1For the lead player on stringed instruments, a David maskil,
2when the Ziphites came and said to Saul, “Is not David hiding out among us?”
3God, through Your name rescue me,
and through Your might take up my cause.
4God, O hear my prayer,
hearken to my mouth’s utterances.
5For strangers have risen against me,
and oppressors have sought my life.
They did not set God before them.
selah
6Look, God is about to help me,
my Master—among those who support me.
7Let Him pay back evil to my assailants.
Demolish them through Your truth!
8With a freewill offering let me sacrifice to You.
Let me acclaim Your name, LORD, for it is good.
9For from every strait He saved me,
and my eyes see my enemies’ defeat.
PSALM 54 NOTES
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2. when the Ziphites came. The story alluded to is reported in 1 Samuel 23. David, in flight from Saul, is denounced by the Ziphites in whose territory he has taken refuge. In the end, he manages to elude Saul’s forces. Again, the general plea for God’s help, conventional in a supplication psalm, has been editorially linked with a particular incident in the life of David that it fits only in part. The complaint “strangers have risen against me” (verse 5) could scarcely refer to Saul, who is hostile to David but by no means a stranger to him or a foreigner (zar) in relation to him.
6. Look, God is about to help me. The selah at the end of the immediately preceding line clearly marks a division in this short poem. Verses 3–5 are taken up with the supplicant’s urgent plea to God to save him from his dire plight. With the beginning of verse 6, introduced by the presentative hineh, “look,” the speaker sees God’s help already about to happen. The participial form of the verb used could mean either “about to help” or “is helping.”
7. Demolish them. In a grammatical move perfectly idiomatic in biblical usage, the line switches from a third-person reference to God in the first verset to an imperative address in the second verset.
8. a freewill offering . . . / Let me acclaim. Because the deliverance has not yet been accomplished, this gesture of sacrifice and thanksgiving at the end is a promise, not a declaration, as at the end of a thanksgiving psalm.
9. and my eyes see my enemies’ defeat. The Hebrew uses “eye” in the singular. The rest of the clause says, literally, “see in [or against] my enemies.” The idiom raʾah be, “see in,” repeatedly occurs in Psalms in the sense of seeing one’s enemies defeated and humiliated, so the translation adds the clearly implied “defeat.”