A broken and contrite heart: David's prayer of confession

Psalm 51 is the most famous prayer of repentance in the Bible. It sits in the second of the five books of the Psalter (Psalms 42 to 72), in a small group of psalms with titles that tie them to events in David's life. The title here names the occasion: 'When Nathan the prophet came to him after his adultery with Bathsheba.' The story is told in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. David stayed in Jerusalem while his army was at war, took Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and then arranged Uriah's death in battle to cover the pregnancy. Nathan confronted him with a parable about a stolen lamb, and David said, 'I have sinned against the LORD.' Nathan answered that the LORD had put away his sin, but that the child would die and the sword would not leave his house (2 Samuel 12:13-14).

The psalm is traditionally ascribed to David, who ruled Israel from about 1010 to 970 BC. Many conservative scholars accept the title as original. Others, working from the view that Psalm titles were added by later editors, treat the link to Nathan as an early interpretation of the psalm rather than a historical record. The last two verses are the main point of difference. They pray for Jerusalem's walls to be built, which some read as David's concern for the city, and others as a later addition from the time after the Babylonian destruction of 586 BC, when the walls were in ruins. Either way, the psalm was gathered into the Psalter as a prayer for any member of God's people who has done great wrong, and it was sung by Israel in that form.

The first hearers lived under the covenant given at Sinai. That covenant provided a system of sacrifices for sin, but it drew a line between sins done in error and sins done 'with a high hand', that is, deliberately and in defiance (Numbers 15:27-31). Adultery and murder were both capital offences (Leviticus 20:10; Exodus 21:12). David, who was king, had committed both. He could not bring an animal and have the matter settled. That is the setting for the psalm's bold claim in verses 16 and 17.

Psalm 51 is an individual lament, and more exactly a penitential prayer. The church later gathered seven psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143) as the penitential psalms, and this is the central one. Hebrew poetry works by parallelism, where the second line repeats, sharpens or completes the first. In verses 1 and 2 three words for sin are paired with three words for cleansing, so that no part of David's wrongdoing is left unnamed.

Two literary points matter.

• First, the psalm is addressed to God throughout. There is no word to the people, no excuse and no mention of Bathsheba or Uriah by name. That silence is part of the meaning: the writer is standing before God alone.
• Second, the psalm has a plain turn at verse 13. Up to verse 12 David asks for things. From verse 13 he promises things, with each promise placed after the corresponding request. Cleansed, he will teach; delivered, he will sing; restored, he will offer.

There are two main interpretive questions: verse 5, which has a long and divided history of reading, and how verses 16 and 17 fit with the sacrificial law and with verses 18 and 19. The class takes the words as David's first hearers would, in light of the sacrificial system they knew, and then asks how the New Testament uses the psalm.

Verses 1 and 2

The prayer opens with a plea, 'Have mercy on me, O God.' The basis is not David's repentance but God's own character: 'according to Your loving devotion' (chesed, the covenant faithfulness God has promised) 'according to Your great compassion' (rachamim, a word related to the womb and so to a parent's tenderness). Three verbs describe what David wants done with his sin: 'blot out' (as one wipes a record clean), 'wash' (the word is used for laundering clothes, which implies scrubbing out a stain) and 'cleanse' (the ritual term for making a person fit to approach God). The three words for sin are just as full. Transgression (pesha) is rebellion against an authority. Iniquity (avon) is a twist or crookedness and also the guilt that comes from it. Sin (chattat) is missing the mark.

Verses 3 to 6. 'For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.' David does not excuse himself or claim that the sin was out of character. Verse 4 is the center of the confession: 'Against You, You only, have I sinned.' David had wronged Bathsheba, Uriah and the nation, and he knew it. His point is that God's is the standard by which every wrong is measured. The purpose clause, 'so that You may be proved right when You speak and blameless when You judge', means that David accepts whatever verdict God gives. Paul quotes this in Romans 3:4 to show that God remains true even when every person is shown to be false.

Verse 5, 'I was sinful when my mother conceived me', is not a comment on the act of conception or on David's mother. It says that David's sin does not stand alone: it comes from a nature that has been bent from the start. Verse 6 then sets truth 'in the inmost being' against that, and says God desires reality in the hidden places, where David had been false.

Verses 7 to 9. 'Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean.' Hyssop was a bushy plant used as a brush for sprinkling. It applied the blood on the doorposts at the first Passover (Exodus 12:22), the cleansing of a person healed of a skin disease (Leviticus 14), and the water of purification made with the ashes of a red heifer (Numbers 19:18). David is using the language of the sanctuary. He cannot cleanse himself; someone must sprinkle him. 'The bones You have crushed' describes the physical weight of guilt, and Psalm 32:3-4 paints the same picture of David's silence before he confessed.

