Psalm 91 in the King James Version

This is the King James Version in the standard spelling of its 1769 Oxford edition, the form most Bibles print today, and no one holds a copyright on it in the United States. The psalm carries no heading in Hebrew, so the first words below are the first words of the poem. Read it once straight through before reading anything about it.

1 He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. 2 I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. 3 Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. 4 He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; 6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. 7 A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. 8 Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

9 Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; 10 There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. 11 For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. 12 They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. 13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

14 Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name. 15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. 16 With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.

Most psalms carry a heading. Psalm 91 does not. Albert Barnes, in his Notes on the Bible, wrote that it has no title and that "there are no internal marks by which we can ascertain when, or by whom, it was written." Charles Ellicott's commentary agrees: "There are no data for ascertaining either the author or the date of this psalm."

Two traditions filled the gap anyway. The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament produced by Jewish translators before the time of Jesus, numbers it Psalm 90 and adds a line assigning it to David. Keil and Delitzsch, in their Old Testament commentary, said the Greek translators did that without any warrant. Jewish tradition gives the psalm to Moses instead, and the Midrash has him composing it on the day he finished building the Tabernacle in the desert.

Moses gets the credit largely because of where the psalm sits. Psalm 90, directly before it, is headed A Prayer of Moses the man of God. Barnes saw no reason to suppose Moses also wrote Psalm 91, and no particular resemblance between the two. Kirkpatrick, in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, disagreed about the resemblance. He traced shared words such as dwelling place and Most High across Psalms 90 to 92, and proposed reading the three as a group from the Babylonian exile, with this one assuring Israel it would be safe when judgment fell on Babylon.

Older Protestant guesses pointed somewhere else. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown called David the most probable author and the plague after David's census in 2 Samuel 24 the most probable occasion. Matthew Poole called the writer uncertain and leaned toward the same plague. So the Hebrew names nobody. The Greek supplied David on its own authority and the rabbis supplied Moses, and nothing in the sixteen verses decides between them or rules out a poet whose name was never kept.

Read Psalm 91 aloud and the pronouns move under you. Verse 1 talks about he that dwelleth. Verse 2 says I will say of the LORD. Verses 3 to 8 speak to thee. Verse 9 starts with my and ends with thy. In verses 14 to 16 the speaker is God, saying I will deliver him. Ellicott called these abrupt changes of person "the especial difficulty of this psalm."

The commentators handle it in different ways. Ellicott wanted to supply a lost first word, Blessed is he that dwelleth, on the guess that a copyist dropped it. Keil and Delitzsch read the poem as a drama with two human voices and then the voice of God as a third, and noted that the Aramaic Targum already heard several speakers. Barnes reported a theory that two choirs sang it in turn, and judged Tholuck's verse by verse division between choir and response "quite arbitrary," since nobody can show that was the original design.

As for what kind of psalm it is, the usual labels fit badly. It holds no complaint, so it is no lament, and nobody gives thanks for a rescue already finished. No king appears in it, and no enemy is cursed. Kirkpatrick said its way of speaking to a single listener follows the usual practice of the didactic style, and set it beside Psalm 37. That puts it near the wisdom psalms, where one person teaches another what becomes of someone who trusts God. Keil and Delitzsch gave it a blunter title: a talismanic song in time of war and pestilence.

The shape matters for how the promises read. Through verse 13 a human voice is telling another person what God will do, which is testimony from someone who has staked himself on it. The only lines in the psalm presented as God's own words are verses 14 to 16. Keil and Delitzsch counted them as a seven line stanza, and the Cambridge Bible reads them as God confirming the confidence the speaker professed in verse 2.

Verse 1 is the line on the wall plaque. Barnes noted that the word translated dwelleth is a participle from the verb to sit, and that abide is literally to lodge, to pass the night. The Cambridge Bible glosses the secret place as a covert or hiding place. Barnes heard the inner room of the Tabernacle behind it, while the Cambridge Bible thought the shadow more likely comes from a mother bird, since verse 4 moves straight on to feathers and wings.

