though I were a scoundrel.
13. to my tears be not deaf. This is an interesting use of the third verset in a triadic line. The first two versets are strictly parallel in meaning: Hear/hearken; my prayer/my cry. “Tears” (in the singular in the Hebrew) is of course a metonymy for weeping, but in itself a tear is mute, unlike the prayer and the cry. God here is entreated in a negative formulation, not to hear but rather to be not deaf.
For I am a sojourner . . . / a new settler. This line is a striking instance of the so-called break-up pattern, in which a hendiadys (“sojourner and settler,” meaning “resident alien”) is split up with each of the component terms set into one of the two parallel versets. The procedure becomes a way of doubling and emphasizing the term for resident alien, thus underscoring the idea of transience associated with it. “New” has been added to “settler” (toshav) in the translation to convey the notion of impermanence clearly implied in the Hebrew idiom.
14. Look away from me, that I may catch my breath. The entire line sounds distinctly Jobean, and one wonders whether the Job poet (who in all probability wrote at a moment after the composition of this psalm) may have quoted our text. See Job 10:20–21: “let me be. / Turn away that I may have some gladness / before I go, never more to return, / to the land of dark and death’s shadow.” I follow Raymond Scheindlin in rendering the disputed verb ʾavligah as “catch my breath.”
and am not. The finality of death that darkens the consciousness of the speaker throughout the poem figures climactically in the single Hebrew word for extinction, weʾeyneni, with which the poem concludes.