properly · verb, niphal active participle, masculine singular absolute
halt
לְצֶ֣לַעle.Tze.la'
H6761
a limping or full (figuratively) · preposition + noun, common masculine singular absolute
sorrow
וּמַכְאוֹבִ֖יu.makh.'o.Vi
H4341
anguish or (figuratively) affliction · conjunction + noun, common masculine singular construct + pronominal suffix
continually
תָמִֽידta.Mid
H8548
properly · noun, common masculine singular absolute
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Psalms 6:6 I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.
Psalms 35:15 But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I knew…
Psalms 38:6 I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long.
Psalms 77:2-3 In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord: my sore ran in the night, and ceased not: my soul refused to be comforted.
Isaiah 53:3-5 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised,…
Micah 4:6-7 In that day, saith the LORD, will I assemble her that halteth, and I will gather her that is driven out, and her that I have afflicted;
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Psalms 38:12–end
In these verses,
I. David complains of the power and malice of his enemies, who, it should seem, not only took occasion from the weakness of his body and the trouble of his mind to insult over him, but took advantage thence to do him a mischief. He has a great deal to say against them, which he humbly offers as a reason why God should appear for him, as Psa 25:19, Consider my enemies. 1. "They are very spiteful and cruel: They seek my hurt; nay, they seek after my life," Psa 38:12. That life which was so precious in the sight of the Lord and all good men was aimed at, as if it had been forfeited, or a public nuisance. Such is the enmity of the serpent's seed against the seed of the woman; it…
for he is confident the
Lord--literally, "Sovereign" (to whom he was a servant), would answer his prayer (Psa 3:4; Psa 4:1), and not permit their triumph in his partial halting, of which he was in danger.
John Gill on Psalms 38:17
For I am ready to halt,.... Meaning either that there was a proneness in him to sin; see Jeremiah 20:10; or that he was subject to affliction and adversity, as the same word is rendered in Psalm 35:15; and the words are either a reason and argument used with the Lord, to hear and keep his foot from slipping, that so his enemies might not rejoice over him, and magnify themselves against him; as they would do should he fall into sin or into any calamity, both which he was liable to: or they are a reason why he was so calm and quiet under the ill usage he met with from friends and enemies, because he was "ready for halting", or "prepared" (o) for it; he considered that he was born for trouble a…
Psalm 38:15-20
15. For on thee, O Jehovah! do I:wait: thou wilt answer me, O Lord! [56] my God. 16. For I said, lest they rejoice over me when my foot slippeth, they magnify themselves against me. 17. Surely I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me. 18. Surely I declare my iniquity; and I am dismayed because of my sin. 19. And yet my enemies living are become strong; and they that oppose me wrongfully are become mighty. 20. And they that reader me evil for good are opposed to me; because I follow that which is good.
15 For on thee, O Jehovah! do I wait. David here shows the source of his patience. It consisted in this, that, trusting in the grace of God, he overcame all t…
The Church Fathers
Sin made me deserve whipping, he is saying; thus I submit myself to punishment. I long for treatment at your hands, pricked as I am by the pangs of sin.
(Verse 17.) Therefore, for all these things, a beautiful remedy is prepared in the form of a whip, and it offers itself to the Lord, so that it may bear the scourges that please God. I indeed choose the holy kind of whip that David endured with composure; but he chose it because the necessity of choosing one out of three conditions was commanded. However, where it is not commanded, the servant of God is prepared for everything, whether he undergoes bodily illness or flees from the face of the enemy, or experiences the death of his sons, whom he does not fear to send ahead; because he can receive it without being dismayed. For he also knows that if he were to be punished with temporal punishment here, it could alleviate the eternal punishment of torment in the future. Therefore, he begs that his petition be accepted, and that he himself be punished in order to be accepted; for the Lord disciplines every son whom he accepts.
"For I am prepared for the scourges" (ver. 17). Quite a magnificent expression; as if He were saying, "It was even for this that I was born; that I might suffer." For He was not to be born, but from Adam, to whom the scourge is due. But sinners are in this life sometimes not scourged at all, or are scourged less than their deserts: because the wickedness of their heart is given over as already desperate. Those, however, for whom eternal life is prepared, must needs be scourged in this life: for that sentence is true: "My son, faint not under the chastening of the Lord, neither be weary when thou art rebuked of Him." "For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth." Let not mine enemies therefore insult over me; let "them not magnify themselves;" and if my Father scourgeth me, "I am prepared for the scourge;" because there is an inheritance in store for me. Thou wilt not submit to the scourge: the inheritance is not bestowed upon thee. For "every son" must needs be scourged. So true it is that "every son" is scourged, that He spared not even Him who had no sin. For "I am prepared for the scourges."
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Halt — Lame on the feet (Gen. 32:31; Ps. 38:17). To “halt between two opinions” (1 Kings 18:21) is supposed by some to be an expression used in “allusion to birds, which hop from spray to spray, forwards…
Conviction · OF SIN — OF SIN
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
(Heb.: 38:16-23) Become utterly useless in himself, he renounces all self-help, for (כּי) he hopes in Jahve, who alone can help him. He waits for His answer, for (כי) he says, etc. - he waits for an answer, for the hearing of this his petition which is directed towards the glory of God, that God would not suffer his foes to triumph over him, nor strengthen them in their mercilessness and injustice. Psa 38:18 appears also to stand under the government of the פּן;
(Note: The following are the constructions of פן when a clause of ore than one member follows it: (1) fut. and perf., the latter with the tone of the perf. consec., e.g., Exo 34:15., or without it, e.g., Psa 28:1 (which see); (2) fut…
No longer able to endure his suffering and teetering on the verge of collapse (cp. 15:5), the psalmist confesses his sin (see 32:5).
Spurgeon's Treasury of David on Psalms 38:17
For I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me.
For I am ready to halt. Like one who limps, or a person with tottering footsteps, in danger of falling. How well this befits us all. "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." How small a thing will lame a Christian, how insignificant a stumbling block may cause him to fall! This passage refers to a weakness caused by pain and sorrow; the sufferer was ready to give up in despair; he was so depressed in spirit that he stumbled at a straw. Some of us painfully know what it is to be like dry tinder for the sparks of sorrow; ready to halt, ready to mourn, and sigh and cry upon any occasion, and for any cause. And…
