Psalm 4

The heading "to the chief Musician on Neginoth" is a performance note. Neginoth means stringed instruments — the lyre and the harp, plucked instruments built with a wooden frame and gut strings. Israel's worship was not quiet; the Chronicles list whole guilds of Levites appointed to play, and a psalm handed to the director was a psalm entering the national repertoire.

"Corn and wine" is shorthand for the two harvests that decided whether a family ate that year: the grain gathered in late spring and the grape crop pressed in early autumn. When the psalm says many people ask who will show them any good, and answers with a joy greater than the season when grain and new wine increase, it is measuring against the happiest week on the farming calendar.

The instruction to commune with your own heart upon your bed fits how people slept. In an ordinary village house the family slept together on mats or a raised platform at one end of a single room, animals often stabled at the other. Night was long, dark, and undistracted — no lamp oil was wasted on a wakeful mind.

"Offer the sacrifices of righteousness" assumes the whole system of altar offerings. An Israelite brought an animal or grain to the sanctuary, and the psalm's point is that the offering has to come from a right life, not stand in for one.