Wednesday Bible Study: Name that tune!

The introduction to several psalms refers to events in 1 Samuel when David is on the run from Saul, although the content is not really specific to the tale. In Psalm 56, "The Dove on Far-off Terebinths" is thought to be the name of the tune. (Terebinths are a kind of tree.) We've seen a few of these instances where an existing composition is apparently given new lyrics. Oddly, however, 1 Samuel 21, in which David goes to Gad, does not actually say that the Philistine seized him. David was apparently afraid that King Achish would do him ill, so he pretended to be insane, whereupon Achish expelled him. But there is no direct reference to these events in the psalm.

 

Regarding Psalm 57, "Do Not Destroy" seems a rather bizarre name for a song -- it's something we would expect to see on a file folder -- but it must have made sense in context. David in the cave refers to 1 Samuel 22, in which he flees from Gath to the cave of Adullam, where he collected a following of 400. But again, there is nothing specific about these events in the psalm.

To the choirmaster: according to The Dove on Far-off Terebinths. A Miktam of David, when the Philistines seized him in Gath.

56 Be gracious to me, O God,
for men trample upon me;
    all day long foemen oppress me;
² my enemies trample upon me all day long,
    for many fight against me proudly.
³ When I am afraid,
    I put my trust in thee.
⁴ In God, whose word I praise,
    in God I trust without a fear.
    What can flesh do to me?

⁵ All day long they seek to injure my cause;
    all their thoughts are against me for evil.
⁶ They band themselves together, they lurk,
    they watch my steps.
As they have waited for my life,
⁷     so recompense^[a] them for their crime;
    in wrath cast down the peoples, O God!

⁸ Thou hast kept count of my tossings;
    put thou my tears in thy bottle!
    Are they not in thy book?
⁹ Then my enemies will be turned back
    in the day when I call.
    This I know, that^[b] God is for me.
¹⁰ In God, whose word I praise,
    in the Lord, whose word I praise,
¹¹ in God I trust without a fear.
    What can man do to me?

¹² My vows to thee I must perform, O God;
    I will render thank offerings to thee.
¹³ For thou hast delivered my soul from death,
    yea, my feet from falling,
that I may walk before God
    in the light of life.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 56:7 Cn: Heb deliver
2. Psalm 56:9 Or because

To the choirmaster: according to Do Not Destroy. A Miktam of David, when he fled from Saul, in the cave.

57 Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
    for in thee my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of thy wings I will take refuge,
    till the storms of destruction pass by.
² I cry to God Most High,
    to God who fulfils his purpose for me.
³ He will send from heaven and save me,
    he will put to shame those who trample upon me.Selah
God will send forth his steadfast love and his faithfulness!

⁴ I lie in the midst of lions
    that greedily devour^[a] the sons of men;
their teeth are spears and arrows,
    their tongues sharp swords.

⁵ Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!
    Let thy glory be over all the earth!

⁶ They set a net for my steps;
    my soul was bowed down.
They dug a pit in my way,
    but they have fallen into it themselves.Selah

⁷ My heart is steadfast, O God,
    my heart is steadfast!
I will sing and make melody!
⁸     Awake, my soul!
Awake, O harp and lyre!
    I will awake the dawn!
⁹ I will give thanks to thee, O Lord, among the peoples;
    I will sing praises to thee among the nations.
¹⁰ For thy steadfast love is great to the heavens,
    thy faithfulness to the clouds.

¹¹ Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!
    Let thy glory be over all the earth!

Footnotes

1. Psalm 57:4 Cn: Heb are aflame

 

Welcome to the nuthouse

Despite having his Precious Bodily Fluids depleted and polluted by the feminist succubus and the Bill Gates microchip vaccine, Travis Kelce turned in a Hall of Fame-worthy performance to lead the KC Chiefs to the Superb Owl. So, right on cue, MAGAland is in hysteria because the game was obviously rigged, presumably by an Italian satellite, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hugo Chavez.

“Taylor Swift is an op,” Benny Johnson, a right-wing media personality who boasts millions of followers across different social media platforms, wrote on X. “It’s all fake. You’re being played.”

