Psalm 21

This is the complete text of Psalm 21 in the King James Version, which carries no copyright in the United States. The verse numbers are the ones English Bibles use. The heading "To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David" stands above verse 1 in printed King James Bibles and is discussed in the next section.

1 The king shall joy in thy strength, O LORD; and in thy salvation how greatly shall he rejoice! 2 Thou hast given him his heart's desire, and hast not withholden the request of his lips. Selah. 3 For thou preventest him with the blessings of goodness: thou settest a crown of pure gold on his head. 4 He asked life of thee, and thou gavest it him, even length of days for ever and ever.

5 His glory is great in thy salvation: honour and majesty hast thou laid upon him. 6 For thou hast made him most blessed for ever: thou hast made him exceeding glad with thy countenance. 7 For the king trusteth in the LORD, and through the mercy of the most High he shall not be moved.

8 Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies: thy right hand shall find out those that hate thee. 9 Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them. 10 Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men.

11 For they intended evil against thee: they imagined a mischievous device, which they are not able to perform. 12 Therefore shalt thou make them turn their back, when thou shalt make ready thine arrows upon thy strings against the face of them. 13 Be thou exalted, LORD, in thine own strength: so will we sing and praise thy power.

The Hebrew text opens with three words, rendered in the King James Version as "To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David." In Jewish Bibles that line is counted as verse 1, so the Hebrew psalm runs to fourteen verses and every English verse number sits one lower. If a Hebrew edition or a rabbinic commentary cites Psalm 21:8, it means the English 21:7.

The phrase "of David" stands over 73 psalms. It tells you the psalm was associated with David by the time the heading was written, and it leaves open who composed the poem and when. Modern scholars do not accept Davidic authorship as a historical fact, and the dating of individual psalms is famously hard. Readers who hold to Davidic authorship point to the heading itself as part of the received Hebrew text.

The body of the psalm never names its king. Nothing in it mentions a city, a battle, or an enemy by name. The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges notices one possible link, a gold crown taken from the king of the Ammonites and set on David's head in 2 Samuel 12:30, and says only that there "may possibly be an allusion" to it.

Even the speaker is disputed. Albert Barnes heard David speaking about himself in the third person. The Cambridge commentary assigns verses 1 to 7 to the congregation or the Levites singing on the king's behalf, verses 8 to 12 perhaps to a priest, and verse 13 to everyone. The text allows each of these readings, and nobody can settle it from the words alone.

Hermann Gunkel listed Psalm 21 among the ten royal psalms, a group defined by one subject, the king. Within that group it reads as a thanksgiving. The Cambridge commentary puts it directly: "Thanksgiving for victory is the leading motive of this Psalm."

The best key to it is the psalm before. Psalm 20 is a blessing spoken over a king before a battle, and in verse 4 the people pray, "Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfil all thy counsel." Psalm 21:2 answers that line closely: "Thou hast given him his heart's desire, and hast not withholden the request of his lips." Psalm 20 ends asking God to save the king. Psalm 21 begins with the king rejoicing in that saving strength.

Commentators disagree about the occasion. Cyril Rodd, writing in the Oxford Bible Commentary, lists four possibilities: before a battle, after a victory, at a coronation, or at a yearly celebration of the king's accession. The Cambridge commentary sets aside the coronation and royal birthday readings and keeps to victory. The crown in verse 3 and the long life in verse 4 are the details that pull readers toward a coronation.

Knowing the form changes how you read it. A royal thanksgiving is public and political. It thanks God for something done for the head of a nation and expects the nation's enemies to fall with it. A private lament written by one person in trouble works differently, and Psalm 21 should be read as the public song it is before anyone applies it to their own week.

Verse 2 is the line people put on cards. In context it reports what already happened to one king, and it uses the past tense. The request it mentions is the one in Psalm 20, a petition for success in a war. Reading it as a general promise that God will hand any reader whatever they want goes beyond what the sentence says.

