Psalms 27:9

27:9 Do not reject me! ¹ 

Do not push your servant away in anger!

You are my deliverer! ² 

Do not forsake or abandon me,

O God who vindicates me!

Psalms 42:9

42:9 I will pray ³  to God, my high ridge: ⁴ 

“Why do you ignore ⁵  me?

Why must I walk around mourning ⁶ 

because my enemies oppress me?”

Psalms 71:11

71:11 They say, ⁷  “God has abandoned him.

Run and seize him, for there is no one who will rescue him!”

Isaiah 41:17

41:17 The oppressed and the poor look for water, but there is none;

their tongues are parched from thirst.

I, the Lord, will respond to their prayers; ⁸ 

I, the God of Israel, will not abandon them.

Lamentations 1:12

ל (Lamed)

1:12 Is it nothing to you, ⁹  all you who pass by on the road? ¹⁰ 

Look and see!

Is there any pain like mine?

The Lord ¹¹  has afflicted me, ¹² 

he ¹³  has inflicted it on me

when ¹⁴  he burned with anger. ¹⁵ 

Lamentations 5:20

5:20 Why do you keep on forgetting ¹⁶  us?

Why do you forsake us so long?

[27:9]  ¹ 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).

[27:9]  ² tn Or “[source of] help.”

[42:9]  ³ tn The cohortative form indicates the psalmist’s resolve.

[42:9]  ⁴ tn This metaphor pictures God as a rocky, relatively inaccessible summit, where one would be able to find protection from enemies. See 1 Sam 23:25, 28; Pss 18:2; 31:3.

[42:9]  ⁵ tn Or “forget.”

[42:9]  ⁶ sn Walk around mourning. See Ps 38:6 for a similar idea.

[71:11]  ⁷ tn Heb “saying.”

[41:17]  ⁸ tn Heb “will answer them” (so ASV, NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT).

[1:12]  ⁹ tc The Heb לוֹא אֲלֵיכֶם (lo’ ’alekhem, “not to you”) is awkward and often considered corrupt but there is no textual evidence yet adduced to certify a more original reading.

[1:12]  ¹⁰ tn The line as it stands is imbalanced, such that the reference to the passersby may belong here or as a vocative with the following verb translated “look.”

[1:12]  ¹¹ tn Heb “He.” The personal pronoun “he” and the personal name “the Lord,” both appearing in this verse, are transposed in the translation for the sake of readability. In the Hebrew text, “He” appears in the A-line and “the Lord” appears in the B-line – good Hebrew poetic style, but awkward English style.

[1:12]  ¹² tn Heb “which was afflicted on me.” The Polal of עָלַל (’alal) gives the passive voice of the Polel. The Polel of the verb עָלַל (’alal) occurs ten times in the Bible, appearing in agricultural passages for gleaning or some other harvest activity and also in military passages. Jer 6:9 plays on this by comparing an attack to gleaning. The relationship between the meaning in the two types of contexts is unclear, but the very neutral rendering “to treat” in some dictionaries and translations misses the nuance appropriate to the military setting. Indeed it is not at all feasible in a passage like Judges 20:45 where “they treated them on the highway” would make no sense but “they mowed them down on the highway” would fit the context. Accordingly the verb is sometimes rendered “treat” or “deal severely,” as HALOT 834 s.v. poel.3 suggests for Lam 3:51, although simply suggesting “to deal with” in Lam 1:22 and 2:20. A more injurious nuance is given to the translation here and in 1:22; 2:20 and 3:51.

[1:12]  ¹³ sn The delay in naming the Lord as cause is dramatic. The natural assumption upon hearing the passive verb in the previous line, “it was dealt severely,” might well be the pillaging army, but instead the Lord is named as the tormentor.

[1:12]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “in the day of.” The construction בְּיוֹם (bÿyom, “in the day of”) is a common Hebrew idiom, meaning “when” or “on the occasion of” (e.g., Gen 2:4; Lev 7:35; Num 3:1; Deut 4:15; 2 Sam 22:1; Pss 18:1; 138:3; Zech 8:9).

[1:12]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “on the day of burning anger.”

[5:20]  ¹⁶ tn The Hebrew verb “forget” often means “to not pay attention to, ignore,” just as the Hebrew “remember” often means “to consider, attend to.”