“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open,” added Laura Loomer, a self-described Islamophobe who has been embraced and promoted by Trump. “It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.”

“The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce),” agreed Mike Crispi, a Salem Media host. “All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA. Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.”“It’s all been an op since day one,” Crispi concluded.

 

Where exactly the Chiefs and Ravens found the time or space to secretly rehearse the game is as yet unknown, but they sure made it look real. Great job guys! The question is how people can actually believe something so manifestly insane. Well, it's not limited to rigged football games, as Krugthulu notes (gift link):

 

Falsely believing that Europe is a continent on the brink of ruin is one thing (although millions of Americans visit Europe, and so get the chance to see for themselves, each year). It’s much harder to excuse the belief that New York — one of the safest big cities in America — is some kind of urban wasteland. After all, estimates say that more than 50 million Americans visited the Big Apple last year, and a lot of people who haven’t visited New York know someone who has visited or who, like yours truly, actually lives here. Yet only 22 percent of Republicans say that the city is safe to visit or live in.

The trashing of New York raises the question of the extent to which MAGA supporters are willing to disregard the evidence of their own eyes. People buy gas all the time; when Trump says “gasoline prices are now $5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon,” around twice the price plainly displayed on big signs all around the country, do his followers believe him?

 

All of this obviously poses the question, why do people believe things that obviously are not true? Jill Filipovic proposes one answer: 

DeSantis seems like an unpleasant person. His cruelty is of the smarmy sort, calibrated to his goal of personal gain, which means winning approval – from Trump or from a voter base he has pegged as malicious and spiteful.  

But even people who support cruel acts don’t typically want to think of themselves, as DeSantis seems to, as callous or vengeful. They want to think that they are pursuing justice and doing what is required to assert a deserved dominance. This means that the cruelty should feel good, and may even be fun. Trump grasps this, which is why he so often makes cruelty a mass spectator sport: in a crowd (or a mob), it’s easy and invigorating to get caught up in the collective pleasure of a shared experience and sense of purpose, and of a common enemy.  . . .

In his essay “The Cruelty is the Point”, Adam Serwer recounted a trip to the Museum of African-American History in Washington DC, where he looked at photos of lynchings, and particularly at the faces of the white men in the crowd, smiling at their grotesque crimes. “Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy,” Serwer wrote. “And it made them feel closer to one another.” This is perhaps Trump’s highest skill: he draws sharp lines around “us” and an abhorrent, dangerous and vermin-like other, and then brings the in-group into his cruelty with him. It’s not Trump targeting vulnerable groups; it’s Trump pulling us together to defend the collective us, protect the tribe. Anyone who has spent time on a middle-school campus knows that there are bully leaders who attract a group of bully followers, and then there are the mean jerks no one likes. Trump is the former, and DeSantis more the latter.  . . .

This desire for collective cruelty, and a sense that being in a group makes cruelty more entertaining and less the responsibility of any one individual, has roots in the darkest parts of humanity. Public executions persisted in England until the second half of the 19th century; in the US, public executions, lynchings, and mob violence aimed at racial minorities were long popular activities; today in some conservative, autocratic, often theocratic nations, public executions remain favoured spectator sports. As other societies have evolved, democratised, secularised and sought to impose human rights-affirming systems of justice, they have moved away from killing-as-spectacle. But the core desire – to make vengeance a communal pastime – has not died out, especially among those who embrace autocracy, conservative religiosity and traditionalism.  

Trump embodies that desire for retribution as sport. Ron DeSantis hit all the right notes on the punitive vengeance part of the equation. But he failed to make it feel like a party.

 

 This.

