(director: of David, lyric)

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Psalm 40 in English is smoother than it is in Hebrew. This is largely because cadence and abstraction make a psalm seem more cohesive than it is. It’s not a coincidence that the band U2’s version, “40,” achieves its power by taking only verses 1-3 and making Psalm 40’s “new song” into a question that this psalm seems unlikely to have asked: “how long?” The whole coheres in only the broadest of ways: a speaker generically expresses confidence that the Lord will deliver as the Lord has done before. But the psalm’s leaps from verse to verse are large, its images and theme-words differ from section to section, and even the ideas are non sequiturs. Only as a retort to the darkness of the preceding psalms does it seem whole.

If we try to assemble the psalm on its own logic, challenges arise. Verse 3 fits verses 1 and 2 just fine as a comment on the experience of being lifted from harm. But verse 4 seems almost to start over, with the generic third-person singular of the typical wisdom verse: “all set, the hero,” which echoes Psalm 34:8). It is primarily the stitching of “lean” in verse 3 and “leaning” in verse 4 that hooks those pieces together. Verse 5 shifts yet again, now to the second person address of the Lord. It even interrupts itself: “your considerations of us” (a mouthful in the original: umachshevotekha eileinu) followed immediately by “nothing compares to you | let me announce / let me speak / they’ve surpassed numbering.”

These leaps are just the beginning. Verse 6 critiques the insufficiency of ritual in the language of prophets. “Slaughter and grain | did not please you” is paired with “burnt gifts and sin gifts | you did not ask,” but interrupted by “my ears | you opened for me.” How did we get from 5 to 6?  Is this the new song? So far we have, to paraphrase, I was rescued and given a new song, people will see and lean on the Lord, the strong person who leans on the Lord will do well, the Lord has done countless wonders, let me speak, and sacrifices are not necessary, my ears are open. Verses 7 and 8 compound the confusion:

                    And so I said                       I have come now                         

                    in the scroll of the book   it was written about me        

                    To do what you like           my God I have been pleased             

your direction                     is in my very core

More interruptions, more tenuous connections. In the scroll of which book what was written? That the speaker has been pleased to follow the instructions of Torah? Or the line “I have come now,” which in fact is written in other books: in the voice of Balaam in Numbers or at the offering of the first fruits in Deuteronomy 26? If this is an allusion, is quotation really what’s going on with the other interruptions, the lines “let me speak” and “my ears | you opened for me,” all three of which seem like dropped hints? A thoroughly textual poem, Psalm 40 comes to seem less like music and more like midrash, like commentary on other texts.

Seen as a response to other psalms, in fact, Psalm 40 starts to hold together. It works to correct the psalms of lament and protest that came just before. To the sinking experience of the speaker in Psalm 38:4, “my wrongs [avonotai] | have come up over my head / like a heavy weight | they weigh more than me,” the first two verses of Psalm 40 respond, “he bent to me… and hauled me | from the pit of clamor/ from the muck of slime | hoisted my feet.” Later, Psalm 40 actually replaces Psalm 38’s vertical scene of jeopardy with a horizontal one: “my wrongs [avonotai] have reached me … they surpassed | the hairs of my head” (40:12). To this replacement threat, the “new song” of Psalm 40 presents a more traditional series of prayers and assertions: “I, weak and poor, | my lord considers me/ my help | and my rescuer” (40:17).

Importantly, this is not a denial or erasure of the claims and experiences of Psalm 38 and 39. It’s a different, competing testimonial. Psalm 38 presents a distant God in the face of pain. Psalm 40 describes a God of “considerations” (40:5, 17), and prays, “your care and steadiness | may they continually keep me close” (40:11). Psalm 39 is an experience of speaking through closed lips—“I was bound in silence” (39:3) and “I have been bound | I won’t open my mouth” (39:9). Psalm 40 interrupts itself to emphasize by contrast the openness of communication: “He gave my mouth | a new song” (40:3), “let me announce / let me speak” (40:5), “my ears | you opened for me” (40:6), and “look I don’t shut my lips” (40:9), “I have spoken / I have not hidden” (40:10). Even little things from Psalm 39 are challenged by Psalm 40. Near the end of Psalm 39, having wondered, “now what | have I held out for” (39:7), the speaker asks in the traditional manner (see 5:1, e.g.), “Hear my prayer Lord | to my cry perk ear” (39:12). The very beginning of Psalm 40 takes up both of these points: “I held out and held out | for the Lord / he bent to me | and heard my cry” (40:1). It is as if to say, that’s what you held out for. At the end of Psalm 39, the speaker wants to smile before the abyss (39:13). Near the end of Psalm 40, the new speaker responds: “may they laugh | and smile in you / all who seek you | may they ever say/ God be great | who love your rescue” (40:16). Psalm 40 even completes, inverts, and clarifies the open-ended “for you [’attah]| you did [`asita]” from 39:9: “So much you did [`asita] | you [’attah], Lord my God / your marvels | your considerations… they’ve surpassed numbering” (40:5).

In this light, seen as a critique of Psalm 39 and, to a lesser extent, Psalm 38 and even Psalm 35 (which 40:14 quotes), the interruptions and asides of Psalm 40 make sense. “It is written of me” (40:7) suggests that it might not be written of you, just as “I have not kept secret… I have not hidden” (40:10) now reads like a dig, as does the literally digging in the verb “to dig” in “my ears | you opened for me” (40:6). Psalm 40:4, which turns from first-person experience to third-person generalization, now reads not as a non sequitur, but as the most direct accusation of all: “all set, the hero | who has set the Lord as his leaning / and not turned to monsters | or those who fall to lies.” The word rehabim may not literally mean “monsters”—it’s used only here— but it wears the plural of Rahab, the great sea beast, and connotes storms as well as pride. Even the word “turned” seems loaded in this context. In the Hebrew, the verb is panah, “faced,” not as in “confronting” or “facing down,” but as in “turns to look at full on.” The point of the verse seems to be that, unlike certain nameless someones, the writer of Psalm 40 feels you’ll be better off not facing down beasts that lie deep, not falling into or falling for lies.