Out of the Depths

The Psalm

A Song of degrees.

1. Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD.
2. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.
3. If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?
4. But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.
5. I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
6. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
7. Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.
8. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

Setting and occasion

The superscription is three words long and it is the only thing the psalm volunteers about itself: A Song of degrees, שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת — a song of the goings-up. Fifteen psalms carry it, Psalms 120 to 134, and they travel as a set: a short, plain, portable collection with nothing in it that needs a choir. Four of the fifteen name David and one names Solomon. This is not one of them. What the degrees are has three standing answers — the pilgrim roads up to Jerusalem for the three feasts, “whither the tribes go up” (Ps. 122:4); the fifteen steps in the temple between the court of the women and the court of Israel, on which the Levites are said to have sung them (Mishnah, Middoth 2:5); and the going up out of Babylon. The first carries the collection best and does not exclude the rest. It matters here only for one reason: this is a travelling psalm, written to be sung by people who are on their way somewhere and are not there yet.

The church gave it a second name from the first two words of the Latin, De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine — Psalm 129 in the Vulgate’s numbering, and the De profundis ever after. It is the sixth of the seven penitential psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143), a grouping already in use in the sixth century, when Cassiodorus names them, and fixed in Western devotion from then on. Its particular home became the burial of the dead — the Office of the Dead, the graveside, the prayer said for the departed — which is a fair instinct about a psalm that begins in the deep and ends in redemption, though it has the side-effect of making people think the psalm is about dying. It is not. It is about a living man with a bad conscience.

Beyond that, the psalm withholds everything. No author, no occasion, no enemy, no city, no year, and no account of what the depths are. The ma’amaqqim of verse 1 are the deep waters of Psalm 69 — the flood, the mire, the place where a man cannot stand — but here the metaphor is left standing empty, and the reader is not told what filled it. Verse 3 makes a reasonable guess possible: whatever else is in the depths with him, his own iniquities are. As with Psalm 62, the anonymity is not a gap in the record but a feature of the writing. A psalm that named its trouble could be sung by the people who share it. This one can be sung by anybody who is in any depth at all, which is why it has been.

One thing in the psalm is invisible in translation and worth pointing at before the exposition begins, because the lesson keeps returning to it. Psalm 130 moves between the two divine names more tightly than any psalm in this series. Five times it says the covenant name — יְהוָה in verses 1, 5 and twice in 7, and its short form יָהּ in verse 3 — and three times it says אֲדֹנָי, my Master, in verses 2, 3 and 6. Verse 3 has both, in that order, in one line. The Authorised Version marks the difference by case: LORD in small capitals for the covenant name, Lord in ordinary case for the other. Read the psalm aloud and the alternation does something the argument needs. The man cries to the God who made promises, and asks his questions of the God who owns him.

The shape of the psalm

The psalm is eight verses in four couplets, and the couplets are so clean that nobody argues about them: the cry (1–2), the question and its answer (3–4), the waiting (5–6), the summons to Israel (7–8). There is no Selah to divide it and no refrain to hold it together. What holds it together is a verb, used in two senses, which the Authorised Version is obliged to translate two different ways.

Take the first two rows together, because that is the psalm’s spine. In verse 3 God is asked not to שׁמר iniquities — not to keep them, watch them, hold them on file. In verse 6 the man himself is שֹׁמְרִים, one of the watchers, keeping his watch through the dark for a morning he is sure of. The AV has to say mark in the one place and watch in the other, and the English reader never sees that the psalm has turned the same word around. The logic it hides is the logic of the whole psalm: because God does not keep watch over sins, a man is free to keep watch for God. Nothing else in the eight verses does as much work.

Around that spine the psalm moves like this.

Two things in that third column are worth naming now. The first is that the psalm never turns to face an enemy — there is no one in it but the man and God until verse 7, and then the congregation. The second is the seam itself. Up to verse 6 every verb is first person singular: I have cried, I wait, my soul waits, my soul waiteth. From verse 7 there is no I left in the psalm at all. What a man found in the depths he turns round and hands to the nation, in the imperative — and the word he hands over, יַחֵל, hope, is the same word he used of himself in verse 5. It is not a second centre, and it does not get the gold rule. It is the psalm doing in public what it has just done in private.

