Psalm 28:7

The Hebrew heading is a single word, le-David, which English Bibles usually print as A Psalm of David. The prefixed letter can mean of, for, or belonging to, so the heading is weaker evidence of authorship than it looks in English. Charles and Emilie Briggs, in their commentary on the Psalms, dated the psalm instead to the reign of King Jehoiakim, in what the Wikipedia article on Psalm 28 quotes them calling the late Babylonian period shortly before the exile. Jehoiakim's reign ended in 598 BCE and Jerusalem fell in 587 or 586, so their window is a loose one.

Readers who take the heading at face value keep the psalm with David. The evidence does not settle it either way.

The situation inside the text is clearer than the date. The speaker is in danger from people who talk to their neighbors pleasantly and plan harm. He is afraid that God will say nothing back, and he says what silence would mean: he would be counted with the ones already in the grave. That is the fear the psalm opens with, and verse 7 is the answer to it.

Verse 2 has him lifting his hands toward the holy place. The Hebrew word is debir, which elsewhere names the inner room of Solomon's temple, and that is why the word gets pulled into the dating argument. The Greek translators rendered it naos, the ordinary word for temple. The psalm itself never says which building it means. This is a fair place to notice that a verse can be genuinely loved and genuinely uncertain about its own address.

Here is the whole psalm around it, in the King James Version. Verses 1 and 2: Unto thee will I cry, O LORD my rock; be not silent to me: lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit. Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle.

Verses 3 to 5: Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts. Give them according to their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours: give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert. Because they regard not the works of the LORD, nor the operation of his hands, he shall destroy them, and not build them up.

Verses 6 to 8: Blessed be the LORD, because he hath heard the voice of my supplications. The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise him. The LORD is their strength, and he is the saving strength of his anointed.

Verse 9: Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance: feed them also, and lift them up for ever. The psalm ends by asking for something, which tells you the speaker did not think his own rescue had finished the story.

Take the clauses one at a time. Two things God is: my strength, my shield. One thing the speaker did: my heart trusted in him. One thing that happened to him: I am helped. One thing that followed: my heart greatly rejoiceth. One thing he will do about it: with my song will I praise him.

The order matters, and it is easy to read backward. Trust is first and it is past tense. Help is second. Joy is third, and it arrives because the help did. Nothing in the verse asks you to feel a certain way in order to qualify for the help. The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges gives the verb one line: better as R.V., hath trusted. The Hebrew form is a perfect, a completed act whose result is still standing.

Whether the help had already arrived is a genuine argument among commentators. The Pulpit Commentary says that as far as feeling goes David is already helped, and reads the closing line as thanksgiving offered for a mercy not yet received. Keil and Delitzsch read the second half of the psalm as the record of something that has actually taken place, and mention the suggestion of Hitzig and Ewald that it was added later as a memorial of the answer. Both readings are printed on the same page at Bible Hub.

Either way the verse is testimony. It reports what happened to one person in one crisis. That is the strongest thing it does and also the limit of what it does.

It does not promise that you will be shielded from harm. The Hebrew noun is magen, and Strong's entry at Bible Hub derives it from ganan, to defend, and defines it as the small shield, the buckler. The large body shield is a different word, tsinnah, which Brown, Driver and Briggs gloss as the large shield covering the whole body and cite at 1 Samuel 17:7, where a bearer carries one in front of Goliath. Magen is the thing in your hand that you get up in time for one blow. The psalm chooses the smaller word.

It does not say that trusting produces feelings. Read the sequence again. The joy is downstream of the help, and the help is downstream of God hearing. A person who trusts and feels nothing has not failed the verse.

It does not stand alone. Verse 4 asks God to give the wicked according to their deeds. If verse 7 belongs to you, so does the sentence four lines above it, and most people who quote the first would not say the second out loud. That gap is worth sitting with instead of editing out.

It does not say what the help was. The only thing the psalm names is that God heard. The text reports no enemy defeated and identifies no rescue of any particular kind. Reading a specific outcome into the word helped is the most common stretch this verse gets put through, and the psalm gives you nothing to hang it on.

It is also singular and personal. My strength, my shield, my heart. Verse 8 widens it to the people and verse 9 turns that into a request, which is the psalm quietly admitting that what one man received is not yet everyone's.

