FOR THE DIRECTOR of music. With stringed instruments. According to sheminith. A psalm of David.
1O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
2Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am faint;
O LORD, heal me, for my bones are in agony.
3My soul is in anguish.
How long, O LORD, how long?
4Turn, O LORD, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
5No one remembers you when he is dead.
Who praises you from the grave?
6I am worn out from groaning;
all night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.
7My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.
8Away from me, all you who do evil,
for the LORD has heard my weeping.
9The LORD has heard my cry for mercy;
the LORD accepts my prayer.
10All my enemies will be ashamed and dismayed;
they will turn back in sudden disgrace.
Original Meaning
A STRIKING PLEA for deliverance, Psalm 6 employs a dramatic description of physical pain and anguish and the resulting emotional distress to good effect. It may be, as many suggest, that the psalmist’s cause for distress is severe illness or debilitating disease, though such descriptions are sometimes used as metaphors for other kinds of suffering.
The psalm is divided into three main units. The opening segment (vv. 1–5) is directed to God, entreating his aid. This invocation is punctuated with almost desperate cries (vv. 3, 5). The psalmist turns in the second unit to a narrative description of the physical torment endured as a result of suffering (vv. 6–7). This section concludes with a transitional reflection that the psalmist’s pain is increased because of the opposition of enemies (v. 7). The final segment turns to a confrontation of the psalmist’s foes, coupling a rejection of them with an assurance of God’s willing deliverance (vv. 8–10).
The Heading (6:0)
MOST OF THE terms here are familiar from earlier psalms.1 The only newcomer is the phrase “According to sheminith [šeminit].” The term is most likely musical, reflecting either a type of eight-stringed instrument or a particular instrumental tuning. As in most of the psalm headings, the reference to David comes after the liturgical instruction—perhaps an indication of the order in which the elements were added.
Invocation of God (6:1–5)
THESE FIVE VERSES where the suffering psalmist invokes Yahweh to come to his aid can be divided into three subsections, each exhibiting distinctive, parallel grammatical structures.
Do not rebuke me in your anger. The first subsection (v. 1) is composed of two lines of affirming parallelism employing negative jussives. Jussives are verbal forms that express the will of the speaker without resorting to the absolute demand associated with the imperative. An instructive example is the way Esther approaches the king in Esther 5. She wishes to invite Xerxes to a banquet she has prepared for him and asks him in this manner: “If it pleases the king . . . let the king . . . come today to a banquet I have prepared for him” (5:4). You don’t command a king’s attendance! You request it. The same is even more true of God. The psalmist requests Yahweh’s response. To get this across in a negative expression is awkward: “O LORD, let you not . . .”; thus, the NIV uses what could be taken mistakenly as a negative demand.2
The word translated “rebuke” comes from a verbal root that describes a process of legal argumentation by which one person is declared to be in the right. In a legal dispute, there are always two parties. For one to be declared right means the other must be proven wrong. Thus, the psalmist pleads that Yahweh will not prove himself right at the psalmist’s expense. As Job understood, however, it is ultimately futile to confront God in court, for God can only be shown to be in the right and his accuser in the wrong.
Discipline. The second jussive in the parallel phrase stresses the educational aspects of discipline and training. Here the picture is the training of an animal or a child. Such discipline can proceed from calm resolution and determination, but it can sometimes (when the subject being trained is balky and rebellious) derive from a core of hot anger. The psalmist again pleads that God will not allow the psalmist’s rebellious actions to lead to angry discipline and rebuke.
Anger . . . wrath. The psalmist fears that the suffering he is experiencing results from divine anger or wrath. Thus, he pleads for Yahweh not to establish his case, for in doing so the psalmist will be shown in the wrong. Whether this indicates an awareness of guilt of some sort on the part of the psalmist is not clear, but Yahweh is viewed at once as both threat and hope. If the psalmist’s malady is physical sickness, the ancient world often saw a direct connection between guilt and illness. Sickness was viewed as divine punishment for sin. For this reason the Pharisees asked Jesus about the man who was blind from birth: “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” (John 9:1–2). The two parallel Hebrew words for “anger” and “wrath” (ʾap and ḥemah) suggest an anger that is hot and poisonous in its intensity.
Be merciful to me. The second subsection of the first unit (vv. 2–3) is set off by a shift to true imperative forms followed by participial clauses introduced by the particle ki (“for”) describing the state of the psalmist. The emphasis changes as well from the negative request that Yahweh refrain from discipline to more positive entreaties for divine action in mercy and healing. The opening phrase of the unit—“Be merciful to me, LORD”—uses the imperative of the verb ḥnn (“be gracious, show favor”). While the NIV is not wrong, it does obscure the psalmist’s desire that God show gracious generosity and favor rather than what we normally think of as mercy.
