1For David.
and everything in me, His holy name.
2Bless, O my being, the LORD,
and do not forget all His generous acts.
3Who forgives all your wrongs,
heals all your illnesses,
4redeems your life from the Pit,
crowns you with kindness, compassion,
5sates you with good while you live—
you renew your youth like the eagle.
6The LORD performs righteous acts
and justice for all the oppressed.
7He makes known His ways to Moses,
to the Israelites, His feats.
8Compassionate and gracious, the LORD,
slow to anger and abounding in kindness.
9He will not dispute forever
nor nurse His anger for all time.
10Not according to our offenses has He done to us
nor according to our crimes requited us.
11For as the heavens loom high over earth,
His kindness is great over those who fear Him.
12As the east is far from the west,
He has distanced from us our transgressions.
13As a father has compassion for his children,
the LORD has compassion for those who fear Him.
14For He knows our devisings,
recalls that we are dust.
15Man’s days are like grass,
like the bloom of the field, thus he blooms—
16when the wind passes by him, he is gone,
and his place will no longer know him.
17But the LORD’s kindness is forever and ever
over those who fear Him
and His bounty to the sons of sons,
18for the keepers of His pact
and those who recall His precepts to do them.
19The LORD set His throne firm in the heavens
and His kingdom rules over all.
20Bless the LORD, O His messengers,
valiant in power, performing His word,
to heed the sound of His word.
21Bless the LORD, all His armies,
His servants performing His pleasure.
22Bless the LORD, O all His works,
in all places of His dominion.
Bless, O my being, the LORD!
PSALM 103 NOTES
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1. Bless, O my being, the LORD. The speaker’s exhortation to his inner self or essential being (nefesh) to bless the LORD is an unusual rhetorical move in Psalms, repeated in the next psalm as well. (The Hebrew for “bless” also has something of the force of “praise,” but the core meaning of blessing is worth retaining to distinguish it from three other common verbs that emphatically mean “praise.”) This exhortation imparts a sense of exaltation to this psalm of thanksgiving, the occasion for which may be the recovery from a grave illness, as verses 3 and 4 suggest.
5. sates you with good while you live. The received text here looks dubious. Literally, it seems to say “sates with good your ornament.” This translation adopts the text evidently used by the Septuagint, which instead of ʿedyekh, “your ornament,” reads ʿodekhi, “while you live.”
like the eagle. This image alludes to the eagle’s shedding its feathers and growing new ones.
8. Compassionate and gracious, the LORD, / slow to anger and abounding in kindness. This entire line is a direct quotation of the revelation of the divine attributes to Moses in Exodus 34:6. It is introduced in the previous line by “He makes known His ways to Moses.” What is left out from the passage in Exodus is God’s “reckoning the crimes of fathers with sons and sons of sons.” Here, on the contrary, the exclusive emphasis is on divine compassion and forgiveness.
10. Not according to our offenses has He done to us. The theology of forgiveness that pervades this psalm is based on the idea that as long as Israel is God-fearing, committed to upholding its pact with God, whatever trespasses, however egregious, it may have committed will not be held against it by God.
11. For as the heavens loom high over earth. This vertical simile of vast distance is neatly complemented in the next verse by a horizontal simile of distance, from east to west. Appropriately, the vertical image is for the overtowering kindness of God on high to humankind below, whereas the horizontal image, pertaining to the terrestrial realm, is for the distance between the human transgressors and their own misdeeds.
14. For He knows our devisings. The pointed noun, yester, is the same one used in Genesis 8:21—“For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth.”
19. The LORD set His throne firm in the heavens. The throne is implicitly the throne of justice, the quality by which God rules the world. At the same time, the switch of focus to the celestial realm sets the stage for the grand conclusion of the psalm in which the heavenly powers are exhorted, just as the speaker exhorted himself at the beginning of the poem, to praise God.
20. His messengers. This term, traditionally rendered as “angels,” designates the celestial beings who form God’s royal entourage and carry out his commands. As the next verset makes clear, these figures are imagined as divine warriors, an idea that Milton would pick up in Paradise Lost.
21. all His armies. This term carries forward the “valiant in power” of the previous line and alludes to God’s identity as “LORD of Armies,” YHWH tsevʾaot.
performing His pleasure. In this instance, the King James Version, which also represents the Hebrew ratson as “pleasure,” is quite accurate, whereas the sundry modern translations that render it as “will” confuse the sense of the term in rabbinic and later Hebrew with its biblical meaning. The idea is that God, as a great monarch, has armies of messengers or courtiers to perform every act that will please Him.
22. all His works, / in all places of His dominion / . . . O my being. In a grand concluding flourish, all creation is pulled together in the exhortation to praise God. “All His works” includes all sentient beings, from the celestial armies to humankind. God’s dominion extends to all imagined places. And in this vast cosmic setting, the speaker repeats the words of his initial injunction to his own being to bless God, now making himself part of the great chorus of all creation.