In Peace I Will Sleep

If someone asks you

Your Bible mistranslates verse 5.

Psalm 4:5 in Hebrew says *rigzu* — tremble, quake, be agitated. It is a word about shaking. The Septuagint translators rendered it *orgizesthe*, "be angry" — a different concept. Paul then quotes the Greek at Ephesians 4:26 as though it were the word of God, as he habitually quotes the Greek, and the entire Christian tradition of "righteous anger" descends from a translation choice that the Hebrew does not require. Your Vulgate locks it into Latin, and Trent declares that Latin "authentic" and forbids anyone to reject it. So you have a moral doctrine, an apostolic proof-text, and a conciliar decree all stacked on a rendering the original does not clearly support.

Three replies, in ascending order of importance.

First, the philology is not as clean as the objection needs. Ragaz denotes violent agitation, and Scripture uses it of the earth shaking, of nations quaking, and of persons in states that include rage as readily as fear; the objection quietly narrows a broad root to one English gloss. "Be angry" is inside the range, not outside it. That is why competent translators still divide over this verse — and why the honest Catholic answer is not "the Greek is obviously right," but "the Hebrew is genuinely ambiguous and the Church has defined nothing about it."

Second, the canon question is the real one, and it does not run the way the objection assumes. The Church did not receive a Hebrew original and then approve a Greek copy of it. The apostolic Church received and used the Greek Old Testament — the New Testament writers quote it constantly — and the Church's judgment about which texts, and in which form, are Scripture is itself part of the deposit, not a downstream administrative act. When Paul prays Psalm 4:5 in Greek, that is not an apostle failing an exam in Hebrew; that is the Church exercising the authority to say what her Scripture is. If you want to argue that the Church cannot do that, argue that — but then you have no canon at all, because the table of contents in the objector's own Bible came from the same kind of judgment.

Third, on Trent and the Vulgate. Session IV (8 April 1546) declared the Vulgate authentica — to be held as authentic in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, and free of doctrinal error. It did not declare it superior to the Hebrew and Greek, and it did not forbid recourse to them. Pius XII removed any doubt in 1943 in Divino Afflante Spiritu, directing Catholic scholars to work from the original languages. There is no wall here to knock down.

And notice what survives every version of this dispute. Tremble and do not sin. Be angry and do not sin. Whatever moved in your chest today, do not let it become an act against God or your neighbor — take it to your bed and be sorry there. No translation of this verse produces a different instruction.

Say it out loud: Tremble or rage, the psalm says the same thing: whatever's moving in you tonight, take it to the bed and not to the fight.

"In peace I will sleep" is a placebo.

This is comfort literature, and its central claim is empirically false. Just men are murdered in their beds. Devout mothers do not wake up. Children who said their prayers die in the night while the men who abused them sleep eight uninterrupted hours. The psalm's premise is that God distinguishes the godly and settles him in safety — and the actual distribution of nighttime catastrophe shows no such pattern, none, not once you control for anything. What you are calling peace is a self-administered sedative: repeat a verse, feel calmer, sleep. That works with any mantra. The calm is real; the reason given for it is not.

Do not answer this by promising something the psalm does not promise. It never says the just man will wake up.

Read the last line again: "for thou, O Lord, singularly hast settled me in hope." In spe — in hope, not in guaranteed outcomes. Hope is precisely the virtue that operates where the outcome is not visible; if the night were secured, hope would be unnecessary. The psalm is not a prediction about the next eight hours. It is a transfer of custody.

Augustine, commenting on this very verse, will not let it be domesticated into a good night's sleep either. He reads "I will sleep, and take rest" of what comes after: "Then shall this corruptible put on incorruption... this is not had now in this life, but is to be hoped for after this life." The peace on offer is resurrection peace. That is a harder claim than the objector's caricature, and a more honest one.

Then look at where the Church puts it. She does not assign Psalm 4 to the morning of a good day. She assigns it to Compline — and then follows it, within minutes, with Christ's dying words from the Cross, into thy hands I commend my spirit, and with an old man asking to be let go in peace. The Church is not pretending that beds are safe. She is teaching men to lie down as though it were the last time, because one night it will be, and she wants the words to be habit by then. That is the opposite of a sedative. A sedative helps you not think about death. This makes you rehearse it nightly.

And take the objector's strongest case seriously — the just man who does not wake. Christianity's answer to that case is not a denial. It is a tomb. The one genuinely innocent man went into the dark and did not come out under his own power, and his Father did not leave him there. That is why the Church can hand a dying man Psalm 4 without lying to him. The peace is not the claim that nothing will happen tonight. It is the claim that the one holding the night has already been through it.

Say it out loud: The psalm never promised I'd wake up. It promised somebody's holding the night — and he's already been dead once and come back out.