For I am faint. In this positive plea, the psalmist’s suffering functions more as a motivation for Yahweh’s gracious action than as a description of divine punishment. Perhaps the problem confronting the psalmist is not the fact that Yahweh is punishing the psalmist’s sin (though that remains a possibility) but that he has not acted generously to heal the psalmist and remove the suffering. The participle ʾumlal can be used to describe the “withering up” of vegetation (Isa. 16:8). The psalmist “shrinks up” both physically and spiritually (as those with severely debilitating disease so often do at the end).
Heal me. While is it not absolutely clear whether the sickness described is real or metaphorical, the psalmist continues to use the language of sickness and healing. In balance with the first phrase of this subsection, he uses a positive imperative followed by two matched participial phrases, both introduced by the initial particle ki. Withering away and on the brink of destruction, healing and restoration to health are the goal of the psalmist’s desperate plea.
For my bones are in agony. The NIV of the underlying word, while capturing the anguish experienced by the psalmist, does not bring out sharply enough the sense of terror associated with the expression. Elsewhere the word translated “are in agony” (bhl) is rendered “terrified out of one’s senses”; here it describes not just the agonizing pain of illness and disease but the suffocating fear that can attend deteriorating life force and loss of control. At the very core, in the “bones,” fear has taken root that threatens to undo the psalmist.
My soul is in anguish. If the situation seems hopeless, it could always be worse! In the balancing participial phrase, the psalmist adds even more emphasis to the engulfing terror. Not only are the bones, the core of the physical self, terrified out of their senses; the very core of his being, the nepeš—that source of selfhood created by the divine animation of the physical body—is even more terrified (lit., “terrified out of its senses indeed!”). As the body fails, the psalmist senses even the animating life force provided by God slipping away.
How long! The first two subsections of the long invocation of Yahweh conclude in verse 3b with an anguished cry that both sums up the desperation of the psalmist and provides transition to the pleas of the final subsection. Having described graphically the terror and disintegration brought on by extended suffering, the psalmist realizes the only hope for healing is the gracious action of Yahweh to save. And yet, Yahweh does not act! The psalmist’s question slips out, unguarded, almost an accusation: “But you, O LORD, how long?” (lit.). You can almost hear exclamation points after every word. God is able to save—he is the psalmist’s only hope—and yet he continues to delay his response to the psalmist’s cries.
Turn, O LORD, and deliver me. The third subsection (vv. 4–5) of the opening unit contains a series of three imperatives demanding divine action, followed by a justifying clause. The word “turn” (šwb) is regularly used to describe a change of action or direction. The prophets frequently use the term as a call to repentance.3 In the wisdom literature, the idiom “turn [šwb] from evil” describes the characteristic stance of the righteous. Humans clearly need to repent and change direction, but the term is also used of God. Israel experienced that the mercy of Yahweh could lead him to respond to human repentance with a revocation of decreed judgment. Thus, Yahweh could himself “repent” and “change,”4 and our psalmist entreats him to “turn” from his long inactivity and act graciously to save.
Deliver me . . . save me. The psalmist uses two further imperatives to entreat Yahweh’s deliverance. The first of these has the sense of “withdraw” or “tear out” and is used in at least one context (Lev. 14:40–43) to describe the extraction of contaminated stones from a wall. Similarly, the psalmist desires to be “snatched out” of the engulfing circumstances. The second term is the more common word for “save, deliver, rescue; give aid.”
Because of your unfailing love. The psalmist grounds his entreaty for divine action in the merciful nature of Yahweh and his “unfailing love [ḥesed].” His need is displayed for all to see but has yet to motivate divine response. His words shift the attack from hope for divine compassion to the essential character of Yahweh, upon which any compassion must be based. Because Yahweh is in his essence one who exercises committed and enduring faithfulness (ḥesed), he must act in the psalmist’s behalf.