 

Reforming new drug development

So what to do about the misalignment between incentives under the current drug patenting and licensing regime, and public health? (To summarize recent posts in a pistachio shell, the pharmaceutical industry is motivated solely by profit, the most profitable drugs are not necessarily the ones that contribute the most to population health, and the prices are too high for many people to afford in any case.) It is true that if there were an effective international regime to limit pharmaceutical prices, the investment in new R&D would be severely limited. As Thomas Pogge puts it (Pharmaceutical Patents and Economic Inequality. Health and Human Rights, Dec. 2023):

Universal access to new medicines could be achieved through a global buyers’ alliance—including national health systems and insurers—which would tell each originator how much it can charge various kinds of buyers for its product. Such an alliance could effectively dictate prices, as the originator’s sole alternative would be to take a loss on its entire R&D investment. But such a monopsony would greatly reduce pharmaceutical R&D: investors would not spend billions on developing important new medicines if their return were wholly at that alliance’s discretion. Is there a feasible regime that would ensure the profitability of pharmaceutical R&D without the massive human rights denials entailed by monopoly patents?

 

So yeah, I get that. Fortunately, Pogge has a proposed solution, called the Health Impact Fund.  The basic idea is not complicated. It costs a lot to develop and test new drugs, but the actual cost of manufacturing them once they are approved is generally very low. The idea is that an alliance of governments puts up a big pot of money -- maybe with a contribution by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the gang, maybe with some regime of dedicated taxes to keep it going. Pharmaceutical companies can register their investigational new drugs with the fund. They agree that if the drug is approved, they'll sell it at a small markup over the cost of manufacture, but they'll receive payments from the fund proportional to the annual gains in health from the product. 

There are a couple of ways to measure global health impact, which we don't need to go into a lot of detail about here. This would presumably use some version of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which combines gains in life expectancy with gains in quality of life. In any case, this gives the companies an incentive to develop products that will have a big impact on public health but either would not be very profitable -- such as antibiotics -- or would otherwise be sold at a very high price, but would now be affordable. They'd make much of their money from the fund, rather than profit on sales.

Now, there is a lot of controversy about this, a lot having to do with exactly how to make it work, who will run it, how it will make decisions and judgments, yadda yadda. It's radical in that it breaks out of the market system, but on the other hand it doesn't resemble socialism as we normally think of it. The companies are still private, for profit entities, they're still looking to enrich their executives and shareholders -- they just have a different incentive structure. It may seem unlikely to happen given the current squabbling nature of the international community, but that's just one more reason to try to get the world to sing in perfect harmony, as if we didn't have enough reasons already. Anyway, the main point is that we can imagine a better world, if we can get our heads out of the post-industrial capitalist box.

Note: Yes, I do in fact believe that anybody who would even consider voting for Donald Trump is an idiot. Pointing out that there are a lot of idiots is not a refutation,

Sunday Sermonette: David Kvetches

We have two short psalms and one long one today. "Mahalath" in Psalm 53 is probably a kind of stringed instrument,  perhaps similar to a guitar. The singer believes that all of humanity is depraved. This seems to have been written at some time of ill fortune, but the context is not specified.

 

Psalm 54 refers to an incident in 1 Samuel 23. David was hiding from Saul in the wilderness of Ziph, when the Ziphites (presumably some Ziphites, or their representatives) went to Saul and told him where David was to be found. Saul and his army went to capture David, but they were called away to respond to a Philistine attack and David escaped.

Psalm 55 is a lengthy complaint about treachery by an unspecified friend. It seems likely that this is meant to refer to Ahitophel, a counselor of David who joined Absalom's rebellion, as described in 1 Samuel 15. I will just note that most of the psalms seem to be grounded in the Deuteronomistic History -- we don't see references to the Torah history, although it is more central to worship in the diaspora. This may be a clue to how the Jewish religion evolved in the exilic and post-exilic period.

53 The fool says in his heart,
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity;
    there is none that does good.

² God looks down from heaven
    upon the sons of men
to see if there are any that are wise,
    that seek after God.

³ They have all fallen away;
    they are all alike depraved;
there is none that does good,
    no, not one.

⁴ Have those who work evil no understanding,
    who eat up my people as they eat bread,
    and do not call upon God?

⁵ There they are, in great terror,
    in terror such as has not been!
For God will scatter the bones of the ungodly;^[a]
    they will be put to shame,^[b] for God has rejected them.

⁶ O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!
    When God restores the fortunes of his people,
    Jacob will rejoice and Israel be glad.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 53:5 Cn Compare Gk Syr: Heb him who encamps against you
2. Psalm 53:5 Gk: Heb you will put to shame

To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Maskil of David, when the Ziphites went and told Saul, “David is in hiding among us.”

