Psalms 16:2-4

He Has Said To YHWH, ‘You Are My Lord' (2-4).

‘You have said to YHWH, You are my Lord,

I have no good beyond (apart from) you.

As for the saints (holy ones) who are in the earth,

They are the excellent (nobles) in whom is all my delight.'

The psalmist now addresses himself. ‘You (feminine singular) have said to YHWH.' The reference of the feminine singular is unclear. He is possibly attributing it to some feminine noun applied to himself which he is carrying in his thoughts (compare ‘you, O my soul' Psalms 42:5 a; see Lamentations 3:24). Or it may be in deference to his reference to YHWH, with him seeing himself as God's helpmeet.

He reminds himself that he has declared YHWH to be his sovereign Lord, to be the source of all his benefits, indeed of his whole life. For apart from Him he has nothing. So he delights in the fact that YHWH is everything to him, and he has no good beyond or apart from Him. He is a YHWH-gripped man.

Parallel with this is his delight in YHWH's own true people, those truly set apart to God, His ‘holy ones'. He sees them as the true ‘nobles' of Israel, the most excellent people on earth and as such takes delight in them. So all his thoughts at this time are of YHWH and of YHWH's true people, His ‘holy ones', to him the two most important things in life. For ‘holy ones' compare his description of himself as ‘your holy one' (Psalms 16:10) although the Hebrew word is different. Certainly later it is a word used to describe God's true people.

Others see the reference to ‘holy ones' as signifying heavenly beings, but nowhere else are similar comments made about heavenly beings. They are always seen as background to the glory of YHWH, not as to be appreciated in their own right. To delight in the angels would be totally without precedent, whereas the use of ‘holy ones' in the Psalms to denote God's people is a regular feature (Psalms 30:4; Psalms 31:23; Psalms 34:9; Psalms 37:28; Psalms 50:5; Psalms 52:9 and often).

Psalms 16:4

‘Their sorrows shall be multiplied who give gifts for (or ‘exchange for') another,

Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer,

Nor take their names on my lips.'

He spurns the idea of any contact with ‘another', i.e. with any of ‘the gods' whose names he will not take on his lips. Those who give gifts to such gods or who exchange YHWH for another god, will have their sorrows multiplied. As for him he will not offer to such gods drink offerings of blood or even take their name on his lips (he has assiduously avoided doing so here. They are nonentities).

‘The drink offerings of blood' may refer to drink offerings offered with child sacrifices which certainly occurred elsewhere in connection with the worship of Molech (see Isaiah 57:5), or it may be that drink offerings of blood were made to some gods, or it may refer to drink offerings made by men of violence. Or he may simply be saying that their drink offerings are so detestable that they may be likened to offering the forbidden blood for the god to drink.