(director: with strings, lyric, of David)
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Like all lyrics and lyric poetry, Psalm 4 invites readers both to participate and to observe. I can just watch— overhear— the first-person and second-person exchanges. Or I can identify by turns and degrees with the I, the we, the singular and plural you. It’s a theater in which I am always the audience and yet always auditioning, reading for every part.
To this dynamic of identification and distance, add the energy that comes from not being told whose lines are whose, exactly. The speaker, whoever this is, calls to God in verse 1: “answer me… hear my prayer.” Verse 2 already presents possibilities: God could speak in immediate response, or the speaker could be continuing, specifying the prayer from verse 1. We don’t know who says “my honor a slur” in verse 2. The first half of verse 3 might introduce a third speaker— or this is the original speaker, or this is God— asserting God’s care. By the end of verse 3, the original speaker returns (with the same word beqare`i that begins the psalm), but the rest of the poem presents similar possibilities. As does the rest of the Psalter, as do hymns and poems more generally. I take it as axiomatic that such interpretive choices are the right and responsibility of we who read and recite and call, all of which are conveyed by the word this psalm’s speaker uses in verses 1 and 3, asking to be heard.
To all of this, add that we cannot tell where and when this psalm takes place. Form-critics seek to define the sitz im leben, the life-setting, of biblical passages, when and where the texts would originally have been read. Kraus’s commentary, for example, follows a tradition of imagining a “cultic-institutional scene of a divine court procedure” that would have taken place formally in a temple. Other readers like Alter follow a different tradition, picturing something more familial, personal, an evening psalm, an interpretation Kraus scoffs off as “pious lyricism.” The better approach, I think, is to acknowledge how the psalm sets the public against the private, the singular against the plural: “speak with your hearts \ on your beds | and hush” in verse 4 is followed by “give the gifts | of justice.” Either bedrooms are invoked within worship, or sacrifices are invoked at bedtime. The personal is the liturgical.
However else we read it, Psalm 4 pairs nicely with Psalm 3 (“I lay asleep | I awoke” 3:5) and even better with Psalm 5 (“Lord, mornings | you hear my voice / mornings I ready | wait for you” 5:3).
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4:1 director The Septuagint has “to the end,” but the more likely reading is that a music director is being addressed.
4:1 strings Again, this is a likely translation, though the meaning is not certain.
4:1 my God of justice The word tsedekah is often rendered “righteousness,” sometimes “right.” As is often the case, the problem is not in the dictionary or in the Hebrew, but with what the traditional English translation introduces. Righteousness connotes piety, propriety, even superiority, rather than alignment with abstract principles of fairness. Justice introduces its own connotations, perhaps, but these are closer, and without the self-satisfaction.
4:1 in a bind The word tsar is most literally a constriction and all the claustrophobic terror that comes with being hemmed in and squeezed. It’s the source of the word for “foe.” In this translation, it’s rendered variously as bind, distress, or stress. In drafts I tried “in a squeeze” and “in a pinch,” but those have problems that now seem laughably obvious.
4:1 feel for me The word chanan refers to favor and pity and graciousness. Noah finds chen in the eyes of the Lord. The idea is that the speaker is asking for an emotional, compassionate response from God. “Pity me” conveys more condescension, while “favor me” seems to ask for preference, “be gracious to me” wears white church gloves.
4:2 mortals Lit. “sons of a man.”
4:3 has marked the caring as hers The words chasid and chesed (“the caring”) may be the most important words in Psalms and in the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The concept stems from the unique but unequal relation between a sovereign and a vassal, each of which owes the other a special obligation: the one with power owes protection; the one with less owes fealty. Both are related by an ethic of care. Biblically, the word chesed refers almost always to the special bond between God and God’s people. It involves fidelity or faithfulness, to be sure, but there is already a parallel word for fidelity—`emunah. It also involves kindness, and even love. The words “care” and “caring” seem to me to convey both the semantic range and the connotations. God cares. The people care. They are caring and cared for. Kraus suggests “has shown great grace to me,” but that blurs.
The choice of “hers” here may seem politically correct. And it’s true that the pronouns are masculine in the original text. There are biblical precedents, however, for imagining the Lord with feminine pronouns. Change it if it bothers you.
4:4 with your hearts || … on your beds “Heart” and “bed” are both singular here, but the you suffixes are plural. The Hebrew syntax overall is awkward.
4:4 hush (rommu: be still or cry) the meaning also of living (see Paul Raabe, “Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter”)
4:5 lean back The generic word “trust” fails to capture the image at the heart of betach, which indicates reclining onto someone or something.
4:6 lift on us (nsh for nsh`–cf. Numbers 6:24-26) The translation follows most in assuming a misspelling.
4:7 the season | when wheat and wine throve Lit. “the time the grain and the young wine multiplied,” a striking image that sticks out in a psalm that is otherwise entirely indoors. It sticks out less if one is persuaded by Dahood’s flattening interpretation that Psalm 4 is “a prayer for rain,” reading “good” as “rain” (4:6) and this line as “let their wheat and their wine increase.”
4:9 alone It’s important to capture the amphiboly of “alone,” as Paul Raabe and others have pointed out: the Lord alone makes me live alone. Such syntactical ambiguity is a feature of biblical art, not a bug.
The Book of Psalms 