1A psalm, a song for the sabbath day.
2It is good to acclaim the LORD
and to hymn to Your name, Most High,
3to tell in the morning Your kindness,
Your faithfulness in the nights,
4on ten-stringed instrument and on the lute,
on the lyre with chanted sound.
5For You made me rejoice, LORD, through Your acts,
of the work of Your hands I sing gladly.
6How great Your works, O LORD,
7The brutish man does not know,
nor does the fool understand this:
8the wicked spring up like grass,
and all the wrongdoers flourish—
9And You are on high forever, O LORD!
10For, look, Your enemies, O LORD,
for, look, Your enemies perish,
all the wrongdoers are scattered.
11And You raise up my horn like the wild ox.
I am soaked in fresh oil.
12And my eyes behold my foes’ defeat,
those hostile toward me, my ears hear their fall.
13The righteous man springs up like the palm tree,
like the Lebanon cedar he towers.
14Planted in the house of the LORD,
in the courts of our God they flourish.
15They bear fruit still in old age,
fresh and full of sap they are,
16to tell that the LORD is upright,
my rock, there is no wrong in Him.
PSALM 92 NOTES
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1. a song for the sabbath day. It is a reasonable inference that this psalm was actually sung as part of the Temple rite for the sabbath. In postbiblical Judaism, it was included in the sabbath liturgy, and six other psalms were chosen for recitation on each of the six other days of the week.
2. It is good to acclaim the LORD. Although the language of acclaim or thanksgiving (hodot) and hymning (zamer) immediately aligns this text with the psalms of thanksgiving, it also has a strong Wisdom coloration as an attempt to explain why the wicked seem to flourish and what is the true order of justice in the world.
5. This line of poetry takes the form of a neat chiasm (a b b' a') as do verse 6 and verse 12. The translation mirrors this formal pattern.
6. Your designs are very deep. This clause lays the ground for the rest of the poem, and for the next two verses in particular. God’s designs are deep. Superficial observation might lead to the conclusion that crime pays, but, despite appearances to the contrary, God prepares due punishment for the wicked. It is this unapparent system of justice that the brutish man is incapable of understanding.
8. to be destroyed for all time. The likely force of the metaphor is that grass grows high only the more readily to be mowed or to wither.
9. And You are on high forever, O LORD! This verse lacks any parallelism and does not scan in the Hebrew. It would seem to be an interjection in prose inserted at the midpoint of the poem: man is ephemeral; God reigns on high forever.
10. For look, Your enemies, O LORD, / for, look, Your enemies perish. The use of incremental repetition in these two versets harks back to the earliest stratum of biblical poetry (as, for example, in the Song of Deborah). In fact, a line occurs in one of the Ugaritic poems that is very close in language and structure to this one, although with “Baal” as the deity addressed rather than YHWH.
12. my foes’ defeat. As elsewhere, “defeat” is merely implied by the idiom “to see [in or against] my foes.” This line is unusual in adding to the seeing a symmetrical element of hearing in the second verset. Again the noun “fall” has been added to make the meaning clear.
13. like the palm tree, / like the Lebanon cedar. These proverbially stately trees with their deep roots are an obvious antithesis to the metaphor of ephemeral grass used to represent the wicked. The contrast is akin to the one in the first psalm between the righteous as a tree planted by waters and the wicked as chaff blown by the wind.
15. fresh and full of sap. This entire line carries forward the image of the righteous as a flourishing tree. “Fresh”—raʿanan, which has a semantic range from vibrant to luxuriant to fresh—is the very term the speaker used in verse 11 to characterize the oil with which he was pleasurably anointed. (The translation reverses the order of the two Hebrew adjectives for the sake of rhythm.) Raʿanan is also a term often linked with trees.
16. to tell that the LORD is upright. At the very end, the psalm picks up “to tell” from the beginning, thus marking an envelope structure. The poem begins and concludes by affirming what a good and fitting thing it is to tell God’s greatness.