Chapter 43

A psalm asking for defense against enemies, and against injustice in general.  A request for direction from God, to lead us back to his altar.

This Psalm ends with the same verse as Psalm 42, yet 42 is not in this day's reading...

Here is yet another Psalm where David is afraid of enemies, and he feels that God has abandoned him.  Was this while he was hiding in the wilderness or while he was King in Hebron.  In the chronological reading, this is after Hebron.  Perhaps these are during the time before all Israel and a lot of Judah got in line behind him.  During Abner's time, and Ishbosheth's.  He would have had a lot of enemies during this time, pretenders trying to knock him off and make their own claims to the throne of all Israel.  So David is not paranoid, there really are plots against him in every direction.

AND, David is not the author of this psalm!  This is book 2, written mostly by the sons of Korah.  So trying to pin these psalms to events specific to David's life is inaccurate.

2021 - Looking at this today, I don't know that you can even say it is about military enemies.  Perhaps this is about the unsettled nature of things after Saul was defeated by the Philistines and David is accepted as King only in Hebron.  That leaves much of Israel in turmoil, without rule of law, and the day to day problems of ordinary people would be their own, with no justice system really to take care of things.  If you got cheated, that was on you.  It would have been a depressing time, a difficult time, an uncertain time.  They could no longer count on the "government" to enforce good behavior much less justice.  A time of growing similarity for the US, with all our "failures of government" right now.  No leadership or common sense in the war on covid, in fact it often seems like deliberate insanity.  The open borders, letting migrants come in and set up "encampments" and then the "government" tells law enforcement they aren't allowed to do anything about it.  That's deliberate injustice to the citizens of this country in favor of those of some other country.  Inflation ramping up because the government is adding so much money to the economy and they seem to be drunk with doing so, and determined to keep it going.  Yes, it is a time of uncertainty here also.  In the case of Psalm 43, it was problems with a new country, just learning to function under a king.  With us, it seems more like the writhing of a dying country, just trying to hang on a little longer, but with an inevitable end in sight.