(lyric, of David, fleeing Absalom his son)

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Psalm 3 turns from national theater to individual lament, but keeps the siege psychology and the fantasy of revenge. In Psalm 2, machinations were primarily verbal, the seemingly whispered conspiring of kings and prisoners’ groans, met by the Lord’s dismissive laughter and speech-acts. In this psalm, both threat and proportional response are primarily physical, expressed by Hebrew root words that convey rising up (qum) and multiplying, pressing in (rab). The move from Psalm 2 to Psalm 3, then, recasts the nation’s troubles on a private stage, a kind of theatrical aside, even as it casts the shadow of personal emotions back onto international drama. The personal is the political.

As in the previous psalm, measure-for-measure retribution is God’s m.o. Foes crowd, rise up, and speak. To each of these threats, the Lord responds—a shield, weight, and an answer. The many mock the speaker: “not even God can rescue her” (verse 2). Against this claim the speaker calls out, “rescue me” (7). It’s the narrator who responds with an assertion, “Rescue is the Lord’s” (8). That word “rescue” is the better translation for the Hebrew ysh’a than “salvation.” The image is of being extricated from a bind, from distress, from a squeeze to a wider place. “Liberation” and “salvation” are ponderous and too particular in their political and theological registers.  

The register of biblical diction can be hard to ascertain and challenging to approximate, but even in poetry, words and phrases are often less formal than most translations and liturgical context suggest. Verse 7 of Psalm 3, for instance, really does feature the most common word for hitting, paralleled by an intensified common word for breaking. But “you’ve hit | all my enemies in the cheek” doesn’t convey the energy or the idiom that “you’ve punched | my enemies all in the jaw.” That’s not an attempt to make the text informal. It’s an approximation of the register of the text itself. (See Klaus Seybold 64: “the language of this simple prayer smacks of everyday colloquial usage.”)

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3:1 lyric, of David, fleeing Absalom  In the psalter, this superscription laces Psalm 3 first to Psalm 2. There we had a king as a son, in the context of international violence, conspiracy, and retribution. Though Psalm 3 is a personal lament, the invocation of the story of David’s retreat from Absalom’s coup gives this psalm another king as a son, in the context of intra-national violence, conspiracy, and retribution. The double role of these Davidic superscriptions— just like the connection of Solomon with wisdom literature— is both to anchor otherwise these open-ended lyrics in communal memory and to enrich those narratives and characters with poetic texture. The past comes to life— every time it’s sung.

3:1 how many my foes grow / many  The verb rabbu in the first half-verse is followed by rabbim, the verb becoming a verbal adjective. Literally, the enemies many, as a verb, they multiply. Then they just are many.

3:2 not even God | can rescue him  In one of the most paradigmatic tropes of the Psalms, a speaker beset, besieged, surrounded, calls out for help. That help is either the default word for help, ‘zr, or conveys deliverance from imprisonment, ntsl, or, as here, conveys rescue by removal to safety. The attackers think rescue is impossible. The speaker calls out for rescue (v. 7). And immediately that rescue is described as completed already. In verse 8, finally, rescue is described as the property of the Lord alone.

3:2 (music)  The Hebrew word selah might be better left untranslated, since no one knows what it means. In drafts of this translation, it was variously “solo,” “crescendo,” “instrumental,” “chorus,” “rest,” “hit it,” and even “word.” The word is a musical term, so the word “music” makes a kind of obvious sense.  

3:6 many thousands The root rab returns here now in noun form as the word rebabah, which is a indefinite number somewhere between 10,000 and a zillion. Seybold proposes m’rbwt “web” rather than mrbbwt, while Dahood suggests ribebot meaning “arrows.”

3:8 your kneeling  The root brkh does means “blessing.” The abstract connotations of divine favor and financial prosperity overwhelmed the underlying metaphor of kneeling, in all likelihood, very early on in the history of the term’s usage. (That’s linguistic conjecture, and I don’t assume that words only mean what they may have meant originally. The word “nature,” for instance, originated from the Latin for birth, and now it means almost nothing of the sort. It means just about anything and everything, as a trip through a supermarket aisle shows.) But the image of blessing as adoration as bending the knee seems worth noting, not because it’s a translator’s discomfort with theology or abstraction, but because it’s there.