1 Samuel 2:9

2:9 He watches over ¹  his holy ones, ² 

but the wicked are made speechless in the darkness,

for it is not by one’s own strength that one prevails.

Mazmur 94:17

94:17 If the Lord had not helped me,

I would have laid down in the silence of death. ³ 

[2:9]  ¹ tn Heb “guards the feet of.” The expression means that God watches over and protects the godly in all of their activities and movements. The imperfect verbal forms in v. 9 are understood as indicating what is typically true. Another option is to translate them with the future tense. See v. 10b.

[2:9]  ² tc The translation follows the Qere and many medieval Hebrew mss in reading the plural (“his holy ones”) rather than the singular (“his holy one”) of the Kethib.

[94:17]  ³ tn Heb “If the Lord [were] not my help, quickly my life would have lain down in silence.” The psalmist, perhaps speaking as the nation’s representative, recalls God’s past intervention. For other examples of conditional sentences with the term לוּלֵי (luley, “if not”) in the protasis and a perfect verbal form in the apodosis, see Pss 119:92 and 124:2-5.