No one remembers you. The psalmist brings the final subsection of the opening unit to a close with a dramatic strategy to motivate God’s action. The introductory particle ki (“for, because”) governs two prepositional phrases that expand artfully on the same theme: If Yahweh continues to “forget” the faithful in this life, there will be no one left above ground to praise him! Certainly the psalmist is feeling forgotten by Yahweh and feels threatened by the approach of death and the oblivion that the Hebrew concept of Sheol, the abode of the dead, assumed. The Hebrew understanding of death and its aftermath held out little or no hope of resurrection into new life (that hope was a later development during the intertestamental period). The dead, regardless whether they were judged righteous or wicked, were thought to descend to Sheol, where they took up a grey, dusty, shadowy existence that admitted no possibility of relationship with God, no experience of blessing or punishment, and no hope of new life.
Unlike the Christian view of heavenly existence after death, there is no chorus of the faithful eternally singing the praises of God around his heavenly throne. Sheol is, by contrast, mute and silent. So the psalmist plays a trump card: If God wishes to hear the praises of the faithful, he must keep them alive now, with their voices primed with thankfulness for his deliverance!
The Torment of Suffering (6:6–7)
THE MIDDLE UNIT of Psalm 6 focuses on the suffering that torments the psalmist, using a constellation of less common vocabulary words. The extended suffering occasioned by Yahweh’s delay of action has reduced the psalmist to nocturnal episodes of uncontrollable weeping and anguish.
I am worn out. The verb ygʾ describes weariness resulting from hard labor and exertion. The psalmist’s anguish and groaning are hard work and result in exhaustion. Weeping and tears dominate the night hours. The psalmist “swims all night long on my bed.” Tears “drip down” (or “melt” like wax, another meaning of the Heb. word śḥh), soaking the bed. Such bouts of restless, uncontrollable weeping are often the end result of physical exhaustion and prolonged stress.
My eyes grow weak . . . they fail. Two verbs in parallel phrases describe the deterioration of the psalmist’s eyes. The reasons provided for this failure do not include the extended weeping, however, but move the psalm in a different direction, providing transition from the description of the psalmist’s pain to confrontation of his opponents. His eyes grow weak from “anger” (NIV “sorrow”), not weeping, and fail “because of all my foes.” The shift of focus at least opens the possibility that the description of suffering from disease in Psalm 6 is used metaphorically for suffering experienced through the attacks of opponents.
Confrontation of Foes (6:8–10)
IN THE FINAL unit of Psalm 6, confrontation and rejection of the psalmist’s enemies (vv. 8a, 10) bracket a strong affirmation of confidence in deliverance by Yahweh (vv. 8b–9). Just who these opponents might be is not clear. The psalmist describes them as those “who do evil” (poʿale ʾawen, terms reminiscent of Psalm 5:5, where Yahweh will not allow the arrogant to stand in his presence and hates all those “who do wrong [poʿale ʾawen]”).
Away from me. The psalmist rejects any association with the opponents in the strongest terms. He seems not so much to be putting off attack as withdrawing from any hint of guilt that might be derived from association with those hated by God. The classic wisdom definition of righteousness is to “turn away from evil.” Here the psalmist takes the righteous stance by demanding his enemies to “[turn] away from me.”
The LORD hears. In the midst of confronting the enemies and sending them away, the psalmist offers up as a reason for his strong rejection and equally strong confidence that, despite the signs of long delay, Yahweh does hear the psalmist’s plea and will deliver him. In a threefold affirming parallelism the psalmist expresses assurance that (lit. trans.):
He hears, Yahweh, the sound of my weeping;
He hears, Yahweh, my lament;
Yahweh my prayer will receive.
Might this suggest that the primary offense of the enemies was their caustic assertion of the psalmist’s guilt and that, therefore, Yahweh would not deliver?
All my enemies will be ashamed. The psalmist returns to the enemies with confidence that they will be shamed by being proven wrong. Yahweh will deliver the psalmist, and the opponents will receive a public comeuppance. The psalmist employs a series of wordplays in verse 10 to emphasize the point. As in verses 2c–3a he was terrified to the core by continued restraint of Yahweh in the face of the opponents’ claims and the psalmist’s worsening condition, so now the enemies will similarly be “greatly terrified” by Yahweh’s action in the psalmist’s behalf. As he pleaded with Yahweh to “turn [šwb] . . . and deliver me” (v. 4), now the enemies “will turn back” (šwb) and “will be ashamed.” Finally, although the psalmist (v. 3b) cried out in desperation “How long?” over the delay of God, now the enemies will experience divine judgment and shame “in sudden disgrace.”
