Psalm 71

This psalm is stitched together out of other psalms. Lines from the ones about a rock and a fortress, from the psalm of the pierced hands, from the psalms of the false witnesses — all reappear here in a new arrangement. That is what a lifetime of singing looks like from the inside. A man who has known the songbook for sixty years prays in its words without stopping to invent new ones.

Cast me not off in the time of old age was a real fear, not a mood. There was no pension and no institution for the old. An elderly Israelite depended on sons, on a share of the harvest, and on the law's provision for gleaning. An old man with no son and no field was one bad season from destitution.

The lines about being held up from the womb and taken out of the mother's body describe the world of the midwife and the household birth. A father acknowledged a newborn by taking it on his knees, and the child's future rested on being received. The psalm says God did the receiving.

Grey hair was legally honoured — the Law commands rising before the aged — and the psalm leans on that: now that I am old and greyheaded, do not forsake me. Then it names the instruments, the harp and the lyre, because the old man still intends to play.