Psalm 7

Here is the whole chapter in the King James Version, numbered the way English Bibles number it. The Hebrew heading, which most printed Bibles set in small type above verse 1, is covered in the next section. The italics King James printings use to mark supplied words do not survive in plain text, so the one that matters most is pointed out further down.

1 O LORD my God, in thee do I put my trust: save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me:

2 Lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it in pieces, while there is none to deliver.

3 O LORD my God, if I have done this; if there be iniquity in my hands;

4 If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me; (yea, I have delivered him that without cause is mine enemy:)

5 Let the enemy persecute my soul, and take it; yea, let him tread down my life upon the earth, and lay mine honour in the dust. Selah.

6 Arise, O LORD, in thine anger, lift up thyself because of the rage of mine enemies: and awake for me to the judgment that thou hast commanded.

7 So shall the congregation of the people compass thee about: for their sakes therefore return thou on high.

8 The LORD shall judge the people: judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness, and according to mine integrity that is in me.

9 Oh let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end; but establish the just: for the righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.

10 My defence is of God, which saveth the upright in heart.

11 God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day.

12 If he turn not, he will whet his sword; he hath bent his bow, and made it ready.

13 He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; he ordaineth his arrows against the persecutors.

14 Behold, he travaileth with iniquity, and hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood.

15 He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.

16 His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.

17 I will praise the LORD according to his righteousness: and will sing praise to the name of the LORD most high.

Above verse 1 sits a heading that belongs to the Hebrew text itself. In Hebrew Bibles it is verse 1, which pushes every later verse up by one, so English 7:11 is Hebrew 7:12. The King James renders it: "Shiggaion of David, which he sang unto the LORD, concerning the words of Cush the Benjamite." Notice that last phrase. The occasion is words, a report or an accusation, and the whole psalm answers it.

Nobody knows exactly what Shiggaion means. Brown-Driver-Briggs calls it a doubtful word and, following Ewald and Delitzsch, ties it to a root meaning to go astray or reel, which yields a wild, passionate song with rapid changes of rhythm. Andrew Bonar, quoted in Spurgeon's Treasury of David, hears something erratic and less calm than other psalms. The only other appearance is the plural Shigionoth in Habakkuk 3:1. The Greek Septuagint puts its ordinary word for a psalm in its place, so its heading opens "A Psalm of David" and then keeps the rest, the words of Chusi the Benjamite.

Cush appears nowhere else in the Bible, and that silence has produced a run of guesses. The Aramaic Targum identified him with Saul, a Benjamite whose father was Kish. Matthew Poole thought the name might be a veiled reference to Saul, or else a courtier never mentioned again. Jerome read the word as Ethiopian. A further identification, which the Cambridge Bible mentions only to dismiss, made him Shimei, the man of Saul's house who cursed David and threw stones at him in 2 Samuel 16.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges rejects all of those and treats Cush as the plain name of a Benjamite we know nothing more about. It goes further and argues that the very obscurity of the name shows the heading is old, written by David or by an editor with fuller information about his life than survives. It sets the psalm in the years when Saul hunted David, and asks readers to compare 1 Samuel 24 and 26, where David complains about men who carry tales to the king.

So the heading settles less than it seems to. It links the psalm to David and to a particular set of slanders, but it gives no date and says nothing about what the accusation was. Cambridge itself allows that the heading may come from an editor. Anyone who tells you exactly who Cush was is choosing one guess from a list that is several centuries long.

Hermann Gunkel, whose commentary sorted the psalms by literary form, placed Psalm 7 among the laments of an individual. That is the right family. The speaker is in danger, he says so, and he asks for help. What gives this lament its shape is the courtroom. He enters a plea of not guilty and asks for a ruling.

Verses 3 to 5 are the plea, and it is an oath with a curse on the one who swears it. If I have done this, if there is iniquity in my hands, if I paid back evil to a man at peace with me, then let the enemy chase me down, tread my life into the ground, and lay my honour in the dust. The Cambridge Bible reads the dust as the dust of death. He is staking his life on the claim.