Verse 3 has the strangest word in the King James wording. The phrase "thou preventest him" means you go before him, in the old English sense of prevent. The Hebrew verb qadam means to meet, go before, or anticipate, and the World English Bible renders the line "For you meet him with the blessings of goodness." God arrives with the blessing before the king gets there.

Verse 4 raises a problem the Cambridge commentary states plainly: "how can length of days for ever and ever be said of a mortal king?" Its answer has two parts. Courtiers greeted kings that way, as when Bathsheba says in 1 Kings 1:31, "Let my lord king David live for ever." And the king was thought to live on in his dynasty, the promise given to David in 2 Samuel 7. Psalm 61:6 asks the same thing for a king, "his years as many generations."

Other readers take verse 4 more literally. Augustine glossed "He asked life" as Christ asking for the resurrection. Charles Spurgeon read the whole first half as the risen Jesus rejoicing. The Cambridge commentary holds both at once: a courtly wish for one Israelite king that also points ahead to Christ.

If one verse of Psalm 21 gets quoted on its own, it is verse 7: "For the king trusteth in the LORD, and through the mercy of the most High he shall not be moved." The verse gives two reasons for the king's stability. One is on his side, trust. The other is on God's side, the Hebrew word chesed, which the King James renders mercy and the World English Bible renders loving kindness. The Cambridge commentary calls this verse the transition to the second half.

Then the person being addressed changes. Verses 1 to 6 speak to God about the king. Verse 8 says "Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies," and readers split over whose hand it is. The Cambridge commentary, Keil and Delitzsch, Ellicott, and the Pulpit Commentary all take verses 8 to 12 as spoken to the king. Albert Barnes read them as addressed to God, a look forward to God's final triumph. John Gill read them as an address to the Messiah.

Keil and Delitzsch give a grammatical reason for their view. If verse 8 were addressed to God, they argue, the speaker would have said his enemies, meaning the king's, to keep the thread from verse 7. Verse 9 also names "the LORD" in the third person, which suits a speech to the king about what God will do through him.

The same commentators read verses 8 to 12 as a confident forecast. Nobody in these lines asks God for anything. Keil and Delitzsch write, "What the people now hope on behalf of their king, they here express beforehand in the form of a prophecy." That makes Psalm 21 different from Psalm 109, where the speaker asks God directly, "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." Here the crowd is predicting what their victorious king will do next.

Verse 10 in the King James Version reads, "Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men." Fruit here means children. The Cambridge commentary, Albert Barnes, Matthew Poole, and Ellicott all read it that way, and Poole gives the alternative, the fruit of their labours, before setting it aside. The World English Bible removes the metaphor entirely: "You will destroy their descendants from the earth, their posterity from among the children of men."

This page will not soften that. The psalm expects the enemies of the king to be burned up as fuel in a furnace and their offspring wiped from the earth. Keil and Delitzsch connect the image to what 2 Samuel 12:31 reports about the people of Rabbah and the brick kiln, and to the fate the Bible assigns to the Amalekites. The Pulpit Commentary points to 1 Kings 11:16, where Joab stayed in Edom until he had cut off every male. These lines come from a culture at war, and the commentators place them there.

The tradition has done several things with it. The Aramaic Targum renders the end of verse 9 so that the burning of Gehinnom devours them, which moves the scene from a battlefield to final judgment. Augustine read the seed of verse 10 as their works or as the people they led astray. Barnes read the verse as a statement that the consequences of the parents' sins pass to their children, and that God's justice wins in the end.

The Bible also argues with a plain reading inside its own pages. Deuteronomy 24:16 says, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers." In 2 Kings 14:5-6 King Amaziah executes his father's murderers, and the text adds, "But the children of the murderers he slew not." A Christian reader also has Matthew 5:44 beside this psalm: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you." Each tradition decides how those texts fit together, and your own pastor or priest can tell you how yours does.

