Psalm 51—Poem, Notes, & Rendition

A Psalm and poem about sin, regret, pain, healing, and redemption.

Listen to the Psalm and the poem set to music.

Introduction to Psalm 51

The setting of the psalm is King David’s greatest failure.

David, a “man after God’s own heart” spied a (married) woman, Bathsheba, bathing on her rooftop. He summoned her and they slept together. She became pregnant. To hide their indiscretion, David summoned her husband, Uriah, home from fighting on the front lines so that he could sleep with Bathsheba too. But Uriah’s loyalty to his King kept him by David’s side. He even refused to go home to sleep with his wife. David responded by telling the commander of his army to send Uriah into the next battle where the fighting is thickest and pull all the other warriors back until Uriah was fighting alone. The commander did it and Uriah died. David got away with adultery and murder.

At least, until God sent Nathan the prophet to confront David and tell him, “God knows what you did and so do I.” When his sin was exposed he was ashamed, he mourned, and he repented. That is the occasion of Psalm 51.

Rendition of Psalm 51

Have mercy on me, O God.
According to the love you bear me
Beyond all my circumstances.
According to your great compassion,
Wipe away the guilt from the bonds I have broken.
Tread me until all my crookedness is gone,
Wash from me the joy I felt at my failures.

I am familiar with all my rebellion,
And the monstrous loves that would consume me
Are always at my side.
You are the one I have failed,
In fashioning evil instead of good.
Even if all were false, your words would still be true.
Even if all were guilty, your justice would remain.
From birth I was twisted and bent;
I was marred even from the moment I was conceived.
But when you find firmness and faith inside me, it delights you.
You teach me wisdom and store it within me.

Sprinkle me with blood and I will be clean;
Trample me in the water and I will be whiter than snow.
I want to hear joy and gladness;
Let the parts of me you have broken rejoice again.
Hide from yourself all the times I have cherished the wrong;
Utterly remove them as though they never were.
Do not fling me away from your presence.
Do not separate me from your light and life.
Summon me back once again to the joy of your salvation,
Teach me to lean on you while you hold me up.

Then I will show others the path I walked back to you,
And they will lay down their revolt and return.
Rescue me from the guilt on my hands,
O God, my deliverer, my salvation,
And my tongue will tell of your justice.
O Lord, open my mouth and I will praise you.
For you do not delight in sacrifices or I would give them;
You will not accept a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
A crushed heart that knows it is shattered, O God,
This you will not despise.

Do good to Zion because you delight in it;
Build up the walls of Jerusalem;
Then you will take delight in the right sacrifices,
All the offerings you have asked for
Will be brought to you and laid on your altar.

Notes on the Rendition

Note #1: Three Words for Evil

I have been greatly helped in understanding poetics in the first stanza of the poem by BibleProject’s Bad Word Series. The psalmist uses three words for bad: transgressions (pesha), iniquity (avon), and sin (khata). However, they are not synonyms; they are all describing different senses of badness.

ESV—51:1b-2 “…blot out my transgressions (pesha).
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity (avon),
and cleanse me from my sin (khata)!”

• The word for transgressions (pesha) occurs 90 times in the Bible and refers to the betrayal of a relationship or the breaking of an agreement.

• Iniquity (avon) occurs 216 times in the Bible is related to a word that means “to be bent or crooked.” Avon carries a sense of something distorted from its rightful state.

• Sin (khata) occurs 269 times in the Bible and means “to fail or miss the goal.”

In using all three words to describe his own misdeeds, David is asking for a triple cleansing and acknowledging how thoroughly he has gone astray. I think the psalm leaves us with the sense that David’s repentance is true and deep because his confession has been broad and thorough.

I have rendered these lines this way:

Wipe away the guilt from the bonds I have broken.
Tread me until all my crookedness is gone,
Wash from me the joy I felt at my failures.

If you want to learn more about these three senses of badness, watch BibleProject’s Bad Word Series.

Note #2: What is Lovingkindness (hesed)?

When the Bible talks about God’s commitment to his wayward creation, it often uses the word hesed, which is often translated as “lovingkindness” or “steadfast love.”

At the start of the poem, David evokes this commitment on God’s part before he asks for forgiveness. He writes:

ESV—Psalm 51:1 “Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love…”

But I didn’t want to render hesed in either of the traditional ways because hesed is a transcendent love, a promising, a commitment. It is more than love and more than kindness. It contains feelings, but goes beyond them. It is realistic about the present, but also farseeing and hopeful for a sure future. It is both without condition and uncompromising and relentless.

To capture a bit of that, I rendered it this way:

Have mercy on me, O God.
According to the love you bear me
Beyond my circumstances.

Note #3: Sin Was Crouching Before Both David and Cain

When David continues his confession, he says:

ESV 51:3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin (khata) is ever before me.

The first time khata is mentioned in the Bible is in Genesis 4 when God comes to Cain before he murders his brother Abel and offers him a challenge and a chance to repent. God depicts sin (khata) as a crouching beast that wants to devour Cain.

Perhaps the Psalmist is going for a double meaning by using the word khata here. David’s sin is before him in the sense that he has not forgotten it, it is near to his mind. However, it is also before him in the sense that it was before Cain, crouching nearby and ready to devour.

It is hard not to see the connection between Cain and his murdered brother, Abel, and David and his murdered servant, Uriah. Perhaps the connection has occurred to David too and the psalm is pointing us back to the first murder to deepen the dark significance of David’s murder of Uriah.

