1For the lead player, al-tashchet, a David michtam, when he fled from Saul into the cave.
2Grant me grace, God, grant me grace,
for in You I have taken shelter,
and in Your wings’ shadow do I shelter
until disasters pass.
3I call out to God the Most High,
4He will send from the heavens and rescue me—
he who tramples me reviled me—
selah
God will send his steadfast kindness.
5I lie down among lions
that pant for human beings.
Their fangs are spear and arrows,
their tongue a sharpened sword.
6Loom over the heavens, O God.
Over all the earth Your glory.
7A net they set for my steps,
they dug before me a pit—
they themselves fell into it.
selah
8My heart is firm, O God,
Let me sing and hymn.
9Awake, O lyre,
awake, O lute and lyre.
10Let me acclaim You among the peoples, Master.
Let me hymn You among the nations.
11For Your kindness is great to the heavens,
and to the skies Your steadfast truth.
12Loom over the heavens, O God.
Over all the earth Your glory.
PSALM 57 NOTES
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1. al-tashchet. Evidently, this is still another musical term, the meaning of which has been lost. The medieval Hebrew commentator David Kimchi ingeniously links it with David’s rebuke to his men when they came upon Saul sleeping in their cave: ʾal-tashḥiteihu, “do him no violence.” The tie-in of the superscription with an episode in David’s life seems to be an after-the-fact editorial maneuver. The poem is a general psalm of supplication, turning into a thanksgiving psalm at the end, as many others do.
2. in Your wings’ shadow do I shelter. The speaker thus implicitly casts himself as a fledgling bird, protected by its parent—a recurrent biblical image.
3. who requites me. The translation reads, with the Septuagint, gomel, “requites,” instead of the Masoretic gomer (“finishes”?).
4. he who tramples me reviled me. The two Hebrew words here, ḥeref shoʾafi, seem syntactically out of place and are obscure in meaning. The safest construction, without performing extensive surgery on the text, is to read this clause as a parenthetical remark about the speaker’s desperate plight, with the “will send” of the third verset then picking up the “will send” of the first verset both semantically and syntactically.
5. their tongue a sharpened sword. The sword image develops, through a pun, the “panting” of the lions, because that verb, lohatim, is associated with “the flame [lahat] of the whirling sword” in Genesis 3:24.
7. they pushed down my neck. The verb in the received text is in the singular. Either it is a scribal error and should be in the plural, or it reflects a use of the third-person singular as an equivalent of the passive (“my neck was pushed down”). The most compelling sense of nafshi here is not “my life” or “me” but “my neck,” because the whole context is one of physical entrapment—the net and the pit.
8. My heart is firm. These words signal a transition, but it is by no means necessary to infer, as some scholars have, that they mark the beginning of a separate poem. The speaker, having brought the expression of his distress to a climax, now affirms his unwavering confidence in God’s saving power, a confidence so strong that he can move on from supplication to thanksgiving.
9. Awake, O lyre. The Masoretic Text reads kevodi (“my glory” or, perhaps, “my being”), but one manuscript as well as the Syriac reads kinori, “my lyre,” which seems more likely, yielding an incremental repetition of terms for stringed instruments in this verse.
I would waken the dawn. In these beautiful words the speaker imagines himself rising before daybreak with his stringed instrument to rouse the sleeping dawn with his song. Film viewers may recall a similar notion in the classic Brazilian film Black Orpheus, where the singer Orfeo explains to the two boys whom he befriends that it is his song, played on a guitar, that makes the dawn come up.
11. For Your kindness is great to the heavens, / and to the skies Your steadfast truth. The rousing of the dawn at the eastern edge of the sky now leads the speaker-singer to envisage God’s benign presence over all the heavens. The hendiadys ḥesed-weʾemet (as in verse 4) means something like “steadfast kindness” (literally, “kindness and truth”). Here, the two terms have been divided between the first and second verset; “steadfast” is added in the translation to “truth” to suggest something of what they mean when joined together.
12. Loom over the heavens. Verse 6 is repeated here verbatim as a closing refrain. But, given the celestial focus of verse 11 and its anticipation at the end of verse 9, God’s looming over the heavens takes on added meaning at the end.