Psalm 91

The Bible contains a scene of this psalm being quoted correctly and used wickedly

Two verses in, the wilderness. The devil takes Jesus to the top of the temple and tells him to jump, and to make the case he quotes this psalm:

Then the devil took him into the holy city. He set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and, ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you don’t dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again, it is written, ‘You shall not test the Lord, your God.’”Matthew 4:5-7 · World English Bible

Check it against the text. This is what Psalm 91:11-12 says:

For he will put his angels in charge of you, to guard you in all your ways. They will bear you up in their hands, so that you won’t dash your foot against a stone.Psalms 91:11-12 · World English Bible

It is an accurate quotation. Not twisted, not half-remembered — the angels, the bearing up, the foot and the stone, all present and in order. And the reply is not that is not what the psalm means. The reply is that you do not test God by manufacturing the danger the promise is supposed to cover.

That is the most useful thing on this page. Scripture itself shows this particular psalm being read correctly and applied wrongly, by the least trustworthy reader in the book. Every argument about how far Psalm 91's promises extend is downstream of a scene the New Testament already staged.

One detail in the psalm is worth putting next to it. Verse 11 has a qualifier that almost never survives quotation: the angels guard you in all your ways. Not on any errand you invent for them.

Verse 7 is the problem, and pretending otherwise is worse

A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it will not come near you.Psalms 91:7 · World English Bible

People have prayed this psalm in trenches, in plague years and in hospital corridors, and then died. Not fewer of them than anyone else. A page that quotes verse 7 approvingly and moves on is telling a bereaved reader, without meaning to, that the death was a shortfall of faith.

So, plainly: this site does not read verse 7 as a guarantee of physical survival, because that reading is refuted by every graveyard. What the psalm is doing is closer to what it does at the end, where God finally speaks for himself:

He will call on me, and I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him, and honour him.Psalms 91:15 · World English Bible

I will be with him in trouble. The trouble is assumed. It is not removed and it is not denied. That is the promise that survives contact with a real year, and it is the same shape as the answer Paul gets when he asks three times to be healed and is refused — which is on our verses for healing page, handled the same way.

Christians have read verse 7 in good faith in more than one way for a very long time, and this page is not going to settle it. What we will not do is quote it as though the question were not there.

The Soldier's Psalm, and the story that is not true

The nickname is real and well attested: Psalm 91 is known as the Soldier's Psalm, printed on cards and camouflage bandanas and carried by troops through both world wars and since.

Attached to the nickname is a story you will find on dozens of sites. A commander of the American 91st Brigade in the First World War handed every man a card printed with the 91st Psalm; the brigade fought at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood and the Argonne and came through without a single combat casualty while neighbouring units lost up to ninety per cent.

It does not survive checking, and the unit is the giveaway. The American Expeditionary Force did have a formation numbered 91 — the 91st Division, which did fight in the Meuse-Argonne. But it was a division, not a brigade, and its two infantry brigades were numbered the 181st and the 182nd. The tidy coincidence the story turns on — the 91st Brigade and the 91st Psalm — is not a unit that appears in the record.

We could not find a primary source for the no-casualties claim either. What circulates is a chain of retellings, and the debunkings that answer them are themselves secondary. So the honest position is not that we have disproved it: it is that a story repeated on hundreds of sites rests on a unit designation that does not match the order of battle, and nobody producing the story has produced the record.

We mention it because the story is the exact error the wilderness scene is about. A promise of protection gets a miracle attached to it, the miracle gets repeated until it sounds like history, and anyone whose experience did not match is left holding the difference. The psalm does not need the story and is worse off for it.

It was a psalm about plagues long before the plague people mean

Verse 6 — the pestilence that walks in darkness — sent a lot of people to this psalm in 2020, but the association is ancient. The Talmud records the psalm being called the song of evil spirits and the song of plagues (shir shel pega'im and shir shel nega'im), and from the time of the Geonim it was recited against harmful spirits. Fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls place it in material associated with exorcism.

It is a Jewish psalm first and has never stopped being one. It is said at bedtime as part of the night prayers, which is also how it entered Christian practice — through Compline, the last office of the day.

The noonday demon

Verse 6 has two halves, and the second has had the stranger life. In Hebrew it is the destruction that wastes at noonday: qeteb, Strong’s 6986, which the lexicon glosses “destruction, ruin, pestilence” and which occurs three times in the whole Hebrew Bible. Nothing in it is a person. Both our translations keep it that way, which is why the toggles above cannot show you what happened next.

