I offer a summary of my study.
My intent is to provide a thoughtful literary and theological analysis of Psalm 40, emphasizing its dual structure, its focus on praise over complaint, and its role in communal worship. The passage invites readers to consider how remembrance of past divine help can inspire confidence and gratitude, even in times of distress. I highlight its rich imagery, theological depth, and interpretive challenges. I balance historical-critical insights with devotional reflections, drawing on linguistic notes, cultural context (e.g., Mesopotamian underworld motifs), and broader biblical themes like wisdom influence, obedience over ritual, and the tension between past deliverance and present distress.
The thematic focus is praise and religious experience. The desire for a public and permanent venue for praise suggests the importance of communal worship and testimony in ancient Israelite religion. The psalmist’s experience is not just personal but intended to be shared and affirmed within the worshipping community. It has nuanced emotional balance: while distress and the need for deliverance are present, the dominant tone is one of gratitude and trust. This sets Psalm 40 apart from other laments that focus more heavily on complaint. The passage underscores a key theological message: faith is sustained by recalling God’s past interventions, and praise is both a response to and an anticipation of divine favor. It suggests an intimate connection between memory and anticipation. It uses metaphors for death or serious illness like desolate and miry bog, while being set upon a rock suggests restoration and security, repetition, and parallelism, contributing to the emotional and theological message of the psalm, which seeks to inspire trust in God by the community.
The poet seeks a public and permanent venue for praising the Lord, to acknowledge the past favors of the Lord and in anticipation of the current favor now requested. This balance between anticipatory praise and a request for deliverance is not unusual, but here the emphasis is on praise rather than on complaint about misfortune. Its new song signals a transformation from sorrow to joy, reflecting a shift in perspective enabled by divine intervention.
Here is my detailed study.
The superscription reads To the leader may indicate the director of the temple musicians (cf. RSV, “choirmaster”), the Hebrew noun deriving from a verbal root meaning “be pre-eminent, enduring.” The construction here occurs only in Habakkuk 3:19 and in 55 psalm titles. The Hebrew preposition le-, frequently translated “to” or “for,” can also mean “of,” which is the closer sense here: “of the choirmaster,” i.e., of the choirmaster’s collection of psalms. We know from the various superscriptions that the present Psalter derives from a number of earlier collections — the Choirmaster’s, the Davidic, the Asaphic, the Korahite — and our current collection probably was assembled as the prayer book of the synagogue perhaps during the Hellenistic period.[2] The superscription concludes with Of David. A Psalm.
Psalm 40:1-10 are a hymn of thanksgiving.
Psalm 40: 1-3a relates the help God gave to the poet earlier in life. The help of the Lord restored him in times past, delivering him from affliction. 1 I waited (qawah, eagerly awaiting or longing) patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. In traditional fashion, he describes how the psalmist waited for the Lord to become aware of his situation and rescue him. The situation from which the Lord rescued him, however, is one he describes in a highly symbolic way. The worshiper addresses a human audience offering testimony to God's saving action. Frequently throughout the Psalter and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, the plea is for the Lord (Yahweh) to “incline” his ear toward the supplicant (e.g., II Kings 19:16; Psalm 17:6; 31:2; 71:2; 86:1; 88:2 — usually near the opening of the psalm). Although it would be unwise to over-literalize the imagery — cocking the head to hear better — the stock phrase does seem to mean “pay attention to” or “listen carefully to.” (We also find the verb used in the phrase “incline the heart,” as in Judges 9:3; I Kings 8:58; 11:2; and “incline the mind,” as in I Samuel 14:7.) The past tense — that the Lord has already inclined toward and heard the petitioner — is the cause for thanksgiving.
The psalmist is confident that God spoke to him in his time of trouble. Do we still have that confidence?
