1He who dwells in the Most High’s shelter,
in the shadow of Shaddai lies at night—
2I say of the LORD, “My refuge and bastion,
my God in whom I trust.”
3For He will save you from the fowler’s snare,
from the disastrous plague.
4With His pinion He shelters you,
and beneath His wings you take refuge,
a shield and a buckler, His truth.
5You shall not fear from the terror of night
nor from the arrow that flies by day,
6from the plague that stalks in darkness
nor from the scourge that rages at noon.
7Though a thousand fall at your side
and ten thousand at your right hand,
8You but look with your eyes,
and the wicked’s requital you see.
9For you—the LORD is your refuge,
the Most High you have made your abode.
10No harm will befall you,
nor affliction draw near to your tent.
11For His messengers He charges for you
to guard you on all your ways.
12On their palms they lift you up
lest your foot be bruised by a stone.
13On lion and viper you tread,
you trample young lion and serpent.
14“For Me he desired and I freed him.
I raised him high, for he has known My name.
15He calls Me and I answer him,
I am with him in his straits.
I deliver him and grant him honor.
16With length of days I shall sate him,
PSALM 91 NOTES
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1. He who dwells in the Most High’s shelter. This psalm is one of a number that have no superscription (though the Septuagint shows—or adds—“a David psalm”). It also does not belong to any obvious cultic genre of psalms. The Israeli scholar Yair Hoffman, noting its eloquent expression of God’s unflagging providential protection, has interestingly characterized the poem as an “amulet psalm,” with the idea that its recitation might help a person attain or perhaps simply feel God’s guarding power.
2. I say of the LORD. Although the Septuagint corrects this to “He says of the LORD,” evidently in the interests of consistency, such unmarked transitions from one speaker to another (it is now the man who shelters in God who speaks) are not uncommon in biblical literature. In fact, there are three speakers in the poem: the poet (verse 1, verses 3–13), the man who trusts in God (verse 2), and God (verses 14–16).
4. His pinion . . . / His wings. It may be misguided to conclude that God is imagined as a large mother bird. The sheltering care of the bird for her fledglings is a recurrent biblical image for solicitous protection; thus, the metaphor appears to refer to the function, not to the imagined appearance of the deity. But such metaphorical usages may have had something to do with the later representation of the Shekhinah (the feminine manifestation of the deity) by Jews and the Holy Spirit by Christians as a dove.
7. Though a thousand fall at your side. In all likelihood, the setting evoked is a raging epidemic in which vast numbers of people all around are fatally stricken. The image of martial danger, however, introduced by the flying arrow of verse 5 and the shield and buckler of verse 4, is superimposed on the image of danger from the plague, life imagined as a battlefield fraught with dangers.
you it will not reach. In this triadic line, after the formulaic semantic parallelism of “a thousand” and “ten thousand,” the third member of the line is not semantically parallel but instead marks a strong contrast—you who will remain untouched over against all those who fall.
8. the wicked’s requital. This phrase suggests that there is a blending in the poem of danger from the plague and danger from hostile people.
9. your refuge. The received text reads, confusingly, “my refuge.”
10. draw near to your tent. This archaic reference to nomadic existence occurs elsewhere in Psalms and is in keeping with the somewhat archaic coloration of biblical poetic diction. It seems worth preserving in English.
12. lest your foot be bruised by a stone. The literal sense of the verb is “bump against.” In the rocky landscape of the Judahite hills, in which there were no paved roads until the Romans introduced them, this image of a person lifted up on the palms of divine messengers to protect him from all painful stumbling has particular force. It is also a concrete focusing of “guard you on all your ways,” at the end of the previous line.
13. lion . . . viper . . . / young lion . . . serpent. These noxious creatures of the wild would have been actual dangers to the wayfarer passing over the rocky roads of Judah. “Young lion” (following the King James Version) is a translator’s strategy of desperation: there are five different terms in biblical Hebrew for “lion,” and it is safe to assume that they designated different kinds or categories of lion, in an era when this animal was much more common in the countryside of Judah. But we have no way of recovering the distinctions, and, in any case, there are no synonyms for “lion” in English.
16. show him. Some scholars propose emending the Masoretic weʾareihu to weʾarweihu, “slake his thirst,” to make a neat parallelism with “sate him” in the first verset. It is a question, however, whether the biblical poets were always committed to such neatness in deploying parallel versets, and “show him” makes perfect sense.