Only

vv. 1–2My soul is silence; I shall not be greatly moved

The Authorised Version supplies a verb that the Hebrew does not have. My soul waiteth upon God is smooth English for a clause with no verb in it at all: only — toward God — silence — my soul. The particle first, then the direction, then the word דּוּמִיָּה, and only then the soul it belongs to. The psalm opens by naming a condition, not an activity.

And the condition is not emptiness. דּוּמִיָּה is silence, stillness, the state of a man who has stopped talking — and the Psalter uses the root for a posture, not a mood: “Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him” is literally be silent to the LORD (Ps. 37:7). Jeremiah says “it is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD” (Lam. 3:26). Isaiah offered it to a nation shopping for allies — “in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength” — and recorded the answer in the same breath: “and ye would not” (Isa. 30:15). What is being given up in all three places is not speech. It is the search for a second option.

Notice also that the silence has a direction. It is silence toward God, which leaves the psalmist entirely free to raise his voice somewhere else — and in three verses’ time he will, at some length, at the men undermining him. It also leaves him free to say, in verse 8, pour out your heart. Silence toward God does not mean saying nothing to God. It means having nowhere else to go.

Then the first refrain, and its three metaphors are all stone. A צוּר is not a stone you pick up but the cliff you stand on, and Moses’ last song sets the word in its proper contest: “He is the Rock, his work is perfect”, and then “their rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges” (Deut. 32:4, 31). Paul puts a name to it: “that Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). The מִשְׂגָּב, the high tower, is the same word Psalm 46 uses in its refrain; the word study is in the Psalm 46 lesson, and this lesson borrows it rather than repeating it.

Which leaves one word, and it is the one to keep a finger on. I shall not be greatly moved. The verb is מוֹט, to totter — the verb Psalm 46 uses of mountains and kingdoms — and רַבָּה, greatly, is doing honest work here. He is not claiming he will not be shaken. He is claiming he will not be shaken off. Read verse 6 when you get there and see whether the word is still in the sentence.

vv. 3–4A bowing wall; they bless and curse

This is the one place the psalm raises its voice, and it is worth letting the room hear the change. Two verses of stone and silence, and then he turns round and says how long?

The second half of verse 3 is genuinely hard, and honesty about that is better than a confident paraphrase. The Authorised Version reads it as a sentence passed on the attackers — ye shall be slain all of you — and then the images: קִיר נָטוּי, a leaning wall, and גָּדֵר הַדְּחוּיָה, a fence that has been shoved. Many read those two images as describing the conspirators rather than their victim, and the sense is sharper that way: you are the thing about to fall. Either construction leaves the picture intact. A wall already out of plumb does not need much of a push.

Verse 4 tells you what they are actually doing, and the psalm’s own word turns up again: אַךְ. They only consult to cast him down. His only is a rock; theirs is a project. They are as single-minded as he is, and what they are working at is מַשְׂאֵת — his height, the noun from the verb to lift: his standing, the place he has been raised to. They want him down off it.

And the method is not force but courtesy. They delight in lies: they bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly. The Hebrew is blunter than it sounds — they take pleasure in a כָּזָב, a lie — and the mouth and the inward parts are set against each other in the same clause. The Psalter knows this animal well: “which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts” (Ps. 28:3); “the words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart” (Ps. 55:21). Our Lord was betrayed with a kiss and asked about the method rather than the betrayal: “betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48). Then Selah, and the room sits with it.

What the strophe does for the argument is set the weights. He is not pretending these men are harmless; they are numerous, organised and pleasant. He is saying they are not load-bearing.

vv. 5–6Wait thou only upon God

Put verses 5–6 beside verses 1–2 and they look like a repeat. They are not. Two things have changed, and both of them are the lesson.

The first is grammatical. Verse 1 had דּוּמִיָּה, the noun — silence, my soul — a man describing his own condition. Verse 5 has דּוֹמִּי, the imperative: be silent, my soul. The description has become an order, and he is giving it to himself. In between, he has spoken his mind to his enemies. Having said his piece out loud, he turns on his own soul and tells it to stop.

This is the Psalter’s most characteristic manoeuvre and it is worth naming in the room, because most people do the opposite. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God” (Ps. 42:5, 11; 43:5). “Bless the LORD, O my soul” (Ps. 103:1). “Return unto thy rest, O my soul” (Ps. 116:7). The believer is not the audience of his own inner life. He is expected to preach to it, and to be quite firm.

The second change is one word, and it is missing. Verse 2: I shall not be greatly moved. Verse 6: I shall not be moved. The Authorised Version preserves the difference exactly — רַבָּה is in the Hebrew of the first and absent from the second. Same clause, same verb, one qualifier gone.

Ask the room what happened in between, because the answer is instructive for being so thin. No new information arrived. The conspirators are exactly where they were; nobody has been vindicated, nothing has been resolved, and the psalm is still four verses from the end. What happened is that he said the true thing out loud, and then told his own soul to be quiet and listen to it. That is all. And the qualifier drops.

There is one more small movement worth pointing at. Verse 1 said from him cometh my salvation — what he has. Verse 5 says my expectation is from him — תִּקְוָה, the noun from the waiting verb, what he does not yet have. He has moved from possession to expectation, and got more confident, not less, in the moving.

v. 7My glory, my strength, my refuge

One verse, four nouns, and a single preposition doing all the work: salvation, glory, the rock of my strength, refuge — and every one of them kept in God. It reads like a man taking inventory after a threat and finding that everything on the list is stored in the same place.

