1To the lead player, a maskil for the Korahites.
2As a deer yearns for streams of water,
so I yearn for You, O God.
3My whole being thirsts for God,
for the living God.
the presence of God?
4My tears became my bread day and night
as they said to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
5These do I recall and pour out my heart:
when I would step in the procession,
when I would march to the house of God
with the sound of glad song of the celebrant throng.
6How bent, my being, how you moan for me!
Hope in God, for yet will I acclaim Him
for His rescuing presence.
7My God, my being is bent for my plight.
Therefore do I recall You from Jordan land,
from the Hermons and Mount Mizar.
8Deep unto deep calls out
at the sound of Your channels.
All Your breakers and waves have surged over me.
9By day the LORD ordains His kindness
and by night His song is with me—
prayer to the God of my life.
10I would say to the God my Rock,
“Why have You forgotten me?
Why in gloom do I go, hard-pressed by the foe?
11With murder in my bones, my enemies revile me
when they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
12How bent, my being, how you moan for me!
Hope in God, for yet will I acclaim Him,
His rescuing presence and my God.
PSALM 42 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. a maskil. See the comment on this term on 32:1. If the maskil is generally a joyous song, the joy in this instance is relegated to the hopeful vision of being reunited with God (verses 6 and 12). This psalm is a supplication in which the speaker presents himself as a man beset by mocking enemies and also banished from God’s presence in Zion to surrounding territories (verse 7).
2. As a deer yearns for streams of water, / so I yearn for You, O God. The poignancy of this famous line reflects the distinctive tone of this supplication, which instead of emphasizing the speaker’s suffering expresses above all his passionate longing for God. He addresses his words to God but feels distant from God, at a painful remove from the Temple and plagued by enemies. The “I” here is the intensive form of the first-person pronoun, nafshi, abundantly used in this psalm, and translated in the next verse as “my whole being” (but not in this verse, to avoid what might sound like an awkward repetition in the English). The verb rendered as “yearns” (ʿarag) appears only twice in the biblical corpus, so the exact meaning is not certain. Some think it may refer to the sound a thirsty deer makes as it drinks, others to the animal’s bending its neck toward water.
3. thirsts for God, / for the living God. The verb “thirsts” of course carries forward the simile of the deer yearning for streams of water. The phrase “living God” may also continue the water imagery, because “living water” is idiomatic in biblical Hebrew for fresh water.
and see / the presence of God. Or “and see the face of God.” As elsewhere in the Bible when this phrase is used, later editorial tradition, to avoid the anthropomorphism, revocalized the verb so it reads “be seen [in God’s presence].” This psalm is the first one in the second book of Psalms, according to the canonical division, and the editors throughout this book generally use “God” (ʾelohim) instead of “LORD” (YHWH).
4. My tears became my bread. Eating salt tears (in the singular in the Hebrew) instead of food carries on the thirst metaphor of the previous two verses.
5. pour out my heart. The Hebrew again uses nafshi, “my life-breath” or “my very self.”
the procession. The meaning of the Hebrew sakh is in doubt.
7. for my plight. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “on me” or “about me.”
from Jordan land, / from the Hermons and Mount Mizar. Though some scholars have sought to link this line with a historical exile of the Judahites, the perspective remains first-person singular and the geographical sweep from Jordan in the east to Hermon in the Lebanon region scarcely suggests anything like the Babylonian exile. Anomalously, Mount Hermon appears here as a plural, perhaps because it was the most prominent in a chain of northern mountains. Mount Mizar has not been identified, but the name means Small Mountain.
8. Deep unto deep calls out. This could be an associative leap from the heights to the antithetical depths, from the mountains to the sea, unless one chooses to imagine that the “deeps” (or “abysses”) are part of the mountainous landscape of Lebanon.
All Your breakers and waves have surged over me. The geological or cosmic “deeps” of the first verset are transformed into a metaphor for the speaker’s distress. The experience of threatened drowning is a familiar image for near death in Psalms, but here it is given startling new power through the linkage with a vast creation in which abyss calls to abyss.
9. by night His song is with me. There is a fine ambiguity in the phrasing. This could mean that the speaker hears God’s song in the nights (“song” thus directly paralleling “kindness” in the first verset). Or the sense could be that the speaker, mindful of God’s kindness, responds in the night with song—such as the song of this psalm. There has been cosmic “sound” in the previous line, and perhaps the Hebrew leqol tsinoreikha, “at the sound of Your channels,” is intended to make us think of leqol kinoreikha, “at the sound of Your lyres.”
11. With murder in my bones. This shocking phrase is what the Hebrew actually appears to say. The King James Version, with no warrant, puts a sword in the bones. Others seek to relate the Hebrew noun to a root that means “crush,” but in fact the verbal stem r-ts-ḥ everywhere means “to murder.” It is best to take this as an arresting expression of the imminent threat of death. The speaker can feel the murder that others wish to perpetrate on him in his very bones at the moment his enemies revile him.
12. How bent, my being. This repetition of verse 6 as a concluding refrain shows two small changes: the word “my God” (ʾelohai) is climactically added at the very end, and the Masoretic Text reads “my presence” (panai), which does not make a great deal of sense. Two manuscripts as well as a version of the Aramaic Targum read panaw, “His presence.” This translation takes that as the probably correct reading.