Psalm 41

What follows is the King James Version, a text no one owns. Most printed Bibles set a short heading above verse one, addressed to the chief musician and naming the psalm as one of David's. The numbering below follows English Bibles, where that heading carries no number.

1 Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the LORD will deliver him in time of trouble.

2 The LORD will preserve him, and keep him alive; and he shall be blessed upon the earth: and thou wilt not deliver him unto the will of his enemies.

3 The LORD will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing: thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness.

4 I said, LORD, be merciful unto me: heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee.

5 Mine enemies speak evil of me, When shall he die, and his name perish?

6 And if he come to see me, he speaketh vanity: his heart gathereth iniquity to itself; when he goeth abroad, he telleth it.

7 All that hate me whisper together against me: against me do they devise my hurt.

8 An evil disease, say they, cleaveth fast unto him: and now that he lieth he shall rise up no more.

9 Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.

10 But thou, O LORD, be merciful unto me, and raise me up, that I may requite them.

11 By this I know that thou favourest me, because mine enemy doth not triumph over me.

12 And as for me, thou upholdest me in mine integrity, and settest me before thy face for ever.

13 Blessed be the LORD God of Israel from everlasting, and to everlasting. Amen, and Amen.

The heading is part of the Hebrew text, and it says two things: the psalm is for the chief musician, and it is a psalm of David. In a Hebrew Bible that heading is verse one, so the verse about the friend's heel is 41:10 there, and the closing doxology is 41:14. Catholic Bibles that follow the Hebrew count print the same numbers.

Headings like this are common. Wikipedia's survey of the Psalter counts 116 psalms with a heading, says over a third of the psalms read as musical directions to a leader or choirmaster, and counts 73 that carry the words "of David." The same article, citing Adele Berlin and Marc Brettler of the Jewish Study Bible, reports that modern scholars do not accept Davidic authorship as historical fact. The heading records how the psalm was filed and sung, and it leaves the author and the date open.

A. F. Kirkpatrick, writing on the Psalms for the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, worked the question conditionally. If David wrote it, the false friend can hardly be anyone except Ahithophel, the royal counsellor who went over to Absalom's revolt. Kirkpatrick concedes that the account in 2 Samuel never mentions David being ill, and then suggests an illness would explain the neglected lawsuits Absalom complains about and David's quick flight from Jerusalem. That is a reconstruction built on an if. The psalm itself never names the friend, the disease, or the year.

The footnotes in the New American Bible, Revised Edition, published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, label Psalm 41 a thanksgiving for rescue from illness. That label matches the type Hermann Gunkel called the individual thanksgiving, where one person thanks God for deliverance from personal distress. On that reading the speaker is already well. Verses four to ten are the prayer he remembers praying, and verses eleven and twelve report how it came out.

Kirkpatrick saw the problem and called it much disputed. He thought the man was still in bed. His reasons are textual: the plea in verse ten for God to raise him up reads oddly as a story about the past, and the Hebrew verb in verse four can be rendered "I have said" or "I say" as well as "I said." Read his way, the psalm sits closer to a lament, and the confidence of verses eleven and twelve is spoken before anything has changed.

The choice matters for the person reading it. A thanksgiving is a song for afterwards. A lament with a confident ending is a prayer for the middle, where nothing has improved yet and the speaker says "by this I know" anyway. Kirkpatrick and the bishops' footnotes land on opposite sides, and the Hebrew does not force either one.

There is a third strand at the opening. Verse one begins with the Hebrew word ashrei, the same "blessed" that opens Psalm 1, so the first book of the Psalter starts and ends on a beatitude. The word behind "considereth" is maskil, the same form that heads thirteen other psalms as a title glossed as enlightened or a wise saying. Here it describes a person instead of labelling the poem, and the first line speaks in the voice of the wisdom teachers before it turns into one man's complaint.