54 Save me, O God, by thy name,
and vindicate me by thy might.
² Hear my prayer, O God;
    give ear to the words of my mouth.

³ For insolent men^[a] have risen against me,
    ruthless men seek my life;
    they do not set God before them.Selah

⁴ Behold, God is my helper;
    the Lord is the upholder^[b] of my life.
⁵ He will requite my enemies with evil;
    in thy faithfulness put an end to them.

⁶ With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to thee;
    I will give thanks to thy name, O Lord, for it is good.
⁷ For thou hast delivered me from every trouble,
    and my eye has looked in triumph on my enemies.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 54:3 Another reading is strangers
2. Psalm 54:4 Gk Syr Jerome: Heb of or with those who uphold

 

To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Maskil of David.

55 Give ear to my prayer, O God;
and hide not thyself from my supplication!
² Attend to me, and answer me;
    I am overcome by my trouble.
I am distraught ³ by the noise of the enemy,
    because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they bring^[a] trouble upon me,
    and in anger they cherish enmity against me.

⁴ My heart is in anguish within me,
    the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
⁵ Fear and trembling come upon me,
    and horror overwhelms me.
⁶ And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
⁷ yea, I would wander afar,
    I would lodge in the wilderness,Selah
⁸ I would haste to find me a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest.”

⁹ Destroy their plans,^[b] O Lord, confuse their tongues;
    for I see violence and strife in the city.
¹⁰ Day and night they go around it
    on its walls;
and mischief and trouble are within it,
¹¹     ruin is in its midst;
oppression and fraud
    do not depart from its market place.

¹² It is not an enemy who taunts me—
    then I could bear it;
it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—
    then I could hide from him.
¹³ But it is you, my equal,
    my companion, my familiar friend.
¹⁴ We used to hold sweet converse together;
    within God’s house we walked in fellowship.
¹⁵ Let death^[c] come upon them;
    let them go down to Sheol alive;
    let them go away in terror into their graves.^[d]

¹⁶ But I call upon God;
    and the Lord will save me.
¹⁷ Evening and morning and at noon
    I utter my complaint and moan,
    and he will hear my voice.
¹⁸ He will deliver my soul in safety
    from the battle that I wage,
    for many are arrayed against me.
¹⁹ God will give ear, and humble them,
    he who is enthroned from of old;
because they keep no law,^[e]
    and do not fear God.Selah

²⁰ My companion stretched out his hand against his friends,
    he violated his covenant.
²¹ His speech was smoother than butter,
    yet war was in his heart;
his words were softer than oil,
    yet they were drawn swords.

²² Cast your burden^[f] on the Lord,
    and he will sustain you;
he will never permit
    the righteous to be moved.

²³ But thou, O God, wilt cast them down
    into the lowest pit;
men of blood and treachery
    shall not live out half their days.
But I will trust in thee.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 55:3 Cn Compare Gk: Heb they cause to totter
2. Psalm 55:9 Tg: Heb lacks their plans
3. Psalm 55:15 Or desolations
4. Psalm 55:15 Cn: Heb evils are in their habitation, in their midst
5. Psalm 55:19 Or do not change
6. Psalm 55:22 Or what he has given you

 

Reflections on the Dumpster

Many sane people are baffled by the veneration of the Trump cultists for such a repulsive, worthless excuse for a human being. I'm going to say what we aren't supposed to say. The answer is obvious: the characteristics of the Orange Shitpile that are most loathsome are exactly what they like about him. He gives not just permission, but affirmation, to the base impulses of people who aren't very smart and whose basic nature is selfishness, continual anger, and hatred.

People who are ignorant, lack critical thinking skills, and whose minds are boxed in by prejudice and bigotry can't win arguments with facts and logic, but now they have permission to win by bullying, threats of violence, and mindless taunts unworthy of a four year old. The hatred in their hearts is amplified and then endorsed. They are not just affirmed, but elevated, for their mindless resentments and false beliefs. The problem is not Trump, but that disturbingly large segment of the population that actually feels empowered and ennobled by his narcissism and psychopathy. That's what they actually like about him.

