1A song of ascents.
From the depths I called You, LORD.
2Master, hear my voice.
May Your ears listen close to the voice of my plea.
3Were You, O Jah, to watch for wrongs,
Master, who could endure?
4For forgiveness is Yours,
5I hoped for the LORD, my being hoped,
6My being for the Master—
more than the dawn-watchers watch for the dawn.
7Wait, O Israel, for the LORD,
for with the LORD is steadfast kindness,
and great redemption is with Him.
8And He will redeem Israel
from all its wrongs.
PSALM 130 NOTES
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1. From the depths I called You. Repeatedly in Psalms, “the depths” are an epithet for the depths of the sea, which in turn is an image of the realm of death. Generations of readers, Christian and Jewish, have responded to the archetypal starkness of this phrase: the speaker, from the darkness of profound despair, on the verge of death, calls out to God. This psalm, of course, is a penitential psalm, focusing not on the evil of Israel’s enemies, as does Psalm 129, but on the wrongs Israel has done. It resembles Psalm 129 in beginning with a first-person singular that turns into the expression of a collective plea, as the last two verses make clear.
3. watch for wrongs. The verb sh-m-r in this context has the particular sense of “keep track of,” but the translation “watch for” preserves the play in the Hebrew with the double occurrence of the same verbal stem in “more than dawn-watchers watch for the dawn,” in verse 6.
4. so that You may be feared. That is, the fear of or reverence for God is not sheer terror but a response of awe to a deity who is both all-powerful and compassionately forgiving. (The Hebrew verb y-r-ʾ covers a semantic range from “fear” to “awe” to “reverence.”)
5. and for His word I waited. Two manuscripts read “for Your word.” This would turn the first clause into a vocative (“I hoped, O LORD”), which is a tempting construction because the verb “hoped” in the first verset is not followed in the Hebrew by a preposition (“for” being assumed in the translation as an ellipsis). The awaited word from God is presumably a word of forgiveness.
6. My being for the Master— / more than the dawn-watchers watch for the dawn. Previous translators have all supplied a predicate here (“is eager,” “is turned to,” or the King James Version’s “waiteth,” duly italicized to show that it is merely implied in the Hebrew). But the power of the line in the original is precisely that the anticipated verb (“wait” having appeared with its synonym “hoped”in the preceding line) is choked off: my inner being, my utmost self—for God more than watchmen watch for the dawn. (The Hebrew noun boqer also has the more general sense of “morning,” but in this context of watchmen through the night awaiting the first light, “dawn” is strongly indicated.) Previous translators render the four Hebrew words mishomrim laboqer shomrim laboqer as a simple repetition (for example, the New Jewish Publication Society, “than watchmen for the morning, watchmen for the morning.” But shomrim can be either a verbal noun (“watchmen”) or a plural verb (“watch”). The line becomes more vivid and energetic if the second occurrence is understood as a verb: more than the watchmen watch for the dawn, I watch—elliptically implied—for the LORD. The force of the image is evident: the watchmen sitting through the last of the three watches of the night, peering into the darkness for the first sign of dawn, cannot equal my intense expectancy for God’s redeeming word to come to me in my dark night of the soul.