Psalm 109:23

Psalm 109:23, in plain English

The psalmist is using two powerful images—his life is disappearing like a shadow at sunset, and he's being brushed aside like an insect—to show how completely he's being discarded.

Why it's here

When someone uses imagery like this, they're trying to help you feel what they feel. A lengthening shadow means the day is ending, the light is fading—there's a finality to it. A locust shaken off means you're insignificant, easily removed, worthless. He's describing not just hardship but irrelevance.

Who's speaking

The psalmist deepening his description of distress.

Where it sits in the story

The Bible repeatedly uses fading and disappearing imagery for human weakness and mortality—it shows up in Job, in Ecclesiastes, and reminds us that God alone is permanent and unchanging. The psalmist is acknowledging his fragility before God.

The scholarly reading

The psalmist employs two vivid metaphors—a fading shadow and a shaken-off locust—to convey his experience of dissolution and rejection.

Language and setting

The imagery grows progressively more acute. A lengthening shadow (*tzal noshlakh*, literally 'shadow stretches out') evokes evening's encroachment and the approach of death; being shaken off like a locust (*kannam yunna'ar*) suggests the violent, dismissive removal of something contemptible. These are not merely poetic flourishes but phenomenological descriptions of how sustained persecution produces a sense of ontological diminishment.

Voice

The petitioner, moving beyond material description into experiential and existential language.

Significance

The shadow metaphor appears throughout Scripture as an emblem of transience (Job 14:2), and the locust image invokes the eschatological judgment of Exodus 10. Here they merge to suggest that the speaker experiences his own condition as a kind of plague visited upon him.

21But You, O GOD, the Lord, deal kindly with me for the sake of Your name; deliver me by the goodness of Your loving devotion.

22For I am poor and needy; my heart is wounded within me.

23I am fading away like a lengthening shadow; I am shaken off like a locust.

24My knees are weak from fasting, and my body grows lean and gaunt.

25I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they shake their heads.

Read all of Psalm 109 — David's most severe imprecatory psalm. The curses are shocking — but they come from a man who has handed vengeance to God instead of taking it himself.