Luther’s Aus tiefer Not, and the Pauline psalms

The Psalm 46 lesson says in passing that Luther wrote close metrical psalms when he wanted to, and that Aus tiefer Not keeps to Psalm 130 line by line. This is where that debt gets paid. Ein feste Burg is a sermon on Psalm 46 that borrows an image and then preaches a different battle; Aus tiefer Not is the other thing Luther could do, and the difference between the two is worth showing a congregation that thinks of him as one kind of writer.

He had been at this psalm for a long time before he set it to music. His lectures on the seven penitential psalms went out in 1517 — among the first things he published — and he revised and reissued them in 1525. Asked later which psalms were his favourites, he is reported to have answered the Pauline psalms, and, pressed for the list, to have named 32, 51, 130 and 143: they teach, he said, that the forgiveness of sins is granted without the law and without works. The saying comes down through the Table Talk, which is other men’s record of his conversation rather than anything he wrote for print, and it should be quoted as what it is. What it reports is at least consistent with what he did. All four are penitential psalms, four of the seven — and it is worth noticing in the room which three he passed over. Psalms 6, 38 and 102 mostly ache. The four he kept are the four that argue.

The hymn

Luther wrote Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir around 1523 and it was in print the next year, in the first Lutheran hymnals. It appears in 1524 in two forms and the difference matters: four stanzas in the Nuremberg Achtliederbuch and the Erfurt Enchiridion, and five in Johann Walter’s Wittenberg choir book, where the original second stanza is opened out into two. Use the five. The extra stanza is where the doctrine is, and a four-stanza text will leave a room wondering why the hymn is on a Reformation list at all.

The tune is Luther’s own. AUS TIEFER NOT is 87.87.887, in German bar form — two matching Stollen and a longer Abgesang — and it is Phrygian, which is why it sounds ancient and unresolved to ears trained on major and minor. It opens by dropping a fifth on the word tief, which is as plain a piece of text-painting as the sixteenth century produced; Erik Routley called the melody one of Luther’s most profound inspirations. Its earliest liturgical use was chiefly as a burial hymn, which is an inheritance from the De profundis and not an invention of Luther’s. It was sung at his own funeral at Halle on 20 February 1546; the hymnological literature also reports it at the funeral of Frederick the Wise in 1525, and that one is worth passing on as a report rather than a document.

Spelling varies between editions and centuries; the lines above follow the common modern printing. For a public-domain English text, Catherine Winkworth’s second translation is the usual choice — “Out of the depths I cry to Thee; Lord, hear me, I implore Thee!”, made for The Chorale Book for England (1863), where it is no. 40 and keeps Luther’s metre. Her earlier Lyra Germanica version (1855) alters the metre and will not sit on Luther’s tune. Richard Massie’s “From depths of woe I raise to Thee” (1854) is plainer and closer to the German. Name whichever you use, as this lesson does.

So: what crosses over, and what does not. Almost all of the psalm crosses — the depths, the ears, the question, the forgiveness, the fear, the word, the night, the morning, Israel, and the abundance. That is a remarkably high rate for a metrical paraphrase, and it is why this hymn can be used as a setting of the psalm in a way Ein feste Burg cannot. What Luther adds is vocabulary the Hebrew does not have: Verdienst, merit, and unser Tun, our doing. Psalm 130 never mentions works. It rules them out by implication in verse 3 — a man whose record would sink him is not in a position to produce a credit — but the word never appears. Luther supplies the term the sixteenth century was arguing about and puts it where the psalm’s logic already pointed. One other import is worth naming from the pulpit if the hymn is sung: stanza 4 describes Israel as der aus dem Geist erzeuget ward, begotten of the Spirit, which is John 3 brought in to define who the Israel of verse 7 now is.

What the psalm does and does not teach

October’s heading for this psalm is justification by faith, and the heading is right about where the psalm belongs and can be made to overreach. It is worth saying both halves plainly, because a lesson that overclaims here will be caught out by anyone who reads the eight verses afterwards.

