Psalm 9 (1928 BCP)

Psalm 9 (1928 BCP) is a psalm of thanksgiving for God's righteous judgment and a prayer that the afflicted will not be forgotten. In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, it is appointed at Morning Prayer on the second day of the month. Its praise is morally serious: the Lord who judges the world in righteousness is a defence for the oppressed and remembers the complaint of the poor.

Text of the Psalm

The Prayer Book gives the Latin opening as Confitebor tibi and prints Psalm 9 as twenty verses. The following wording, including the Prayer Book's division marks, has been checked against the Society of Archbishop Justus transcription of the 1928 Psalter:

I WILL give thanks unto thee, O LORD, with my whole heart; * I will speak of all thy marvellous works.
2 I will be glad and rejoice in thee; * yea, my songs will I make of thy Name, O thou Most Highest.
3 While mine enemies are driven back, * they shall fall and perish at thy presence.
4 For thou hast maintained my right and my cause; * thou art set in the throne that judgest right.
5 Thou hast rebuked the heathen, and destroyed the ungodly; * thou hast put out their name for ever and ever.
6 O thou enemy, thy destructions are come to a perpetual end; * even as the cities which thou hast destroyed, whose memorial is perished with them.
7 But the LORD shall endure for ever; * he hath also prepared his seat for judgment.
8 For he shall judge the world in righteousness, * and minister true judgment unto the people.
9 The LORD also will be a defence for the oppressed, * even a refuge in due time of trouble.
10 And they that know thy Name will put their trust in thee; * for thou, LORD, hast never failed them that seek thee.

11 O praise the LORD which dwelleth in Sion; * show the people of his doings.
12 For when he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them, * and forgetteth not the complaint of the poor.
13 Have mercy upon me, O LORD; consider the trouble which I suffer of them that hate me, * thou that liftest me up from the gates of death;
14 That I may show all thy praises within the gates of the daughter of Sion: * I will rejoice in thy salvation.
15 The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made; * in the same net which they hid privily is their foot taken.
16 The LORD is known to execute judgment; * the ungodly is trapped in the work of his own hands.
17 The wicked shall be turned to destruction, * and all the people that forget God.
18 For the poor shall not alway be forgotten; * the patient abiding of the meek shall not perish for ever.
19 Up, LORD, and let not man have the upper hand; * let the heathen be judged in thy sight.
20 Put them in fear, O LORD, * that the heathen may know themselves to be but men.

Thanksgiving and righteous judgment

The psalm begins not with a theory of providence but with thanksgiving. The speaker recalls God's “marvellous works,” then appeals to the Judge who has maintained a right and a cause. Verses 7–8 keep judgment from becoming private vengeance: it belongs to the enduring Lord, who judges the world in righteousness and ministers true judgment to the peoples.

Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

That apostolic proclamation helps a Christian reader hear Psalm 9 without treating its enemies as a warrant for personal retaliation. The psalm entrusts judgment to God; the resurrection is presented as assurance that the judge is not indifferent to evil.

Augustine reads the opening thanksgiving through divine providence, explicitly refusing the conclusion that suffering is outside God's governance:

He does not, with a whole heart, confess unto God, who doubts of His Providence in any particular: but he who sees already the hidden things of the wisdom of God ... and so now all things are referred to the governance of Divine Providence, which fools think done as it were by chance and at random, and without any Divine ordering.

This is an interpretation, not a substitute for the Psalm's literal prayer. It directs the worshipper to confess God's rule even when the psalm's final petition—“let not man have the upper hand”—still needs to be prayed.

The refuge of the oppressed

Psalm 9 joins God's throne of judgment to the concrete claim that he is “a defence for the oppressed.” The poor are neither an incidental example nor a romantic ideal: their complaint is remembered, and the psalm asks that human pride learn its creaturely limits.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they which mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Jesus' beatitudes do not flatten Psalm 9 into a promise that every present injustice is immediately reversed. Rather, they locate the meek and mourning within the kingdom promised by God. Augustine similarly treats the patience of the poor as a present vocation under the judgment still to come:

For there shall not be forgetfulness of the poor man to the end; who now seems to be in forgetfulness, when sinners are thought to flourish in this world's happiness, and the righteous to be in travail: but “the patience,” says He, “of the poor shall not perish forever.” Wherefore there is need of patience now to bear with the evil, who are already separated in will, till they be also separated at the last judgment.

The point is neither passivity before injustice nor confidence in a party or nation. The psalm gives the complaint to God, calls the congregation to remember the poor, and places final judgment beyond human self-justification.

Christ and the Church in Christian reading

Christian interpretation has often heard the speaker both as Christ and as the Church united to him. John Mason Neale, an Anglican priest and scholar, states the interpretive question plainly:

This is the first of the many Psalms which may be applied to both the Head of the Church, and to the Church herself. It is the voice of CHRIST, say a great crowd of commentators. It is the voice of the Church, say an equal number. But in truth it is both one and the other: for how shall that which is said by the Head, not also be capable of being said by the members?

This is a received Christian reading, not an argument that the Psalm has no first sense as Israel's prayer. It allows the Church to pray the psalm in the confidence that Christ has entered affliction and that his body still bears witness to the righteous Judge.

Neale's comment on verse 18 makes the devotional consequence especially clear: the Prayer Book's “patient abiding” is not mere resignation, but a hopeful endurance shaped by Christ's suffering and exaltation.

Where notice, as Hugh of S. Victor says, it is not the poverty of the meek, or the labour of the meek, or the afflictions of the meek; but the patient abiding. This is the grace which is dearest of all in God's sight.

Prayer in the Daily Office

Psalm 9 begins the second day's Morning Prayer psalmody, before Psalms 10 and 11. In that position it forms a movement from thanksgiving and trust, through candid speech about oppression, to the confession that the Lord is a refuge. After psalmody, the Daily Office gives the ancient doxology:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

The doxology does not erase the psalm's pleas for justice. It sets them within the Church's worship of the Triune God, teaching congregations to praise, lament, and await God's judgment without claiming that judgment for themselves.

See Also

• Book of Common Prayer (1928)
• The Psalter (1928 BCP)
• Daily Office (1928 BCP)
• Psalm 8 (1928 BCP)
• Psalm 10 (1928 BCP)

External Links

• The 1928 Psalter, Psalms 1–50, Society of Archbishop Justus
• Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 9
• Neale and Littledale, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1