15 For for Thee, Jehovah, do I wait; Thou, Thou wilt answer, O Lord, my God. 16 For I said, Lest they should rejoice over me, [And] when my foot slips, should magnify themselves over me 17 For I am ready to fall, And my sorrow is continually present to me. 18 For I must declare my guilt, Be distressed for my sin. 19 And my enemies are lively, they are strong, (And my enemies without cause are strong?) And they who wrongfully hate me are many; 20 And, requiting evil for good, They are my adversaries because I follow good. 21 Forsake me not, Jehovah; My God, be not far from me. 22 Haste to my help, O God, my salvation. This is a long-drawn wail, passionate at first, but gradually calming itself into submission and trust, though never passing from the minor key. The name of God is invoked thrice (vv. 1, 9, 15), and each time that the psalmist looks up his burden is somewhat easier to carry, and some "low beginnings of content" steal into his heart and mingle with his lament. Sorrow finds relief in repeating its plaint. It is the mistake of cold-blooded readers to look for consecution of thought in the cries of a wounded soul; but it is also a mistake to be blind to the gradual sinking of the waves in this psalm, which begins with deprecating God's wrath, and ends with quietly nestling close to Him as "my salvation." The characteristic of the first burst of feeling is its unbroken gloom. It sounds the depths of darkness, with which easy-going, superficial lives are unfamiliar, but whoever has been down into them will not think the picture overcharged with black. The occasion of the psalmist's deep dejection cannot be gathered from his words. He, like all poets who teach in song what they learn in suffering, translates his personal sorrows into language fitting for others' pains. The feelings are more important to him and to us than the facts, and we must be content to leave unsettled the question of his circumstances, on which, after all, little depends. Only, it is hard for the present writer, at least, to believe that such a psalm, quivering, as it seems, with agony, is not the genuine cry of a brother's tortured soul, but an utterance invented for a personified nation. The close verbal resemblance of the introductory deprecation of chastisement in anger to Psalm vi. 1 has been supposed to point to a common authorship, and Delitzsch takes both psalms, along with Psalms xxxii., and li. as a series belonging to the time of David's penitence after his great fall from purity. But the resemblance in question would rather favour the supposition of difference of authorship, since quotation is more probable than self-repetition. Jer. x. 23 is by some held to be the original, and either Jeremiah himself or some later singer to have been the author of the psalm. The question of which of two similar passages is source and which is copy is always ticklish.