John Calvin Commentary Psalms 11:3

"If the foundations be destroyed, What can the righteous do?" — Psalms 11:3 (ASV)

Truly, the foundations are destroyed. Some translate the word השתות, hashathoth, as nets, a meaning in which Scripture often uses this word in other places; and their explanation of the words is that the wicked and deceitful arts which the ungodly practiced against David were defeated. If we accept this interpretation, the meaning of what he adds immediately after, What has the righteous one done? will be that his safe escape was owing neither to his own exertion nor to his own skill, but that, without putting forth any effort, and when, as it were, he was asleep, he had been delivered from the nets and snares of his enemies by the power of God.

But the word foundations agrees better with the scope of the passage, for he evidently proceeds to relate into what straits he had been brought and shut up, so that his preservation, to all appearances, was now hopeless. Interpreters, however, who maintain that foundations is the proper translation of the word, do not agree on the meaning.

Some explain it as meaning that he did not have a single spot on which to fix his foot; others, that covenants, which ought to have stability by being faithfully kept, had often been shamefully violated by Saul. Some also understand it allegorically, as meaning that the righteous priests of God, who were the pillars of the land, had been put to death.

But I have no doubt that it is a metaphor taken from buildings, which must fall and become a heap of ruins when their foundations are undermined; and thus David complains that, in the eyes of the world, he was utterly overthrown, inasmuch as all that he possessed was completely destroyed. In the last clause, he again repeats that being persecuted so cruelly was something he did not deserve: What has the righteous one done? And he asserts his own innocence, partly to comfort himself in his calamities from the testimony of a good conscience, and partly to encourage himself in the hope of obtaining deliverance. That which encouraged him to trust in God was the belief he held that, on account of the justice of his cause, God was on his side and would be favorable to him.