Psalm 39 (1928 BCP)

Psalm 39 (1928 BCP) is Dixi, Custodiam in the Psalter of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It is appointed with Psalms 38 and 40 at Morning Prayer on the Eighth Day of the monthly Psalter. The prayer moves from guarded speech through the knowledge of mortality and the vanity of acquisitiveness to hope in God, confession, tears, and the plea of a sojourner.

The 1928 Prayer Book text

The Prayer Book retains the Coverdale rendering and divides this fifteen-verse psalm for public reading or chanting:

I SAID, I will take heed to my ways, * that I offend not in my tongue.
2 I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle, * while the ungodly is in my sight.
3 I held my tongue, and spake nothing: * I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.
4 My heart was hot within me: and while I was thus musing the fire kindled, * and at the last I spake with my tongue:

5 LORD, let me know mine end, and the number of my days; * that I may be certified how long I have to live.
6 Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long, and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; * and verily every man living is altogether vanity.
7 For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; * he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.
8 And now, Lord, what is my hope? * truly my hope is even in thee.
9 Deliver me from all mine offences; * and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.

10 I became dumb, and opened not my mouth; * for it was thy doing.
11 Take thy plague away from me: * I am even consumed by the means of thy heavy hand.
12 When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: * every man therefore is but vanity.
13 Hear my prayer, O LORD, and with thine ears consider my calling; * hold not thy peace at my tears;
14 For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, * as all my fathers were.
15 O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, * before I go hence, and be no more seen.

From restrained speech to prayer

The opening is not a counsel to bury conscience or grief. The speaker first guards the tongue in the presence of the ungodly; the inward fire then makes him speak, but he speaks to the Lord. The movement distinguishes silence before hostile hearers from prayerful speech before God. It also prevents the psalm from being reduced to a general meditation on death: its awareness of frailty is born in an address to God.

Augustine calls attention to the danger that understandable caution about sinful speech can become silence from good speech:

Whilst I was too much afraid of saying anything wrong, I kept silence from all that is good. For whence could I say good things, except that I heard them?

That reading is especially useful for the Church's use of the psalm. The person at Morning Prayer need not turn either agitation or restraint into self-display. The psalm supplies words which direct the heated heart away from retaliation and toward the God who hears prayer.

Then spoke I with my tongue. In this fluctuation, in the midst of these dangers and these difficulties, ... I spoke with my tongue. To whom? Not to the hearer whom I would fain instruct; but to Him who hears and takes heed also, by whom I would fain be instructed myself.

Frailty, possessions, and hope

Verses 5–8 name the brevity of life without treating creatures as worthless. The rebuke falls on the illusion of mastery: a person may accumulate wealth and yet cannot determine who will receive it. The psalmist's answer is not resignation but the direct confession, “truly my hope is even in thee.” James 4:13–16 similarly places planning under the confession that human life is “a vapour,” while Matthew 6:19–21 redirects treasure toward God’s kingdom.

Phil J. Botha’s peer-reviewed study cautions against classifying the poem merely as an illness-prayer. He describes it as:

a meditation on the transitoriness of human life.

This description fits the Prayer Book text's progress from “a span long” and “vain shadow” to hope and forgiveness. Botha's proposal about delayed retribution should not be made into a settled historical certainty, but it rightly foregrounds what the Psalm itself makes explicit: hope in God is joined to the request for deliverance from offences, not to an explanation that makes suffering easily intelligible.

Chastening, tears, and pilgrimage

The last movement holds together divine chastening, confession, and urgent petition. It should not be used to infer that every sickness or loss is punishment for a particular sin. The psalmist tells God how suffering has exposed human frailty and asks mercy; Christians should hear it alongside John 9:1–3, where Christ rejects a simple equation of a person's suffering with personal guilt. Hebrews 12:5–11 gives a distinct New Testament account of discipline as filial formation, not a license to judge another sufferer.

Augustine reads the petition for an “end” as a hope that cannot be exhausted by the passing sequence of days:

Make me to know mine end; the end, from which I am still removed, not the course which is already before me. For we are not to remain here, where there are trials, offenses, where we have to bear with persons who listen to us and cavil at us.

In this patristic reading, the final words do not deny earthly goods or the body. They train the worshipper to receive life as a pilgrimage before God: “a stranger with thee, and a sojourner.” The Eighth-Day Morning Prayer appointment makes that training corporate. Joined to the penitence of Psalm 38 and the waiting praise of Psalm 40, Psalm 39 teaches a congregation to speak truthfully of mortality, to entrust judgment and speech to God, and to make God—not possessions or control—their hope.

See Also

• The Psalter (1928 BCP)
• Daily Office (1928 BCP)
• Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)
• Psalm 38 (1928 BCP)
• Psalm 40 (1928 BCP)

External Links

• 1928 Book of Common Prayer: Psalms 1–37
• Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 39
• Phil J. Botha, “Psalm 39 and its Place in the Development of a Doctrine of Retribution in the Hebrew Bible”