1For the lead player, a David psalm, 2upon Nathan the prophet’s coming to him when he had come to bed with Bathsheba.
3Grant me grace, God, as befits Your kindness,
with Your great mercy wipe away my crimes.
4Thoroughly wash my transgressions away
and cleanse me from my offense.
5For my crimes I know,
and my offense is before me always.
6You alone have I offended,
and what is evil in Your eyes I have done.
So You are just when You sentence,
You are right when You judge.
7Look, in transgression was I conceived,
and in offense my mother spawned me.
8Look, You desired truth in what is hidden;
in what is concealed make wisdom known to me.
9Purify me with a hyssop, that I be clean.
Wash me, that I be whiter than snow.
10Let me hear gladness and joy,
let the bones that You crushed exult.
11Avert Your face from my offenses,
and all my misdeeds wipe away.
12A pure heart create for me, God,
and a firm spirit renew within me.
13Do not fling me from Your presence,
and Your holy spirit take not from me.
14Give me back the gladness of Your rescue
and with a noble spirit sustain me.
15Let me teach transgressors Your ways,
and offenders will come back to You.
16Save me from bloodshed, O God,
God of my rescue.
Let my tongue sing out Your bounty.
17O Master, open my lips,
that my mouth may tell Your praise.
18For You desire not that I should give sacrifice,
burnt offering You greet not with pleasure.
19God’s sacrifices—a broken spirit.
A broken, crushed heart God spurns not.
20Show goodness in Your pleasure to Zion,
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
21Then shall You desire just sacrifices,
burnt offering and whole offering,
then bulls will be offered up on Your altar.
PSALM 51 NOTES
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2. upon Nathan the prophet’s coming to him when he had come to bed with Bathsheba. The superscription incorporates a barbed pun. The Hebrew verb used for both Nathan and David is “to come to” (or “into”), but in the former instance it refers to the prophet’s entering the king’s chambers, whereas the latter instance reflects its sexual sense, to have intercourse with a woman (probably intercourse for the first time). The strong character of this poem as a confessional psalm led the editors to attribute it to David when he was stricken with remorse after Nathan rebuked him for sleeping with Bathsheba and murdering her husband (2 Samuel 12). But in all likelihood, this psalm is a general penitential psalm composed centuries after David. If the reference to the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem in the penultimate verse is an integral part of the original psalm and not an editorial addition, the text would have to date to sometime after 586 B.C.E. In any case, the idea of offering God a broken spirit instead of sacrifice looks as though it may have been influenced by the later Prophetic literature. The eloquent confessional mode of this psalm has made it an important liturgical vehicle for both Christians and Jews. It is one of the seven penitential psalms in Church ritual. The wrenching plea of verse 13 is used in the introduction to the penitential prayer during the Jewish Days of Awe.
7. in transgression was I conceived, / and in offense my mother spawned me. Christian interpreters through the ages have understood this verse as a prime expression of the doctrine of Original Sin. Some of the early rabbis register a similar notion—as they put it, David’s father, Jesse, did not have relations with his wife to fulfill a higher obligation but rather out of sheer lust. Such a reading may be encouraged by the fact that the verb attached to the mother, yaḥam, is typically associated with animals in heat. It may, however, be unwarranted to construct a general theology of sinful human nature from this verse. The speaker of this poem certainly feels permeated with sinfulness. He may indeed trace it back to the sexual act through which he was conceived, but there is not much here to support the idea that this is the case of every human born.
8. You desired truth in what is hidden. This whole verse is the one line in the poem that is rather obscure. The meaning of batuḥot, “what’s hidden,” or “hidden things,” is not certain. Traditional commentators generally think it refers to the inner organs. It is unclear what the line as a whole means to say—perhaps that the speaker feels he may harbor guilt for transgressions of which he is not consciously aware, and asks God to reveal these to him.
9. Purify me with a hyssop. Hyssop was used in a ritual of purification. The priest dipped the hyssop branch in the blood of a sacrificial animal, then sprinkled it on the impure object or person to expunge the impurity (see Leviticus 14). (The fine hairs on hyssop leaves may have prevented the blood from congealing.) Alternately, hyssop was used to sprinkle water (Numbers 19:18–22) to remove impurities. The claim made by some scholars that this psalm is therefore a liturgical text for a rite of purification is not altogether convincing because hyssop, familiar to the audience from such ceremonies, could easily have been invoked as a symbol of a process of purification that is spiritual, not ritual, in nature. Such a move from ritual to spiritual is strongly etched in verses 18 and 19.
Wash me, that I be whiter than snow. The same image is used in Isaiah 1:18.
13. Do not fling me from Your presence. As elsewhere, this Hebrew verb has a connotation of violent action for which the conventional translation of it as “cast” is too tame.
15. Let me teach transgressors Your ways. At the completion of the process of transformation that the confessional speaker envisages, he will be so different from his former condition as a reprobate that he will be able to teach those who err what God requires of them.
19. God’s sacrifices—a broken spirit, / A broken, crushed heart God spurns not. Although Isaiah and Micah equally stress that what God requires of man is not animal sacrifices but ethical behavior, here there is an arresting new emphasis on an inward condition of contrition. It is a person’s remorse over past actions, or perhaps simply his authentic grief over his desperate plight, that God accepts instead of sacrifice.
20. Show goodness in Your pleasure to Zion, / rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. The poem until this moment at the end has been entirely concerned with the remorseful confession of an individual, so this prayer for the rebuilding of Jerusalem looks suspiciously like a conclusion added by an editor.
21. Then shall You desire just sacrifices. In the rebuilt Jerusalem—this would seem to be the specific implication of the repeated “then”—with, we may infer, a rebuilt Temple, it will once again be possible to offer sacrifices. The single word “just” might by a stretch harmonize this concluding verse with 18 and 19, but it seems more likely that an editor, uneasy with the outright rejection or at least downgrading of sacrifices expressed in the psalm, added this line at the end to reaffirm the idea that God desires sacrifices, at least if they are just ones.