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to [humankind].[3]
2 He drew me up (ya’al[4] ) from the desolate pit (b´ôršāôn “miry” New Jewish Publication Society translation[5] the abode of the dead), out of the miry bog (tit hayyawen, NJPS uses the more literal phrase “slimy clay,” also the abode of the dead). The second word in this phrase, hayyawen, is virtually impossible to translate with any clarity because it appears only here and once again in Psalm 69:2. Psalm 69:1-2 reads “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire (Hebrew yawen), where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.” He uses the metaphor of death to refer to grave illness. In both psalms, then, God is rescuing the petitioner from a place dominated by water, where mud makes it difficult to stand securely and rising water makes it unlikely that escape will be possible without assistance. There are also, however, clear indications that the pit or mire described is a naturalistic image representing approaching death. The psalm evokes images of Death in many ways, the most basic of which is the fact that the term b´ôr can also mean “grave” (Psalm 28:1; 143:7; Isaiah 38:18). The image of clay and mud suggests the Mesopotamian description of the underworld as the place where clay and muddy water are the only things to eat and drink. Psalm 40 is describing the Lord rescuing the petitioner from near certain death when it states that God caused the petitioner to “go up” from that miry mud- filled prison from which no one is ever supposed to return. In sharp contrast with the watery death-like experience, the Lord And set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. 3 He put a new song (this psalm but also 33:3; 96:1; 98:1; 144:9; 149:1) in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. We should note that the deeply conservative religious tradition of ancient Israel did not prize novelty. Indeed, they regarded it with great suspicion, as the engine that drove Israel’s theological bus was in the past: the Magnalia Dei, the mighty acts of God, expressed and preserved pre-eminently in the Exodus-Sinai experience. In this case, however, God had enabled him to interpret life differently. The soundtrack at the beginning was probably “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen.” The psalmist “changed his tune” because he found that the song in his heart was no longer a dirge but a hymn.
In Psalm 40: 3b-5, the writer describes the effect of the restoration of the divine salvation has on the community of the faithful. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord. Israel repeatedly confronted hostile neighbors and their patron deities. The poet unites with all the people praise during worship concerning the deeds of the Lord. This narrow escape from death after long waiting may imply that this psalm commemorated recovery after a lingering and near-fatal illness. Once God has drawn the petitioner back from the brink of death, then life returns to normal. One can rise and stand up securely, finding the ability to walk restored as well. One can once again speak or sing praise to God, and verse 3 declares that respect or fear of God is the response of all who see the recovery of the person once believed to be in the grip of death. 4 Happy (`esher (always in the plural construct form `ashre), based on a root meaning “to go straight on, advance,”) are those who (gever, which is a gender-specific noun, used principally in poetic contexts, referring to a fighting male person, distinct “from women, children, noncombatants whom he is to defend,”[6] meaning the psalm could refer to a soldier who has escaped death.) make the Lord their trust. The poet is preaching. He promises happiness or fortune to the person who trusts in the Lord instead of trusting in less worthy sources of help. The ascription of happiness to those who trust in the LORD is one of the indications that the wisdom tradition in ancient Israel has influenced this psalm. The Hebrew word rarely occurs outside the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible (only at Deuteronomy 33:29; I Kings 10:8 = Ii Chronicles 9:7; Isaiah 56:2; 30:18; 32:20), and always occurs in such stock phrases as “happy is the one [`adam]” (Psalm 32:2; 84:5, 13;12 Proverbs 3:13; 28:14), “happy is the warrior” (Psalm 34:8; 94:12; 127:5), and “happy is the man” (Psalm 1:1; 112:1). Happy (or “blessed”) is the condition that comes from a right relationship with the divine; it differs from “righteous” in that it takes account of one’s physical, material, emotional and social condition — the horizontal as well as the vertical dimension, as it were, of one’s life. This was an expansion in ancient Israel’s theological thinking that broadened the narrower Deuteronomistic reward-and-punishment, holiness-based schema, in which the Lord rewarded the righteous with material as well as spiritual benefits, and the Lord accordingly punished wicked. As Israel’s theologians grappled with the awareness that the wicked often go unpunished (at least as far as this world is concerned) and the righteous often suffer (the theme of the book of Job), their theological focus broadened to account for aspects of reality inconsistent with received doctrine. Happiness, related to but broader than righteousness, became one of those interests, and a hallmark of the wisdom tradition. The poet promises happiness to those who do not turn to the proud (rehovim[7], also boisterous), to those who go astray after false gods. The poet now turns to address the Lord: 5 You have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds, continuing the theme of the opening of the thanksgiving, and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you. The multiplication of divine “thoughts” as well as deeds again reflects a wisdom understanding, which will come to florescence in the Jewish tradition near the turn of the era in the work of such philosophers as Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.E. – 50 C.E.). Were I to proclaim and tell of them, they would be more than can be counted.
