Psalms 39:4

39:4 “O Lord, help me understand my mortality

and the brevity of life! ¹ 

Let me realize how quickly my life will pass! ² 

Psalms 143:8

143:8 May I hear about your loyal love in the morning, ³ 

for I trust in you.

Show me the way I should go, ⁴ 

because I long for you. ⁵ 

¹ tn Heb “Cause me to know, O Lord, my end; and the measure of my days, what it is!”

² tn Heb “Let me know how transient I am!”

³ tn Heb “cause me to hear in the morning your loyal love.” Here “loyal love” probably stands metonymically for an oracle of assurance promising God’s intervention as an expression of his loyal love.

⁴ sn The way probably refers here to God’s moral and ethical standards and requirements (see v. 10).

⁵ tn Heb “for to you I lift up my life.” The Hebrew expression נָאָשׂ נֶפֶשׁ (na’as nefesh, “to lift up [one’s] life”) means “to desire; to long for” (see Deut 24:15; Prov 19:18; Jer 22:27; 44:14; Hos 4:8, as well as H. W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 16).