Psalms 51: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This psalm is a prayer for mercy from someone who admits he has sinned. He asks God to wipe out his guilt, wash him clean, create a clean heart in him, and not send him away, and he promises that if he is restored he will teach other wrongdoers and sing God's praise. He says the sacrifice God wants is a broken spirit and a heart that is sorry, not an animal offering. The prayer ends by asking God to do good to Zion and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, saying that then God will be pleased with the right kind of sacrifices on his altar.

Claim by Claim

1. 51:1
   • The speaker asks God to be gracious to him.
   • The speaker bases his plea on God's steadfast love.
   • The speaker bases his plea on the abundance of God's compassion.
   • The speaker asks God to wipe out his transgressions.
2. 51:2
   • The speaker asks God to wash him thoroughly from his iniquity.
   • The speaker asks God to cleanse him from his sin.
3. 51:3
   • The speaker says he knows his transgressions.
   • The speaker says his sin is continually before him.
4. 51:4
   • The speaker says he has sinned against God.
   • The speaker says he has sinned against God alone.
   • The speaker says he has done what is evil in God's sight.
   • The speaker says this is so that God may be shown right when God speaks.
   • The speaker says this is so that God may be shown blameless when God judges.
5. 51:5
   • The speaker says he was brought forth in iniquity.
   • The speaker says his mother conceived him in sin.
6. 51:6
   • God desires truth in the inward parts.
   • God will make the speaker know wisdom in the hidden inward place.
7. 51:7
   • The speaker asks God to purge him of sin with hyssop.
   • The speaker says that if God does so he will be clean.
   • The speaker asks God to wash him.
   • The speaker says that if God washes him he will be whiter than snow.
8. 51:8
   • The speaker asks God to make him hear joy and gladness.
   • The speaker asks that the bones God has crushed may rejoice.
   • God has crushed the speaker's bones.
9. 51:9
   • The speaker asks God to hide his face from his sins.
   • The speaker asks God to wipe out all his iniquities.
10. 51:10
    • The speaker asks God to create a clean heart in him.
    • The speaker asks God to renew a steadfast spirit within him.
11. 51:11
    • The speaker asks God not to cast him away from God's presence.
    • The speaker asks God not to take God's holy spirit from him.
12. 51:12
    • The speaker asks God to restore to him the joy of God's salvation.
    • The speaker asks God to sustain him with God's willing spirit.
13. 51:13
    • The speaker says he will then teach transgressors God's ways.
    • The speaker says sinners will turn back to God.
14. 51:14
    • The speaker asks God to deliver him from bloodguilt.
    • The speaker calls God the God of his salvation.
    • The speaker says his tongue will sing aloud of God's righteousness.
15. 51:15
    • The speaker asks the Lord to open his lips.
    • The speaker says his mouth will declare God's praise.
16. 51:16
    • God does not desire sacrifice.
    • The speaker says that otherwise he would give sacrifice.
    • God does not take pleasure in burnt offering.
17. 51:17
    • The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.
    • God will not despise a broken and crushed heart.
18. 51:18
    • The speaker asks God to do good to Zion in God's good pleasure.
    • The speaker asks God to build the walls of Jerusalem.
19. 51:19
    • God will then delight in sacrifices of righteousness.
    • God will then delight in burnt offering and whole burnt offering.
    • Bulls will then be offered on God's altar.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

51:1

"Lovingkindness" translates the Hebrew *chesed*, a word for loyal, committed love, the steady faithfulness expected of someone bound to you by a promise or a family tie. "Tender mercies" translates *rachamim*, which comes from the Hebrew word for a womb; it carries the sense of the feeling a parent has for a child. "Blot out" is the image of erasing writing from a scroll: ink was scraped or washed off the surface, so the plea is to remove a charge from a record.

51:2

The psalm uses three different Hebrew words in verses 1–3, and the King James Version keeps them distinct. "Transgression" (*pesha*) is rebellion, breaking faith with someone you owe loyalty to. "Iniquity" (*avon*) is what is bent or twisted, and also the guilt that clings to it. "Sin" (*chatta't*) is missing a mark, falling short of a target. The word for "wash" here is the one used for laundering cloth, which was cleaned by beating and treading it, not the word for bathing a body.