Verses 1 and 2 also stack four names for God into two verses: the most High, the Almighty, the LORD, and my God. Ellicott took the pile as deliberate. In his words, "By their accumulation the poet makes the sum of assurance doubly sure."

Verses 5 and 6 cover the whole clock: night and day, darkness and noon. Ellicott thought the terror by night might be a raid and the arrow by day either open battle or a figure for plague, a usage he said Arabic speakers still kept. The Talmud, in tractate Shevuot 15b, records the name song of plagues for this psalm. The midrashim heard demons in those four nouns, and from late antiquity both Jews and Christians wrote the psalm on amulets.

Verse 7 is the line people quote when the news is bad, and it is the one most often misread. The picture is a person left standing while thousands drop on both sides. Verse 8 adds that he will only look on and see the reward of the wicked. Keil and Delitzsch compared the onlooker to Israel on the night of the Passover. A later section on this page takes up what that promise does when it meets an actual hospital ward.

The line worth carrying out of the psalm comes later, in verse 15: "He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him." God speaks it, inside the closing promise, and it takes for granted that the trouble arrives.

Psalm 91 is the psalm the devil quotes. In Matthew 4 he sets Jesus on a pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem and says, in the King James wording: "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone." Luke 4:9-12 tells the same scene, placing it last of the three temptations.

Jesus answers with a second text and leaves the psalm itself standing: "It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." That is Deuteronomy 6:16, which in full reads "Ye shall not tempt the LORD your God, as ye tempted him in Massah." Massah is the place in the wilderness where Israel put God to the test.

Look at what the quotation drops. Psalm 91:11 says the angels keep thee in all thy ways. Matthew leaves out in all thy ways, and Luke keeps to guard you and stops there. John Gill, in his Exposition of the Entire Bible, said the devil was to be blamed for the wrong purpose he quoted it for and for leaving out the next clause. Barnes added that the tempter's use of the verse proves nothing about whether it was first written about the Messiah.

Kirkpatrick saw one more layer. If the psalm was first addressed to Israel, and Israel was a type of Christ, then Jesus had the fullest right to its promises, which makes his refusal to test them sharper. In the Gospels, then, Psalm 91 is a promise to rest in, and the devil's mistake is to treat it as a dare.

Verse 13 surfaces once more in Luke 10:19, where Jesus tells the seventy, "I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions." Benson's commentary heard the psalm's language of lion and adder behind that line.

Verse 10 in the King James reads: "There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." Taken as a contract, that line collides with ordinary experience, and the Psalter itself knows it. Psalm 44:22 says, "Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter." Romans 8:36 quotes that verse.

The commentators disagree here, and the disagreement matters to anyone reading Psalm 91 beside a sickbed. Barnes wrote that the promise "is not to be understood as absolute," because good people die in a plague along with bad. Charles Spurgeon, in The Treasury of David, granted that faith will not in all cases ward off disease and death, then argued that where saints are not sheltered, "it is because they have not all such a close abiding with God."

Spurgeon's reading has a cost. It lets someone tell a family whose believer died of an illness that the faith was too thin. Nobody should use this psalm to say that to a grieving person. Alexander MacLaren, preaching on verse 9, faced the same problem head on. The psalm promises no plague will come near, he said, and yet the faithful are smitten by every woe that afflicts humanity. His answer was that God draws the poison out of the trouble, and he paired the verse with Romans 8:28.

The psalm's own closing is more modest than its middle. God says in verse 15, I will be with him in trouble, so trouble is expected. And the scene at the temple tells you what not to do with the rest. You do not test the promise by stepping off a ledge, whether the ledge is a skipped round of treatment or a storm warning you refuse to heed.

The largest difference is verse 9. The King James reads: "Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation". The American Standard Version of 1901 reads: "For thou, O Jehovah, art my refuge! Thou hast made the Most High thy habitation". The World English Bible reads: "Because you have made Yahweh your refuge, and the Most High your dwelling place".

