Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Psalm 37:4 (KJV)
The psalm opens on a reader watching the wicked prosper and being told to stop letting it eat him. Four verses in comes the line that ends up on wall art. The surprise is that the word behind desires is stronger than the wall art assumes, and that the psalm defines its own terms further down.
Written for a reader who is furious
Fret not thyself because of evildoers, it starts, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. The complaint stays in the room for all forty verses. Near the end the poet says he has seen the wicked in great power, spreading himself like a green bay tree, and then went looking for him and could not find him.
Whatever verse four is promising, it is being said to a reader who is angry about how the world is being run.
Verse four is line two of a couplet
Verse four is not a standalone offer. It is the second of a short run of four commands, and three of them have an outcome fastened to them. Trust in the LORD and do good, says verse three, and you will dwell in the land and be fed. Delight thyself, says verse four, and the desires follow. Commit thy way unto the LORD, says verse five, and he shall bring it to pass. Rest in the LORD, says verse seven, and wait patiently for him, which is the one command with nothing attached.
Read together they are one instruction given four ways, and the Hebrew of verse four opens with and, which ties it to the sentence before instead of letting it stand alone.
The poem’s own shape says the same thing. Psalm 37 is an alphabet poem: successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet start successive units, usually two verses to a letter. Verse three begins the letter B unit and verse five begins the letter G unit, which leaves verse four as the second line of verse three. Trust in the LORD and do good is the first half of the couplet somebody later lifted the second half out of.
Desires is a stronger word than people think
Here the popular reading gets help. The Hebrew noun means a request or a petition. It occurs exactly twice in the entire Old Testament, and here is the only other place.
We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners: the LORD fulfil all thy petitions.
Psalm 20:5 (KJV)
Same word, and the King James translates it petitions there. The ancient Greek translators chose their own word for a petition too. So anybody who tells you the verse means God will quietly adjust what you want is going further than the Hebrew does. A petition is a definite thing, named out loud and written down.
Verse eleven says what the delight fills
But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.
Psalm 37:11 (KJV)
That is the same verb as verse four, seven lines on, and this time the psalm says what it fills up on. Peace, and enough of it to be called an abundance, in a poem whose whole problem is that peace is exactly what the reader has lost.
The verb repays a look. Its root is about softness and being pampered, and the King James renders it once each as delicate, delicateness, and sport yourselves, so the picture under it is closer to indulgence than to payment.
Count what actually gets promised
Go through all forty verses and the same promise keeps arriving: the same piece of ground, in seven separate verses, five of them with the word inherit. The King James calls it the land in three of those verses and the earth in three others, out of one Hebrew word. Material provision appears, and every time it is at the level of not going hungry. Thou shalt be fed. In the days of famine they shall be satisfied. Nor his seed begging bread.
Riches appear once, and they belong to the other side. A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked. Jeremiah 29:11 gets read the same way, as a guarantee of outcomes, when the text around it is doing something else.
The strongest verse against me
There is a passage that reads like the wall art and reads that way on purpose. Job 22 promises gold as dust, plenty of silver, then the same delight verb, then this.
Thou shalt make thy prayer unto him, and he shall hear thee, and thou shalt pay thy vows. Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee: and the light shall shine upon thy ways.
Job 22:27-28 (KJV)
That is as transactional as the Hebrew Bible gets, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It is also Eliphaz talking, and at the end of the book God tells Eliphaz by name that he and his friends have not spoken the thing that is right. Which does not make every sentence he said false. The tension is real and I am leaving it where it is.
The years I read it as a lever
What I wanted from this verse was leverage, and the sentence gives leverage if you stop reading at the end of it. I stopped there for years and called it study. Philippians 4:13 was doing the same job for me in the same years, and I never once asked either of them what the paragraph around them was for.
The psalm was written for a reader stuck watching liars do well, and it answers him with three things he can count, which are the petitions it has in view. The wall art offers you the thing you want. The psalm offers ground under your feet, food, and quiet, and it offers them to a man who has none of the three and is watching somebody worse do better. That is more than the wall art offers, not less.