1 Give ear to my words, Jehovah; Consider my meditation. 2 Listen to the voice of my crying, my King and my God, For to Thee do I make supplication. 3 Jehovah, in the morning Thou shalt hear my voice; In the morning will I order my [prayer] to Thee and keep watch.
4 For not a God delighting in wickedness art Thou; Evil cannot sojourn with Thee. 5 Fools cannot stand before Thine eyes; Thou hatest all workers of iniquity. 6 Thou destroyest the speakers of falsehood; The man of blood and deceit Jehovah loathes. 7 But I, in the multitude of Thy loving-kindness I dare come into Thy house; I dare fall prostrate before Thy holy temple in Thy fear.
8 Jehovah, lead me in Thy righteousness, because of them that are spies on me; Make Thy way level before me. 9 For in his mouth is nothing trustworthy; Their inward part is destruction; An open grave is their throat; Their tongue they smooth.
10 Hold them guilty, Jehovah: let them fall by their own schemes; In the multitude of their transgressions strike them down, for they have rebelled against Thee. 11 Then shall all those who take refuge in Thee be glad; For ever shall they shout for joy, since Thou dost shelter them; And they that love Thy name shall exult in Thee. 12 For Thou dost bless the righteous; Jehovah, as with a shield, with favour dost Thou compass him about.
The reference to the temple in ver. 7 is not conclusive against the Davidic authorship of this psalm, since the same word is applied in 1 Sam. i. 9 and iii. 3 to the house of God in Shiloh. It means a palace, and may well be used for any structure, even if a hair tent, in which God dwelt. No doubt it is oftenest used for the Solomonic temple, but it does not necessarily refer to it. Its use here, then, cannot be urged as fatal to the correctness of the superscription. At the same time, it does create a certain presumption against it. But there is nothing in the psalm to determine its date, and its worth is quite independent of its authorship. The psalmist is surrounded by foes, and seeks access to God. These are constant features of the religious life, and their expression here fits as closely to the present time as to any past.
The psalm falls into two main parts: vv. 1-7 and 8-12. The former division deals with the inner side of the devout life, its access to God, to whom sinful men cannot approach, the latter with the outward side, the conduct, "the way" in which the psalmist seeks to be led, and in which sinful men come to ruin because they will not walk. Naturally the inward comes first, for communion with God in the secret place of the Most High must precede all walking in His way and all blessed experience of His protection, with the joy that springs from it. These two halves of the psalm are arranged in inverted parallelism, the first verse of the second part (ver. 8) corresponding to the last verse of the first (ver. 7) and being, like it, purely personal; vv. 9 and 10 corresponding similarly to vv. 4-6 and, like them, painting the character and fate of evil-doers; and, finally, vv. 11, 12, answering to vv. 1-3 and representing the blessedness of the devout soul, as in the one case led and protected by God and therefore glad, and in the other abiding in His presence. The whole is a prayerful meditation on the inexhaustible theme of the contrasted blessedness of the righteous and misery of the sinner as shown in the two great halves of life: the inward of communion and the outward of action.
In the first part (vv. 1-7) the central thought is that of access to God's presence, as the desire and purpose of the psalmist (1-3), as barred to evil-doers (4-6), and as permitted to, and embraced as his chief blessing by, the singer (7). The petition to be heard in vv. 1 and 2 passes into confidence that he is heard in ver. 3. There is no shade of sadness nor trace of struggle with doubt in this prayer, which is all sunny and fresh, like the morning sky, through which it ascends to God. "Consider [or Understand] my meditation"--the brooding, silent thought is spread before God, who knows unspoken desires, and "understands thoughts afar off." The contrast between "understanding the meditation" and "hearkening to the voice of my cry" is scarcely unintentional, and gives vividness to the picture of the musing psalmist, in whom, as he muses, the fire burns, and he speaks with his tongue, in a "cry" as loud as the silence from which it issued had been deep. Meditations that do not pass into cries and cries which are not preceded by meditations are alike imperfect. The invocation "my King" is full of meaning if the singer be David, who thus recognises the delegated character of his own royalty; but whoever wrote the psalm, that expression equally witnesses to his firm grasp of the true theocratic idea.