Discovery BoxPsalms 27:2 
Context27:2 When evil men attack me 1
to devour my flesh, 2
when my adversaries and enemies attack me, 3
they stumble and fall. 4
Psalms 35:8
Context35:8 Let destruction take them by surprise! 5
Let the net they hid catch them!
Let them fall into destruction! 6
Psalms 45:5
Context45:5 Your arrows are sharp
and penetrate the hearts of the king’s enemies.
Nations fall at your feet. 7
Psalms 60:2
Context60:2 You made the earth quake; you split it open. 8
Repair its breaches, for it is ready to fall. 9
Psalms 68:9
Context68:9 O God, you cause abundant showers to fall 10 on your chosen people. 11
When they 12 are tired, you sustain them, 13
Psalms 91:7
Context91:7 Though a thousand may fall beside you,
and a multitude on your right side,
it 14 will not reach you.
Psalms 91:12
Context91:12 They will lift you up in their hands,
so you will not slip and fall on a stone. 15
1 tn Heb “draw near to me.”
2 sn To devour my flesh. The psalmist compares his enemies to dangerous, hungry predators (see 2 Kgs 9:36; Ezek 39:17).
3 tn Heb “my adversaries and my enemies against me.” The verb “draw near” (that is, “attack”) is understood by ellipsis; see the previous line.
4 tn The Hebrew verbal forms are perfects. The translation assumes the psalmist is generalizing here, but another option is to take this as a report of past experience, “when evil men attacked me…they stumbled and fell.”
5 tn Heb “let destruction [which] he does not know come to him.” The singular is used of the enemy in v. 8, probably in a representative or collective sense. The psalmist has more than one enemy, as vv. 1-7 make clear.
6 tn The psalmist’s prayer for his enemies’ demise continues. See vv. 4-6.
7 tn Heb “your arrows are sharp – peoples beneath you fall – in the heart of the enemies of the king.” The choppy style reflects the poet’s excitement.
8 tn The verb פָּצַם (patsam, “split open”) occurs only here in the OT. An Arabic cognate means “crack,” and an Aramaic cognate is used in Tg. Jer 22:14 with the meaning “break open, frame.” See BDB 822 s.v. and Jastrow 1205 s.v. פְּצַם.
sn You made the earth quake; you split it open. The psalmist uses the imagery of an earthquake to describe the nation’s defeat.
9 sn It is ready to fall. The earth is compared to a wall that has been broken by the force of the earthquake (note the preceding line) and is ready to collapse.
10 tn The verb נוּף (nuf, “cause rain to fall”) is a homonym of the more common נוּף (“brandish”).
11 tn Heb “[on] your inheritance.” This refers to Israel as God’s specially chosen people (see Pss 28:9; 33:12; 74:2; 78:62, 71; 79:1; 94:5, 14; 106:40). Some take “your inheritance” with what follows, but the vav (ו) prefixed to the following word (note וְנִלְאָה, vÿnil’ah) makes this syntactically unlikely.
12 tn Heb “it [is],” referring to God’s “inheritance.”
13 tn Heb “it,” referring to God’s “inheritance.”
14 tn Apparently the deadly disease mentioned in v. 6b is the understood subject here.
15 tn Heb “so your foot will not strike a stone.”
