1A David psalm.
O LORD, I call You. Hasten to me.
Hearken to my voice when I call You.
2May my prayer stand as incense before You,
my uplifted hands as the evening offering.
3Place, O LORD, a watch on my mouth,
a guard at the door of my lips.
4Incline not my heart to an evil word
to plot wicked acts
with wrongdoing men,
and let me not feast on their delicacies.
5Let the righteous man strike me,
Let no wicked man’s oil adorn my head,
for still my prayer is against their evils.
6 Let their leaders slip on a rock,
and let them hear my words which are sweet.
7 As when the earth is parted and split,
our bones are scattered in the mouth of Sheol.
8 For to You, O LORD, my eyes turn.
In You I take refuge. Expose not my life.
9Guard me from the trap they laid for me
and the snares of the wrongdoers.
10May the wicked fall in their nets.
I alone shall go on.
PSALM 141 NOTES
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1. O LORD, I call You. This is another highly formulaic psalm of supplication.
3. a watch on my mouth, / a guard at the door of my lips. As in many of the supplications, the malicious intention of the speaker’s enemies seems to manifest itself in vicious speech. The special emphasis here is on the speaker’s prayer that he not answer them in kind, that he keep his own speech from slander and invective.
4. an evil word. Although davar can also mean “thing,” the focus on acts of speaking suggests that its other sense, of “word,” is more salient here. A revocalization proposed by Rabbi Israel Stein, ledaber instead of ledavar, yields “to speak evil.”
5. the faithful rebuke me. It is at this point that the coherence of the Hebrew text breaks down, and grave textual problems persist until the end of verse 7. The Masoretic Text appears to say literally, “May the righteous man strike me kindness.” Attempts to rescue this by interpreting ḥesed as “with kind intention” or “in loyalty” are strained. The translation reads instead of ḥesed the noun ḥasid, meaning “the faithful person” and making it the subject of “rebuke me,” dropping the waw (“and”) before that verb.
Let no wicked man’s oil adorn my head. This whole clause is problematic in the Hebrew, which seems to say “Let not oil of the head negate [?] my head.” The translation assumes that the first roʾsh (“head”) has been inadvertently duplicated from the second, and originally read rashaʿ, “wicked man.” The verb yani here is anomalous, lacking the aleph at the end that would make it mean “negate” and not corresponding to any recognizable Hebrew verb formation. The translation guesses it may derive from the root n-w-h (“to be beautiful,” yielding noy, “beauty” in postbiblical Hebrew). Oil on the head was regarded as a pleasure and an enhancement. Whatever the obscurity, the line means to contrast the preferability of being rebuked by the righteous to the pleasures of the wicked.
6. Let their leaders slip on a rock. Everything in this segment of text is doubtful. The noun shoftim usually means “judges,” but in the Book of Judges it designates an ad hoc military leader, and the judicial sense may be unlikely here. The phrase “slip on a rock” is peculiar, especially because the Hebrew says, quite unidiomatically, “in the hands of a rock,” and the form of the verb used here does not ordinarily indicate a jussive. Perhaps “rock” belongs somewhere in the splitting of the earth of the next verse.
7. As when the earth is parted and split. Here it is the grammar that is baffling because both Hebrew verbs are active and transitive, with no grammatical subject in sight. Rashi proposes an elided “tree” as the subject of the parting and splitting, though the imagery looks more like an earthquake.
our bones are scattered in the mouth of Sheol. As the text stands, this would be an expression of the dire plight of the speaker and his friends (the latter rather suddenly introduced, it must be said) beset by evil people. One version of the Septuagint and the Syriac reads instead “their bones,” making this a continuation of the catastrophe that overtakes the wicked in the previous verse.
8. my eyes turn. “Turn” is merely implied in the Hebrew.