Psalm 144
Of David.
1 Blessed be the LORD, my rock,
who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle,
2 my rock and my fortress,
my stronghold and my deliverer,
my shield, in whom I take refuge,
who subdues the peoples under me.
3 O LORD, what are humans that you regard them,
or mortals that you think of them?
4 They are like a breath;
their days are like a passing shadow.
5 Bow your heavens, O LORD, and come down;
touch the mountains so that they smoke.
6 Make the lightning flash and scatter them;
send out your arrows and rout them.
7 Stretch out your hand from on high;
set me free and rescue me from the mighty waters,
from the hand of foreigners,
8 whose mouths speak lies
and whose right hands are false.
9 I will sing a new song to you, O God;
upon a ten-stringed harp I will play to you,
10 the one who gives victory to kings,
who rescues his servant David.
11 Rescue me from the cruel sword,
and deliver me from the hand of aliens,
whose mouths speak lies,
and whose right hands are false.
12 May our sons in their youth
be like plants full grown,
our daughters like corner pillars,
cut for the building of a palace.
13 May our barns be filled
with produce of every kind;
may our sheep increase by thousands,
by tens of thousands in our fields,
14 and may our cattle be heavy with young.
May there be no breach in the walls, no exile,
and no cry of distress in our streets.
15 Happy are the people to whom such blessings fall;
happy are the people whose God is the LORD.
Bolded words have comments on translation below.
My first memory of Psalm 144 was reading it be used as a prayer by Robert E. Lee in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels and later in the movie adaptation of the book Gettysburg. After reading these words I suspected they were a psalm and so I pulled out my bible and searched for the words and went on to read the entire psalm. This was many years before I was called to ministry and I found the opening words of the psalm a comforting phrase during my time as an officer in the U. S. Army. Many years later I would utilize this psalm during the funeral of my grandfather, Walter Clarkson, who had retired from the Army. Yet this psalm is never utilized in the Sunday readings in the Revised Common Lectionary which is why it took its quotation in a work of historical fiction for me to initially discover it.
My educated guess as to the reason this psalm is omitted from the lectionary is its opening line where the LORD prepares the speaker, David in the attribution, for combat. A reader in the United States in the twenty first century may be able to view conflict as a distant thing, but in the world of King David and throughout the story of Israel, military conflict was a frequent reality. As N.T. Wright comments in The New Testament and the People of God:
The land of Israel is a small country…But it has an importance out of all proportion to its size. Empires have fought over it. Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of its natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead. (Wright, 1992, p. 3)
Israel was never an empire with a massive army. The Deuteronomy 17:16 prohibits the king from going down to Egypt to acquire the horses and chariots that which many armies in the region utilized. The leaders and soldiers of Israel were expected to depend on the LORD rather than either the newest technology or the size of their army. David was a warrior king, and these initial verses make sense within the story of his life shaped by frequent moments of combat.
Psalm 144 echoes the language of several other psalms. Nancy deClaissé-Walford has a helpful summary of the echoes:
It contains echoes of a number of other psalms in the Psalter, including Pss. 8:4 in 144:3; 39: 5-6 in v. 4; 33:2 and 3 in v. 9; and 33:12 in v. 15. But most prevalent in Psalm 144 are connections to Psalm 18, another royal psalm: 18:1, 2, 34, 46, 47 to 144: 1, 2; 18:9 to v.5; 18:14 to v. 6; 18:16, 44, 45 to vv. 7, 11; and Psalm 18’s superscription to v. 10. (Nancy deClaisse-Walford, 2014, p. 984)
Many commentaries treat Psalm 144 as a collection of sayings taken from other psalms and stitched together to create a psalm for a new situation. Although it is possible that Psalm 144 was composed in this way I find it likely that the commonalities in language are reflective of the language used in worship, giving vocabulary and structure to their prayers. Both Psalm 18 and 144 are attributed to David and the commonalities may also be due to a common authorship.
