5:10 Condemn them, 1 O God!
May their own schemes be their downfall! 2
Drive them away 3 because of their many acts of insurrection, 4
for they have rebelled against you.
27:2 When evil men attack me 5
to devour my flesh, 6
when my adversaries and enemies attack me, 7
they stumble and fall. 8
35:8 Let destruction take them by surprise! 9
Let the net they hid catch them!
Let them fall into destruction! 10
36:12 I can see the evildoers! They have fallen! 11
They have been knocked down and are unable to get up! 12
37:14 Evil men draw their swords
and prepare their bows,
to bring down 13 the oppressed and needy,
and to slaughter those who are godly. 14
45:5 Your arrows are sharp
and penetrate the hearts of the king’s enemies.
Nations fall at your feet. 15
57:6 They have prepared a net to trap me; 16
I am discouraged. 17
They have dug a pit for me. 18
They will fall 19 into it! (Selah)
69:9 Certainly 20 zeal for 21 your house 22 consumes me;
I endure the insults of those who insult you. 23
78:55 He drove the nations out from before them;
he assigned them their tribal allotments 24
and allowed the tribes of Israel to settle down. 25
140:10 May he rain down 26 fiery coals upon them!
May he throw them into the fire!
From bottomless pits they will not escape. 27
1 tn Heb “declare/regard them as guilty.” Declaring the psalmist’s adversaries guilty is here metonymic for judging them or paying them back for their wrongdoing.
2 tn Heb “may they fall from their plans.” The prefixed verbal form is a jussive, expressing an imprecation. The psalmist calls judgment down on the evildoers. Their plans will be their downfall in that God will judge them for their evil schemes.
3 tn Or “banish them.”
4 tn The Hebrew noun used here, פֶּשַׁע (pesha’), refers to rebellious actions. The psalmist pictures his enemies as rebels against God (see the next line).
5 tn Heb “draw near to me.”
6 sn To devour my flesh. The psalmist compares his enemies to dangerous, hungry predators (see 2 Kgs 9:36; Ezek 39:17).
7 tn Heb “my adversaries and my enemies against me.” The verb “draw near” (that is, “attack”) is understood by ellipsis; see the previous line.
8 tn The Hebrew verbal forms are perfects. The translation assumes the psalmist is generalizing here, but another option is to take this as a report of past experience, “when evil men attacked me…they stumbled and fell.”
9 tn Heb “let destruction [which] he does not know come to him.” The singular is used of the enemy in v. 8, probably in a representative or collective sense. The psalmist has more than one enemy, as vv. 1-7 make clear.
10 tn The psalmist’s prayer for his enemies’ demise continues. See vv. 4-6.
13 tn Heb “there the workers of wickedness have fallen.” The adverb שָׁם (sham, “there”) is used here for dramatic effect, as the psalmist envisions the evildoers lying fallen at a spot that is vivid in his imagination (BDB 1027 s.v.).
14 tn The psalmist uses perfect verbal forms in v. 12 to describe the demise of the wicked as if it has already taken place.
17 tn Heb “to cause to fall.”
18 tn Heb “the upright in way,” i.e., those who lead godly lives.
21 tn Heb “your arrows are sharp – peoples beneath you fall – in the heart of the enemies of the king.” The choppy style reflects the poet’s excitement.
25 tn Heb “for my feet.”
26 tn Heb “my life bends low.” The Hebrew term נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh) with a pronominal suffix is often equivalent to a pronoun, especially in poetry (see BDB 660 s.v. נֶפֶשׁ 4.a).
27 tn Heb “before me.”
28 tn The perfect form is used rhetorically here to express the psalmist’s certitude. The demise of the enemies is so certain that he can speak of it as already accomplished.
29 tn Or “for.” This verse explains that the psalmist’s suffering is due to his allegiance to God.
30 tn Or “devotion to.”
31 sn God’s house, the temple, here represents by metonymy God himself.
32 tn Heb “the insults of those who insult you fall upon me.”
33 tn Heb “he caused to fall [to] them with a measuring line an inheritance.”
34 tn Heb “and caused the tribes of Israel to settle down in their tents.”
37 tn The verb form in the Kethib (consonantal Hebrew text) appears to be a Hiphil imperfect from the root מוּט (mut, “to sway”), but the Hiphil occurs only here and in Ps 55:3, where it is preferable to read יַמְטִירוּ (yamtiru, “they rain down”). In Ps 140:10 the form יַמְטֵר (yamter, “let him rain down”) should probably be read.
38 tn Heb “into bottomless pits, they will not arise.” The translation assumes that the preposition -בְּ (bet) has the nuance “from” here. Another option is to connect the line with what precedes, take the final clause as an asyndetic relative clause, and translate, “into bottomless pits [from which] they cannot arise.” The Hebrew noun מַהֲמֹרָה (mahamorah, “bottomless pit”) occurs only here in the OT.