Psalm 38
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Speaks with:Psalms 35×6Psalms 6×5Psalms 32×3Psalms 22×3Psalms 31×2Psalms 40×2
Summary
Chapter summary
The third penitential psalm: 'thine arrows stick fast in me.' Wounds fester because of foolishness; friends and companions stand aloof from his plague; kinsmen stand afar off. He is as a deaf man who hears not, a man with no arguments left: 'for in thee, O Jehovah, do I hope: thou wilt answer.' Sin is owned plainly: 'I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin.' The last words are the sick man's whole theology: 'Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation.'
Context
Poetry · David, Asaph, Sons of Korah, others — Psalms overview
The world behind this chapter
Psalms 38The history
The heading "to bring to remembrance" may connect the psalm with the memorial portion of a grain offering, which the priest burned as a reminder before God. It sets the whole prayer in a sanctuary frame.
The symptoms are described without decoration: no soundness in the flesh, no rest in the bones, wounds that stink and fester, loins filled with a burning, the heart pounding, the sight failing. Festering sores in that climate, without antiseptic, could go septic quickly; the Law's inspection rules for skin disease existed because a spreading sore was both a medical and a community emergency.
"My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off." That distance was partly fear of contagion and partly law: a person declared unclean by the priest lived apart, outside the camp or town, until examined again. The isolation was official.
Meanwhile "they also that seek after my life lay snares for me." Illness stripped a man of the ability to defend his household or press his case at the gate, and rivals moved on a sick man's property and standing the way they would on a widow's.
What it meant to them
The psalm does not argue that the suffering is unfair. It says plainly, "there is no rest in my bones because of my sin," and asks only that the correction not be delivered in wrath.
What Israel took from it was a way to be honest about deserved trouble without despairing — the sufferer is deaf and dumb to his accusers because his hope is set on God to answer for him.
Sources cited
- Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David on Psalm 38
- Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Psalms 38. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.