Psalms 6:1

Rebuke me not. Calamity and illness were anciently often considered to be divine punishment for sin. In his anguish the psalmist assumes that God is displeased with him and therefore chastises him. The psalmist pleads that his well-deserved rebuke may be in mercy, not in anger (see Jer. 10:24). As frequently in the OT, the inspired writer characterizes the attitudes and actions of Deity in the language of men (see on Ps. 2:4). In the Hebrew, the last word of v. 1 ends with the long sound ee. This sound predominates throughout the psalm, especially at the close of many of the verses, and constitutes an interesting resemblance of sounds called assonance that imparts a penitential tone to the psalm (see p. 624).