1For the lead player, for the Korahites, a maskil.
2God, with our own ears we have heard,
our fathers recounted to us
a deed that You did in their days,
in days of yore.
3You, Your hand dispossessed nations—and You planted them.
You smashed peoples and sent them away.
4For not by their sword they took hold of the land,
and it was not their arm that made them victorious
but Your right hand and Your arm,
and the light of Your face when You favored them.
5You are my king, O God.
Ordain the victories of Jacob.
6Through You we gore our foes,
through Your name we trample those against us.
7For not in my bow do I trust,
and my sword will not make me victorious.
8For You rescued us from our foes,
and our enemies You put to shame.
9God we praise all day long,
and Your name we acclaim for all time.
selah
10Yet You neglected and disgraced us
and did not sally forth in our ranks.
11You turned us back from the foe,
and our enemies took their plunder.
12You made us like sheep to be eaten
and scattered us through the nations.
13You sold Your people for no wealth
and set no high price upon them.
14You made us a shame to our neighbors,
derision and mockery to those round us.
15You made us a byword to nations,
an object of scorn among peoples.
16All day long my disgrace is before me,
and shame has covered my face,
17from the sound of revilers and cursers,
from the enemy and the avenger.
18All this befell us, yet we did not forget You,
and we did not betray Your pact.
19Our heart has not failed,
nor have our footsteps strayed from Your path,
20though You thrust us down to the sea monster’s place
and with death’s darkness covered us over.
21Had we forgotten the name of God
and spread out our palms to an alien god,
22would not God have fathomed it?
For He knows the heart’s secrets.
23For Your sake we are slain all day long,
we are counted as sheep for slaughter.
24Awake, why sleep, O Master!
Rouse up, neglect not forever.
25Why do You hide Your face,
forget our affliction, our oppression?
26For our neck is bowed to the dust,
our belly clings to the ground.
27Rise as a help to us
and redeem us for the sake of Your kindness.
PSALM 44 NOTES
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2. with our own ears we have heard, / our fathers recounted to us. The first-person plural at the beginning of the psalm identifies it as a collective supplication. The disaster that has occurred is to the nation, and the psalmist remembers times past when God led the people in triumph.
3. Your hand dispossessed nations—and You planted them. The fluidity of biblical Hebrew in pronominal reference is especially evident here. The historical event from “days of yore” referred to is the conquest of the land of Canaan in Joshua’s time. Although “nations” is the object of the verb “dispossessed,” the next clause is disjunctive because “them” must refer to the people of Israel planted in the land after the Canaanites were driven out (at least in this poetic fiction). “Them” in the same position at the end of the next line refers to the peoples of Canaan. In the line after that, “their” refers once more to Israel.
4. made them victorious. The verb hoshiʿa (and its cognate noun yeshuʿah) can mean “rescue” if the object is a person or group in dire straits (the more common usage in Psalms), or, if the situation is one of straightforward military confrontation, it can mean “make victorious, grant victory.” In this psalm, it occurs in both senses. In the present verse, the military sense is required. The context of verse 8 strongly suggests the connotation of “rescue.”
10. Yet You neglected . . . us. The initial adverbial ʾaf here clearly is an indicator of opposition or contradiction. We praised You continually and kept faith with You, yet You allowed our enemies to triumph over us. Which enemies and what historical period are matters of conjecture. Some commentators, without warrant from the text, have wanted to situate this psalm in the second century B.C.E., under Greek domination; others have put it back somewhere in the first Davidic dynasty. Ancient Israel in all periods had no lack of powerful adversaries, and there is nothing in the language of the poem to enable a confident dating.
14. You made us a shame to our neighbors. Repeatedly in Psalms and in the Prophets, the bitterness of defeat is thought to be compounded by a stinging sense of national humiliation, an experience vividly evoked from this verse to the end of verse 17.
15. an object of scorn. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “a wagging of the head”—a gesture of contempt.
16. and shame has covered my face. The received text reads, “and the shame of my face covered me,” but a change of a single consonant in the Hebrew verb for “covered” yields a more plausible idiom, as translated here.
19. nor have our footsteps strayed from Your path. The Masoretic Text reads, “and You made our footsteps stray from Your path,” which makes little sense. An emendation of watet (“made stray”) to watiteh (“strayed” [that is, our footsteps strayed]) resolves the difficulty and produces a neat parallelism with “our heart has not failed.”
20. thrust us down to the sea monster’s place. This is another allusion to the Canaanite cosmogonic myth of a primordial sea monster conquered by a divine adversary, then forever imprisoned in the seabed.
23. we are slain all day long, / we are counted as sheep for slaughter. The insistence of images such as this in the psalm leads one to conclude that the military defeat here is no metaphor but reflects an actual historical situation in which the people of Israel suffered devastation at the hands of an armed enemy.
26. our neck is bowed to the dust. The context strongly suggests that the multivalent nefesh in this instance is used in its anatomical sense, the neck or throat, in tight parallelism with the belly crushed to the earth in the second verset. The abased figure of the nation, bowed to the earth, is an antithesis to the exhortation to God to rise and conquer.
27. for the sake of Your kindness. Here, and virtually everywhere else in Psalms, ḥesed equally implies kindness or caring as well as keeping faith, honoring covenantal obligations.