Bridging Contexts
A STUDENT OF mine who was journaling his way through the early psalms of the Psalter in response to a class assignment wrote in his journal: “What is it with these psalmists anyway? They’re such a bunch of whiners!” It’s true, isn’t it? If all we had was the first book of the psalms (1–41), or even the first three books (1–89), our overwhelming impression would be one of lament—what my student called whining! The cumulative effect of reading through these psalms dominated by the lament can be a growing discomfort. The psalmists seem always to be hurting. Their view of the world is so dark and pessimistic. They are so demanding—seeking deliverance and redress from God. Where is the joy of the believer’s life?
Rather than seeing these psalms as a mirror of our own experience or allowing them to challenge our own naive worldview, we can end up avoiding them as we might avoid a negative friend who is always depressed and threatens to drag us down every time we are together. But before we excise the psalms from our private and personal canon of Scripture or find ourselves hopping, skipping, and jumping through the Psalter in search of the more “positive parts,”5 we must remember that the psalms, with all their whining, are no longer just the collected comments of a bunch of negative people. They have become in a strange way God’s words to his people. No matter how uncomfortable they make us feel, they are still Scripture and must be included in what it means to study the “whole counsel of God.”
In what follows, I will look at three aspects of Psalm 6 that can challenge us: a sense of rightness run amok, bargaining with God, and the rejection of evildoers.
Rightness run amok. Yes, the psalmists seem to complain a lot. This may in part be because the world in which they lived was filled with danger and threat, pain and suffering, attack and oppression. We know that because of war, plague, famine, and high infant mortality, the average life expectancy during good times in the ancient Near East was about forty years. That may be why forty years appears regularly in the Old Testament as the round number for a generation. So, for every person who reached the biblical ideal of seventy to eighty years (Ps. 90:10), many more failed to survive infancy.
And that was just the good times. In really bad periods of famine, drought, and rampant plague, average life expectancy could drop as low as eighteen years of age! Life was difficult for the psalmists and their world—far more difficult than anything we are likely to encounter in our technologically advanced modern world. Perhaps they had good reason to whine and lament.
But that is not the whole picture. The psalmists did not lament just the personal, individual, or societal suffering they saw and experienced. They also complained because it just did not seem right! The rightness that should have been an integral part of a world created by Yahweh seemed to have run amok in suffering, pain, injustice, oppression, and death. Life was not just difficult, it was not only painful, it was also very, very wrong.
With this sense of wrongness and injustice in the world, the psalmists did not respond as many do today. This pain was not something to be simply dismissed as part of the necessary fabric of a godless world of chance and accident. The psalmists’ sense of rightness demanded that God act to reestablish his intended order. Thus, the psalmists felt free to ask, “God, what are you doing? Where are you?” By these tough questions hurled at God, the psalmists were aligning themselves with the tough-minded worldview that the world as we have it is not the world as it should be or as God intended. The world is broken and needs divine help to restore it.
Nor does the psalmist in Psalm 6 see the wrongness encountered in the world as something that ought to be glossed over. The psalmists call suffering “suffering” and oppression “oppression.” They never try to explain it away or find ways to interpret it positively. They appeal to God to remove it and to restore his intended order in all life. They are not so unrealistic as to think such restoration will magically happen as they desire, but they are consistently clear in their affirmations that it ought to be so.
Bargaining with God. Another significant feature of Psalm 6 is the psalmist’s rather transparent attempt in verses 4–5 to “bargain” with God. He builds the motivation for Yahweh’s delivering action on the assumption that the psalmist has more to offer God alive than dead. This is a recurring, if not frequent, theme in the lament psalms. The psalmist here urges God to act because he is approaching death when it will no longer be possible either to praise God or to testify concerning his goodness to others.
This may seem like rather ineffective and self-centered pleading—and in a sense it is. It finds its more positive counterpart in the promise to praise God before the great congregation repeated in some lament psalms. While they may seem to border on manipulation, the psalmist’s words do reveal a certain understanding of God and of the role of humans in relation to him. On the one hand, the psalmists acknowledge God as free to act in any way consistent with his essential holy nature.6 He is free to deliver, so the psalmist is emboldened to hope for a change of circumstance. But God is equally free not to save.
On the other hand, the psalmist assumes that the proper role of humans—the role threatened by death—is to “remember” (zkr) God and to praise him. These two activities are important parts of congregational worship. If the psalms are any indication, Israel was constantly remembering her life before Yahweh and calling those memories to praise. It may be, as Kraus suggests,7 that the psalmist here is mourning the loss of human meaning and purpose through remembrance and praise rather than attempting to “threaten” Yahweh by the potential loss of it.
