Psalm 141

Psalms 141:1-2

The psalm opens as an urgent evening prayer, make haste unto me set against the slower picture that follows: prayer offered as incense and the lifting up of hands as the evening sacrifice. Both figures are drawn from the temple's own worship, the incense burned morning and evening on the golden altar and the evening lamb of the daily offering, so that private prayer is pictured as a priestly act performed without a priest. Henry and Spurgeon both take the comparison as David's claim that unseen prayer is as real an offering to God as the offerings the nation could see.

Psalms 141:3-4

The prayer turns from being heard to being kept: a watch set over the mouth and a door kept over the lips, asking God to guard speech the way a sentry guards a gate. The same request reaches the heart, that it not be inclined to evil or drawn into the works of men who deal in iniquity, and closes with a plea not to eat of their dainties, the comforts and luxuries the wicked set on their table. Gill reads the dainties as the seductions of easy company, the kind of fellowship that corrupts before any single wicked act is committed.

Psalms 141:5

The verse asks for the opposite of the dainties just refused: a blow from a righteous man received as a kindness, and his reproof as an excellent oil, one that will not break the head it is poured on. The picture reverses expectation, a wound from a friend welcomed and a comfort from an enemy declined, and the older commentators read it as David's settled preference for honest correction over flattering company. The clause that follows, for yet my prayer also shall be in their calamities, is one of the most difficult in the psalm, and the bench reads it several ways without a settled sense, some taking it as continued prayer against the wicked's evil and others as prayer that outlasts their downfall.

Psalms 141:6-7

The Hebrew of these two verses is counted among the hardest in the Psalter, and the bench does not force a single sense on it. Read plainly, the fall of the wicked's own leaders from rocky heights is pictured as the event that finally makes David's words believable to those who once dismissed them, they shall hear my words, for they are sweet. The bones scattered at the grave's mouth like chips flung by a woodcutter is then read either as the fate of those same judges or as a picture of the righteous under violent pressure, and Barnes and Delitzsch both name the difficulty rather than resolve it.

Psalms 141:8-10

Against the confusion of the verses just past, the prayer settles on one fixed point, eyes turned to God alone, trust placed in him, a plea not to be left destitute. The request narrows to the snares and gins the workers of iniquity have laid, the same hunting language that opened the plea for a guarded mouth now aimed outward at the traps set by others. The closing wish, that the wicked fall into their own nets while David escapes, asks for nothing more than their own devices turned back on them, a plea for justice through their own doing rather than a curse called down by name.