What I don't really get is why nearly all Republican politicians are buying into the scam. The people he most enjoys humiliating and screwing over are precisely the people who are most sycophantic. What did Mike Pence get out of being VP? What has happened to his butt kissing lawyers? What does Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham have to show for shoving their noses into his diaper? Where is the Red Wave of 2022? They could have rid themselves of him for good in 2020 by voting to convict on impeachment. What did they think they were gaining by not doing what was obviously right?

I will say that fortunately, it is getting to the point where even the New York Times, as hard as they are trying, can't ignore his rapidly progressing dementia. That he spews word salad and confuses Nancy Pelosi with Nicki Haley and Joe Biden with Barack Obama doesn't matter to his cultists -- they aren't actually paying attention to anything he is literally saying, it's just about the affect and the schoolyard insults for them. But the aphasia is getting to the point where he's just completely unpresentable in public. What will Mitch McConnell and Maggie Haberman do then?

Calling out the bullshit

Yes, it is expensive to run the clinical trials needed to get approval of new drugs. However, as people seem to be very skilled at missing the point, the profit motive does not cause drug companies to spend that money in ways that optimize public benefit. As a matter of fact, the cost of drug development and trials is completely unrelated to the price of drugs: 

Abstract

Importance  Drug companies frequently claim that high prices are needed to recoup spending on research and development. If high research and development costs justified high drug prices, then an association between these 2 measures would be expected.

Objective  To examine the association between treatment costs and research and development investments for new therapeutic agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2009 to 2018.

Design, Setting, and Participants  This cross-sectional study analyzed 60 drugs approved by the FDA between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2018, for which data on research and development investments and list or net prices were available. Data sources included the FDA and SSR Health databases.

Main Outcomes and Measures  The primary independent variable was estimated research and development investment. The outcome was standardized treatment costs (ie, annual treatment costs for both chronic and cycle drugs, and treatment costs for the maximum length of treatment recommended for acute drugs). Standardized treatment costs were estimated separately using list and net prices obtained from SSR Health at the time of launch and in 2021. To test the association between research and development investments and treatment costs, correlation coefficients were estimated and linear regression models were fitted that controlled for other factors that were associated with treatment costs, such as orphan status. Two models were used: a fully adjusted model that was adjusted for all variables in the data set associated with treatment costs and a parsimonious model in which highly correlated variables were excluded.

Results  No correlation was observed between estimated research and development investments and log-adjusted treatment costs based on list prices at launch (R = −0.02 and R² = 0.0005; P = .87) or net prices 1 year after launch (R = 0.08 and R² = 0.007; P = .73). This result held when 2021 prices were used to estimate treatment costs. The linear regression models showed no association between estimated research and development investments and log-adjusted treatment costs at launch (β = 0.002 [95% CI, −0.02 to 0.02; P = .84] in the fully adjusted model; β = 0.01 [95% CI, −0.01 to 0.03; P = .46] in the parsimonious model) or from 2021 (β = −0.01 [95% CI, −0.03 to 0.01; P = .30] in the fully adjusted model; β = −0.004 [95% CI, −0.02 to 0.02; P = .66] in the parsimonious model).

Conclusions and Relevance  Results of this study indicated that research and development investments did not explain the variation in list prices for the 60 drugs in this sample. Drug companies should make further data available to support their claims that high drug prices are needed to recover research and development investments, if they are to continue to use this argument to justify high prices.

 

In case you don't know much about statistics, this is as zero of a correlation as you will ever get. I mean no association at all, zip, zilch, nada.

 

And I might add that the basic research to identify biological mechanisms that are likely targets for pharmaceutical intervention, and to identify candidate drugs or biologicals, is mostly done by NIH-funded investigators in universities. The drug companies then appropriate the knowledge to develop their products.  There is a better way to do this.

