1A song, a David psalm.
2My heart is firm, O God.
Let me sing and hymn
3Awake, O lute and lyre.
I would waken the dawn.
4Let me acclaim You among the peoples, LORD.
Let me hymn You among the nations.
5For Your kindness is great over the heavens,
and Your steadfast truth to the skies.
6Loom over the heavens, O God.
Over all the earth Your glory,
7that Your beloved ones be saved,
rescue with Your right hand, answer me.
8God once spoke in His holiness:
“Let Me exult and share out Shechem,
and the valley of Succoth I shall measure.
9Mine is Gilead, Mine Manasseh,
and Ephraim My foremost stronghold,
Judah My scepter.
10Moab is My washbasin,
upon Edom I fling My sandal,
over Philistia I shout exultant.”
11Who will lead me to the fortified town,
who will guide me to Edom?
12Have You not, O God, abandoned us?
You do not sally forth, God, with our armies.
13Give us help against the foe
when rescue by man is in vain.
14Through God we shall gather strength,
and He will stamp out our foes.
PSALM 108 NOTES
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2. My heart is firm, O God. From these initial words of the poem proper to the very end, this text is a stitching together of two previous psalms in the collection. Verses 2–6 here are virtually identical, with only minor variations, to Psalm 57:8–12. Verses 7–14 similarly reproduce Psalm 60:6–14. Psalm 57 is an individual supplication, and Psalm 60 is a national supplication. It remains unclear why sections of both poems should have been spliced together to make the present psalm. Some scholars have speculated, without much evidence, that the composite psalm was intended to serve a new ritual purpose. It is also distinctly possible that the joining of texts was the result of an inadvertency or confusion in the ancient editorial process. Readers are referred to the comments on the relevant verses in Psalm 57 and Psalm 60 for elucidation of the language and imagery. Some brief notes on points of divergence from the duplicated text follow here.
with my inward being. The Masoretic Text has kevodi, “my glory,” instead of which this translation reads keveidi, literally, “my liver.” Psalm 57 also has kevodi, but because the placement of the term is different there, it seemed preferable to read it, following one ancient manuscript, as kinori, “my lyre.”
5. great over the heavens. Psalm 57 has a different preposition, “to the heavens” (ʿad instead of meʿal, as here).
10. I shout exultant. Psalm 60 at this point has a feminine imperative form of the verb rather than the first-person singular. In fact, the imperative does not make sense in context, and the translation of Psalm 60 corrected the verb to read as it does here.