Psalm 40: 6-10 offer the true way of giving thanks. The psalmist claims complete submission to and obedience to God. God desires obedience and heartfelt commitment rather than ritual sacrifice alone, anticipating later developments in Jewish thought, where prayer, love, and ethical living take precedence over cultic rituals.
6 aSacrifice (any animal offering) and meal offering accompanying animal sacrifice, you do not desire, 6bbut you have given me an open ear (literally, God has dug out his ear). 6cBurnt offering that consumed the entire sacrifice by fire,and sin or purification offering you have not required. The point is not critique of the sacrificial system, but a notice that sacrifice is not required in this instance and does not satisfy the desire of the poet to do what pleases the Lord. Obedience is better than sacrifice. The poet is against religious practices with no interior commitment. In Judaism, religious practices like prayer, obedience, love take over the value of the cult. This development prepared for the destruction of the temple. One can see further wisdom influence in the statement that the Lord does not desire “sacrifice and offering,” an idea that would have shocked those responsible for the temple cult in Jerusalem, which continued until the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. Although the idea of God not desiring cultic observance occurs also in prophetic literature (e.g., Isaiah 1:11; Jeremiah 6:20; Amos 5:21), it was always within the context of the forlorn attempt to camouflage moral turpitude with ritual exactitude and never simply as a criticism or renunciation of the sacrificial cult per se. 7 Then I said, “Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me.[8] The idea of one’s name and/or deeds being written “in the scroll of the book” is among the latest in the Hebrew Bible (see, for example, Daniel 7), and although scrolls are mentioned in various periods of the Hebrew Bible, they figure prominently only in the visions of later prophets (e.g., Ezekiel and Zechariah), another hint of a late date for the current psalm. However, it could be a scroll of his experience, bringing before the Lord the scroll rather than sacrifices. The idea will develop later into the notion of the book of life that records one’s deeds. 8 I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” For much of the literature of the Hebrew Bible, having God’s law written on one’s heart was a desideratum (compare Psalm 119:11). In verses 9-10, the psalmist now moves toward the final stage of his restoration. 9 I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation (a term occurring only in the psalms), presenting himself to those gathered at the temple in Jerusalem, the community to which the poet relates, testifying to his renewed dedication to the God who has saved him.[9] See, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O Lord. It is possible that this public declaration of restoration, complete with a written record, is a clue that leprosy, a condition whose cure priests had to be verify (Leviticus 13:17), was the disease that has struck the petitioner. It is also possible, however, to read into certain words chosen for this psalm, that the writer of the psalm received a wound on the battlefield. Such terms are šāôn from verse 2 (which can describe the noise of a battlefield), gever, in verse 4 (which can mean “person” but may also mean “warrior”), and basar, in verse 9 (which elsewhere describes messengers sent from the battlefield to give reports). Like those who bear good news from the battlefield (Psalm 68:11, Hebrew mebasserot), the psalmist announces the good news of his deliverance by the hand of the Lord. 10 I have not hidden your saving help within my heart. The statement is as bit unexpected. I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation. Regardless of the ambiguous nature of the psalmist’s predicament before the Lord restored him, Psalm 40 clearly attests to the fact that one of the greatest joys which follows being restored to new life after a brush with death is the joy of entering one’s house of worship to declare before all in the community that one’s life has been saved and restored by God.
Psalm 40: 11, part a of a segment that extends to verse 17, are a lament. Verses 11-12 are a prayer of preservation in a new calamity and confession of sin. The saving experience of the past gives the poet confidence that God will have mercy. He knows his own sin and guilt, the sinister power of sin. He cannot rely on himself, but only on God. 11 Do not, O Lord, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love and your faithfulness keep me safe forever.
Psalm 40 stands out for its dual structure and its emphasis on praise, trust, and obedience. It invites both personal and communal reflection on the nature of deliverance, the importance of remembering past blessings, and the value of heartfelt worship over mere ritual. Its themes remain relevant for modern readers seeking resilience and hope in the face of adversity. It beautifully illustrates the Psalter's emotional range: from confident testimony to raw plea, unified by trust in Yahweh's steadfast love (hesed) and faithfulness. It invites readers to praise publicly, obey inwardly, and petition boldly, knowing deliverance — past, present, or future — comes from the One who inclines to hear.
Memory and Anticipation: The psalmist’s recollection of past divine help serves as a source of hope during new challenges. This dynamic invites readers to consider how remembering God’s faithfulness can sustain confidence in times of distress.
