In this Psalm, the Invocavit Psalm of the church, which praises the protecting and rescuing grace which he who believingly takes refuge in God experiences in all times of danger and distress,[1] the relation of Psa 91:2 to Psa 91:1 meets us at the very beginning as a perplexing riddle. If we take Psa 91:1 as a clause complete in itself, then it is tautological. If we take אמר in Psa 91:2 as a participle (Jerome, dicens) instead of אמר, ending with Pathach because a construct from (cf. Psa 94:9; Psa 136:6), then the participial subject would have a participial predicate: “He who sitteth is saying,” which is inelegant and also improbable, since אמר in other instances is always the 1st pers. fut. If we take אמר as 1st pers. fut. and Psa 91:1 as an apposition of the subject expressed in advance: as such an one who sitteth.... I say, then we stumble against יתלונן; this transition of the participle to the finite verb, especially without the copula (וּבצל), is confusing. If, however, we go on and read further into the Psalm, we find that the same difficulty as to the change of person recurs several times later on, just as in the opening. Olshausen, Hupfeld, and Hitzig get rid of this difficulty by all sorts of conjectures. But a reason for this abrupt change of the person is that dramatic arrangement recognised even in the Targum, although awkwardly indicated, which, however, as first of all clearly discerned by J. D. Michaelis and Maurer. There are, to wit, two voices that speak (as in Psa 121:1-8), and at last the voice of Jahve comes in as a third. His closing utterance, rich in promise, forms, perhaps not unaccidentally, a seven-line strophe. Whether the Psalm came also to be executed in liturgical use thus with several voices, perhaps by three choirs, we cannot tell; but the poet certainly laid it out dramatically, as the translation represents it. In spite of the many echoes of earlier models, it is one of the freshest and most beautiful Psalms, resembling the second part of Isaiah in its light-winged, richly coloured, and transparent diction.
- ↑ Hence in J. Shabbath 8, col. 2, and Midrash Shocher tob on Psa 91:1 and elsewhere, it is called, together with Psa 3:1-8, (פגעים) שיר פגועין, a song of occurrences, i.e., a protective (or talismanic) song in times of dangers that may befall one, just as Sebald Heyden's Psalm-song, “He who is in the protection of the Most High and resigns himself to God,” is inscribed “Preservative against the pestilence.”