The psalm teaches, in its own words, that forgiveness is with God and nowhere else (v. 4, and the preposition is the point); that it is not earned, because verse 3 has already closed that door on everyone alive; that it rests on his word and not on the sinner’s estimate of himself (v. 5); that it produces fear rather than dissolving it (v. 4); that it is a purchase, not a waiver (v. 7, פְדוּת); and that it reaches all the iniquities of the people it reaches (v. 8). That is a great deal, and every line of it is in the text.

What the psalm does not do is use the vocabulary of imputation. It never says that the righteousness of another is reckoned to the sinner. When Paul wants that, he does not quote Psalm 130; he quotes Psalm 32 — “blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven” — and builds Romans 4:6–8 on it, on the strength of a psalm that says God does not impute sin. That psalm is on the same October list and now has a lesson of its own, which takes up the question this one leaves standing; this one should stop at its own last verse. The confessions make the same division visible. The Shorter Catechism, asked what justification is, answers with “the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone” (WSC 33), and the Heidelberg, asked about the forgiveness of sins, reaches immediately for the same word — God “will graciously impute to me the righteousness of Christ” (HC 56, and Q. 60 for the whole). Psalm 130 gets a congregation to there is forgiveness with thee, and gets it there honestly. The catechisms answer the question the psalm leaves standing: how forgiveness can be with him and still reach me.

Read alongside, four references earn their place: WCF 11 and WSC 33 on justification; WCF 15 and WSC 87 on repentance unto life, which is verse 4 in catechism form — “apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ” producing grief, hatred of sin and turning; HC 56 and 60 on forgiveness and righteousness; and WCF 18 on assurance, for the waiting of verses 5 and 6, where a man is certain of the morning and has not seen it yet.

Singing Psalm 130

Eight verses, no refrain, no Selah, and nothing in it to shout. This is the shortest psalm in the October set and the easiest to sing badly, because a room will take a short psalm at a brisk pace and the whole point of verses 5 and 6 is that the night is long. Sing it slowly enough that the waiting is audible.

Metre and settings

Check metre and stanza breaks against the edition in your hands. For this psalm check one thing more: whether the setting keeps “that thou mayest be feared” at the end of verse 4. Some paraphrases drop it, or soften it to reverence, and a congregation singing the psalm without it has been handed a different psalm.

Suggested CM tunes

• MARTYRDOM — the traditional Scottish partner for this psalm; minor, weighted, and unhurried enough for verses 5 and 6.
• ST. MARY — old and plain, with no brightness in it to fight the text.
• KILMARNOCK — Dougall’s tune; grave, and it carries the long vowels of “out of the depths” well.
• BANGOR — Tans’ur; austere, and the right size for eight verses sung straight through.
• DUNFERMLINE — the plainer option, quickly learned, for a room meeting this psalm for the first time.

Confirm the metre against your own book before printing; tune names travel between metres more often than anyone expects.

Leading suggestion

The psalm has one joint and everything depends on it, so let the singing put the joint where the psalm does. Sing verses 1 to 3 and stop. Read verse 4 aloud, one voice, without comment — the room has just sung a question that has no answer, and the answer should arrive as speech before it arrives as music. Then sing verses 4 to 8 through without a break.

Do not tidy the repetition in verse 6. A leader’s instinct is to vary the second more than they that watch for the morning, and the right instinct is the opposite: sing it the same way twice and let it be as long as it is. That is what a night on a wall is like.

If you are singing Luther’s hymn as well, sing both and say which is which. The psalm is the text; the hymn is a sixteenth-century pastor’s reading of it, and a very close one — but Verdienst and unser Tun are his words, not the psalmist’s, and a congregation is better off knowing that than not. Verse 4 is the place to point out that Luther kept the clause about fear when he could easily have let it go.

In Reformation month this is the third of the October psalms, and the three belong together in a way worth saying aloud. Psalm 46 is sung from inside a city that will not be moved; Psalm 62 is sung by a man being quietly pushed, who finds that God is the only thing that will bear weight; Psalm 130 is sung from under the water by a man whose trouble is himself. A fortress, a rock, and a debt — and the same God in all three. If the month allows only one of them, this is the one that gets furthest down.

The psalm’s own settings, recordings and music sheets are collected on its psalter page, with recordings here, as they are added.