Modern Relevance: The question “Do we still have that confidence?” encourages contemporary reflection on trust, gratitude, and the role of public testimony in faith communities.
What I want to do is weave together the journey of the psalmist, from the brink of death (the "horrible pit" and "miry clay") to a place of firm footing and a "new song" of praise, with profound human experiences of facing mortality. The psalmist's character shines brightest not in ease but in that ultimate challenge: staring down death and still choosing trust in the Lord over despair, false gods, or self-reliance. As he waits patiently (qawah), God inclines, hears, draws him up, and replaces the dirge-like soundtrack of suffering ("Nobody Knows the Troubles I've Seen") with joyful testimony. This "new song" is not mere novelty; it is a transformed perspective, a hymn born from deliverance that invites the community to fear, trust, and praise.
The ultimate measure of our character is not where we stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where we stand at times of challenge and controversy.[10] The psalmist stands firm amid controversy—not external enemies alone, but the internal and existential crisis of near-death. His blessedness ('ashre) flows from trusting Yahweh through it all, yielding obedience over ritual and public proclamation over hidden fear. The greatest challenge any of us faces is a brush with death. Through the experience, the Lord gave the psalmist a new song. Moving from a dirge, something like nobody has seen the trouble I have seen, to a joyful song of the Lord hearing, speaking, and delivering.
My mother had some songs playing when she was near death. When I brought her to the Mayo Clinic, someone was playing an old song, and mom wanted me to stop. We started talking about music that mattered to her. We had never done that before. She referred to Frank Sinatra, especially “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “Young at Heart.” Music becomes a vessel for unspoken truths when words falter. Those songs, evoking romance, humor, and enduring spirit, offered a gentler "soundtrack" than clinical silence or despair.
This mirrors the shift in Wit (the 2001 HBO film adaptation of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer-winning play, starring Emma Thompson as Vivian Bearing). Vivian, a Donne scholar armored in intellectual rigor, faces stage IV ovarian cancer with the same toughness she demanded of students dissecting metaphysical poetry. Yet as treatment ravages her, cold analysis gives way to craving simple kindness. A professor, when diagnosed with cancer, re-examines her life. Margaret Edson's Pulitzer-winning script is faithfully adapted to the small screen by director Mike Nichols and star Emma Thompson. Thompson plays Vivian Bearing, a professor of 17th Century poetry specializing in "the Holy Sonnets of John Donne." The intellect is everything to Vivian--which is why, when she receives a diagnosis of stage four ovarian cancer--"there is no stage five"--she agrees to undergo aggressive chemotherapy in the name of cancer research. "You must be very tough," her doctor tells her, and Vivian is nothing if not tough--a tough professor who is tough on her students. Yet as her treatment--and her cancer--progresses, Vivian finds that what she needs most is not the cold rationality with which she has lived her whole life and which is amply evidenced by the hospital staff attending her, but the simple human kindness shown by her primary nurse and her former mentor. The director shot this beautiful meditation on death and humanity in close-ups that linger on Emma Thompson's spare, emotionally naked performance. Nichols's sure-handed direction brings out both the script's own wit and its poignancy. In one scene (1:22:00 to 1:29:30), the deathbed scene, the professor’s favorite teacher from the past visits her. She reads The Runaway Bunny to her and cradles her as she dies.
Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away,
So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”
“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you.
For you are my little bunny.”
“If you run after me,” said the little bunny,
“I will become a fish in a trout stream
And I will swim away from you.”
If you become a fish in a trout stream,
Said his mother
I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”
Ah, look at that, Vivian, a little allegory of the soul. Wherever it hides, God will find you.
If you catch me, said the bunny,
I will be a bird and fly away from you.
If you become a bird and fly away from me,
Said his mother,
I will be a tree that you come home to.
Very clever.
Shucks, said the bunny.
Then I might as well as stay where I am
And be your little bunny.
And so he did.
Have a carrot, said his mother.
The teacher says: “Time to go.” She kisses her on the forehead.
“And flights of angels
sing thee to thy rest.”
The movie concludes with the voice of Vivian reciting a portion of “Death be not proud,” by John Donne, 1573-1631
DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, 5
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell, 10
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
Another updated version
DEATH, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be, 5
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go—
Rest of their bones and souls' delivery!
