Psalm 142

Psalms 142:1-2

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads Maschil of David, a Prayer when he was in the cave, an instruction psalm written from hiding. The bench most often connects the setting to the cave of Adullam in 1 Samuel 22:1, though some read it of the cave at Engedi in 1 Samuel 24:3, and the title itself does not say which. The doubled line, my voice unto the Lord, my voice unto the Lord, and the pouring out of complaint and trouble before him picture prayer as speech refused to no one else, loud where human help has gone silent.

Psalms 142:3-4

The complaint names a hidden snare, laid privily in the very way David walked, danger he could not see coming even while God already knew his path before he spoke it. Verse 4 turns to look for a human ally and finds none, no man that would know me, refuge failed me, no man cared for my soul, three clauses stacking the same abandonment three ways. Gill reads the search to the right hand, the position of a defender or advocate in court, as sharpening the picture: David looks for a witness to stand at his side and there is not one.

Psalms 142:5-6

Where human refuge failed in the verse just past, David names God directly as refuge and my portion in the land of the living, the same word for portion the Psalter uses elsewhere of the Lord as inheritance, in Psalm 16:5, the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance. The prayer asks to be heard because he is brought very low and his persecutors are stronger than he, an honest admission of weakness rather than a claim of strength deserving rescue. Delitzsch notes that the plea rests entirely on who God is to him, not on any merit of David's own.

Psalms 142:7

The cave itself may stand behind the figure of prison, a narrow, enclosed refuge from which David asks to be brought out so that he may praise thy name in the open. The verse answers the isolation of the verses before it: where no man cared for his soul, now the righteous shall compass me about, a gathered company in place of the solitary cave. The last clause, for thou shalt deal bountifully with me, states the confidence the whole psalm has been asking for rather than yet possessing.