1A David psalm.
Kindness and justice I would sing.
To You, O LORD, I would hymn.
2I would study the way of the blameless:
I shall go about in my heart’s innocence
within my house.
3I shall not set before my eyes
any base thing.
I hate committing transgressions.
It will not cling to me.
4May a twisted heart turn far from me.
May I not know evil.
5Who defames in secret his fellow,
him shall I destroy.
The haughty of eyes and the proud of heart,
him shall I not suffer.
6My eyes are on the land’s faithful,
that they dwell with me.
Who walks in the way of the blameless,
7Within my house there shall not dwell
one who practices deceit.
A speaker of lies shall not stand firm
before my eyes.
8Each morning I shall destroy
all the wicked of the land,
to cut off from the town of the LORD
all the wrongdoers.
PSALM 101 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
2. I would study the way of the blameless. The verb haskil means both to observe or gaze upon and to get wisdom. This is preeminently a Wisdom psalm, proclaiming in terms reminiscent of the Book of Proverbs the speaker’s firm resolution to keep himself from all who do evil and to follow the ways of the just. Many scholars since Hermann Gunkel have claimed that it is a royal psalm, but any language that might be attached to a king is quite oblique—mainly, in the suggestion that the speaker has the power to destroy the wicked and that just men will serve him. It is possible that these are references to the situation of a king, but the inference is not entirely compelling.
when will it come to me? The antecedent would be “the way of the blameless.” But it is also possible to construe this clause as “When will You come to me?”
3. I shall not set before my eyes / any base thing. It is worth noting that there is no semantic parallelism between the two halves of this line, and the same is true of several other lines in the poem. Perhaps this abandonment of parallelism is driven by the plainly expository nature of this Wisdom psalm. In any case, as often happens in biblical poetry, the poet compensates for the lack of parallelism between versets by introducing interlinear parallelism (compare verses 6, 7, and 8).
transgressions. The Hebrew setim is obscure but might possibly derive from the verbal stem s-t-h, which means “to go astray.”
5. the proud of heart. The literal sense is “the broad of heart.”
6. My eyes are on the land’s faithful. The use of “eyes” here picks up “haughty of eyes” from the previous line and turns around the meaning. My own eyes, the speaker says, are directed toward the land’s faithful. In the same fashion, he speaks of studying “the way of the blameless.”
it is he who will serve me. This formulation does presuppose that the speaker is someone who enjoys a position of eminence and resolves to staff his house with decent people. It is possible, though far from certain, that it is the royal house that he speaks of.