In my rendition, I wrote it this way:

I am familiar with all my rebellion,
And the monstrous loves that would consume me
Are always at my side.

Note #4: Building Evil Instead of Good

ESV 51:4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done (asah) what is evil in your sight,

The ESV translates the verb asah as “done,” as in “accomplished or acted”, but the most common sense of the word is something more like “fashioned, built, or produced.”

So I have rendered these lines as:

You are the one I have failed,
And fashioned evil instead of good.

In choosing these words, I am trying to bring to the surface an allusion to Genesis 1:26-31 in order to get at the heart of what evil is in the first place.

Evil isn’t just being naughty; it is reneging on our primary calling.

We tend to think of sin in the terms of penal code and broken rules. However, there is something bigger going on when we sin that has to do with the nature of what it means to be made in the image of God.

Here is Genesis.

ESV—Genesis 1:26-31: “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion…”

This dominion is not to be confused with “domination.” It is not strip mines and slavery, and oppression.

Dominion is ruling the earth the way a master gardener rules a garden as she causes it to flourish under her care. Humankind was meant to build things, to bring out all the latent potential and richness packed into the goodness of God’s creation.

Theologically, the verb asah isn’t just “done,” it is about what you have made, what you have done with your dominion, what you have fashioned with your hands and with your time.

So I changed the psalm to:

You are the one I have failed,
And fashioned (asah) evil instead of good.

Notes on the Poem

Like Psalm 51, this is a poem about sin and redemption, second chances (and seventy-seventh chances), failed repentances, doubt, regret, memory, and hope.

Here are my annotations and notes on where these lines are coming from and what I think they mean.

You sit at the big bay window
In the house where you grew up
And watch the lights of the city.

If you have ever been to the Rochester L’Abri, you will recognize the big bay window in the living room that overlooks the promontory and beneath it, the lights of the city. There is a hidden image here as well—when you look through a window at night you get a double vision, yourself and the things on the other side of the window. The “you” in the poem is reflecting both inwardly and outwardly.

“O God,” you say to the night outside,
“Have mercy on me.”

At the end of each stanza, the character of the poem raises a prayer to a God he half believes and half doubts, hoping for a redemption that seems against the odds given his life and choices. But he prays self-conscious, hopeful prayers anyway.

You know that you have been a man of strings
Pushing through a hedge without end,
Stranded, strangled, and caught.

My two biggest poetic influences are T. S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins and they are always popping up in my poetry, sometimes verbatim and sometimes by mimicking their poetic effects. I can see them both in these lines. Eliot’s poetry was full of southern England: hedges, lanes, hyacinths, and yew trees. Hopkins loved his unusual alliteration and his assonance and when I read him his way with words infects my poems. The rhythm and sounds in the line “Stranded, strangled, and caught” remind me a lot of Hopkins.

You buried it under the garden behind the house
Where you planted the black roses last year.

This is a reference to The Babadook, a horror movie with a lot to say about so many important things and one David might relate to.

You watch at the chasm of all your flown things
And wait for your old loves to return…

This is a reference to Li-Young Lee’s poetic memoir A Winged Seed. He begins with the question that has stuck with me ever since I first read it: “How can I touch you across the chasm of flown things?”

Here is the poem.

Poem—My First and Last Love and Only

You sit at the big bay window
In the house where you grew up
And watch the lights of the city.
You sip whiskey and count things:
The years of violence you did against your own self;
The cold concatenation of the fears you mistook for virtues;
The parade of things you used things for;
The years you were always elsewhere
And always regretting it;
The creatures in cages
that were once your dearest prayers;
“O God,” you say to the night outside,
“Have mercy on me.”

You know that you have been a man of strings
Pushing through a hedge without end,
Stranded, strangled, and caught.
You have known so many disasters
That found you without warning or herald or witness.
And though they were a long time ago,
You can still find them inside you.
You still wander through them like old ruins,
Old choices you can’t escape.
“Cleanse me and I will be cleansed,”
You ask without hope.
You can see that you are losing ground,
And every redoubt is only another retreat.
“Wash me and I will be whiter than snow.
Or leave me alone to go on loving my vices.”

You are doing it again—
That old thing you conquered
Again and again and also left free.
You buried it under the garden behind the house
Where you planted the black roses last year.
“You will find it there, my God,” you say,
“Along with all the other loves
that lost me all I wanted.
If you can, Lord, hide your face
From my empty renunciations.”

More and more you struggle to feel things.
Inside yourself you sense the failing light, the emptying tide,
The tumbling glass, the hissing sand,
The endless internal slipping into the sea.
And everywhere the void inside you yawns wider
And you wonder if there is anything that can’t slip inside.
At the precipice, you say aloud,
“Gather me together, O Lord,
If you are there.”

You tried so long to devote yourself
To the fidelities you cherished.
It seems to you now there are so many reasons to believe,
And so many reasons to throw it all away.
You watch at the chasm of all your flown things
And wait for your old loves to return,
Like birds to eat from your hands:
Your gentleness, your quiet, the stillness
You spent so long running from.
You find yourself asking,
“O God, be my first and last love and only.”

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Psalms: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 63, 65, 66, 73, 74, 75, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 100, 107, 110, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 139, 140, 142, 147, 148.

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Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash