16. Hear and answer me, O Lord, for Your loving-kindness is sweet and comforting; according to Your plenteous tender mercy and steadfast love turn to me.
17. Hide not Your face from Your servant, for I am in distress; O answer me speedily!
18. Draw close to me and redeem me; ransom and set me free because of my enemies [lest they glory in my prolonged distress]!
19. You know my reproach and my shame and my dishonor; my adversaries are all before You [fully known to You].
20. Insults and reproach have broken my heart; I am full of heaviness and I am distressingly sick. I looked for pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none.
21. They gave me also gall [poisonous and bitter] for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar (a soured wine) to drink. [Matt. 27:34, 48.]
22. Let their own table [with all its abundance and luxury] become a snare to them; and when they are secure in peace [or at their sacrificial feasts, let it become] a trap to them.
23. Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually [from terror, dismay, and feebleness].
24. Pour out Your indignation upon them, and let the fierceness of Your burning anger catch up with them.
25. Let their habitation and their encampment be a desolation; let no one dwell in their tents. [Matt. 23:38; Acts 1:20.]
26. For they pursue and persecute him whom You have smitten, and they gossip about those whom You have wounded, [adding] to their grief and pain.
27. Let one [unforgiven] perverseness and iniquity accumulate upon another for them [in Your book], and let them not come into Your righteousness or be justified and acquitted by You.
28. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living and the book of life and not be enrolled among the [uncompromisingly] righteous (those upright and in right standing with God). [Rev. 3:4, 5; 20:12, 15; 21:27.]
29. But I am poor, sorrowful, and in pain; let Your salvation, O God, set me up on high.