Psalm 20

The King James text is public domain and is printed here one numbered verse per line. The three-word Hebrew heading sits outside this numbering and is discussed further down.

1 The LORD hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend thee;

2 Send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen thee out of Zion;

3 Remember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt sacrifice; Selah.

4 Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfil all thy counsel.

5 We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners: the LORD fulfil all thy petitions.

6 Now know I that the LORD saveth his anointed; he will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand.

7 Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.

8 They are brought down and fallen: but we are risen, and stand upright.

9 Save, LORD: let the king hear us when we call.

Count the pronouns. In verses 1 to 5 somebody is saying thee and thy to one man, and in verse 5 the speakers call themselves we. Verse 6 has the anointed, which in this psalm means the king. So the bulk of Psalm 20 is a congregation praying for its ruler, out loud, in his hearing.

Hermann Gunkel classified ten psalms as royal psalms by their subject, kingship, and Psalm 20 is one of them, alongside Psalms 2, 18, 21, 45, 72, 101, 110, 132 and 144. The shared feature is a king at the centre of worship. The Wikipedia article on Psalm 20 describes it and Psalm 21 as a matched pair, an intercession followed by a thanksgiving, with the king prominent in both.

The Cambridge Bible and Keil and Delitzsch both reconstruct the setting as a sacrifice before a campaign. Verse 3 asks God to remember the king's offerings and accept his burnt sacrifice. The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges points to sacrifice before war in 1 Samuel 7 and 13. The Pulpit Commentary, following Hengstenberg, guesses that the Selah after verse 3 marks a pause while the offering was made. It calls that a reasonable conjecture, and nobody can prove it.

Then the voice changes. Verse 6 opens with Now know I, singular. The Pulpit Commentary thinks the high priest or the king himself speaks it. Keil and Delitzsch hear one of the Levites announcing that the offering has been accepted. The text leaves the speaker unnamed and records the shift from many voices to one, and back to many in verse 7.

The Hebrew heading, lamnatseach mizmor le-David in transliteration, is three words: one for the choir leader, the word for a sung psalm, and David's name with a prefix that can mean of, for, or belonging to. It is part of the Hebrew text, and Hebrew Bibles such as the one on Sefaria count it as verse 1. That is why English verse 7 is verse 8 in a Hebrew Bible.

The heading does not settle who wrote the words. The psalm talks about the king in the third person and speaks to him in the second, so even on the traditional reading David is the subject of the prayer more than its speaker. The Pulpit Commentary and Keil and Delitzsch both place it in David's wars with the Syrians, who fought with chariots. Keil and Delitzsch add an argument from horses: the law limited a king's horses, and only under Solomon did Israel build up chariots.

Charles and Emilie Briggs, in the International Critical Commentary, put it more than a century later, in the reign of Jehoshaphat. That dating is reported in the Wikipedia article on the psalm. Ellicott reads the mention of chariots and horses as pointing to a Syrian war without naming a king. The evidence fits more than one reign, and nobody has a document that decides it.

There is one outside witness. Papyrus Amherst 63, an Aramaic text written in Egyptian demotic script and deciphered only in the 1980s, contains a polytheistic prayer that runs parallel to Psalm 20. The excerpt printed in the Wikipedia article on the papyrus opens with May Horus answer us in our troubles. The papyrus itself dates from the fourth or third century BC, depending on which Wikipedia article you read, but the Amherst article dates the texts it carries to the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Karel van der Toorn argues the collection was compiled for a temple at Palmyra, and Tawny Holm disputes that.

Verse 7 is the line people quote. In the King James it reads Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. The American Standard Version prints the first verb in brackets, Some [trust] in chariots, because the Hebrew has no verb there at all. Ellicott renders the first half literally as these in chariots and these on horses.

The verb in the second half is nazkir, from zakar, the ordinary word for remember. In this form it means to bring something to mind out loud, to mention it. Keil and Delitzsch gloss it as to make laudatory mention of a thing, and indirectly to boast of it. The King James says remember, the American Standard says make mention of, and the World English Bible says we trust the name of Yahweh our God.

Read that way, the contrast is about what each side calls out as it goes in. The other army names its hardware. Israel names its God. 1 Samuel 17:45 has David doing the same thing to Goliath, sword and spear on one side and the name of the LORD of hosts on the other.

The verse does not say horses are wicked or that preparation is faithless. Proverbs 21:31 holds both halves together: The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD. Deuteronomy 17:16 told Israel's king not to multiply horses, and 1 Kings 10:26 records Solomon gathering fourteen hundred chariots anyway. Isaiah 31:1 later pronounces woe on those who go down to Egypt and trust in chariots. Psalm 20 sits inside that argument.

Verse 4 gets lifted onto cards: Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfil all thy counsel. The World English Bible makes the grammar plain: May He grant you your heart's desire. Keil and Delitzsch point out that the verbs in this opening run are optatives, wishes, five of them stacked one after another. The King James form, The LORD hear thee, is the same wish in older English, and it is easy to misread as a statement.

