Complaint and Request in the Same Breath

Psalm 142 is built from two moves repeated and interwoven rather than kept in separate sections, and that interweaving is the clearest illustration in the Hebrew Psalter of what a combined lament-and-petition prayer looks like from the inside. The complaint is concrete and social before it is theological: "I look on my right hand, and see, but there is no man that knoweth me; refuge hath failed me; no man careth for my soul," a statement about abandonment by other people rather than a statement about God's absence. The petition that follows does not wait for the complaint to be resolved or even fully stated before it begins: "I cried unto thee, O Jehovah; I said, Thou art my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low."

The psalm's final line, asking that the righteous compass him about because God has dealt bountifully with him, is phrased in the future tense of hoped-for deliverance rather than the past tense of deliverance received, which means the psalm as written never actually resolves into thanksgiving. It ends still inside the plea, a structural choice shared with several other ancient Near Eastern prayers of this type and one that later liturgical use, reciting the psalm precisely because its distress is never narrated as past, has generally respected rather than smoothed over.