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90:1  Lord, You have been our dwelling place and our refuge in all generations [says Moses].
90:2  Before the mountains were brought forth or ever You had formed and given birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting You are God.
90:3  You turn man back to dust and corruption, and say, Return, O sons of the earthborn [to the earth]!
90:4  For a thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.
90:5  You carry away [these disobedient people, doomed to die within forty years] as with a flood; they are as a sleep [vague and forgotten as soon as they are gone]. In the morning they are like grass which grows up—
90:6  In the morning it flourishes and springs up; in the evening it is mown down and withers.
90:7  For we [the Israelites in the wilderness] are consumed by Your anger, and by Your wrath are we troubled, overwhelmed, and frightened away.
90:8  Our iniquities, our secret heart and its sins [which we would so like to conceal even from ourselves], You have set in the [revealing] light of Your countenance.
90:9  For all our days [out here in this wilderness, says Moses] pass away in Your wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told [for we adults know we are doomed to die soon, without reaching Canaan].
90:10  The days of our years are threescore years and ten (seventy years)—or even, if by reason of strength, fourscore years (eighty years); yet is their pride [in additional years] only labor and sorrow, for it is soon gone, and we fly away.
90:11  Who knows the power of Your anger? [Who worthily connects this brevity of life with Your recognition of sin?] And Your wrath, who connects it with the reverent and worshipful fear that is due You?
90:12  So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom.
90:13  Turn, O Lord [from Your fierce anger]! How long—? Revoke Your sentence and be compassionate and at ease toward Your servants.
90:14  O satisfy us with Your mercy and loving-kindness in the morning [now, before we are older], that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
90:15  Make us glad in proportion to the days in which You have afflicted us and to the years in which we have suffered evil.
90:16  Let Your work [the signs of Your power] be revealed to Your servants, and Your [glorious] majesty to their children.
90:17  And let the beauty and delightfulness and favor of the Lord our God be upon us; confirm and establish the work of our hands—yes, the work of our hands, confirm and establish it.