The Hebrew opens ki attah YHWH machsi, word for word for you, LORD, my refuge, and the refuge carries a first person ending. The speaker breaks off to address God, then turns back to the listener. Ellicott said the King James avoids that change of person "only with violence to the text." The ASV keeps the break. The World English Bible smooths it the other way, reading your refuge so the whole verse speaks to the listener. Barnes adds that the Targum heard Solomon speaking this line.

In verse 3 the King James has the noisome pestilence, and the ASV and WEB have the deadly pestilence. Noisome can mean foul smelling today, but Wiktionary illustrates its older sense, hurtful or noxious to health, with this very verse. The Hebrew noun is havvah, which Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses as destruction. Ellicott rendered the phrase pestilence of calamities, meaning a fatal one.

In verse 4 the King James and ASV make God's truth the shield and buckler, while the World English Bible has "His faithfulness is your shield and rampart." The noun is emet, which Brown-Driver-Briggs defines as firmness or faithfulness as well as truth, so both renderings stand on the lexicon. The word behind buckler occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and Keil and Delitzsch took it as a defence surrounding the body on all sides.

In verse 13 the King James tramples the young lion and the dragon, and the ASV and WEB trample the serpent. The Hebrew tannin can be a serpent, a dragon, or a sea monster. Brown-Driver-Briggs files this verse under serpent, because it stands parallel to the adder in the first half of the line. The verse lies behind the old image of Christ treading on the beasts, found in late antique and Anglo-Saxon art.

In Jewish practice Psalm 91 belongs to the morning psalms of Sabbath and festivals, and it is said at night with the bedtime Shema. At a burial it is recited seven times as the bearers carry the casket toward the grave, stopping every few feet. Some say it before setting out on a journey.

In Catholic Night Prayer it is the psalm for Sunday night, and the Eastern Orthodox read it every day at the Sixth Hour. The Revised Common Lectionary appoints verses 1 and 2 and 9 to 16 for the first Sunday in Lent in Year C, read together with Luke 4:1-13, so a congregation hears the psalm and then hears the devil misuse it. That Sunday next falls on March 5, 2028.

It is known as the Soldier's Psalm, and camouflage bandanas printed with it are handed out to American troops. Kate ter Horst read it to wounded British soldiers sheltering in her cellar at the Battle of Arnhem, and in the 1946 film Theirs Is the Glory she played herself doing it. The hymn On Eagle's Wings, written by Michael Joncas in 1979, is loosely based on this psalm.

Plague has sent people back to it before. Spurgeon tells of walking home from a funeral in the London cholera of 1854, worn out from visiting the dying, and finding verses 9 and 10 written out in a shoemaker's window on the Dover Road. Ellicott, citing Stier, records a physician in St. Petersburg recommending the psalm against cholera.

Now the moments are smaller and just as specific. The night before a deployment. The drive to an emergency room. The week a hurricane track bends toward your county. The evening before surgery. Reading Psalm 91 then is sound practice, as long as it sits beside the locked door, the seat belt, the evacuation order, and the surgeon's instructions, and does not stand in for any of them.

If someone you love is sick, or died after this psalm was prayed over them, read verse 15 again. The text expects trouble and promises company inside it. Nothing in the sixteen verses says an outcome measures how much you believed.

Then talk to a person who knows you. Your own pastor, priest, or rabbi, or the chaplain on the hospital floor, can sit with this question in a way a web page cannot. PrayWithJesus.ai is a piece of software made by a company, without ecclesiastical approval or any authority to teach, so where your church reads Psalm 91 differently, follow your church.

If fear or grief has turned into thoughts of not wanting to be alive, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline takes calls and texts at 988 across the United States. It costs nothing and stays confidential at any hour of the day or night, and its text and chat lines now work in Spanish too. If someone is in danger right now, call 911.