1 A prayer of David.
Heed, Adonai, my righteousness,
accept
my supplication,
give ear to my prayer, for no deceit crosses my lips.
2 From your face the judgment upon me came forth, [and]
my eyes beheld [your] rectitude.
3 You have put my heart to the test, I searched the night;
You put me through a trial by fire,
and no injustice was found in me.
4 As my mouth did not speak the words of humanity,
By your words, I kept to the strait and narrow.
5 I kept my strides
firmly to your beaten path,
in order that my stride might not be shaken.
6 I uttered a cry, in order that you might hear me with favor, O God;
bend down to me and hear what I have to say.
7 Marvellous is your hesed
the saved ones trust in you,
from the ones who stand out against your right side.
8 Guard me as the pupil
of your eye;
In the shelter of your wings, shelter me
9 From the face of the wicked ones who are causing me severe hardship,
The enemies of my psyche surrounding me;
10 They close their hearts to compassion,
their mouths speak arrogance.
11 Those who rejected me with contempt now surround me,
their eyes are all set
to strike me to the earth.
12 They are like a lion that is ready for the chase
and a lion’s cub that is lurking, hidden, near the houses.
13 Rise up, Adonai, anticipate their moves and trip them up,
Rescue my psyche from evil.
Use your scimitar on the enemies of your hand.
14 Adonai, from the rare ones of the earth,
they are divvying up the spoils of life.
And their womb is filled with your secret inheritance,
they satiate their children,
With the leftovers going to their babies.
15 But I, in righteousness, observe
your face,
satiated in observing your glory.
In the Episcopal tradition, each service contains a reading from the Psalms, in some churches responsively, in others in unison. That’s the good news. The bad news is, I cannot call to mind a single occasion in which anyone preached on a text from that Sunday’s psalm. Moreover, most Sundays’ psalm readings seem relentlessly upbeat; I cannot remember ever in my life hearing a psalm of complaint or lament in church. My guess (and this is strictly a guess) is that most Christians have the uneasy feeling that if we were to complain or lament to God — why did you have to rain out the big game, why was I unjustly fired, why did you kill my father at such a young age? — God’s reply would be, “I suffered and died on the Cross for you, and you’re complaining about a little thing like that?” As for anger, well, perish the thought. One is permitted to feel anger in a vertical relationship — at one’s boss, at the government, at God — but one is permitted to express anger only horizontally. Tell your boss off and your boss might fire you, but you’d live to yell again. Tell God off, and those old commercials about “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” take on a whole new meaning.
Psalm 17 appeals to me because it appears to be the lament of someone who is doing the best that she can, and senses that righteousness just might not be enough. There is also the intriguing implication that the things we worry about by day — arrogant enemies lurking, waiting to pounce — may be as ephemeral as dreams. In the version of The Inclusive Psalms, the psalmist says, “You search my heart, you visit me by night. . . . Hide me in the shadow of your wings [where chicks traditionally sleep, protected from danger by the hen]. . . . And me? When I look at justice I see your face; and when I awake, I’ll be content just to see your likeness.” If life in God is the only true reality, then it is up to God to rescue us “from people whose only reward is in this present life.” (Inclusive, 17-18)
As I did with Psalm 34, when I began researching Psalm 17, I started by reading all the English translations I had available — NRSV, KJV, NIV, The Inclusive Psalms, and even an ancient Coverdale that belonged to my great-grandmother — and then moved on to the Internet, where I acquired the Bible in Basic English, Young’s Literal Translation, Darby, the Webster Bible, and the ASV, NASB, and RSV. Then, emboldened by my earlier success in translating Psalm 34, I did my own translation of Psalm 17 from the Septuagint.
The “speed bumps” of Psalm 17 become apparent only when one starts comparing versions; there are such wild variations — particularly between the English translations, but also between the English and the Septuagint — that one can only imagine that the Masoretic text must be especially difficult. Pronouns didn’t match up; for example, the “your” of verse 2 is “my” in the Greek. There were four words that did not appear, in any variation I could think of, in any Greek dictionary available to me — including the high-powered version of Liddell-Scott made available on the Internet by Tufts University.
Verses 1 through 5 provide the background: I’ve been a good person, God; even you couldn’t find a situation where I’ve slipped up. Verses 6 through either 13 or 14 describe the fix the psalmist is in: Enemies have tracked the psalmist down, and now they lurk on all sides, just waiting to pounce. Verse 15 wraps the psalm up with an expression of trust in God.