What happened next was the Greek. The Septuagint — the translation Greek-speaking Jews and the early church read — renders the line daimoniou mesēmbrinou, a demon of midday. Brenton’s 1851 English of the Septuagint gives it as “the evil spirit at noon-day”, and the Latin of the Vulgate psalter, made from that Greek, has dæmonio meridiano. A sickness at midday had become a spirit.

The monks of the Egyptian desert took it at its word. Evagrius of Pontus, in the fourth century, gave the name acedia to the listless, restless can’t-stay-in-the-room despair that came over them in the middle of the day, and wrote that “the demon of acedia, also called the noonday demon, is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all” — quoted by R. R. Reno in First Things, who notes that the desert fathers had the sixth verse of Psalm 91 in mind. The phrase is still in print: it is the title of Andrew Solomon’s book on depression, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2001.

We are not saying the Hebrew means a demon. It does not, and neither of our translations says so. We are saying where the demon came from: a translation choice made in antiquity, carried into Latin, and still on a bookshop shelf.

The Greek did something like it once more, with the same pair of words. Verse 6 opens with dever, the pestilence (Strong’s 1698), and closes with qeteb. Hosea 13:14 puts the two side by side again — dever, and qoteb, which Strong’s lists separately as 6987 but derives “from the same as qeteb” (interlinear):

I will ransom them from the power of Sheol. I will redeem them from death! Death, where are your plagues? Sheol, where is your destruction? “Compassion will be hidden from my eyes.Hosea 13:14 · World English Bible

Here our two translations part company: the King James has “O death, I will be thy plagues”, the modern rendering a question, “Death, where are your plagues?”. The Septuagint read it as a question too, and gave qoteb a new sense — “O Hades, where is thy sting?” in Brenton’s English. Paul reaches for that line:

“Death, where is your sting? Hades, where is your victory?”1 Corinthians 15:55 · World English Bible

Barnes calls it “a somewhat loose quotation from Hosea 13:14”; Meyer has Paul taking the Greek and making it his own “with free alteration”; the Cambridge Bible says it “follows neither the Septuagint nor the Hebrew” (all three at Bible Hub’s commentaries). We are not settling that. What the words show is one Hebrew root that the Greek turned into a noonday demon in a psalm and into death’s sting in a prophet.

There are no eagles in Psalm 91

The best-known song drawn from this psalm is On Eagle's Wings, written by Michael Joncas in 1976 for the funeral of a friend's father, and now sung at more English-speaking Catholic funerals than almost anything else.

Read verse 4 again and you will not find an eagle in it. The psalm has feathers and wings, and the bird is unnamed; the eagle is Joncas's addition, brought in alongside the angels of verse 11. It is a good addition — but if you came to this page looking for the eagle line because you heard it at a funeral, it is in the hymn, not in the psalm.

Using it

Both texts above are public domain — the King James by age, the modern rendering by the translators' choice. Print either on an order of service, a card, a hospital noticeboard or a card for someone deploying, with no permission and no fee. Most modern translations are licensed, which is why so many sites show you three verses and a copyright notice.

Where you've heard it

Psalm 91 has travelled less into general English than Psalm 23 — there is no phrase from it that people quote without knowing — but it has a longer history of being carried around as an object.

• The temptation narrative — the earliest and most important appearance, in Matthew 4:6 and Luke 4:10-11, where verses 11 and 12 are quoted verbatim by the devil. Discussed above.
• On Eagle's Wings (1976) — Michael Joncas's setting, written for a funeral and now a fixture of Catholic and Protestant hymnals alike. It is where most people meet this psalm, and it contains an eagle the psalm does not.
• The Soldier's Psalm — printed on cards and camouflage bandanas and distributed to troops. Jimmy Stewart's father is reported to have sent him a copy when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
• The noonday demon — the Septuagint’s reading of verse 6, carried through the Latin into the desert monasteries and onto the cover of Andrew Solomon’s 2001 book on depression. Discussed above.
• Epidemic reading — verse 6's pestilence that walks in darkness made it one of the most-searched passages of 2020, continuing a use the Talmud already records under the name shir shel nega'im, the song of plagues.

What it has not produced is an English catchphrase. Psalm 23 gave English the valley of the shadow of death; Psalm 91 gave it a card to keep in a pocket — and the one phrase of its own that travelled went by way of Greek and Latin.