(director: of Jeduthun, lyric, of David)

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As the first book of the Book of Psalms nears its end— Psalms 40 and 41 are its final pair— things get bleak. Psalm 39 is as dark as it gets, a protest psalm, a prayer of outrage. The physical suffering and psychological torment of Psalm 38 have given way to resignation, the end of the rope. This is the mode of Job and Ecclesiastes, a speaker with no time for pieties, who can’t keep her mouth shut.

The introductory verses, best read as two tercets with the last line of verse 2 marking the turn to a second stanza, establish a complicated dynamic at the very edge of speech. “I said,” says the speaker, talking ironically about having tamed the tongue and gagged the mouth. But pain and its contemplation boil over, and again she speaks: “I spoke | with my tongue” (3). The effect is paradoxical, speech that doesn’t want to be spoken, the clenched teeth of an outburst.

  And what an outburst!

          Make me know, Lord         my end                                                  4

          and the hem of my days     how it is

          I want to know                   how fragile I am

In Hebrew, too, the syntax is interruptive, with expressions that waver between statement, question, and exclamation. The doubled mah, rendered here as “how,” can be interrogative, but also means “what” and “oh.” It even means “why.” How long do I have left? How is it my life is so short? The line “I want to know” reframes “make me know,” an insistence on being told. It works backward—“what is it that I want to know?”—as well as forward: “I want to know | how fragile I am.”

That irony cuts deep. If the speaker knows anything, it’s how fragile she is, as evidenced by answering her own question: “Look, palms wide | you made my days / my lifespan | as nothing to you” (5). Those palms are a gesture of prayer, which the lyric address to the Lord achieves. It is a prayer, an extraordinarily bold one. It indicts God for the injustices of pain and mortality. The term that comes next is straight out of Ecclesiastes: vanity, vanity, all is vanity. The word is hevel, a puff of breath, a lifespan measured not by hands but by the single exhalation it takes to speak or pray. Existence itself is empty: standing, walking, blowing around, “just air” (5-6). And more, life is cut off, leaving behind all the unnamed things a life accrues: “she piles but doesn’t know | who gathers up” (6).

There are gestures at modesty and piety in Psalm 39, to be sure, but even these feel hollowed out. “From all my wrongs | deliver me,” the speaker cries out in verse 8. But this line follows the desperation of verse 7: “Now what | have I held out for, my lord,” a question that’s answered, limply, by “my hope | is in you.” If we have been reading verses 1-6, we have the sense that life is simultaneously too short and too long, that our lifespan is “as nothing to you” (5). Even the traditional language of verse 12—“Hear my prayer… do not hush”—manages to sound both deeply felt and empty of heart. Again, the gesture is emptied by what precedes it: “you rub off as with a moth | what makes them lovely / just air | all of us” (11).  

In this powerful prayer of outrage, there are two truly exceptional moments. The first comes in verse 9 where the speaker, having reluctantly broken her desire to keep quiet, tries again to keep quiet. It echoes the scene at the psalm’s beginning: “I have been bound | I won’t open my mouth.” But look at that next line: “for you | you did.” Did what? What did the Lord do? Opened the speaker’s mouth for them? Already made the speaker “a taunt for dolts”? Did something else? Is the text fragmented here, or is the speaker, whose mouth is a volatile border, just unwilling or unable to finish the thought?

The other standout moment is the ending, which begins with the speaker’s last imperative. Nothing about her is cowed or craven. Maybe that’s because there’s nothing left for her to lose. “Look away from me” is an aching command, a gut-punch prayer. It bears the weight of both shame and indignation: “avert your eyes!” as well as “what are you looking at?” as well as “stop looking at me!” And why this? Because, the speaker says, “I would like to smile / before I walk away | and am nothing.”

The echoes of Job’s speech in Job 10 are unmistakable. It’s not that the psalmist or speaker wants to “curse God and die,” as Job’s wife unhelpfully suggests (Job 2:9). It’s that her mouth wants to do something other than keeping it all inside.