Psalm 11

Psalm 11 is the eleventh psalm of the Book of Psalms, beginning in English in the King James Version: "In the LORD put I my trust: how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?" In the slightly different numbering of the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, it is Psalm 10, "In Domino confido". Its authorship is traditionally assigned to King David, but most scholars place its origin some time after the end of the Babylonian captivity.

The psalm forms a regular part of Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and other Protestant liturgies. It was set to music by composers including Heinrich Schütz, Joseph Stephenson and Benjamin Cooke.

The shape of this psalm differs from the usual scheme, for which the Old Testament scholar Hermann Gunkel finally assigns as a "confidence Psalm in the form of conversation". Erhard S. Gerstenberger calls the psalm a "disputierendes prayer" within the genus of Lamentations of an individual. Hans-Joachim Kraus [de] has the psalm as a song of prayer.

Usually, the Psalm is organized as follows:

A division into verses is sometimes not done.

The following table shows the Hebrew text of the Psalm with vowels, alongside the Koine Greek text in the Septuagint and the English translation from the King James Version. Note that the meaning can slightly differ between these versions, as the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text come from different textual traditions. In the Septuagint, this psalm is numbered Psalm 10.

The psalm is strongly individual. Klaus Seybold [de] calls this the personal testimony of persecution, who have opted for the legal process. Hermann Gunkel agrees calling it the "subjective response of a single poet to an involuntary emergency". Oswald Loretz [de] sees the psalm as "a product of post-exil scriptural scholarship that seeks to modernise traditional text" "ein Produkt nachexilischer Schriftgelehrsamkeit, die die Texte der Tradition modernisieren will").

The psalm leads off with a question which is put to the writer's soul: 'Why should I flee like a bird to the mountains?' Barnes and many others see the fleeing as negative and running away rather than trusting God. The Psalmist instead resolves to trust God. There is an irony in that David often did flee from Saul to the mountains, but in the long run became King in Jerusalem in 1 Sam chapters 21 through 23. Additionally there is a contrast with Psalm 7: the wicked shoot arrows at the righteous in Psalm 11, but in Psalm 7 God readied his bow and arrows for the wicked. There is also a tension: God is felt to be far away and unresponsive - but He is not and that tension also appears in other Psalms, such as in Psalm 22.