Verses 13 b-14 contain the wildest variations. Here is a representative sampling:
Coverdale: Deliver my soul from the ungodly, which is thy sword: From the men of thy hand, O LORD [Hebrew: Yahweh], from the men, I say, and from the evil world, which have their portion in this life, whose bellies thou fillest with thy hid treasure: they have children at their desire, and leave the rest of their substance for their babes. |
The Bible in Basic English: With your sword be my saviour from the evil-doer. With your hand, O Lord, from men, even men of the world, whose heritage is in this life, and whom you make full with your secret wealth: they are full of children; after their death their offspring take the rest of their goods. |
| NIV: Rescue me from the wicked by your sword. O LORD, by your hand save me from such men, from men of this world whose reward is in this life. You still the hunger of those you cherish; their sons have plenty, and they store up wealth for their children. | YLT: Deliver my soul from the wicked, Thy sword, From men, Thy hand, O Jehovah, From men of the world, their portion [is] in life, and [with] Thy hidden things Thou fillest their belly, They are satisfied [with] sons; And have left their abundance to their sucklings. |
| NRSV: By your sword deliver my life from the wicked, from mortals — by your hand, O LORD — from mortals whose portion in life is in this world. May their bellies be filled with what you have stored up for them; may their children have more than enough; may they leave something over to their little ones. | The Inclusive Psalms: Rescue me from the violent with your sword! Let your hand rescue me from such people, from such a world, from people whose only reward is in this present life. You fill the bellies of those you cherish; their children willhave plenty, and will store up wealth for their children. |
A literal translation of the Septuagint goes: “Your scimitar upon the enemies of your hand. / Lord, upon the few [small, deficient] upon the earth / they are dividing [them] up and distributing them [or, they are putting them into a state of dissension] in their life. / And their belly/womb (gastayr) is filled/fulfilled of your secrets [hidden things, things laid up in storage], / they fatten [or, fill with grass] of [their] children / and they send away/dismiss the remainder to their babies [literally, not speaking, infants, minor children].” Just who is doing what to whom?
Most of the translations of these verses appear to include apo oligwn apo gays among the psalmist’s enemies — “men of the world” or “of this age” — and I originally wondered about the juxtaposition of scimitar, secrets, and belly/womb: was the psalmist bloodthirstily recommending the solution Caligula found to his sister’s pregnancy? The operative words, however, appear to me to be oligwn (the few) and your, God’s, kekrummenwn (secrets/things laid up in storage). There would seem to be far more unrighteous people on earth than righteous ones; surely it is the few righteous whose belly God fills with God’s hid treasure/secret wealth (to quote Coverdale/BBE).
I found this translation far more difficult than I did Psalm 34, partly because there were so many words that either did not appear in any dictionary available to me or had to be guessed at (aorist imperative?), and partly because the Septuagint seemed so different from the various English translations. The translation that began this article is my own best guess as to what the Septuagint had in mind.
The psalter is a hymnbook, with each psalm standing alone; Psalm 17 appears to be very general, although a few inferences can be drawn. The psalmist lives in a time and place where lions and their cubs are a present danger, where the scimitar (a heavy sword) is already known, where one has the chance to observe the behavior of nestlings. I like the feminine images of this psalm very much: God guards God’s favored ones as a hen protects her chicks; God has compassion — or, in the Hebrew, womb-love — where one’s enemies do not; and the world is full of the young, whether the lion’s cub or one’s own children. (This latter is why I chose “womb” as a more appropriate translation of gastayr than “belly.”)
Matthew Henry said, “This prayer is a prediction that Christ would be preserved through all the hardships and difficulties of his humiliation, to the glories and joys of his exalted state, and is a pattern to Christians to commit the keeping of their souls to God, trusting him to preserve them to his heavenly kingdom.” A more cynical person might wonder just what Matthew Henry had been smoking.
Psalm 17 seems a very homey psalm, something that might have been sung in a village or hamlet — again, where people just go along doing the best they can and hoping for the best. But, the psalmist implies, it is the world that is the dream, and God that is the reality. We can lie awake at night fondling our own righteousness and fretting over the plottings of our enemies — but it is the contemplation of God that is, in the end, the true satisfaction and nourishment.