Bible Commentary - Psalms 21

This is a psalm of thanksgiving for God’s salvation and answered prayer.  Like so many other psalms, this psalm is well-characterized by the first verse, which establishes the overall tone of the chapter as a whole.  Even in the first verse, we see the praise themes with David “rejoicing” and being “glad” at the salvation of God.

Remember how I explained that the psalms of prayer had three parts?  A prayer psalm is a problem statement, a request for deliverance, and then praise and thanksgiving for God’s presumed response.  This psalm basically takes that last third of the prayer and stretches it out to fill up an entire song.

I can identify two parts in this psalm.  The first part is from verses 1-7, and this is, for lack of a better word, the “positive” section.  This is the part where David describes how wonderful God is to him, how God has “given him his heart’s desire” (v. 2).  He continues to describe the “blessings of good things”, “a crown of fine gold”, “life”, “glory”, “splendor and majesty”, and “joyful with gladness in your presence” as a choice selection of God’s blessings for the king.

These are all wonderfully positive things and de-emphasize the adversarial nature that many other prayers in the psalms can take.  For example, you don’t need to defeat an enemy to have a crown of gold, or life or glory or joyfulness or any of those things.  Those are blessings that come from a bit of hard work and the favor of God.  In contrast, many other psalms focus on victory over his enemies as both the goal and the object of praise and thanksgiving (for one example, see Psalm 18).

The second part is verses 8-12 (excluding the brief concluding verse 13).  This is the part where David praises God for destroying all his enemies.  Interestingly, if you carefully parse the pronouns here David is not talking about his own enemies, he is talking about God destroying God’s enemies.  I know this because throughout the entire psalm, David has an entirely consistent usage of pronouns: “he/him” refers to “the King” (with one minor exception in v. 9, where it is God), “they/them” refers to the enemies, while “you/your” refers entirely to God.  Every single place it says “you” or “your”, in both the first and second part, it is referring to God.  This means that “your enemies” (v. 8) are God’s enemies, not David’s.  It’s also interesting how David describes himself in the third person, referring to himself as “the king” rather than using first person pronouns.

Again this is an interesting, if minor, shift from the typical narrative.  Typically the “enemies” in Psalms are either wicked men, exploiting the poor and vulnerable and generally running contrary to social justice values, or they are evil men seeking to destroy David or the righteous more generally (these groups contain some overlap of course and are not always easily distinguishable).  In this chapter, the crimes of these “enemies” are not clearly described, but since they are called the enemies of God I would suspect it could include either group.

Anyone who breaks the laws of God is considered, in some vague fashion, an enemy of God, because God’s laws and God himself are somewhat conflated in the biblical text.  What is the difference between obeying God and obeying his laws?  Or in the same way, what is the difference between disobeying God and disobeying his laws?  From there, it’s only a small jump to get from disobeying God to being his enemy.

Similarly, David and the righteous more generally carry a strong association with God throughout the bible.  Therefore seeking to kill or destroy the righteous is generally equivalent to attacking God himself.  In conclusion, I think David would equate any kind of wicked person, regardless of the nature of their crimes, as an enemy of God inasmuch as their wickedness stands in rebellion against God’s nature and God’s law.  Even though I called this a minor shift, it seems like this is just a slightly different way of talking about the same general group of people.

Between these two sections, then, we see the righteous (such as the king) uplifted, and we see the simultaneous downfall of the wicked.  This reminds me of Job and elsewhere in the OT where God is the righteous judge, blessing the righteous and punishing the wicked.  This seems to be the basic narrative structure of the psalm, where “the king” is the righteous and the “enemies” of God are the wicked.

The centerpoint of this whole structure is trust.  “For the king trusts in the LORD” (v. 7), and that is the reason we can believe in both deliverance of the king and destruction of those who do evil.  It begins and ends with praise (v. 1, 13), but in the center is trust, believing that God will do what he has promised and help his people.