כָּבוֹד is the surprise. Glory is a strange thing for a man to claim for himself, and he is not claiming it: he is saying where it is kept. It answers verse 4 precisely. They were working to cast him down from his מַשְׂאֵת, the height he had been given; he replies that his weight is not held where their hands can reach it. David says the same thing in the morning after fleeing his own son: “thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head” (Ps. 3:3).

מַחְסִי, my refuge, is Psalm 46’s opening word, and again the lesson points rather than repeats. What matters here is that the psalm has just spent six verses on rock and tower and now adds refuge — the place you run into — and says that it, too, is in God and nowhere else. And עֹז, the strength of which God is the rock, will come back in the last verse as the content of what God actually said.

v. 9Low degree and high degree, lighter than vanity

The sixth and last אַךְ, and it lands on men. Everything the psalm has said about God it now says, in reverse, about the alternatives.

The two phrases the Authorised Version renders low degree and high degree are בְּנֵי־אָדָם, sons of Adam — men as earth-creatures, the ordinary word — and בְּנֵי אִישׁ, sons of a man in the sense of a man of standing. The commoner is הֶבֶל, a breath; the notable is כָּזָב, a lie — which is the very word used of what the conspirators delighted in at verse 4. Note that the psalm is not flattering the poor at the expense of the great, or the reverse. It weighs both, and neither registers.

הֶבֶל is the word Ecclesiastes repeats until the reader gives in: vapour, breath, the mist off a pond. The usual English vanity suggests worthlessness, and that is not quite it. A breath is not worthless — you are breathing one now. It is unholdable. You cannot lean on it, and that is the psalm’s complaint about men, including good ones.

Then the image, which is exact and easy to read past. בְּמֹאזְנַיִם לַעֲלוֹת — in the balances, to go up. On a two-pan balance, the lighter pan is the one that rises. Put the whole of humanity in together — יָחַד, altogether, high and low in the same pan — and the pan goes up. Isaiah weighs the nations the same way: “the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance” (Isa. 40:15). Belshazzar had the result written on his own wall in the middle of a party: “TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting” (Dan. 5:27). And Proverbs says whose scales they are: “a just weight and balance are the LORD‘s” (Prov. 16:11).

This is not misanthropy, and the lesson should say so before someone takes it that way. It is arithmetic in the service of verse 8. He has just told the room to trust God at all times; verse 9 is the reason there is no competing offer.

v. 10If riches increase, set not your heart

The verb is the one from verse 8, now negated: trust ye in him — בִּטְחוּ — and trust ye not in this. The psalm never suggests you might stop trusting. It assumes you will not, and spends its time on the question of where.

אַל־תֶּהְבָּלוּ is worth showing the room, because it is a verb built out of the noun in verse 9. Literally: do not become vapour. The Authorised Version’s become not vain is accurate and loses the joint. You take the character of the thing you trust — “they that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them” (Ps. 115:8) — and Jeremiah states the rule with the same word twice over: “they have walked after vanity, and are become vain” (Jer. 2:5). Trust a breath, become one. That is the most practical sentence in the psalm.

The second half is the sharper warning, because it is not about theft. יָנוּב is an agricultural word — to bear fruit, to yield — so the case is honest increase: the business grows, the investment comes good, the year goes well. That is the moment the psalm chooses to speak, and what it forbids is not the money but the attachment: אַל־תָּשִׁיתוּ לֵב, set not the heart. Moses warned a nation about to become comfortable in exactly this order — full houses, then “thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God” (Deut. 8:12–14). Solomon: “he that trusteth in his riches shall fall” (Prov. 11:28). Our Lord told the story of a man whose ground brought forth plentifully and who never once did anything dishonest (Luke 12:15–21). And Paul gives Timothy the charge in the psalm’s own terms: “that they trust not in uncertain riches, but in the living God” (1 Tim. 6:17).

vv. 11–12Once, twice: power, and mercy

The psalm closes on a standard Hebrew form, the numerical saying: once … twice, as Job has it — “God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not” (Job 33:14; cf. 40:5) — and Proverbs — “these six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven” (Prov. 6:16). The form is not arithmetic. It signals that the last item in the list carries the weight.

So: God said one thing, and what the psalmist heard was two. First, עֹז — power belongeth unto God. That is the word from verse 7, and it settles verses 3–4: the leaning wall has no strength that was not lent. Second, and this is where the sentence turns: also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth חֶסֶד — covenant mercy, loyal love, the steadfastness God binds himself to. Power without mercy would be a threat. Mercy without power would be a kind wish. The psalm refuses to let the room have either on its own, and says they were one utterance heard properly.

Watch the pronouns in the last two verses, because the psalm does one more thing before it stops. For eleven verses God has been spoken about — he is my rock, God is a refuge for us. In verse 12 the psalmist turns and speaks to him: also unto thee, O Lord. And this is the only place in the psalm where the title אֲדֹנָי appears — my Master. A meditation that began in silence ends in address.

Which leaves the last clause, and it is the hard one: for thou renderest to every man according to his work. Paul quotes it (Rom. 2:6), our Lord quotes it (Matt. 16:27), the Revelation ends on it (Rev. 22:12), and Proverbs has it already (Prov. 24:12). It is not an intrusion of bookkeeping into a psalm about trust. It is the ground of the trust: a God who has the power to act and the character to repay is the only surface in the psalm that will bear weight. What that clause does and does not mean for justification is the subject of the next section, and it should not be left to an aside.