1A David prayer.
Incline Your ear, LORD, answer me,
for lowly and needy am I.
2Guard my life, for I am faithful.
Rescue Your servant who trusts in You
—You, my God.
3Grant grace to me, Master,
for to You I call all day long.
4Gladden Your servant,
for to You, O Master, I lift up my being.
5For You, O Master, are good and forgiving,
abounding in kindness to all who call to You.
6Hearken, O LORD, to my prayer,
and listen well to the sound of my pleas.
7When I am in straits I call You,
for You will answer me.
8There is none like You among the gods, O Master
and nothing like Your acts.
9All the nations You made
will come and bow before You, Master
and will honor Your name.
10For You are great and work wonders.
You alone are God.
11Teach me, O LORD, Your way.
I would walk in Your truth.
Make my heart one to fear Your name.
12Let me acclaim You, O Master, my God, with all my heart,
and let me honor Your name forever.
13For Your kindness to me is great,
and You saved me from nethermost Sheol.
14O God, the arrogant rose against me,
and a band of the violent sought my life
and did not set You before them.
15But You, Master, are a merciful, gracious God,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast kindness.
16Turn to me and grant me grace.
Give Your strength to Your servant
and rescue Your handmaiden’s son.
17Show me a sign for good,
that those who hate me may see and be shamed.
For You, LORD, have helped me and consoled me.
PSALM 86 NOTES
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1. Incline Your ear, LORD, answer me. The poem begins with a formula of the psalms of supplication, and this psalm is highly formulaic from beginning to end. A reader who has been going through the Book of Psalms in sequence by this point will have encountered almost every line of this poem, with minor variations, elsewhere.
4. for to You . . . I lift up my being. The idiom, which occurs elsewhere in Psalms, means to pray, to implore, to long desperately. “My being,” nafshi, also has the sense of “my very self,” “my life-breath.”
5. abounding in kindness to all who call to You. The epithets for God are borrowed from Exodus 34:6. Verse 15 provides a fuller quotation of God’s benevolent attributes spelled out in the same passage in Exodus.
7. When I am in straits. Literally, “in the day of my strait.”
8. There is none like You among the gods, O Master. This line quotes the Song of the Sea, Exodus 15:11. The move from this quotation to verses 9 and 10 traces the trajectory from henotheism to proper monotheism. In the old poem in Exodus, other gods are imagined as existing but are feeble in power compared with YHWH, God of Israel; here the poet goes on to affirm that “You alone are God” (verse 10).
13. nethermost Sheol. The addition of the adjective taḥtiyah, “nethermost” or “down below,” suggest something of the terror of death in this culture oriented toward life in the here and now. Sheol, the underworld, rather like the Homeric Hades, is imagined as a deep pit far below the busy surface where human creatures for a brief time look on the bright sunlight.
16. Your handmaiden’s son. This is a poetic invention often introduced because of the necessity of having an equivalent term in the poetic parallelism for “servant.” ʿEved, the word for servant, can also mean, depending on context, “slave,” just as ʾamah, “handmaiden,” often means “slavegirl.”