Psalm 27 · a question people ask
"When my father and my mother forsake me" (27:10). Did the psalmist's parents abandon him?
The psalm doesn't say. The verse reads, "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up" (27:10). It names no event and tells no story, and these notes don't add one. Forsake is azav, the verb of the plea just before it, "neither forsake me, God of my salvation" (27:9) (tap forsake). Take me up is one Hebrew word, a form of asaf, which Brown-Driver-Briggs gives as "gather, remove" and Strong's as "to gather for any purpose; hence, to receive" (tap take). It is the verb of the elders who take in the one who flees to a city of refuge: "They shall take him into the city with them" (Joshua 20:4). Isaiah sets a mother beside the LORD too: "Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you!" (Isaiah 49:15). Both set the LORD's care beside a parent's.
The verses
“Don’t hide your face from me. Don’t put your servant away in anger. You have been my help. Don’t abandon me, neither forsake me, God of my salvation. When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.”
““Speak to the children of Israel, saying, ‘Assign the cities of refuge, of which I spoke to you by Moses, that the man slayer who kills any person accidentally or unintentionally may flee there. They shall be to you for a refuge from the avenger of blood. He shall flee to one of those cities, and shall stand at the entrance of the gate of the city, and declare his case in the ears of the elders of that city. They shall take him into the city with them, and give him a place, that he may live among them.”
““Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you!”