¹tn Heb “O Lord God of my deliverance.” In light of the content of the psalm, this reference to God as the one who delivers seems overly positive. For this reason some emend the text to yT!u=W~v! yh^Oa^, “[O Lord] my God, I cry out.” See v. 13.
²tn Heb “[by] day I cry out, in the night before you.”
³tn Heb “may my prayer come before you.” The prefixed verbal form is understood as a jussive, indicating the psalmist’s desire or prayer.
⁴tn Heb “turn your ear.”
⁵tn Or “my soul.”
⁶tn Heb “and my life approaches Sheol.”
⁷tn Heb “I am considered with.”
⁸tn Heb “the pit.” The noun rwb (“pit,” “cistern”) is sometimes used of the grave and/or the realm of the dead.
⁹tn Heb “I am like a man [for whom] there is no help.”
¹⁰tn Heb “set free.”
¹¹tn Heb “from your hand.”
¹²tn The noun rwb (“pit,” “cistern”) is sometimes used of the grave and/or the realm of the dead. See v. 4.
¹³tn Heb “[I am] confined and I cannot go out.”
¹⁴tn Heb “I spread out my hands to you.” Spreading out the hands toward God was a prayer gesture (see Exod 9:29, 33; 1 Kgs 8:22, 38; 2 Chr 6:12-13, 29; Ezra 9:15; Job 11:13; Isa 1:15). The words “in prayer” have been supplied in the translation to clarify this.
¹⁵tn Heb “Rephaim,” a term that refers to those who occupy the land of the dead (see Isa 14:9; 26:14, 19).
¹⁶tn Heb “in Abaddon,” a name for Sheol (see BDB 2). The noun is derived from a verbal root meaning “to perish,” “to die.”
¹⁷tn Heb “known.”
¹⁸tn Heb “darkness,” here a title for Sheol.
¹⁹tn Heb “forgetfulness.” The noun, which occurs only here in the OT, is derived from a verbal root meaning “to forget” (BDB 674).
sn The rhetorical questions in vv. 10-12 expect the answer, “Of course not!”
²⁰tn Heb “[why] do you hide your face from me?”
²¹tn Heb “and am dying from youth.”
²²tn Heb “I carry your horrors [?].” The meaning of the Hebrew form hnwpa, which occurs only here in the OT, is unclear. It may be an adverb meaning “very much” (BDB 67), though some prefer to emend the text to hgwpa (“I am numb”) from the verb gwp (see Pss 38:8; 77:2).
²³tn Heb “passes over me.”
²⁴tn Heb “they encircle me together.”
²⁵tn Heb “you cause to be far from me friend and neighbor.”
²⁶tn Heb “those known by me, darkness.”
²⁷sn Psalm 89. The psalmist praises God as the sovereign creator of the world. He recalls God’s covenant with David, but then laments that the promises of the covenant remain unrealized. The covenant promised the Davidic king military victories, but the king has now been subjected to humiliating defeat.
²⁸tn The meaning of the Hebrew term lykcm (“maskil”) is uncertain. See the note on the phrase “well-written song” in the superscription of Ps 88.