The King James Version of 1611 reads: The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise him.

The American Standard Version of 1901 reads: Jehovah is my strength and my shield; My heart hath trusted in him, and I am helped: Therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; And with my song will I praise him. The World English Bible reads: Yahweh is my strength and my shield. My heart has trusted in him, and I am helped. Therefore my heart greatly rejoices. With my song I will thank him.

Three differences are doing real work. The first is the divine name. The Hebrew has the four letters YHWH. The King James translators followed the Jewish reading tradition and printed LORD in small capitals; the ASV committee transliterated it as Jehovah; the World English Bible prints Yahweh. Same word underneath, three different decisions about how to say it.

The second is the tense. KJV trusted, ASV and WEB hath trusted and has trusted. The Hebrew perfect covers both, and the ASV wording keeps the sense that the trusting is still in force.

The third is praise against thank. The Hebrew verb is yadah, which carries the sense of publicly acknowledging something. Praise is warm and general. Thank is specific and owes somebody. WEB went with thank, and the verse gets sharper for it. If you want to see how a modern copyrighted translation handles the same line, open Psalm 28 at Bible Gateway and switch versions there instead of trusting a summary of it.

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made a few centuries before Christ, numbers this psalm as 27 and gives the second half of verse 7 differently. Where the Hebrew has the heart exulting, the Greek has anethalen he sarx mou, my flesh revived. Where the Hebrew has from my song, the Greek has ek thelematos mou, out of my will. Both phrases can be checked against the Greek text printed alongside the Hebrew in the Wikipedia article on Psalm 28.

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers takes a position most English readers never hear. On the words with my song he notes that the literal Hebrew is from my song, calls that reading doubtful, and says the Septuagint, which at this point in the verse reads my flesh has flourished, is probably correct. Ellicott is endorsing the Greek line as a whole and not the phrase out of my will specifically. He also prefers danceth for joy over greatly rejoiceth, following the Prayer Book. The Pulpit Commentary keeps the Hebrew and reports the explanation that out of my song means out of his store of song.

There is a second divergence one verse later. The Hebrew of verse 8 says the LORD is strength to them, using the short word lamo. Sefaria's footnote to that verse records that the Septuagint, Saadia Gaon, and others render it, and some manuscripts read it, as oz le-ammo, the strength of God's people. Keil and Delitzsch record that Boettcher, Olshausen, and Hupfeld all preferred the Greek reading, and then decline to follow them.

None of this leaves the verse unstable. It is what a sentence copied by hand for two thousand years in two languages looks like. It has seams, and the honest thing is to show you where they are.

The Hebrew behind my strength is uzzi, from oz, which Strong's glosses as strength in various applications, covering force, security, majesty, and praise. Brown, Driver and Briggs list the suffixed forms and put Psalm 28:7 and Exodus 15:2 side by side, the two spelled with different vowels under the first letter.

That Exodus reference is the interesting one. Exodus 15:2 pairs strength with something else: The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation. Psalm 118:14 uses the same pairing, and so does Isaiah 12:2. Strength and song is a fixed formula in the Hebrew Bible, and those are its three occurrences.

Psalm 28:7 breaks it. Strength gets paired with shield, and the song is held back until the end of the verse, after the trusting and the help. A man in fear of the pit reaches for defence first and gets to the singing when he is out. That is a small thing to notice and it changes how the sentence sounds.

The verb translated trusted is batach. Strong's defines its root sense as to hie for refuge, and adds the comparison in so many words: but not so precipitately as chacah, the other Hebrew verb English Bibles render as trust. Batach is the settled kind, the sort you can hold for weeks. That fits a psalm whose first complaint is that the answer has been slow.

People search this line at three in the morning, in a hospital parking lot before a scan result, on the drive home after being laid off, and in the week a child stops answering the phone. That is what the psalm is for. The man who wrote it was frightened too.

What it gives you in that hour is a script for asking, and a report from somebody who asked and got an answer. What it does not give you is a guarantee about your Thursday. Holding both is harder than holding one, and holding both is what the psalm does.

If you are in the first half of the psalm, verses 1 to 5, you are allowed to stay there. The Bible printed the fear and the request for justice without rushing either of them. Praying verse 1 for a month while waiting to mean verse 7 is a normal use of this text.

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