51:3

The King James says "I acknowledge my transgressions." To acknowledge means to say out loud that you did it. He is not making excuses.

51:4

"Justified" and "clear" are courtroom words. To be justified is to be declared in the right at the end of a case; "clear" means found blameless. The line is not about God forgiving, but about God's verdict against the speaker being shown to be the correct one.

51:5

"Shapen" is the King James rendering of a verb meaning to be brought forth or born. The two halves of the verse are Hebrew poetic parallelism, one idea stated twice, the second line pushing the timeframe further back, from birth to conception. Grammatically the guilt in both lines belongs to the speaker, not to his mother; the point is how far back his own condition reaches.

51:6

The two Hebrew words behind "inward parts" and "the hidden part" are rare and their exact sense is uncertain; both point to the concealed interior of a person, what no one else can see. The second line can be read either as a statement ("you teach me wisdom there") or as a request ("teach me wisdom there"); the Hebrew allows both.

51:7

Hyssop was a small bushy plant with hairy stems that held liquid well, used as a sprinkler in Israelite purification rites, for daubing blood on doorposts at the first Passover, for cleansing a person or house after a skin disease, and in the water used to purify anyone who had touched a corpse. The request is to be put through that ritual cleaning.

51:8

In Hebrew, bones stand for the whole physical frame and by extension the person's strength and vitality. "The bones which thou hast broken" is not a literal injury but a way of saying that God has crushed him bodily and completely.

51:9

Elsewhere in the Psalms, God hiding his face means abandonment and is something the speaker begs against. Here the object is different (it is the sins God is asked to look away from, not the person), so the phrase means to refuse to look at the offense rather than to withdraw from the offender.

51:10

The verb translated "create" is one that the Hebrew Bible uses only with God as its subject, the verb of the opening of Genesis. It is used of making something new, not of repairing something. "A right spirit" translates a word meaning firm, steady, set securely in place.

51:11

The Hebrew reads "the spirit of your holiness", God's own presence and power at work in a person. This exact phrase appears in only one other place in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 63). Readers in different traditions have understood it differently; the Hebrew wording itself says no more than that the spirit is God's.

51:12

"Free" in 1611 English means willing or freely giving, not unconstrained. The Hebrew word is related to the term for a freewill offering, something brought because the giver wants to, not because it is required. The spirit asked for is one that is glad to comply.

51:13

"Converted" in 1611 English simply meant turned around or brought back; it did not yet carry the modern sense of changing religion. The Hebrew verb is the ordinary word for returning, going back the way you came.

51:14

"Bloodguiltiness" translates a Hebrew plural, literally "bloods," which is the standard idiom for the guilt incurred by causing someone's death. The Hebrew heading that stands above this psalm links it to David after the prophet Nathan confronted him about Bathsheba, whose husband Uriah was killed on David's orders.

51:15

"Shew" is the old spelling of "show." Asking God to open his lips is a way of asking for the ability to speak and sing again.

51:16

A burnt offering was an animal placed entirely on the altar fire, with no part kept back for the priests or for a shared meal, the most costly and complete of the regular offerings. "Sacrifice" in the first line is the broader word covering offerings generally.

51:17

"Contrite" translates a Hebrew word meaning crushed or pulverised, the same imagery as the broken bones in verse 8, now applied to the inner person. "The sacrifices of God" means the sacrifices God accepts, not sacrifices offered by him.

51:18

Zion was originally the fortified hill David captured in Jerusalem; the name came to stand for the whole city and especially its temple. Verses 18–19 turn to the city's walls needing rebuilding and to sacrifice being welcome again, where verse 16 said God did not want sacrifice. Many readers, ancient and modern, have taken these last two verses as an addition made after Jerusalem's walls were destroyed in 586 BC; the text itself gives no signal either way.

51:19

"Sacrifices of righteousness" means offerings made properly, in the right manner. The King James distinguishes "burnt offering" from "whole burnt offering" because the Hebrew uses two words; the second stresses that the animal is consumed entirely. "Bullocks" are young bulls, the largest and most expensive animals that could be offered.