¹ sn Psalm 27. The author is confident of the Lord’s protection and asks the Lord to vindicate him.

² tn Heb “the Lord [is] my light and my deliverance.” “Light” is often used as a metaphor for deliverance and the life/blessings it brings. See Pss 37:6; 97:11; 112:4; Isa 49:6; 51:4; Mic 7:8. Another option is that “light” refers here to divine guidance (see Ps 43:3).

³ tn Heb “Whom shall I fear?” The rhetorical question anticipates the answer, “No one!”

⁴ tn Heb “Of whom shall I be afraid?” The rhetorical question anticipates the answer, “No one!”

⁵ tn Heb “we will cause them to disappear from [being] a nation.”

⁶ 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.

⁷ 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.

⁸ tn Heb “and he did not delight in a blessing and it is far from him.”

⁹ tn Heb “there is no one who recognizes me.”

¹⁰ tn Heb “ a place of refuge perishes from me.”

¹¹ tn Heb “there is no one who seeks for the sake of my life.”