Big Idea: In the face of death, wealth cannot buy God off, but he can and does redeem (spare) our lives from the power of death at his own will.

Understanding the Text

Psalm 49 has typically been classified as a wisdom psalm and dated anywhere from the tenth to the second century BC (see the sidebar “Wisdom Psalms” in the unit on Ps. 37). Kraus prefers the category of didactic poem because this psalm, like Psalms 73 and 139, aims to reflect on a problem.1In the same frame of thought, Craigie imagines that this psalm was the product of a question brought to a wise sage, a “counseling situation,” no less.2Like Psalm 47, the audience is the wide sphere of humanity, addressed to “all you peoples,” “all who live in this world” (49:1), and further defined as “both low and high, rich and poor…