Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 141:5

"Let the righteous smite me, [it shall be] a kindness; And let him reprove me, [it shall be as] oil upon the head; Let not my head refuse it: For even in their wickedness shall my prayer continue." — Psalms 141:5 (ASV)

The difficulties of the psalm increase here. Render it as: Let a righteous man smite me, it is a kindness; and let him reprove me, it is oil for the head: my head shall not refuse it, even if it continues; yet my prayer is against their wickedness.

The word rendered “smite” is that used of Jael’s “hammer strokes” (Judges 5:26). (Compare Isaiah 41:7.) The Hebrew for “reprove” is probably used in a judicial sense, as in Genesis 31:37; Isaiah 2:4; Proverbs 24:25; and others.

The greatest obscurity surrounds the word rendered above as “refuse”—but in the Authorized Version as “break”—probably because in Psalms 33:10 (bring to none effect) it is in parallelism with “break.” The Septuagint and Vulgate understand it as meaning “anoint,” rendering (from a different text than ours) let not oil of a wicked man anoint my head. If we could adopt this reading, it would remove the difficulty of this part of the verse and provide an excellent parallelism: “A righteous man may smite me in mercy and reprove me, but let not a wicked man’s oil anoint my head;” that is, I would welcome reproof from the righteous but reject even the festive oil offered by the wicked.

For the rendering “wickednesses” instead of “calamities,” compare Job 20:12 and Psalms 94:23. For the sense of “although” given to the conjunction, see Exodus 13:17. The suffix “their” refers back, of course, to the ungodly in Psalms 141:4.

The “oil for the head” is a natural emblem of festivity, and the whole sentiment of the passage is fairly clear. Rather than join in the wicked mirth of a profane banquet, the poet would be the object of continued rebuke and chastisement from one of the godly—his prayer meanwhile still rising for protection against the allurements held out to tempt him. We probably have sketched here the actual condition of many a Levite between the apostate and the loyal part of the nation.