27:9 Do not reject me! 2
Do not push your servant away in anger!
You are my deliverer! 3
Do not forsake or abandon me,
O God who vindicates me!
51:11 Do not reject me! 4
Do not take your Holy Spirit 5 away from me! 6
51:12 Let me again experience the joy of your deliverance!
Sustain me by giving me the desire to obey! 7
119:116 Sustain me as you promised, 8 so that I will live. 9
Do not disappoint me! 10
119:117 Support me, so that I will be delivered.
Then I will focus 11 on your statutes continually.
15:5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains 12 in me – and I in him – bears 13 much fruit, 14 because apart from me you can accomplish 15 nothing.
1 tn The participles in v. 20 have been variously interpreted. Some treat them imperativally or as attendant circumstance to the imperative in v. 21 (“maintain”): “build yourselves up…pray.” But they do not follow the normal contours of either the imperatival or attendant circumstance participles, rendering this unlikely. A better option is to treat them as the means by which the readers are to maintain themselves in the love of God. This both makes eminently good sense and fits the structural patterns of instrumental participles elsewhere.
2 tn Heb “do not hide your face from me.” The idiom “hide the face” can mean “ignore” (see Pss 10:11; 13:1; 51:9) or carry the stronger idea of “reject” (see Pss 30:7; 88:14).
3 tn Or “[source of] help.”
4 tn Heb “do not cast me away from before you.”
5 sn Your Holy Spirit. The personal Spirit of God is mentioned frequently in the OT, but only here and in Isa 63:10-11 is he called “your/his Holy Spirit.”
6 sn Do not take…away. The psalmist expresses his fear that, due to his sin, God will take away the Holy Spirit from him. NT believers enjoy the permanent gift of the Holy Spirit and need not make such a request nor fear such a consequence. However, in the OT God’s Spirit empowered certain individuals for special tasks and only temporarily resided in them. For example, when God rejected Saul as king and chose David to replace him, the divine Spirit left Saul and came upon David (1 Sam 16:13-14).
7 tn Heb “and [with] a willing spirit sustain me.” The psalmist asks that God make him the kind of person who willingly obeys the divine commandments. The imperfect verbal form is used here to express the psalmist’s wish or request.
8 tn Heb “according to your word.”
9 tn The prefixed verbal form with vav (ו) conjunctive indicates purpose/result after the preceding imperative.
10 tn Heb “do not make me ashamed of my hope.” After the Hebrew verb בּוֹשׁ (bosh, “to be ashamed”) the preposition מִן (min, “from”) often introduces the reason for shame.
11 tn Or “and that I might focus.” The two cohortatives with vav (ו) conjunctive indicate purpose/result after the imperative at the beginning of the verse.
12 tn Or “resides.”
13 tn Or “yields.”
14 tn Grk “in him, this one bears much fruit.” The pronoun “this one” has been omitted from the translation because it is redundant according to contemporary English style.
15 tn Or “do.”