Wednesday Bible Study: Bad King

Psalms 51 and 52 refer to incidents in 2 Samuel and 1 Samuel, respectively, in which David does not exactly earn his crown. As with all the psalms of David, they were written long after he was dead -- they're actually fan fiction, or commentaries on Samuel. Just as a reminder, Psalm 51 refers to 2 Samuel 11-12 in which David rapes a woman named Bathsheba and gets her pregnant. To try to cover it up he summons her husband Uriah, a general, back from the front, but Uriah is loyal to his troops and won't come, so David has him murdered. He then marries Bathsheba. That is definitely not nice. God sent Nathan to let David know this behavior was not approved. The psalm, however, invokes a concept of original sin. It's not that David is especially psychopathic, it's that we're born in sin. Once again, this psalm says that God doesn't really desire sacrifice (verse 16), which is a total contradiction of the central essence of the Torah and Deuteronomistic history, and indeed of the very story of which this is a part, David's establishment of Zion. It's also hard to make sense of in the context in which it was actually composed, because the rebuilding of the Temple was essential to the return from exile and reestablishment of the Kingdom of Judah.

The incident in Psalm 52 has come up before, in which the scribe appears to misspell Ahimelech as Abimelech. King Saul was trying to have his rival David murdered, so David fled and sought refuge with the priest Ahimelech. Doeg, a servant of Saul's, was present. David knew that Doeg would tell Saul what had happened, which indeed Doeg did, whereupon Saul had Ahimelech and his friends killed. But David didn't try to do anything about it, he just split the scene. Again, not a nice person. However, the psalm puts all the blame on Doeg.

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

51 Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love;
    according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
² Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
    and cleanse me from my sin!

³ For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is ever before me.
⁴ Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
    and done that which is evil in thy sight,
so that thou art justified in thy sentence
    and blameless in thy judgment.
⁵ Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
    and in sin did my mother conceive me.

⁶ Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being;
    therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
⁷ Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
    wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
⁸ Fill^[a] me with joy and gladness;
    let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.
⁹ Hide thy face from my sins,
    and blot out all my iniquities.

¹⁰ Create in me a clean heart, O God,
    and put a new and right^[b] spirit within me.
¹¹ Cast me not away from thy presence,
    and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
¹² Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,
    and uphold me with a willing spirit.

¹³ Then I will teach transgressors thy ways,
    and sinners will return to thee.
¹⁴ Deliver me from bloodguiltiness,^[c] O God,
    thou God of my salvation,
    and my tongue will sing aloud of thy deliverance.

¹⁵ O Lord, open thou my lips,
    and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.
¹⁶ For thou hast no delight in sacrifice;
    were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased.
¹⁷ The sacrifice acceptable to God^[d] is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

¹⁸ Do good to Zion in thy good pleasure;
    rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
¹⁹ then wilt thou delight in right sacrifices,
    in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;
    then bulls will be offered on thy altar.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 51:8 Syr: Heb Make to hear
2. Psalm 51:10 Or steadfast
3. Psalm 51:14 Or death
4. Psalm 51:17 Or My sacrifice, O God

 

To the choirmaster. A Maskil of David, when Doeg, the Edomite, came and told Saul, “David has come to the house of Ahimelech.”

52 Why do you boast, O mighty man,
    of mischief done against the godly?^[a]
    All the day ² you are plotting destruction.
Your tongue is like a sharp razor,
    you worker of treachery.
³ You love evil more than good,
    and lying more than speaking the truth.Selah
⁴ You love all words that devour,
    O deceitful tongue.

⁵ But God will break you down for ever;
    he will snatch and tear you from your tent;
    he will uproot you from the land of the living.Selah
⁶ The righteous shall see, and fear,
    and shall laugh at him, saying,
⁷ “See the man who would not make
    God his refuge,
but trusted in the abundance of his riches,
    and sought refuge in his wealth!”^[b]

⁸ But I am like a green olive tree
    in the house of God.
I trust in the steadfast love of God
    for ever and ever.
⁹ I will thank thee for ever,
    because thou hast done it.
I will proclaim^[c] thy name, for it is good,
    in the presence of the godly.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 52:1 Cn Compare Syr: Heb the kindness of God
2. Psalm 52:7 Syr Tg: Heb his destruction
3. Psalm 52:9 Cn: Heb wait for