The Hebrew word is dal, Strong's H1800. Strong's gives its root sense as dangling, and by implication weak or thin. The King James Version renders it "poor" 43 of its 48 times, and Brown, Driver and Briggs list its senses as low, weak, poor and thin, including the thin cows of Pharaoh's dream in Genesis 41. Kirkpatrick reads it here as covering the sick as well as the poor, and points out that the rest of the psalm is about a sick man.

The verb is sakal, Strong's H7919. The King James Version renders it "consider" only four times in 63, and far more often as understand, be wise, or prosper. The blessing is on someone who pays intelligent attention to the weak. Kirkpatrick's gloss is behaving considerately toward the afflicted and not judging them harshly. That definition matters later in the psalm, when people come to see the sick man and go out judging him.

Two other lines in the King James Version carry the same idea in plainer terms. Proverbs 19:17: "He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again." Matthew 5:7: "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." Kirkpatrick reads the first stanza of Psalm 41 as an expansion of the beatitude in Matthew, written by a man who had shown mercy and was now asking for some.

Verse nine is the line most people come to this psalm for. "Mine own familiar friend" is, in Kirkpatrick's literal rendering, "the man of my peace." Eating someone's bread meant the bond of hospitality, and at a king's table it meant a place of honour. "Lifted up his heel" is, literally, made great the heel. The noun is aqeb, the ordinary Hebrew word for heel. The Catholic bishops' footnote calls the phrase unclear Hebrew, and Kirkpatrick takes it as spurning a man with brutal violence, or working to trip him up and throw him down.

In John 13:18 Jesus applies the line to the meal he is eating with his disciples. The King James Version reads: "I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me." Eight verses later he hands the dipped morsel to Judas Iscariot. John's wording keeps the bread and the heel. The words "in whom I trusted" from the psalm do not appear in it.

Kirkpatrick was careful about how the two passages connect. In his reading the treachery and the fate of David's trusted counsellor foreshadowed the treachery and the fate of Judas, and he called the psalm's words "not a direct prediction." Ahithophel hanged himself in 2 Samuel 17:23, and Matthew 27:5 says Judas did the same. John's own phrase is "that the scripture may be fulfilled," and Kirkpatrick took fulfilment in that patterned sense.

Psalm 55 makes the same complaint at greater length, in the King James Version: "For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance." Kirkpatrick notes that the Hebrew word for the friend there is a different one.

Verse three is where the translations split hardest. King James Version: "thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness." World English Bible: "Yahweh will sustain him on his sickbed, and restore him from his bed of illness." The Hebrew verb is haphak, Strong's H2015, to turn over or overturn. The King James Version renders it 94 times, "turn" 57 of them and "overthrow" 13, and "make" exactly once.

Two readings sit behind those English choices. Kirkpatrick takes the literal sense as "thou hast turned his lying down," meaning God changes the sickness into health. He mentions the familiar picture of a nurse shifting the pillows and says Hebrew usage does not support it. The Catholic bishops' footnote calls the Hebrew obscure and reads it as ongoing, attentive care of a sick person. The King James wording leans toward the nurse. The World English Bible leans toward recovery.

Verse two has a smaller split with a real effect. The King James Version makes the last clause a promise: "thou wilt not deliver him unto the will of his enemies." The American Standard Version makes it a request: "And deliver not thou him unto the will of his enemies." Kirkpatrick prefers the request, reading it as the point where the language of promise turns into prayer for the speaker's own need. The World English Bible goes back to a statement: "he will not surrender him to the will of his enemies."

The rest is vocabulary. Verse one's "in time of trouble" is "in the day of evil" in the World English Bible, the rendering Kirkpatrick cites from the Revised Version. Verse eleven's "thou favourest me" becomes "you delight in me." The divine name is LORD in the King James, Jehovah in the American Standard, and Yahweh in the World English Bible, three editorial policies about the same four Hebrew letters.

