PSALM 92

Stupid Man and Righteous Man

 

 

Singing praises to Yahweh (vv.1-4)

 

1 It is good to give thanks to Yahweh[1]

And to sing praises to Your name, O Most High;

2 To declare Your lovingkindness in the morning

And Your faithfulness by night,

3 With the ten-stringed lute and with the harp,

With resounding music upon the lyre.

4 For You, O Yahweh, have made me glad by what You have done,

I will sing for joy at the works of Your hands.

 

The wicked do not sing praises to Yahweh & perish (vv.5-11)

 

5 How great are Your works, O Yahweh!

Your thoughts are very deep.

6 A senseless man has no knowledge,

Nor does a stupid man understand this: (Ps.49:10)

 

7 That when the wicked sprouted up like grass

And all who did iniquity flourished,

It was only that they might be destroyed forevermore.[2]

 

 

8 But You, O Yahweh, are on high forever. [3]

 

 

9 For, behold, Your enemies, O Yahweh,

For, behold, Your enemies will perish; (Ps.1:6)

All who do iniquity will be scattered.[4]

 

10 But You have exalted my horn like that of the wild ox;

I have been anointed with fresh oil.

11 And my eye has looked exultantly upon my foes,

My ears hear of the evildoers who rise up against me.

 

The righteous flourish forever in the house of Yahweh (vv.12-15)

 

12 The righteous man will flourish like the palm tree,

He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon.

13 Planted in the house of Yahweh,

They will flourish in the courts of our God.

14 They will still yield fruit in old age;

They shall be full of sap and very green,

15 To declare that Yahweh is upright; He is my rock,

and there is no unrighteousness in Him.

 

 



[1] Yahweh occurs 7x in this Psalm.  In a total of seven Psalms Yahweh occurs seven times (Psalm 7; 84; 92; 99; 102; 109; 140).

 

[2] On August 20, 1608, the great scholar, Casaubon, was going with his wife to the Huguenot worship at Charenton in an open boat on the Seine, singing psalms as they went. They had finished Psalm xci., and had reached verse 7 of Psalm xcii., when a heavy barge struck the stem of his boat and threw his wife into the river. Casaubon saved her, after almost losing his own life in the effort. But, in doing so, he dropped into the river his Book of Psalms, given to him by his wife as a wedding-present, and for twenty-two years the constant companion of his travels. They reached the Temple, and were present at the services. When the chant of the Psalms began, Casaubon put his hand into his pocket for his book, and for the first time discovered his loss. He did not recover himself till the congregation had finished more than half the 86th Psalm. The verse at which he was able to join in the singing was the end of the 13th: " and thou hast delivered my soul from the nethermost hell." "I could not but remember," says Casaubon in his journal, "that place of Ambrose where he says, ‘This is the peculiarity of the Psalter, that every one can use its words as if they were completely and individually his own’" (Prothero, pp.184f.).

 

[3]  “The verse almost always consists of two or three cola, never more.  Sometimes, however, we encounter a verse that consists of only one colon [e.g. Psalm 90:1].  The book of Psalms contains twenty-one of these versets functioning as verses.  There are none at all in Job, and almost none in Proverbs” (J.P. Fokkelman, Reading Biblical Poetry p.38).  Fokkelman notes that almost 12.5 percent of the verses in the Psalms are tricola (e.g. Psalm 1:1).

 

[4] Marvin Tate points out that the tricolon in v.9 matches the tricolon in v 7.

 

 

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