Bible Commentary - Psalms 13

Psalm 13 is short and simple.  Like many other psalms, it is a prayer for deliverance most purely expressed in the repeated phrase, “how long”.  The core idea this expresses is David wondering how long before God will deliver him and answer his prayers.  It calls itself a psalm of David, which is similar to most of the other early psalms we have read, but it does not give a historical context in the title, so we are left without a specific incident or event that David is praying about.

One thing we can see is the nature of David’s threat.  It is “the enemy” (v. 2, 4), though v. 4 also ambiguously references “my adversaries”.  The repeated phrase “the enemy” suggests that David may be thinking about Saul, since Saul was indeed David’s main enemy for several years of his life.  It is somewhat speculative however, as no adversary is directly named in the body of the psalm.  This is consistent with the generic nature of the psalms as a whole, which is a subject I have previously discussed.

Looking at this psalm broadly, we can discern a logical progression through three sections.  It opens in verses 1-2 with a modified form of what I call the “problem statement”.  It’s modified because David isn’t directly describing the crisis he faces, but I still think it is a form of a problem statement because the essential purpose of these two verses is to justify and explain why God needs to act and how he needs to act.  They are ambiguous because the psalm is, I think intentionally, ambiguous about the problem that David is praying about.  Like so many psalms, it is ambiguous so that it may be generally applicable and relevant to worshipers throughout time and circumstance, but that generality by definition makes the exact nature of the crisis less clear.

The closest it comes to a specific crisis is at the end of verse 2 when David’s “enemy [is] exalted over me”.  However, while this passage lacks specificity, I nevertheless see these verses as the setup for the next section, which is David’s prayer for relief.

The prayer for relief in verses 3-4 is simple and to the point.  Like the “help, LORD” of Psalm 12, the prayer in this psalm is “Consider, and answer me, Oh LORD”.  He says some other things but I think “answer me” is really the core of this prayer, and I would also say that it is the center of this entire psalm.  Especially if you view the three sections as an arc, then the prayer for relief is the central and most important part.

The final section is praise and thanksgiving for deliverance, which we see in verses 5-6.  It’s also quite simple; David is rejoicing and singing because God “has dealt bountifully with me”.  As with many other prayers, David concludes with thanksgiving under the presumption that God would answer his request and deliver him from the crisis he is now facing.

This structure is very similar to Psalm 10, where I broke the psalm into four parts that follow a very similar trajectory.  I only split that psalm into four parts because I described the “problem statement” in two sections.  If we consider the psalm to be “problem statement”, “plea for intervention”, and “praise and thanksgiving for resolution”, then both this psalm and Psalm 10 follow identical formulas.

Interestingly, Psalm 10 does not have a title but it is structurally very similar to this psalm, which gives further evidence in my opinion that Psalm 10 may also be a psalm “of David” but with the title missing for historical reasons unrelated to its original composition.

I’m not sure how often we will run into this tri-partite formula for prayer, but it is simple enough that I imagine it will show up at least a few more times in the book of Psalms.  With all that said, let’s move on to Psalm 14.