So verse 4 is the crowd wishing something for a man who has just offered sacrifice and is about to risk his life. It is a blessing spoken over one man before one battle, and the verse claims no more than that. Nothing in it tells a later reader that God will hand over whatever the reader wants.

The wish is answered in the next psalm, for that king. Psalm 21:2 reports, Thou hast given him his heart's desire, and hast not withholden the request of his lips. That is a report of one answered prayer, and it is the closest the two psalms come to a promise.

Matthew Henry and Gill also read the anointed king as pointing to Christ. Matthew Henry's concise commentary opens its note on the psalm by calling it a prayer for the kings of Israel, but with relation to Christ. That reading comes from the church, and the psalm itself names only the LORD's anointed, a king of Israel facing a battle.

Verse 8 says They are brought down and fallen: but we are risen, and stand upright. The battle has not happened yet. Keil and Delitzsch call these past tenses perfects of confidence, and quote Luther's description of the psalm as a song of triumph before the victory.

Verse 6 works the same way. The Cambridge Bible notes that saveth is literally hath saved, meaning will surely save, because to faith the victory is already won. Hebrew poetry can put a thing it is sure of into the past tense before it happens.

What the psalm does not do is report a result. There is no account of the battle or of how it went. Anyone using Psalm 20 as proof that praying the right words wins the fight is reading a sequel the text never wrote. The last thing it says is a request, which is an odd way to end if the outcome were settled.

The last verse in the King James reads Save, LORD: let the king hear us when we call. The American Standard and World English versions keep that division and capitalize King, so the King who answers is God. Barnes reads it the same way: a king going to war asks the greater King to hear. That division follows the accents printed in the Masoretic Hebrew.

The Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate divide the same Hebrew words differently, making it O Lord, save the king, and hear us when we call. Ellicott says all modern commentators of his day followed that reading. The Cambridge Bible and Keil and Delitzsch both prefer it, partly because, as both note, God is nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible called simply the King. The JPS Tanakh Gender-Sensitive Edition on Sefaria divides it this way too and footnotes the other reading.

Not everyone agrees. Gill keeps the Masoretic accent and says the King is the Messiah. The Pulpit Commentary names scholars on both sides and calls them nearly equally balanced before leaning slightly toward the Hebrew division. The question decides whether the king in the last line is praying or being prayed for.

The Latin words are Domine salvum fac regem. The Cambridge Bible calls them the origin of the familiar God save the king, and Ellicott says the national anthem came from here. Marc-Antoine Charpentier set the Latin psalm more than once, and two of his settings are titled as prayers for the king.

Verse 1 in the King James asks the name of the God of Jacob to defend thee. The American Standard and World English Bible both say set thee, or you, up on high. The Hebrew verb is sagab, which Brown, Driver and Briggs define as to be inaccessibly high, and in this form to set securely on high. Ellicott compares a fortress out of the reach of foes. The Pulpit Commentary would translate exalt thee.

The verb the King James renders hear in verses 1, 6 and 9 is the Hebrew for answer, and the Cambridge Bible notes that the Revised Version changed all three to answer. Ellicott and the Cambridge Bible both connect verse 1 to Genesis 35:3, where Jacob resolves to build an altar to the God who answered him in the day of his distress. Keil and Delitzsch report the same link from the rabbi Alshekh and call it not improbable. It would explain why the psalm calls him the God of Jacob.

Verse 3 says accept thy burnt sacrifice. The Hebrew verb is dashen, to be fat, and Brown, Driver and Briggs explain this use as to find a burnt offering fat, which means acceptable. The Cambridge Bible prefers regard as fat and calls the other possible rendering, turn to ashes, less probable.

In Jewish prayer this psalm is called Lamenatzeiach, after its first Hebrew word. Most communities say it daily near the end of the morning service, between Ashrei and Uva Letziyon, and leave it out on festive days, with the list of exceptions differing between Ashkenazi and Sephardic custom. The Hebrew last verse also turns up on its own in several other prayers, including Havdalah at the end of the Sabbath.

The Wikipedia article on the psalm reports two explanations for its seventy Hebrew words: the seventy years of exile, or, following the Zohar, the seventy cries of a woman in labor. It also reports the custom of saying the psalm in times of stress, labor among them.

Churches use it too. The Coptic Agpeya prays it at Terce, and the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer sets it for the morning of the fourth day of the month. Bibles that follow the Greek and Latin numbering call it Psalm 19, and its Latin opening words, Exaudiat te Dominus, became the title of several musical settings.

Because almost every line is addressed to thee, Psalm 20 suits a particular situation: somebody you love is about to walk into something and you cannot go with them. A surgery where you wait in the family lounge. A deployment. A court date. A child's first night shift on a hospital ward. A woman in labor, which is where the Jewish custom already uses it.

Read it aloud with their name in place of thee and the structure holds. You ask that they be answered and set out of harm's reach. You say where your own confidence sits. You ask to be heard when you call. None of that tells you how the day will go, and the psalm does not pretend to.

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