Read alone, the first three verses sound like a policy: look after the weak and God will keep you alive, keep you from your enemies, and hold you up on your sickbed. The man saying this is sick. By verse four he is praying from his own sickbed, and by verse eight his visitors are telling the street he will not rise. The psalm puts the promise and the illness in the same body, and it does not explain the gap.

Verse four complicates it again. The sick man confesses: "heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee." Then verse eight gives his visitors' verdict. Kirkpatrick explains that the Hebrew behind "an evil disease" is literally "a thing of belial," which can mean an incurable illness or a matter of wickedness, and that the gossips probably meant both at once. The Catholic bishops' note says it outright: people, friends included, took the illness as punishment for sin and shunned him.

So the psalm lets a sick man confess his own sin before God, and in the same breath condemns the people who diagnose sin from outside the sickroom. Those are two different acts. In John 9 the disciples ask whether a blind man or his parents sinned, and Jesus answers that neither did. Using Psalm 41 to tell someone their cancer is a judgment puts you among the whisperers of verses seven and eight.

Verse twelve then claims integrity. Kirkpatrick saw no contradiction with verse four, because integrity is not the same thing as sinlessness. A person can confess real wrong and still refuse the verdict that the illness proves something worse.

Verse ten asks God to raise the sick man up "that I may requite them." Kirkpatrick did not sand it down. He called the words vindictive in tone and startling, and set them against Proverbs 20:22, which tells the reader not to say he will recompense evil. His explanation is tied to David: a king conscious of his appointment by God might pray to be restored so he could punish traitors as God's instrument. Kirkpatrick adds that elsewhere David mostly left vengeance to God.

The Catholic bishops' footnote reads the same line another way. In its reading the healing is itself the judgment, God deciding for the sick man and against the false friends, and the prayer need not be a request for strength to punish anyone. So one line has two serious readings, and they disagree.

Romans 12:19 sits in the same Bible as this psalm and tells its readers to leave vengeance to God. Anyone who prays verse ten prays it with both readings in view. This page does not settle the question for you, and it would be overreaching if it tried.

Verse thirteen does not continue the sick man's prayer. Kirkpatrick calls it no part of the psalm, and the Catholic bishops' footnote agrees: the doxology marks the end of the first of the five books of the Psalter. Psalm 72 closes Book Two the same way, followed by a line the King James Version renders "The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended." Psalm 89 and Psalm 106 close Books Three and Four.

The doubled amen is the congregation's answer. Kirkpatrick reads it as the people affirming the praise on their own behalf. Luke 1:68 opens the prophecy of Zacharias with the same first words in the King James Version: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people." Kirkpatrick lists the same formula in doxologies spoken by David and Solomon in 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles, and again in Ezra and Nehemiah.

Several prayer books still give Psalm 41 a fixed day and hour. The Catholic Liturgy of the Hours assigns it to Vespers on Friday of the first week. The Church of England's Book of Common Prayer appoints it for the evening of the eighth day of the month. Benedictine monks sang it at Matins under the Rule of Saint Benedict, and the Coptic Agpeya places it at Terce. In Jewish prayer, a verse of it appears in the repetition of the Amidah on Rosh Hashanah, and the psalm is one of the ten in Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's Tikkun HaKlali.

Its first verse has a public history too. A 1604 inscription on Chubb's Almshouses in Crewkerne, England, carries Psalm 41, and the English text of Handel's Foundling Hospital Anthem, composed for a fundraising concert for that hospital, is adapted from the opening. People who built houses for the poor reached for verse one.

Outside the liturgy, people usually come to it from one of two places. One is a hospital room, their own or someone else's, often with the question of whether an illness means God is angry. The other is a betrayal: a business partner, a sibling, a spouse, a friend from church, someone who sat at the same table.

If you are in the first place, find a person. Ask the nurses to call the hospital chaplain, or call your parish priest or pastor and say you are ill. This site is a computer program that no church has approved, and it cannot visit you. If an illness or a betrayal has brought you to the point of wanting to die, phone or text 988 from anywhere in the United States. The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline there answers every hour of every day, for free and in confidence.