Passage Research
Psalm 143 — Sermon Preparation
A David prayer of desolation in which the crushed spirit spreads out hands to God, pleading for guidance and deliverance while acknowledging that no one stands righteous before him. Below is a research summary for Psalm 143, drawn from openly licensed scholarly databases — original-language morphology, classic sermons from the church fathers through the Puritans, and ancient geography data.
- 12
- verses
- 117 / 84
- Hebrew words / lemmas
- 8
- classic sermon excerpts
- 4
- preachers & commentators
Psalm 143 in the Hebrew
Distinctive vocabulary of this chapter, based on original-language morphology.
| Hebrew | Transliteration | Strong's | Count | Glosses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| נֶפֶשׁ | nephesh | H5315 | 5 | breathing creature, animal |
| אֹיֵב | ʼôyêb | H341 | 3 | hating, adversary |
| רוּחַ | rûwach | H7307 | 3 | wind, breath |
| צְדָקָה | tsᵉdâqâh | H6666 | 2 | rightness, rectitude |
| חֶסֶד | cheçed | H2617 | 2 | kindness, piety |
| עָנָה | ʻânâh | H6030 | 2 | eye, heed |
| חַי | chay | H2416 | 2 | alive, raw |
How preachers through history handled this text
8 public-domain excerpts on Psalm 143, from the church fathers to the Puritans.
“This psalm, as those before, is a prayer of David, and full of complaints of the great distress and danger he was in, probably when Saul persecuted him. He did not only pray in that affliction, but he prayed very much and very often, not the same over again, but new thoughts. In this psalm, I. He complains of his troubles, through the oppression of his enemies (ver. 3) and the weakness of his spirit under it, which was ready to sink notwithstanding the likely course he took to support himself, ver. 4, 5. II. He prays, and prays earnestly (ver. …”
— Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, Vol. 3 (Job to Song of Solomon), on Psalm 143:1–30 (Public Domain)
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