One more caution. Joseph Benson applied verses 8 and 9 to the unbelieving Jews, and John Gill put the Jews first in his list of Christ's enemies. The Hebrew names no people at all. The enemies in verse 8 are the enemies of a victorious Israelite king, and turning them into a nation the reader dislikes is a choice the reader makes.

Jewish tradition read Psalm 21 as messianic too. The Aramaic Targum to Psalms renders "the king" in verse 1 and again in verse 7 as King Messiah. The Cambridge commentary notes the same thing and then disagrees with it, saying a purely messianic reading "is excluded by the general sense of the Psalm."

Augustine went further. His exposition of the psalm opens with "the Psalm is of Christ." He reads the king's joy as the joy of the man Christ Jesus, the crown as the disciples gathered around him, and the life asked for in verse 4 as the resurrection. Matthew Henry, Spurgeon, and Gill read it in much the same direction.

The Cambridge commentary takes a middle line. It reads the psalm first as thanks for a real king's victory, then says its language looks forward to Christ, pointing to 1 Corinthians 15:25: "For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet." It adds, "Hence its selection as one of the Proper Psalms for Ascension Day." The Church of England's table of proper psalms appoints Psalms 8, 15, and 21 for Morning Prayer on that day.

None of these readers claims the psalm names Jesus. The messianic reading is an interpretation, made by both Jewish and Christian readers, and the historical reading is also an interpretation. Where your church stands on it is a question for your church.

Verse 1 changes tense between translations. The King James has "The king shall joy in thy strength," a future. The World English Bible has "The king rejoices in your strength, Yahweh!" a present. Ellicott argued for the present, "the king is exulting in thy might," because the victory has already been won.

Verse 3 has two differences. "Preventest" in the King James becomes "meetest" in the American Standard Version and "meet" in the World English Bible, which is a change in English usage only. The King James crown is of pure gold and the World English Bible crown is of fine gold, both rendering the Hebrew paz, refined gold. The Greek Septuagint reads a crown of precious stone, and Augustine's Latin text has the same reading.

Verse 6 in the King James says God has made the king "exceeding glad with thy countenance." The World English Bible says, "You make him glad with joy in your presence." The Cambridge commentary adds that the first half literally reads "thou makest him blessings," which it explains as "the possessor and the medium of blessing." In verse 9 the King James phrase "the time of thine anger" is, by the same commentary, literally the time of your face or presence.

Verse 12 is the hardest line to read in old English. The King James has "make ready thine arrows upon thy strings against the face of them." The World English Bible says the same thing in modern words: "when you aim drawn bows at their face." Both translations picture archers facing an enemy who turns and runs.

The divine name follows the usual pattern. The King James prints LORD, the American Standard Version of 1901 prints Jehovah, and the World English Bible prints Yahweh, all for the same four Hebrew letters. Bibles and liturgical books that follow the Greek and Latin numbering call this psalm Psalm 20.

Psalm 21 has a long public life. In the Book of Common Prayer it is read on the morning of the fourth day of each month and on Ascension Day. William Byrd set its opening verses as the anthem "O Lord make thy servant Elizabeth." Handel took his text for "The King Shall Rejoice" from it, writing the anthem for the coronation of George II in 1727.

Private use is smaller and more specific. Verses 1 and 2 fit the day after something you prayed for actually happened, such as a biopsy that came back benign or a son who walked out of rehab and stayed out. Verse 7 suits a hospital waiting room or the morning of a court date, when the job is to stay steady. Verse 13 works as a closing line when a group has finished praying.

Some people reach for verses 8 to 12 when someone is hurting them. If that person is a partner or a family member, your safety comes before any psalm. Reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or by texting START to 88788, free and confidential, day and night. If you have started thinking about suicide, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is one call or text away at 988. If the danger is immediate, dial 911.

For the psalm itself, take your questions to a person with a name. Your pastor or rabbi knows you and can be called. PrayWithJesus.ai is a business's software with no church behind it and no standing to teach, so where your church reads Psalm 21 differently from this page, follow your church.