1A David maskil, when he was in the cave, a prayer.
2With my voice I shout to the LORD,
with my voice I plead to the LORD.
3I pour out my speech before Him,
my distress before Him I tell,
4when my spirit faints within me,
On the path on which I walk
they have laid a trap for me.
5Look on the right and see—
there is no one who knows me.
Escape is gone for me,
no one inquires for me.
6I shouted to You, O LORD.
I said, You are my shelter,
my lot in the land of the living.
7Listen close to my song of prayer,
for I have sunk very low.
Save me from my pursuers,
for they are too strong for me.
8 Bring me out from the
to acclaim Your name.
For the righteous will draw round me
when You requite me.
PSALM 142 NOTES
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1. A David maskil, when he was in the cave. Because of the urgency of this compact supplication, the editors link it in the superscription with David’s moment of distress when he was hiding from Saul (1 Samuel 22).
4. when my spirit faints within me. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “when my spirit faints upon me.”
You, You know my path. The addition of the usually elided pronoun ʾatah makes this emphatic.
5. Look on the right. In Psalms, help is repeatedly on the right hand, so it is dismaying when there is no one there who knows the speaker.
8. Bring me out from the prison. Some scholars have understood this literally, making this psalm a prisoner’s supplication. The speaker has been entrapped (verse 4); he is incarcerated with no one around to help him (verse 5); and he pleads to be freed. But all this may be fanciful because prison, like “straits,” is a ready metaphor for a condition of acute distress, and the binary opposition between restrictive enclosure and wide-open space is common in the figurative language of Psalms.
the righteous will draw round me. The meaning of the verb yakhtiru is in dispute. Normally, it would mean “to crown,” but the verbal stem suggests “to go around” (a crown going around the head). Either the Masoretic yakhtiru has the sense here of yekhatru (the same root in another conjugation), “to surround,” or it should be revocalized as yekhatru (in the consonantal text, it lacks the yod, as the form yekhatru does). This is the reading of the Septuagint.