Mazmur 25:1

Psalm 25 ¹ 

By David.

25:1 O Lord, I come before you in prayer. ² 

Mazmur 86:4

86:4 Make your servant ³  glad,

for to you, O Lord, I pray! ⁴ 

Mazmur 143:8

143:8 May I hear about your loyal love in the morning, ⁵ 

for I trust in you.

Show me the way I should go, ⁶ 

because I long for you. ⁷ 

[25:1]  ¹ sn Psalm 25. The psalmist asks for divine protection, guidance and forgiveness as he affirms his loyalty to and trust in the Lord. This psalm is an acrostic; every verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, except for v. 18, which, like v. 19, begins with ר (resh) instead of the expected ק (qof). The final verse, which begins with פ (pe), stands outside the acrostic scheme.

[25:1]  ² tn Heb “to you, O Lord, my life I lift up.” To “lift up” one’s “life” to the Lord means to express one’s trust in him through prayer. See Pss 86:4; 143:8.

[86:4]  ³ tn Heb “the soul of your servant.”

[86:4]  ⁴ tn Heb “I lift up my soul.”

[143:8]  ⁵ tn Heb “cause me to hear in the morning your loyal love.” Here “loyal love” probably stands metonymically for an oracle of assurance promising God’s intervention as an expression of his loyal love.

[143:8]  sn The morning is sometimes viewed as the time of divine intervention (see Pss 30:5; 59:16; 90:14).

[143:8]  ⁶ sn The way probably refers here to God’s moral and ethical standards and requirements (see v. 10).

[143:8]  ⁷ tn Heb “for to you I lift up my life.” The Hebrew expression נָאָשׂ נֶפֶשׁ (na’as nefesh, “to lift up [one’s] life”) means “to desire; to long for” (see Deut 24:15; Prov 19:18; Jer 22:27; 44:14; Hos 4:8, as well as H. W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 16).