1 Jehovah, my God, in Thee I take refuge; Save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me, 2 Lest like a lion he tear my soul, breaking it while there is no deliverer. 3 Jehovah, my God, if I have done this, If there is iniquity in my hands, 4 If I have repaid evil to him who was at peace with me-- Nay, I have delivered him that was my enemy causelessly-- 5 May the enemy chase my soul and overtake it, and trample my life to the ground! And may he lay my honour in the dust! Selah.
6 Arise, Jehovah, in Thine anger; Lift up Thyself against the ragings of my adversaries, And awake for me: judgment Thou hast appointed. 7 And let a gathering of peoples stand round Thee, And above it sit Thou on high. 8 Jehovah will judge the peoples; Do me right, Jehovah, according to my righteousness and according to my innocence [that is] upon me. 9 Let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and establish Thou the righteous, For a Trier of hearts and reins is God the righteous. 10 My shield is upon God, The Saviour of the upright-hearted.
11 God is a righteous Judge, And a God who is angry every day. 12 If [a man] turn not, He will sharpen His sword; His bow He has bent, and made it ready. 13 And at him He has aimed deadly weapons; His arrows He will kindle into flaming darts. 14 See! he is in labour with wickedness; Yea, he is pregnant with mischief, and gives birth to a lie. 15 A pit has he sunk, and dug it out; And he will fall into the hole he is making. 16 His mischief shall come back on his own head, And upon his own skull shall his violence come down.
17 I will thank Jehovah according to His righteousness, And sing with the harp to the name of Jehovah most high.
This is the only psalm with the title "Shiggaion." The word occurs only here and in Hab. iii. 1, where it stands in the plural, and with the preposition "upon," as if it designated instruments. The meaning is unknown, and commentators, who do not like to say so, have much ado to find one. The root is a verb, "to wander," and the explanation is common that the word describes the disconnected character of the psalm, which is full of swiftly succeeding emotions rather than of sequent thoughts. But there is no such exceptional discontinuity as to explain the title. It may refer to the character of the musical accompaniment rather than to that of the words. The authorities are all at sea, the LXX. shirking the difficulty by rendering "psalm," others giving "error" or "ignorance," with allusion to David's repentance after cutting off Saul's skirt or to Saul's repentance of his persecuting David. The later Jewish writers quoted by Neubauer ("Studia Biblic.," ii. 36, _sq._) guess at most various meanings, such as "love and pleasure," "occupation with music," "affliction," "humility," while others, again, explain it as the name of a musical instrument. Clearly the antiquity of the title is proved by this unintelligibility. If we turn to the other part of it, we find further evidence of age and of independence. Who was "Cush, a Benjamite"? He is not mentioned elsewhere. The author of the title, then, had access to some sources for David's life other than the Biblical records; and, as Hupfeld acknowledges, we have here evidence of ancient ascription of authorship which "has more weight than most of the others." Cush has been supposed to be Shimei or Saul himself, and to have been so called because of his swarthy complexion (Cush meaning an African) or as a jest, because of his personal beauty. Cheyne, following Krochmal, would correct into "because of [Mordecai] the son of Kish, a Benjamite," and finds in this entirely conjectural and violent emendation an "attestation that the psalm was very early regarded as a work of the Persian age" ("Orig. of Psalt.," p. 229). But there is really no reason of weight for denying the Davidic authorship, as Ewald, Hitzig, Hupfeld, and Riehm allow; and there is much in 1 Sam. xxiv.-xxvi. correspondent with the situation and emotions of the psalmist here, such as, _e.g._, the protestations of innocence, the calumnies launched at him, and the call on God to judge. The tone of the psalm is high and courageous, in remarkable contrast to the depression of spirit in the former psalm, up out of which the singer had to pray himself. Here, on the contrary, he fronts the enemy, lion-like though he be, without a quiver. It is the courage of innocence and of trust. Psalm vi. wailed like some soft flute; Psalm vii. peals like the trumpet of judgment, and there is triumph in the note. The whole may be divided into three parts, of which the close of the first is marked by the Selah at the end of ver. 5; and the second includes vv. 6-10. Thus we have the appeal of innocence for help (vv. 1-5), the cry for more than help--namely, definite judgment (vv. 6-10)--and the vision of judgment (vv. 11-17).