(director: on strings, of David)

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There is so much conventional imagery in this plain psalm that it’s not hard to imagine it might have been written by a king, as many suppose. It doesn’t take much: verses 6-7 refer to a king; verses 5 and 8 use the first person. Still, such conjectures are better avoided. What can we know about ages lost? Does it matter to how we read now?

Many claims about the life-setting of psalms, not just those with Davidic superscriptions, beg the question. A psalm that mentions a king is called a royal song, which, it’s said, must have been used in royal settings because it mentions a king and is a royal song. The details can be more elaborate, but the arguments usually no less circular. All depends on assumptions, interpreted. But with Psalm 61, to imagine that perhaps a king wrote it seems a relatively harmless guess. All it assumes is that kings have skillsets other than poetry.

The psalm is tidy and contained, four four-line stanzas with a Selah break in the middle (4). Three imperatives frame the first stanza: “Hear… heed… lead” (1-2). The second stanza adds two more wishes, cohortative, to its matrix of four locations: “let me stay… let me nestle” in “my shelter / a tower of strength… your tent… the secret of your wings” 3-4). These verb forms skip the third stanza but return in the fourth, imperative and cohortative, “appoint” and “let me hymn” (7-8). That’s a satisfying pattern, four imperatives plus three cohortatives, spaced out nicely within a psalm that largely moves from the spatial to the temporal. Whoever this psalmist was, they sought order in form.

To guess this psalmist was a king also assumes that rulers are willing to offer their own third-person intercessions, which again doesn’t seem like a stretch. There’s the first-person statement in verse 5 that makes sense in the voice of a leader: “you’ve given me the gift | of those who revere your name.” The next four lines shift person, however: “days to the days of a king | you keep adding…. He sits forever / at the face of God” (6-7). The second half of the poem shows abiding interest in preserving not just the realm but the reign of this individual king. Most telling, however, is that final imperative, “appoint,” in the line “appoint care and fidelity | they guard him” (7b). Who but a king would consider “those who revere your name,” the God-fearers, as a personal bequest, his own property? Who but a king would imagine chesed and `emet, care and trust, as being appointed and delegated rather than mutual and relational?