40:12 For innumerable dangers 1 surround me.
My sins overtake me
so I am unable to see;
they outnumber the hairs of my head
so my strength fails me. 2
68:2 As smoke is driven away by the wind, so you drive them away. 3
As wax melts before fire,
so the wicked are destroyed before God.
109:17 He loved to curse 4 others, so those curses have come upon him. 5
He had no desire to bless anyone, so he has experienced no blessings. 6
1 tn Or “sinful deeds.” The Hebrew term used here can have a nonmoral nuance (“dangers”) or a moral one (“sinful deeds”) depending on the context. The next line (see “my sins”) seems to favor the moral sense, but the psalmist also speaks of enemies shortly after this (v. 14).
2 tn Heb “and my heart abandons me.” The “heart” is here viewed as the seat of emotional strength and courage. For a similar idea see Ps 38:10.
3 tn Heb “as smoke is scattered, you scatter [them].”
4 sn A curse in OT times consists of a formal appeal to God to bring judgment down upon another. Curses were sometimes justified (such as the one spoken by the psalmist here in vv. 6-19), but when they were not, the one pronouncing the curse was in danger of bringing the anticipated judgment down upon himself.
5 tn Heb “and he loved a curse and it came [upon] him.” A reference to the evil man experiencing a curse seems premature here, for the psalmist is asking God to bring judgment on his enemies. For this reason some (cf. NIV, NRSV) prefer to repoint the vav (ו) on “it came” as conjunctive and translate the verb as a jussive of prayer (“may it come upon him!”). The prefixed form with vav consecutive in the next line is emended in the same way and translated, “may it be far from him.” However, the psalmist may be indicating that the evil man’s lifestyle has already begun to yield its destructive fruit.
6 tn Heb “and he did not delight in a blessing and it is far from him.”