Psalm 55

Psalms 55:1-3

Give ear to my prayer, O God, and hide not thyself opens the psalm with the plainest request a suffering man can make, that God stay present and listening. The distress named in the next line, mourn in my complaint, and make a noise, describes audible grief rather than silent resignation. Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked names the outward cause before the inward pain is described, cast iniquity and hatred his only complaint against people who wronged him without provocation.

Psalms 55:4-6

The terror escalates by name, sore pained, terrors of death, fearfulness and trembling, horror, one word after another as if the one before were not strong enough for what he felt. Oh that I had wings like a dove is the most quoted line of the psalm, the wish to escape rather than to endure, offered honestly and without any pretense that faith removes the desire to flee. The dove's flight to rest names the goal plainly, simple quiet rather than victory over the enemy, which the psalm does not receive until its final verses.

Psalms 55:7-8

The wish continues into a wilderness named by contrast with the city he cannot escape, and Selah pauses the verse without the text explaining why, one more case of the mark's honest unknown that the reader is left to weigh rather than resolve. The windy storm and tempest describes the pressure driving the wish, language strong enough that some read it of the political storm around Absalom's revolt as much as of any weather. The escape is never taken, and the psalm's remaining verses turn instead to face what he first wished to flee.

Psalms 55:9-11

Divide their tongues asks God to do to the conspiracy what he once did at Babel, confuse the plotters' common purpose, a request several commentators connect by echo to Genesis 11 though the psalm itself never names that history. Violence and strife in the city moves the complaint from a private grief to a civic one, a community under siege from within by its own wickedness rather than by an outside army. The picture drawn in verses 10 and 11, mischief on the walls and deceit that will not leave the streets, describes a city sick at its center, its watchmen counted among the threats rather than the defense.

Psalms 55:12-14

The blow that breaks the psalm's composure is not an enemy's but a friend's, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance, someone who walked with him unto the house of God in company. Many of the older commentators, reading the psalm against David's flight from Absalom, name Ahithophel behind these verses, the counselor turned traitor of 2 Samuel 15 to 17, though the psalm's own words name no one. The tradition has long set this betrayal beside the one Christ himself named at Psalm 41:9, quoted of Judas at John 13:18, but that is a separate verse the New Testament itself cites, and Psalm 55 draws the same likeness only by the church's long reading, not by its own text or the apostles' words.

Psalms 55:15

This is one of the psalm's imprecatory lines, prayed against the conspirators named just before, the false friend and his circle, and the site's rule for such prayers holds here as everywhere: an imprecation belongs to Scripture as written and is never softened away, and it is never turned by a reader onto anyone living now. The readings differ on how literally quick into hell should be taken, a plea for sudden death like Korah's company swallowed alive, so several of the older commentators read it, or a vivid figure for utter and immediate ruin, so others read it. Either way the ground given is stated plainly, wickedness in their dwellings, judgment asked for a named cause rather than an unexplained hatred.

Psalms 55:16-19

As for me turns the psalm decisively away from the conspirators and back to its own confidence, matching resolve to whatever the city plots. Evening, and morning, and at noon fixes prayer to three set times in the day, a rhythm several commentators set beside Daniel's own three prayers at his open window. Selah marks another pause at verse 19, and the reason given there for the wicked's hardness, they have no changes, therefore they fear not God, reads their unbroken ease itself as what blinded them, a settled life mistaken for divine approval.

Psalms 55:20-21

The psalm returns once more to the false friend, now named by his own act, breaking a covenant rather than merely wounding a stranger. Verse 21 draws the portrait the whole psalm has been building toward, words smoother than butter and softer than oil while war sits in the heart and the words themselves are drawn swords, speech used as a weapon precisely because it never announces itself as one. The line has supplied language for treachery ever since, a smooth tongue over a hostile heart, without the psalm needing to name its object beyond what has already been said.

Psalms 55:22-23

Cast thy burden upon the Lord turns the whole complaint into instruction, addressed now to any reader rather than to God alone, a movement from private prayer to public counsel that closes the psalm's argument. The promise attached to it, he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved, answers the earlier wish to fly away with something better than escape, a settled confidence that outlasts the threat. The last verse leaves the conspirators to their own end, bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days, and closes instead on the psalm's own resolve, but I will trust in thee.