Ps. 56.10-11 (man-blessed-by-God)

By God’s help / I will be able / to praise a word
by Yhwh’s help / I will be able / to praise a word.
In God / I trust; / I am not afraid
what can human beings / do to me? 

This section almost mirrors verse 4 except for the inclusion of the statement “by Yhwh’s help I will be able to praise a word” and the change of “his word” to “a word”. Its repetition is not surprising as it comes to close the second portion that largely recapitulated the first section. However, why the inclusion of Yhwh? I don’t know. It is the only mention of the divine name in the psalm, which is largely absent from this portion of the psalms. The ‘word’ referred to here has the same significance it had in verse 4: that of a delivering and empowering word. It both contains a message and is an action or response to the psalmist’s plea for help. Why it drops the ‘his’ is not clear although it may be that it points to the immediacy of the word, in that it has become almost objectively concrete to the psalmist. It is already “on its way” to deliver him, in the same sense that (perhaps) the help and mercy (vs. 1) have been sent from heaven and are now journeying to the psalmist to deliver him. All of this, again, points to the psalmist’s sense of God’s moving him within his sphere of ‘everlasting’ power and away from the ‘men of flesh’ that are ready to overtake him. It is becomes of this certainty (the immediacy of the word and mercy) that he can come to say that he is no longer afraid and completely relativize the entirety of “human beings”. It is an astonishing confidence and reveals the extent that he views the power of God working in his life. As we said previously—the greater his confidence in God’s power the more all of ‘human beings’ become relegated to ‘mere breath’. That said, it is clearly a breath that is and can be fatal if one does not stand within the sphere of God’s saving power. For, as we saw, what humans can do is quite a lot: they can topple a king through slander; they can poison a community toward a righteous man; they can instigate a coup at precisely the moment when the king is most vulnerable. In short, they can destroy a kingdom.  And yet, within the midst of that very real and understood reality, the king now moves into this moment of almost calm confidence in God’s power to ‘on that day’ deliver him. It is not that man is not dangerous, it is that man-blessed-by-God is safe.