Psalm 9

Psalms 9 and 10 run through the Hebrew alphabet together, one letter starting each new section — and the old Greek translation counted them as a single psalm, which is why Greek and Hebrew numbering differ from here on. An alphabetic pattern was a memory aid and a claim to completeness: the subject covered from A to Z.

"Muth-labben" in the heading appears nowhere else and probably names a tune. Translators have guessed at it for centuries; the honest answer is that the melody is lost.

"The gates of the daughter of Zion" were the town's public square. A walled city's gateway was a deep, chambered passage with benches, where court was held, deals were witnessed, news traveled, and crowds gathered. Praising God "in the gates" meant doing it where the whole town transacted its business, not in a private room.

Verse 6 pictures destructions come to a perpetual end, cities uprooted, their very memory perished. That was literal warfare in the ancient Near East. A defeated town could be burned, its walls pulled down, and its name struck from record — and archaeologists still dig through the ash layers those campaigns left behind.