1Grant me justice, O God,
take up my case against a faithless nation,
from a man of deceit and wrong free me.
2For You, O God, my stronghold,
why should You neglect me?
Why should I go in gloom, pressed by the foe?
3Send forth Your light and Your truth.
It is they that will guide me.
They will bring me to Your holy mountain
And to Your dwelling place.
4And let me come to God’s altar,
And let me acclaim You with the lyre,
5How bent, my being, how you moan for me!
Hope in God, for yet will I acclaim Him,
His rescuing presence and my God.
PSALM 43 NOTES
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1. Grant me justice. This is one of the rare psalms that begins without a superscription. That fact, taken together with the refrain like recurrence of whole clauses and lines from Psalm 42 (the third verset of verse 2 here is almost identical with the third verset of verse 10 in Psalm 42; verse 5 here virtually replicates verses 6 and 12 of Psalm 42), has led most scholars to conclude that Psalms 42 and 43 were originally a single poem, broken up by editors for reasons not entirely clear to us. The opening line here lays out the persecution by enemies evoked in Psalm 42 in explicitly legal terms.
3. They will bring me to Your holy mountain. This line of poetry and the two that follow pick up the idea from Psalm 42 that the speaker has been exiled from Zion. In this supplication, which is also a kind of prospective thanksgiving, he longs for the joy of approaching the altar in Jerusalem and celebrating God with song.
4. my keenest joy. The Hebrew is a bracketing in the construct state of two synonyms, simḥat gili, “joy of my gladness,” which has the idiomatic force of an intensification or superlative.
O God, my God. This odd-sounding collocation, ʾelohim ʾehohay, appears with some frequency in the second book of Psalms because YHWH has been editorially replaced by ʾelohim.
5. How bent, my being, how you moan for me! This repeated sentence takes on new meaning here at the end, because the bent being stands in contrast to the celebrant approaching the altar in the previous line, and the low murmuring sound of complaint contrasts with the song accompanied by the lyre.
His rescuing presence. Again, as at the end of Psalm 42, the Masoretic Text has “My presence,” and, as there, two manuscripts and a version of the Targum show “His presence.”