6:6 I am exhausted as I groan;
all night long I drench my bed in tears; 1
my tears saturate the cushion beneath me. 2
22:2 My God, I cry out during the day,
but you do not answer,
and during the night my prayers do not let up. 3
42:8 By day the Lord decrees his loyal love, 4
and by night he gives me a song, 5
a prayer 6 to the living God.
77:2 In my time of trouble I sought 7 the Lord.
I kept my hand raised in prayer throughout the night. 8
I 9 refused to be comforted.
77:6 I said, “During the night I will remember the song I once sang;
I will think very carefully.”
I tried to make sense of what was happening. 10
A song of ascents. 12
134:1 Attention! 13 Praise the Lord,
all you servants of the Lord,
who serve 14 in the Lord’s temple during the night.
139:11 If I were to say, “Certainly the darkness will cover me, 15
and the light will turn to night all around me,” 16
139:12 even the darkness is not too dark for you to see, 17
and the night is as bright as 18 day;
darkness and light are the same to you. 19
1 tn Heb “I cause to swim through all the night my bed.”
2 tn Heb “with my tears my bed I flood/melt.”
3 tn Heb “there is no silence to me.”
4 sn The psalmist believes that the Lord has not abandoned him, but continues to extend his loyal love. To this point in the psalm, the author has used the name “God,” but now, as he mentions the divine characteristic of loyal love, he switches to the more personal divine name Yahweh (rendered in the translation as “the
5 tn Heb “his song [is] with me.”
6 tc A few medieval Hebrew
7 tn Here the psalmist refers back to the very recent past, when he began to pray for divine help.
8 tn Heb “my hand [at] night was extended and was not growing numb.” The verb נָגַר (nagar), which can mean “flow” in certain contexts, here has the nuance “be extended.” The imperfect form (תָפוּג, tafug, “to be numb”) is used here to describe continuous action in the past.
9 tn Or “my soul.” The Hebrew term נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh) with a pronominal suffix is often equivalent to a pronoun, especially in poetry (see BDB 660 s.v. נֶפֶשׁ 4.a).
10 tn Heb “I will remember my song in the night, with my heart I will reflect. And my spirit searched.” As in v. 4, the words of v. 6a are understood as what the psalmist said earlier. Consequently the words “I said” are supplied in the translation for clarification (see v. 10). The prefixed verbal form with vav (ו) consecutive at the beginning of the final line is taken as sequential to the perfect “I thought” in v. 6.
11 sn Psalm 134. The psalmist calls on the temple servants to praise God (vv. 1-2). They in turn pronounce a blessing on the psalmist (v. 3).
12 sn The precise significance of this title, which appears in Pss 120-134, is unclear. Perhaps worshipers recited these psalms when they ascended the road to Jerusalem to celebrate annual religious festivals. For a discussion of their background see L. C. Allen, Psalms 101-150 (WBC), 219-21.
13 tn Heb “Look!”
14 tn Heb “stand.”
15 tn The Hebrew verb שׁוּף (shuf), which means “to crush; to wound,” in Gen 3:15 and Job 9:17, is problematic here. For a discussion of attempts to relate the verb to Arabic roots, see L. C. Allen, Psalms 101-150 (WBC), 251. Many emend the form to יְשׂוּכֵּנִי (yesukkeniy), from the root שׂכך (“to cover,” an alternate form of סכך), a reading assumed in the present translation.
16 tn Heb “and night, light, around me.”
17 tn The words “to see” are supplied in the translation for clarification and for stylistic reasons.
18 tn Heb “shines like.”
19 tn Heb “like darkness, like light.”