Because of the similarities between Psalm 144 and Psalm 18 the NRSVue harmonizes verse two, unnecessarily in my opinion, with 18:2. This obscures the Hebrew of 144:2 which states “my hesed (steadfast love) and my fortress.” The hesed of God is a critical idea in Hebrew and although the LORD is called the rock in the previous verse, the introduction of steadfast love here makes sense within the context. God’s steadfast love and deliverance are placed alongside God’s functioning as a safe space (tower/fortress, shield, refuge) for the psalmist.
Verse three transitions to a place of wondering about God’s regard for the psalmist. The language echoes the wonder of Psalm 8:4, but the words for humans (Hebrew ‘adam) and mortals (Hebrew ben ‘enos) are both singular. “What is a man (person) that you care for them, a son of man (human) that you think of them?” They are hebel[1] (NRSVue ‘breath). Hebel is one of the favorite words of Ecclesiastes meaning breath, wind, vapor, mist. It is an evanescent word translated ‘vanity’ in Ecclesiastes. The individual human may be as temporary as the wind or mist or may pass like a shadow. Yet, God still takes notice of them and prepares them for the conflicts they must face.
Many of the themes in verses five to eight are similar to the language in Psalm 18, but here the psalmist is asking for the LORD to act where in Psalm 18 they are recounting how God acted. As the individual prepares for an upcoming conflict, they ask for God to act in powerful ways: making the mountains smoke and lightning flash (like God’s appearance at Sinai). They ask their God who is their rock, stronghold, and fortress to deliver them from a perilous situation described metaphorically as a rising flood. Yet, the threat in the moment of this psalm’s composition appears to be an external enemy, foreigners/aliens (Hebrew bene-nakar in verses 7 and 11), who are unreliable. Perhaps a treaty has been violated, or some other deceptions have placed the psalmist in a situation where they must fight this foe. If the psalm comes from King David, his reign was full of conflicts.
In response to the LORD’s anticipated action on behalf of the leader and the people the psalmist promises a new song to God. God’s deliverance of the king will be the inspiration of this new song of praise. The “evil sword” (NRSVue ‘cruel sword’) is an expression only found in this psalm. The sword has been used as a figure of speech for the words of the wicked in other psalms.[2] (Mays, 1994, p. 436) Yet, the language of this psalm seems to fit with the preparation for real and not metaphorical conflict. The impact of armed conflict on an individual, an army, and a people can be devastating and I read this psalm as asking for deliverance from the harm that the enemy’s weapons can inflict.
The psalm turns from the concerns of war to the longing for the prosperity of peace. The psalmist’s immediate concern may be God preparing them for the upcoming fight but they long to think about sons and daughters, the harvest of the field and the produce of the flocks. Verse fourteen likely speaks of the delivery of livestock without complications rather than a breech in the walls of the city (Nancy deClaisse-Walford, 2014, p. 988) but the overall sense of the verse is clear. A time when children can grow in peace, harvests are plentiful, animals are productive, and no one cries in distress. They prepare for war as they long for times of peace.
The psalm began with one word for blessing (Hebrew baruk) and the final verse now ends with another word for blessed (NRSVue ‘happy, Hebrew ‘asre). (Bellinger, 2014, p. 599) The Hebrew ‘asre[3] is frequently used in the psalms and wisdom literature and here the psalm ends with two statements beginning with ‘asre. Happy/blessed/content are the people on whom such blessings fall is linked with happy/blessed/content are the people whose God is the LORD. The psalmist proclaims that those who trust the LORD in the times of conflict will experience the blessing of the LORD in times of peace. Ultimately the psalm is one of trust that the LORD will both deliver and provide: be the rock, fortress, stronghold, and deliverer for the psalmist in their time of need and the one who gives the blessing of children, harvests, and flocks. They bless the LORD and they anticipate they will also experience blessing/happiness/contentment because they have trusted the LORD as their God.
[1] Sometimes written as hevel. In Hebrew the ‘b’ and ‘v’ sound are the same consonant. For more on this term see my comments on Ecclesiastes 1.
[3] The Hebrew ‘asre is translated as markarios in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This is the same Greek term used at the beginning of the Sermon of the Mount for ‘blessed’ in Matthew 5: 1-12.
