1A prayer of Moses, man of God.
O Master, You have been our abode
in every generation.
2Before mountains were born,
before You spawned earth and world,
from forever to forever You are God.
3You bring man back to the dust
and say, “Turn back, humankind.”
4For a thousand years in Your eyes
are like yesterday gone,
like a watch in the night.
5You engulf them with sleep.
In the morn they are like grass that passes.
6In the morning it sprouts and passes,
by evening it withers and dies.
7For we are consumed in Your wrath,
and in Your fury we are dismayed.
8You have set our transgressions before You,
our hidden faults in the light of Your face.
9For all our days slip away in Your anger.
We consume our years like a sigh.
10The days of our years are but seventy years,
and if in great strength, eighty years.
And their pride is trouble and grief,
for swiftly cut down, we fly off.
11Who can know the strength of Your wrath?
As the fear of You is Your anger.
12To count our days rightly, instruct,
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
13Come back, O LORD! How long?—
and have pity on Your servants.
14Sate us in the morn with Your kindness,
let us sing and rejoice all our days.
15Give us joy as the days You afflicted us,
the years we saw evil.
16Let Your acts be seen by Your servants
and Your glory by their children.
17And may the sweetness of the Master our God be upon us
and the work of our hands firmly found for us,
and the work of our hands firmly found!
PSALM 90 NOTES
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1. A prayer of Moses, man of God. This psalm is unique in attributing the text to Moses. Some interpreters have seen linguistic connections with the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32), but these are tenuous and, if they really exist, are very few. Given the focus of the psalm on the limitations of the human condition, the editor may have been thinking of the reiterated zero-degree epithet for the lawgiver, “the man Moses”: Moses is the great founding leader and yet but a man, granted the great life span of 120 years that would become proverbial, yet circumscribed by mortality, never to enter the promised land. Of the eight times that the name of Moses is mentioned in Psalms, seven occur in the fourth book of Psalms, which begins here, so this may have been a signature device on the part of the editor.
2. from forever to forever You are God. This evocation of God’s eternality introduces the topic of the two temporal scales, God’s and man’s, which is the fearsome subject of the psalm.
3. You bring man back to the dust. The word represented as “dust,” dakaʾ, is associated with a root that indicates lowness, or crushing down, but is reasonably understood here as a poetic substitute for “dust” (ordinarily, ʿafar). God’s abasement of man, followed in the next verset by His exhortation to humankind to turn back, or repent, suggests that this psalm is a collective penitential supplication, perhaps recited at a moment when the community has been overtaken by disaster (“bring man back to the dust”). But the nature of the disaster is not specified, and there is no mention either of Israel or the Temple. Thus the supplication becomes the vehicle for a Wisdom-style meditation on the transience of human life, cast in the universal terms characteristic of Wisdom literature. There is, in fact, a certain kinship between this poem and passages in both Job and Qohelet.
4. For a thousand years in Your eyes. In the eloquent triadic structure of this line, the poet moves from a thousand years to a passing day to a watch in the night (a mere third of the night). Thus, he concretizes a vision of time seen from God’s end of the telescope.
5. You engulf them with sleep. Both the verb and the syntax in the Hebrew sound odd, and there may be a textual problem here, but the sundry efforts to emend it chiefly exhibit the logic of scholars, not of biblical poets.
In the morn they are like grass that passes. The verb translated as “passes” could also mean “changes.” The poem here enters the sphere of human temporality, which is only from morning to evening. Terms marking units of time—days, years—continue to be invoked in the poem.
7. For we are consumed in Your wrath. Because the words for both “wrath” and “fury” in the Hebrew suggest hotly burning breath, the language carries forward the image of grass withering and dying.
9. like a sigh. The Hebrew hegeh also means “murmur.”
10. cut down. Though the meaning of this word in the Hebrew is clear, the grammar is problematic because the verb is masculine singular and so does not readily attach to the first-person plural subject that follows.
11. As the fear of You is Your anger. That is, with good reason are people afraid of You because the manifestations of Your anger are indeed fearsome.
12. To count our days rightly, instruct. In effect, this is precisely what the poem as a whole—with its powerful images for representing the limitations of human existence over against God’s eternal being—has achieved for its audience.
13. have pity. The verb used means literally “change your mind.”
14. Sate us in the morn with Your kindness. Such an act would enable a different kind of flourishing from the grass that sprouts in the morn and then withers. God’s kindness has the power to move human joy beyond the fleeting framework of a few hours to “all our days.”
15. as the days . . . / the years. God’s kindness to humanity makes possible a different order of human temporality, in which the days add up to the years in a round of joyful fulfillment, even within the limited span of seventy or eighty years of a human life.
17. and the work of our hands firmly found. The poet uses a triadic line, the third verset a virtual repetition of the second verset, as a concluding flourish. The verb konen, “firmly found,” is strategically important. It is the word used for keeping dynasties or buildings unshaken. Against the dismaying ephemerality of human existence, in which a life sprouts and withers like grass, God can give fleeting human experience solid substantiality.