Inside the oath sits a parenthesis: "yea, I have delivered him that without cause is mine enemy." Cambridge connects it to the cave and the camp in 1 Samuel 24 and 26, where David stopped his own men from killing Saul. The accused man is saying he spared the very person who hunts him. Cambridge also records a second possible reading of verse 4, if I have taken revenge on one who wronged me, which lands in the same place.

Verse 8 asks God to judge "according to my righteousness, and according to mine integrity that is in me." That sounds like a claim to be sinless, and Cambridge says plainly that it is no such thing. It is a plea of not guilty on one charge, the charge of treachery. David's words to Saul in 1 Samuel 24:11 say the same: "there is neither evil nor transgression in mine hand."

Is Psalm 7 an imprecatory psalm, one of the cursing psalms? It asks God to rise in anger in verse 6 and to bring the wickedness of the wicked to an end in verse 9. It never asks for a particular harm to fall on a particular person. The six psalms most often grouped as imprecatory are 55, 59, 69, 79, 109 and 137, and Psalm 7 is absent from that list and from the longer list of sixteen sometimes added to it.

Verse 9 gives the reason the speaker is willing to stand trial: "the righteous God trieth the hearts and reins." Reins is the old English word for kidneys. Cambridge explains that the Old Testament treats the heart as the seat of thought and will and the reins as the seat of the emotions. The judge in this court can see what no witness can, which is exactly what a falsely accused man wants.

The phrase travels. Jeremiah prays to the LORD "that triest the reins and the heart, let me see thy vengeance on them," a prayer from another man under attack. In Revelation 2:23 the letter to the church at Thyatira uses it again: "I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts."

There is a second way to read the first half of verse 9. Cambridge notes that the ancient Hebrew accent marks point toward "O let evil make an end of the wicked," which would make wickedness its own executioner, the idea verses 14 to 16 develop. Cambridge prefers the familiar sense found in the Septuagint, in Jerome, and in the English versions, a prayer that the evil of the wicked might come to an end.

Verse 10 shows one of the plainest differences between KJV and WEB. King James has "My defence is of God," and the World English Bible has "My shield is with God." The Hebrew noun is the ordinary word for shield, and Cambridge renders the line literally as my shield is upon God, meaning it rests with God to defend me. Psalm 28:7 calls the LORD a shield too, and that verse has its own page on this site.

The King James reads: "God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day." In King James printings the words "with the wicked" are set in italics, the translators' way of marking words the Hebrew does not have. Matthew Poole called it a bold supplement but a necessary one, drawn from the verses that follow. The Pulpit Commentary saw no need for it, since anyone reading on can tell whom the anger is aimed at.

The World English Bible reads: "God is a righteous judge, yes, a God who has indignation every day." The American Standard Version of 1901 is almost identical. Both take the first half as a description of God, where King James made it a sentence about God judging the righteous. Albert Barnes noted that the Hebrew allows either, and thought the difference in sense small.

The Greek tradition goes the other way. Brenton's translation of the Septuagint reads: "God is a righteous judge, and strong, and patient, not inflicting vengeance every day." Ellicott reports that the Syriac also says God is not angry every day, and that the Latin Vulgate turns the line into a question. He mentions a proposal to read the Hebrew as and not in place of and God, two words that differ only in their vowels, and calls it unnecessary. Cambridge adds that the words strong and patient in the old Prayer Book Psalter came from the Septuagint by way of the Vulgate.

So the line most often quoted from Psalm 7, usually as proof that God is furious with sinners at all times, is in Hebrew a short statement that God's indignation is daily, with its object left unstated. In the oldest Greek translation it says nearly the opposite. Either way, inside the psalm it is the accused man's reason for expecting the court he asked for in verses 6 to 8 to actually sit.

Verse 12 in King James reads "If he turn not, he will whet his sword; he hath bent his bow, and made it ready." There are two hes and the Hebrew does not name either. Benson, Poole, and Keil and Delitzsch all read it the same way: if the wicked man does not turn from his course, God will sharpen his sword. Gill says plainly that the one who must turn is the enemy, and notes that the Septuagint and Vulgate read if ye turn not, a direct warning to the wicked.

