Psalm 91:5-6

I've written about Psalm 91 twice before, but when it was one of the readings on Worship Anew last month, I noticed something else about verses 5-6.  I was following along in my French hymnal, where these verses are:

5 Tu ne craindras ni les terreurs de la nuit,
ni la flèche qui vole au grand jour,
6 ni la peste qui rôde dans le noir,
ni le fléau qui frappe à midi.

The formatting (which I followed) makes it clear that there's anaphora here:  the repeated "ni."  There are four "ni"s, but the corresponding English has a "not" and three "nor"s:

5 You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, 6 nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.

It may just be because of the formatting, but I think the French does a better job of evoking a list of things that we need not fear because we have God's protection.  It's as if each "ni" is a separate bullet point.

Additionally, both grammatical genders (masculine "le" and feminine "la") and singular and plural are represented, which gives a sense of entirety.

Psalm 91:11

Last month, I started translating a German book published by CPH about a century ago (my edition is from 1902).

Although the title Kirchen-Gesangbuch translates to Church Songbook, the book actually seems to be a collection of antiphons, prayers, selected Bible passages for specific days, the Augsburg Confession, and other things I have yet to discover.

So far, I've made my way through two pages of the antiphons (translating one pair [Intonation and Responsorium] every day [although occasionally falling behind]).  Recently, a verse from Psalm 91 appeared:

I.  Er hat seinen Engeln befohlen über dir.  Halleluja.
R. Daß sie dich behüten auf allen deinen Wegen.  Halleluja.

This is only slightly different from what my German Bible (Luther's translation) has:  "Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen, daß sie dich behüten auf allen deinen Wegen."  In the ESV, this is "For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways."

English doesn't differentiate between 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural (at least not anymore), so until reading the German, I hadn't realized that the "you" here is singular.  (Or maybe I had, but this certainly drew my attention to it.)  I referenced the Hebrew to confirm this (although I had to look up the forms):

כִּי מַלְאָכָיו יְצַוֶּה־לָּךְ לִשְׁמָרְךָ בְּכָל־דְּרָכֶֽיךָ׃

(Here's a link to the interlinear.)

The significance here is that God's care is specific to the individual.

Psalm 91:5-6

Psalm 91 was the Psalm this week (for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels), and I was reminded of something I noticed about it a couple years ago (in December 2016), specifically in these verses:  "5 You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, / 6 nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday."  Both of these verses contain a merism relating to time:  "night" and "day" in verse 5 and "darkness" and "noonday" in verse 6.  Taken individually, each verse gives a sense of God's protecting us during the course of a single day.  But if they're taken together and each temporal element is understood as a different day, there's a sense of God's ongoing and continual protection.