Verses 10 to 12. David now asks for more than pardon. 'Create in me a clean heart.' The verb is bara, which in the Old Testament has God alone as its subject: it is the verb of Genesis 1:1. David asks for a new act of creation. 'Renew a right spirit' means a steady one, which does not waver. Verse 11, 'take not Your Holy Spirit from me', is one of only two places in the Old Testament that use the phrase 'Holy Spirit' (the other is Isaiah 63:10-11). Saul had experienced the Spirit's departure (1 Samuel 16:14), and David is aware that he could lose what Saul lost. 'A willing spirit' in verse 12 is a generous and ready one, willing to obey.

Verses 13 to 15. The vow follows. The forgiven sinner will 'teach transgressors Your ways.' 'Bloodguilt' in verse 14 is the Hebrew plural 'bloods', and it names Uriah's death. David does not soften it. He asks to be delivered from it and promises that his tongue will 'sing of Your righteousness'. In verse 15 David asks God to open his lips, as one who cannot praise unless God enables him.

Verses 16 and 17

'You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it.' This is not a rejection of the sacrificial law. It is a statement that no sacrifice was provided for what David had done, and that God was looking beyond the ritual. The sacrifices that God will accept are 'a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart'. 'Contrite' means crushed. God 'will not despise' it. The prophets use the same logic (1 Samuel 15:22; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:6-8).

Verses 18 and 19

The psalm ends with the city. David, or a later singer, prays that God would 'build up the walls of Jerusalem', and promises that then 'righteous sacrifices' will be offered. Private repentance leads to public worship, and a restored heart is what gives the temple its meaning.

Psalm 51 teaches a doctrine of sin and forgiveness that fits the whole Bible. Sin is first an offence against God and only second a harm to people. It is also deeper than a single act, since verse 5 traces the act to the person. The Old Testament elsewhere says that every inclination of the human heart is evil from youth (Genesis 8:21) and that the heart is deceitful and sick (Jeremiah 17:9). Forgiveness is therefore not simply the removal of guilt but the renewal of the person, which is what verses 10 to 12 ask for.

The prophets promised exactly this. Jeremiah looked for a new covenant with the law written on the heart (Jeremiah 31:33), and Ezekiel promised that God would sprinkle clean water, give a new heart and put his Spirit within his people (Ezekiel 36:25-27). The vocabulary matches Psalm 51: cleansing, a new heart, a right spirit, and God's Spirit. David prays, in the era of the old covenant, for a gift that the new covenant makes the pattern.

Psalm 51 also shows how the Old Testament understood sacrifice. The offerings were real and God-given, yet they did not work mechanically. The prophets and psalmists insist that what God wants is a heart. This is not a contradiction of Leviticus. It is the intention behind it. Psalm 32, also ascribed to David, tells the same story from the side of the joy of being forgiven.

The main connection here is a type, with a promise behind it. David asks to be cleansed by hyssop, an instrument of sacrificial application, and the sacrifice that actually cleanses is not a lamb or a heifer. Hebrews 9:13-14 argues that if the blood of animals and the ashes of a heifer sanctified the flesh, the blood of Christ will cleanse the conscience, and Hebrews 10:4 says that the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins. The cleansing David reached for was, on that reading, real but dependent on the offering that would one day be made. John 19:29 records that a sponge of wine vinegar was lifted to Jesus on a branch of hyssop. John does not comment on it, so this is best taken as an echo of the Passover imagery that runs through his Gospel.

The New Testament also draws on the psalm in a second way. Paul's quotation of verse 4 in Romans 3:4 is not a prophecy of Jesus but a statement about God's justice: God is true and right, and Romans 3:21-26 then shows how he can remain just and still justify the ungodly through the redemption in Christ Jesus. The psalm supplies the question: how can a righteous God pardon a guilty king when no sacrifice was prescribed? Romans 3:25-26 gives the New Testament's reply.

Finally, David's request for the gift of the Holy Spirit and a new heart finds its fulfillment in the promise of the new covenant. Jesus told Nicodemus that a person must be born of water and Spirit (John 3:5), which many interpreters link to Ezekiel 36:25-27. 1 John 1:7 and 9 speak of the blood of Jesus that cleanses from all sin and of the faithfulness and justice of God who forgives when sins are confessed.