The notes in the Geneva Bible read it differently. They take the weapons as Saul's, so the verse becomes David's fear: unless Saul changes his mind, he has the men and the arms to kill me. Ellicott offers another option, surely he will again whet his sword, and Cambridge points out that this rendering leaves open whether the attacker is God or the enemy coming back for a second try. The World English Bible keeps the ambiguity: "If a man doesn't relent, he will sharpen his sword."

Verse 13 has its own split. King James ends with "he ordaineth his arrows against the persecutors." The American Standard reads "He maketh his arrows fiery," and the World English Bible reads "He makes ready his flaming arrows." The Hebrew participle comes from a verb that Brown-Driver-Briggs defines as both to burn and to hotly pursue, so both readings have a footing. Cambridge favours fiery, and compares the burning arrows shot into besieged towns.

Jonathan Edwards borrowed the picture for his 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string." The psalm attaches a condition the sermon line leaves out, and it sits in the first words of verse 12. The bow is drawn against someone who will not turn.

Verses 14 to 16 switch to a pregnancy. The wicked man travails with iniquity, conceives mischief, and gives birth to falsehood. Cambridge calls these words of studied ambiguity: the harm he plans for others turns out to be calamity for himself. Then the image changes to a hunter's pitfall. He dug a pit and fell into it, and his violence comes down on his own pate, the old word for the crown of the head. Proverbs 26:27 says the same thing in one line: "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein."

What those verses describe is how wrongdoing tends to recoil. They do not say when. The same book contains Psalm 73, where a man nearly loses his footing because, in his words, "I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked." Reading verse 15 as a promise that the person who lied about you will be exposed by Friday asks the verse for a timetable it never gives.

The psalm's oath also cuts both ways, since the speaker asks to be judged first and invites the worst if he is guilty. C. S. Lewis, writing about the cursing psalms, warned against adding Thus saith the Lord to one's own emotions. Praying Psalm 7 against a rival without first praying verses 3 to 5 over yourself skips the part that makes the prayer honest.

What the psalm does with its anger is give it away. The speaker spared the man hunting him and asked God to rule. The New Testament keeps that move. Romans 12:19 says "avenge not yourselves," and 1 Peter 2:23 describes Jesus, who when he was reviled, reviled not again, "but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously."

Cambridge records that ancient Jewish tradition prescribes Psalm 7 for the feast of Purim, which remembers Haman hanged on the gallows he built for Mordecai. The story reads like verse 15 acted out. In the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours it is prayed at Daytime Prayer on Monday of the first psalter week, split in two after Psalm 19. Monday 19 October 2026 falls in that week, and Psalm 7 is among the psalms of the day.

Outside church the occasions are specific. A complaint filed at work with your name on it. A custody filing that says something untrue about you. A rumour in a congregation that nobody will repeat to your face. A screenshot passed around a group chat with half the context cut away. People reach for Psalm 7 when they are accused, cannot prove a negative, and need somewhere to put the anger.

The psalm gives you words to say to God, and the practical side of an accusation still has to be handled. If the accusation has legal weight, talk to a lawyer before you talk to anyone else. Keep a dated record of what was said and who said it. Verse 4 is worth copying in practice, too: the speaker did not strike back at the man who wronged him, and that restraint was part of his defence.

If the person accusing you is someone you live with or are afraid of, an advocate at the National Domestic Violence Hotline picks up on 1-800-799-7233, and the hotline takes chats and texts too. If the accusation has you thinking about not being alive, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is 988, by call or text, free and staffed around the clock. If anyone is in danger right now, dial 911.

For the psalm itself, ask your own pastor or priest, someone who knows your name and your situation. PrayWithJesus.ai is a product made by a software company. No church body has approved what it says, and it has no authority to teach. If your church reads Psalm 7 differently from this page, go with your church.