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Psalms 9: What the Passage Says

52 claims across 20 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Psalms 9 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The singer thanks the LORD with his whole heart and recounts how God turned back his enemies and upheld his cause. The psalm describes the LORD as a lasting king who judges the world fairly and is a safe place for those who are crushed, and it says the nations who dug pits have fallen into them. It ends with a plea for mercy at the gates of death and a call for God to rise up and judge the nations so they know they are only human.

Claim by Claim

  1. 9:1
    • The speaker will give thanks to the LORD with his whole heart.
    • The speaker will recount all of the LORD's wonderful deeds.
  2. 9:2
    • The speaker will be glad and rejoice in the LORD.
    • The speaker will sing praise to the LORD's name.
    • The speaker addresses the LORD as the Most High.
  3. 9:3
    • The speaker's enemies turn back.
    • When his enemies turn back, they stumble and perish before the LORD's presence.
  4. 9:4
    • The LORD has upheld the speaker's right and his cause.
    • The LORD sat on a throne.
    • The LORD judged righteously.
  5. 9:5
    • The LORD has rebuked the nations.
    • The LORD has destroyed the wicked.
    • The LORD has blotted out their name forever and ever.
  6. 9:6
    • The verse addresses the enemy.
    • Ruins have come to a perpetual end.
    • Cities have been uprooted.
    • It is ambiguous whether the destroyer of the cities is the enemy addressed or the LORD.
    • The memory of them has perished.
  7. 9:7
    • The LORD remains enthroned forever.
    • The LORD has established his throne for judgment.
  8. 9:8
    • The LORD will judge the world in righteousness.
    • The LORD will administer judgment to the peoples with equity.
  9. 9:9
    • The LORD will be a high stronghold for the oppressed.
    • The LORD will be a stronghold in times of trouble.
  10. 9:10
    • Those who know the LORD's name will trust in him.
    • The LORD has not forsaken those who seek him.
  11. 9:11
    • The hearers are commanded to sing praises to the LORD.
    • The LORD dwells in Zion.
    • The hearers are commanded to declare his deeds among the peoples.
  12. 9:12
    • The one who requires an accounting for bloodshed remembers them.
    • He does not forget the cry of the afflicted.
  13. 9:13
    • The speaker asks the LORD to have mercy on him.
    • The speaker asks the LORD to see the affliction he suffers from those who hate him.
    • The speaker says the LORD lifts him up from the gates of death.
  14. 9:14
    • The speaker asks this so that he may declare all the LORD's praise.
    • The speaker will declare that praise in the gates of the daughter of Zion.
    • The speaker will rejoice in the LORD's salvation.
  15. 9:15
    • The nations have sunk into the pit that they made.
    • Their own foot is caught in the net they hid.
  16. 9:16
    • The LORD is known by the judgment he executes.
    • The wicked is snared by the work of his own hands.
    • The notations Higgaion and Selah follow.
  17. 9:17
    • The wicked will be turned back to Sheol, the realm of the dead.
    • All the nations that forget God will be turned back to Sheol.
  18. 9:18
    • The needy will not always be forgotten.
    • The hope of the poor will not perish forever.
  19. 9:19
    • The speaker asks the LORD to arise.
    • The speaker asks that man not prevail.
    • The speaker asks that the nations be judged before the LORD's face.
  20. 9:20
    • The speaker asks the LORD to put fear in them.
    • The speaker asks this so the nations may know they are only men.
    • The notation Selah follows.

Words Worth Explaining

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

9:1
In Hebrew, Psalms 9 and 10 share a single alphabetical pattern: successive sections begin with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The pattern is broken in places, and the two psalms were counted as one in the ancient Greek and Latin versions. That is why the argument here can seem to jump from praise to complaint and back.
9:2
"Most High" translates the Hebrew title Elyon, an ancient name for God that stresses rank: the one above every other power, human or divine.
9:4
In the ancient Near East a king was also the supreme judge, and to "sit on the throne" was the posture of hearing a case and giving a verdict, not simply of reigning.
9:5
"Nations" translates a Hebrew word (goyim) meaning the peoples other than Israel; the King James renders it "heathen," which in 1611 carried the same neutral sense of "foreign nations" rather than the insult it suggests today. To "wipe out their name" meant to end a family or people so completely that no descendants remained to carry the name and no one remembered it.
9:6
This verse is broken and disputed in the Hebrew, and translators divide it differently: it can be read as an address to the enemy ("Enemy, your ruins are finished forever"), or as a statement about the enemy ("The enemy has come to everlasting ruin"). Who tore down the cities, God or the enemy, is likewise unclear in the original.
9:7
God's throne is set up for judging. That means God is the one who decides what is fair.
9:9
The word rendered "safe place" means a height or hilltop stronghold, the kind of fortified high ground people fled to when raiders came.
9:10
In Hebrew usage a person's "name" stands for their known character and reputation, so knowing God's name means knowing what he is like, not merely what he is called.
9:11
Zion was originally the fortified hill David captured in Jerusalem; the word came to stand for the temple mount, and then for Jerusalem and its people as a whole. Saying God "lives" there refers to the temple as his earthly dwelling.
9:12
Israelite law gave a murdered person's nearest relative the duty of pursuing the killer and seeing justice done; he was called the avenger of blood. The verse pictures God taking that role himself, investigating a killing and not letting it go unanswered.
9:13
Death is pictured as a walled city with gates. To be at its gates is to be on the point of dying; to be lifted up from them is to be pulled back from that entrance.
9:14
"Daughter of Zion" is a Hebrew way of speaking of a city as a woman, standing for Jerusalem and its inhabitants together. The gates were the open space where the townspeople gathered, business was done and legal cases were heard, so to say something "in the gates" was to say it in public.
9:15
The images come from hunting: a pit dug and covered over so an animal falls in, and a net spread and concealed on the ground to catch the feet.
9:16
"Higgaion" and "Selah" are technical terms whose meaning was already lost by ancient times. Both appear to be directions for the musicians rather than part of the poem: Higgaion may mark a musical interlude or a low murmur of strings, and Selah, which recurs at the end of verse 20, may mark a pause, a change of volume, or a place for instruments to sound.
9:17
The Hebrew word is Sheol, the underworld where all the dead were thought to go, good and bad alike, a shadowy place of silence rather than a place of punishment. The King James "hell" carried the older, broader sense of the realm of the dead. The verb can mean either "return" or "turn back," so the line may picture the wicked going back to the dust they came from.
9:19
The word translated "mere people" here, and "only human" in the next verse, means humankind as frail and mortal; the point of the request is that the nations be made to recognize what they actually are.
9:20
"That the nations may know themselves to be but men" is the point the whole psalm has been building toward: the word for "men" stresses that human beings are frail and temporary, in contrast to the God of verse 7 who "shall endure for ever."

Read Psalms 9