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell; 10
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
The deathbed scene with her former mentor (Evelyn Ashford) reading The Runaway Bunny—is profoundly moving. The children's book becomes an "allegory of the soul": no matter how far the bunny (or soul) tries to flee—becoming a fish, bird, or rock—love pursues relentlessly. "Wherever it hides, God will find you." The mother bunny's promise echoes divine pursuit: "If you run away, I will run after you." In the end, the bunny stays home. Ashford cradles Vivian, kisses her forehead, and invokes Hamlet's farewell: "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." Vivian's voiceover then recites Donne's "Death, be not proud"—defying death's arrogance, declaring it a mere "short sleep" before eternal waking, where "Death thou shalt die."
Both the psalmist and Vivian confront death's shadow. The psalmist emerges with praise renewed, his life a testimony. Vivian finds redemption not in scholarly conquest but in vulnerability, kindness, and childlike assurance of being pursued and held. In both, facing mortality strips away pretense, revealing what endures: trust, love, and a song (or poem) that reorients the heart toward hope beyond the grave.
The psalmist faces death in a way that shows who he truly is. He is among the blessed or happy who have trusted in the Lord, even when the temptation must have been strong to trust something else. Yet, because he trusted the Lord through it all, he has a new song to sing. Such a notion would be worthy of some meditation. What is the soundtrack of our lives? Maybe each stage of our lives has a different soundtrack precisely because of the differing challenges we face. I leave the matter open for us to fill in the rest of the story.
What is the soundtrack of our lives? Might each stage carry its own, shaped by challenges? It is a rich, open question. Early years might hum with carefree melodies of discovery; midlife with anthems of striving and struggle; later seasons with reflective ballads or laments that resolve into quieter hymns of gratitude. For the psalmist, crisis birthed praise. For my mother, vulnerability opened shared memories through song. For Vivian, intellect yielded to tenderness and eternal promise.
[1] Weiser.
[2](see F. Brown, S. R. Driver and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906], 664).
[3] Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on the moment when the guns went silent on Armistice Day, 1918, in Breakfast of Champions: A Novel (Random House, 2009), 6.
[4] May well be another reference to common images of death. The land of the dead is called in Sumerian, “the land of no coming back.” In Hebrew this idea is represented, though in abbreviated form, in the place name Belial, based on the Hebrew phrase bli-ya’al, “without going up.”
[5] based on derived meanings of the second word in the pair, šāôn, the use of which with the word b´ôr, is rather unusual. Ordinarily šāôn describes a sound, specifically a roaring sound, either of battle (Amos 2:2; Hosea 10:14; Psalm 74:23), of a noisy crowd (Isaiah 5:14; 24:8), or of rushing water (Isaiah 17:12; Psalm 65:7). Because b´ôr can mean “cistern,” or “well” (Deuteronomy 6:11; Leviticus 11:36; 1 Samuel 19:22; 2 Kings 18:31; Jeremiah 6:7), the one thing both words have in common is a meaning related to water. The water imagery is carried a little further in the second part of the verse.
[6] (Brown, Driver and Briggs, 150)
[7] Another reading would be to see it as an odd plural form of the name Rahab, a type of false god, specifically a sea monster, known from Near Eastern mythology. Given the fact that the petitioner has been rescued from a watery death, there might at least be a pun here in the choice of this rare term.
[8] The text of verses 6-7 is clearly amiss. The obvious parallelism occurs between 6a and 6c, with 6b (“but you have given me an open ear”) intruding. The beginning of verse 7 naturally corresponds to the sentiment in 6b, suggesting that the text has suffered displacement (and loss) in its transmission. God sees to it that this servant knows the will of God. In verse 6 there is another return to the image of the well or cistern from verse 1 in that the psalmist credits God with “digging” him a new ear, hollowing out his ear, as one would dig a well (Genesis 26: 25). In exchange for the cistern of death in which he was trapped, God has dug through his obscured thoughts and given him a new enlightenment with which to understand the earnest desire of God for right devotion instead of sacrifice.
[9] However, for some scholars, the theme of proclaiming God’s wondrous deeds in “the great congregation” (elsewhere only in the psalms) reflects a synagogue-oriented religious culture in which such Mosaic, Davidic and Solomonic concerns as forging national identity, building and consolidating an empire, and defending against enemies are in the distant past. He would have it recorded officially, “in the scroll of the book it is written” that he is healed and restored.
[10] MLK, Jr
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