Psalm 28

"When I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle" names a direction and a posture. The oracle is the innermost room — the most holy place where the ark stood — and Israelites prayed facing it. Raised open hands were the standard prayer position across the ancient Near East; it is the gesture carved on reliefs from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and it means both appeal and empty-handedness.

"Lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit" uses the word for a cistern or shaft. Judean towns cut bottle-shaped cisterns into the limestone to store winter rain, and empty ones doubled as prisons — Joseph was thrown into one, and so was Jeremiah, who sank into the mud at the bottom. A pit was a place you could not climb out of by yourself.

"Which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts" describes the greeting of the marketplace. Shalom was the ordinary word of welcome and of settled dealings; men who used it while planning harm were poisoning the one currency village life ran on.

The psalm closes with the Lord as "the saving strength of his anointed" and asks him to "feed them also, and lift them up for ever" — shepherd language applied to the nation, the same picture Psalm 23 puts on one man.