5:7 But as for me, 1 because of your great faithfulness I will enter your house; 2
I will bow down toward your holy temple as I worship you. 3
18:35 You give me your protective shield; 4
your right hand supports me; 5
your willingness to help 6 enables me to prevail. 7
35:27 May those who desire my vindication shout for joy and rejoice!
May they continually say, 8 “May the Lord be praised, 9 for he wants his servant to be secure.” 10
48:2 It is lofty and pleasing to look at, 11
a source of joy to the whole earth. 12
Mount Zion resembles the peaks of Zaphon; 13
it is the city of the great king.
66:3 Say to God:
“How awesome are your deeds!
Because of your great power your enemies cower in fear 14 before you.
78:4 we will not hide from their 15 descendants.
We will tell the next generation
about the Lord’s praiseworthy acts, 16
about his strength and the amazing things he has done.
1 sn But as for me. By placing the first person pronoun at the beginning of the verse, the psalmist highlights the contrast between the evildoers’ actions and destiny, outlined in the preceding verses, with his own.
2 sn I will enter your house. The psalmist is confident that God will accept him into his presence, in contrast to the evildoers (see v. 5).
3 tn Heb “in fear [of] you.” The Hebrew noun יִרְאָה (yir’ah, “fear”), when used of fearing God, is sometimes used metonymically for what it ideally produces: “worship, reverence, piety.”
4 tn Heb “and you give to me the shield of your deliverance.”
sn You give me your protective shield. Ancient Near Eastern literature often refers to a god giving a king special weapons. See R. B. Chisholm, “An Exegetical and Theological Study of Psalm 18/2 Samuel 22” (Th.D. diss., Dallas Theological Seminary, 1983), 260-61.
5 tc 2 Sam 22:36 omits this line, perhaps due to homoioarcton. A scribe’s eye may have jumped from the vav (ו) prefixed to “your right hand” to the vav prefixed to the following “and your answer,” causing the copyist to omit by accident the intervening words (“your right hand supports me and”).
6 tn The MT of Ps 18:35 appears to read, “your condescension,” apparently referring to God’s willingness to intervene (cf. NIV “you stoop down”). However, the noun עֲנָוָה (’anavah) elsewhere means “humility” and is used only here of God. The form עַנְוַתְךָ (’anvatÿkha) may be a fully written form of the suffixed infinitive construct of עָנָה (’anah, “to answer”; a defectively written form of the infinitive appears in 2 Sam 22:36). In this case the psalmist refers to God’s willingness to answer his prayer; one might translate, “your favorable response.”
7 tn Heb “makes me great.”
8 tn The prefixed verbal forms in v. 27a are understood as jussives (see vv. 24b-26).
9 tn The prefixed verbal form is taken as a jussive, “may the
10 tn Heb “the one who desires the peace of his servant.”
11 tn Heb “beautiful of height.” The Hebrew term נוֹף (nof, “height”) is a genitive of specification after the qualitative noun “beautiful.” The idea seems to be that Mount Zion, because of its lofty appearance, is pleasing to the sight.
12 sn A source of joy to the whole earth. The language is hyperbolic. Zion, as the dwelling place of the universal king, is pictured as the world’s capital. The prophets anticipated this idealized picture becoming a reality in the eschaton (see Isa 2:1-4).
13 tn Heb “Mount Zion, the peaks of Zaphon.” Like all the preceding phrases in v. 2, both phrases are appositional to “city of our God, his holy hill” in v. 1, suggesting an identification in the poet’s mind between Mount Zion and Zaphon. “Zaphon” usually refers to the “north” in a general sense (see Pss 89:12; 107:3), but here, where it is collocated with “peaks,” it refers specifically to Mount Zaphon, located in the vicinity of ancient Ugarit and viewed as the mountain where the gods assembled (see Isa 14:13). By alluding to West Semitic mythology in this way, the psalm affirms that Mount Zion is the real divine mountain, for it is here that the
14 tn See Deut 33:29; Ps 81:15 for other uses of the verb כָּחַשׁ (kakhash) in the sense “cower in fear.” In Ps 18:44 the verb seems to carry the nuance “be weak, powerless” (see also Ps 109:24).
15 tn The pronominal suffix refers back to the “fathers” (“our ancestors,” v. 3).
16 tn Heb “to a following generation telling the praises of the