Many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord

The King James Version will always be the Bible I know and love best, but reading a different translation from time to time can be helpful, too, as it makes the familiar unfamiliar and helps one to see it in a new way. Such has been my recent experience reading the Penitential Psalms in the Vulgate translation of St. Jerome. My attention was particularly arrested by the 10th verse of Psalm 32 (called Psalm 31 in the Greek numbering used by Jerome). This is the King James Version I have always known:

Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.

And here is the Vulgate, followed by the Douay-Rheims, which is an English translation of the Vulgate rather than of the original Hebrew.

Multa flagella peccatoris, sperantem autem in Domino misericordia circumdabit.

Many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord.

Insofar as I can judge, the sorrows, wicked, and trusteth of the King James are more faithful to original Hebrew than the Vulgate's flagella, peccatoris, and sperantem. However, Jerome sticks closer to the Hebrew when he translates the first clause without a verb, literally "many scourges to the sinner." This is not really grammatical in English, though, so the King James inserts shall be, italicized to indicate that those words are not present in the Hebrew, while the Douay-Rheims instead uses are. I think both are justifiable from the Hebrew, which has no verb at all.

I've always read the KJV Ps. 32:10 as one of those contrasts between the righteous and the wicked that one associates more with the Proverbs than with the Psalms: one type of person will suffer, while a contrasting type will be encompassed with mercy.

The Vulgate suggests a different reading: not a contrast between two types of people, but between the present state of sinners and (what may be) their future state. All sinners suffer, but those (sinners) who trust in the Lord will be encompassed about by his mercy (chesed, "lovingkindness"). I think this is a much better fit for the overall tenor of the psalm, which is not about how much better it is to be righteous than wicked, but about a sinner who suffered, acknowledged his sin to the Lord, and found forgiveness.

I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah (v. 5).

The idea of confessing to the Lord sheds important light on what it really means to confess one's sins. It cannot primarily mean admitting that one has in fact performed this or that action. God obviously already knows what you have done! Acknowledging or hiding one's sin cannot be a question of letting God know or trying to prevent him from knowing. I think confessing to God does not mean telling him what you have done but rather recognizing that what you have done was sinful -- rather than making excuses or trying to justify or rationalize it.

⁂

Minor synchronicity:

When I said that obviously no one would literally try to prevent God from knowing what they had done, Cain came to mind as a possible exception. When God asks him where his murdered brother Abel is, doesn't he lie and say, "I know not"? Then I realized that, while this was clearly an evasion, it was probably not actually a lie. Cain really didn't know where Abel had gone, only that he was no longer in his body.

Just after thinking that, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read this in his latest post: "Men die and their spirits leave the world, and go... nobody knows where."

As a further synchronicity, the title of the post is "Tolkien's Elves and Men both need to trust in God." The pre-Christian David's trust in God is similar in nature to the kind of trust Tolkien's Men, similarly ignorant of Christ, would have needed.