Rejecting the evildoers. The psalmist’s rejection of the evildoers in Psalm 6 seems less a response to endemic evil in the world than a reaction to those who seek to undermine his confidence in God’s goodwill for the psalmist and all humans. The prolonged delay of divine response has left him vulnerable to this kind of attack.
In verses 1–3, the psalmist pleads for divine mercy rather than angry discipline and wonders at the end why God takes so long to answer. In the following verses (vv. 4–5), the poet comes face-to-face with imminent death and mourns the loss of life as well as the ability to praise the goodness of God. He is reduced to weeping in the next set of verses (vv. 6–7) and relates the cause of overwhelming sorrow to the attacks of the enemies. The psalmist then seeks to send away the evildoers who seek to undermine confidence:
for the LORD has heard my weeping.
9The LORD has heard my cry for mercy;
the LORD accepts my prayer.
As a result of Yahweh’s faithfulness, the enemies will not be defeated or destroyed; instead, they will be ashamed and dismayed and made to withdraw in sudden disgrace. Rather than violent opponents, these people seem to me more like the friends of Job, who in their “comforting” actually undermined Job’s confidence both in his own righteousness (already affirmed for the reader in God’s conversation with the adversary) and in the beneficent goodwill and justice of God. The psalmist’s rejection of the evildoers is not so much a rejection of them as it is a refusal to accept their negative message. Their resultant shame and dismay affirm Yahweh’s power and will to save in the face of prolonged suffering and divine silence.
Contemporary Significance
INTERPRETING PAIN AND SUFFERING. Often we try to interpret away the troublesome evidence of a world run amok by giving pain and suffering new and more palatable names, such as “divine discipline” or “test of faith” or “opportunity for growth.” This they can be and certainly have been for many generations of the faithful. But the danger of such an approach is that it can dull our awareness of the “wrongness” of pain, suffering, and oppression. When they become just one more means God uses to accomplish his purposes, we fail to realize just how contrary to God’s will and intention for his world and his people these evidences of evil really are.
We must realize with the psalmists that the experiences of personal pain—whether physical, emotional, or spiritual; the sense of the distance, even the absence of God in our lives; the alienation we feel from ourselves or from others; the resultant sense that we live in a hostile world—are all evidences that we live in a disordered world that is at present far less than the world God created. It is a world that in many ways defies the good intention of the creator.
To say with Joseph, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Gen. 50:20) is far different from saying that God creates evil in order to accomplish good ends. To say with Paul that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28) is to affirm that evil, whether natural or human, physical or emotional, does not have the upper hand, but that God can reshape any evil we experience in order to bring forth good—in order to allow our broken lives and our disordered world to move back toward the fullness of his purpose.
Like the psalmist, let us mourn suffering, pain, oppression, and evil in all their forms rather than rejoice in them as divine punishment when they fall on one we think deserves it. Nor should we seek to explain such things away as discipline and guidance when we experience them ourselves. We can and should allow distress and oppression to provide opportunities to shape our dependence on God to create a fierce loyalty to him, but they remain evil just the same and do not become good by the fact that God can turn them to our good.
If, as the psalmist suggests, the chief role of humans is to remember and praise God, how is it possible to do that in the midst of personal pain and suffering? It is especially difficult when all the voices around us undermine our confidence—either with words that are too negative or with those that are too positive.
On the one hand, I am injured almost beyond repair by those who claim, “There is no way out. This pain is deserved. God does not care. God does not exist!” I have to admit that I have been too long ingrained in the faith from earliest childhood to be shaken, even in times of great trouble, by those who question whether God exists. God has existed for me from earliest memory. But I can, like so many in my culture, believe that God could not possibly care for one like me, and this fear can lead quickly to despair of any deliverance.
On the other hand, my confidence in God can be shaken by those who too easily seek to put some positive cast on my experience of pain. “God is in control. God is using these circumstances to punish or discipline you. Praise God for what is happening, for you will understand the purpose for it later.” Far from helping me, such responses, while often well intended, can leave me with a sense of isolation. I am left with a feeling that my pain is not understood and is belittled. I cannot escape the gnawing feeling that this suffering, no matter how deserved, is nevertheless evil and ought not to be.
I meet regularly with a group of men who have experienced significant pain and trouble in their lives. The best solace we offer to one another is not to explain away the pain but to acknowledge its reality. We can hold up to one another our own experiences of divine grace within the continuing reality of suffering that marks our daily lives. The pain has not gone away, but God and his grace have become even more real to each of us as we acknowledge that God’s will for us is not suffering and death but abundant life, lived in the light shining out of the darkness.