Psalm 142

“there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul.” (Psalm 142:4)

The heading places this prayer in a cave, a setting it shares with Psalm 57 and which readers have long attached to the episodes at Adullam and En-gedi (1 Samuel 22:1; 24:3). In form it is an individual lament, and an unusually bare one. No enemies are described beyond a trap hidden in the path (v. 3), no wrongdoing is confessed, and no vow appears until the final line. Isolation is the subject. Verse 4 looks to the right, the side where a defender would stand (compare Psalm 109:31), and finds no one; the turn comes when the missing refuge is supplied by God himself, “you are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living” (v. 5), borrowing the vocabulary of an allotted inheritance. The closing plea to be brought out of prison (v. 7) is the only concrete hint of circumstance in the whole poem, and even that may be figurative.

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