“Indeed, I was born guilty.” (Literally, “Behold, in iniquity I was writhed out.”)
The word “indeed” means to call our attention to a special point. It has the purpose of furthering what David asserted at the end of the previous verse, that God has every right to label him a sinner. We could get at the sense of this word by paraphrasing it in English as, “If you want to get to the real fact of the matter.” In other words verse 5 is a further and more compelling truth than David set forth in verses 4-5a.
When the verse reads, “I was born guilty,” it really is paraphrasing the Hebrew which is very hard to translate directly into English. In the Hebrew David is the subject of a verb that describes his mother “writhing” in labor pains. There is not, of course, any English verb like “writhed out,” but with this made-up verb I was trying to show what the Hebrew is saying.
The word translated “guilty” means sin in the aspect of something that incurs guilt and demands punishment. In the Hebrew it is not clear from the sentence whether the guilt is that of David or of his mother. GOD’S WORD solves the problem for us by phrasing it in such a way that it is clear that David is referring to his own sin. We can agree with this understanding. David is not describing something sinful about the way his mother gave birth to him. Throughout the psalm he is speaking of his own sin. Yet the way David describes his birth, focusing on his mother writhing in pain as she gave birth to him, reminds us of the painful consequences of sin that the LORD revealed to Eve in Genesis 3:16: “I will increase your pain and your labor when you give birth to children.” The writhing of David’s mother in giving birth to him reminds him that she was sinful, and that she passed this sinful human nature on to him as well.
“I was a sinner when my mother conceived me.” (Literally, “in sin my mother went into heat for me.”)
Here David uses a different Hebrew word for sin. It means to miss the mark, to be off target. It is the general, most common Hebrew word for sin.
If we thought that David was less than dignified when he described his mother as writhing in pain when she gave birth to him, the verb he uses here is downright crass. David’s choice of words is not the usual word used in the Bible for pregnant. This word actually means to become hot, and is almost identical to our phrase, “to go into heat.” We use this phrase to describe the reproductive cycle of female animals. And the Bible does the same. This is a rare word in Biblical Hebrew. It is only used five times. All the other times are in Genesis 30-31 where the subjects are Jacob’s sheep conceiving offspring.
Here is the only place that the word is used of a human being, and it can hardly be meant to be complimentary. Instead of the focus being on intercourse as a thoughtful act of human love which results in a child’s amazing conception, it is debased to mere animal sex drive. It almost reduces that act by which David’s mother became pregnant to a pornographic, thoughtless act of sex for sex’s sake. This is not a pretty picture. David hardly could have made his point that he is a sinful man born of sinful parents any more vividly.
This psalm like all the psalms is Hebrew poetry. The chief characteristic of such poetry is a mechanism called parallelism. This means that in each verse, or perhaps in two verses together, two sentences stand in a parallel arrangement to each other. Often the structure of each sentence is the same as its parallel. You can see this in our verse. There are three types of parallelism identified by scholars of the Old Testament:
ANTITHETICAL (the two clauses say opposite things)
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.
Stubborn fools despise wisdom and discipline” (Proverbs 1:7).
SYNONYMOUS (the two clauses say the same thing, usually in different words)
“Wash me thoroughly from my guilt,
and cleanse me from my sin” (Psalm 51:2).
PROGRESSIVE (the second clause completes the thought of the first)
“Righteous people will see this and be struck with fear;
They will laugh at you and say,” (Psalm 52:6).
The question is which type of parallelism do we have here? Obviously, it is not antithetical. But are the two clauses just saying the same thing, or is David adding to and completing his thought with the second clause. If we say that the clauses are saying the same thing in different words, David is saying that conception and birth are all part of one great nine-month event. Whether you mention birth or conception makes no difference. They are just looking at the beginning or the end of the same thing. We could understand David that way. At the same time we can understand this verse as expressing progressive parallelism. When David mentions conception, he is adding to and making his thought more complete than it was before.
The last thing we wish to look at in this verse is the arrangement of the verse. It seems a little strange. Why would David speak of his birth in the first clause and then his conception in the second? According to the natural order of things it ought to be the other way around. However, David seems to be telling us something with this order. The place where he is standing as he writes the psalm is at the point of confessing his great sins of adultery and murder. He is saying that the LORD is absolutely right to label him a sinner. These great sinful acts prove it. But, in fact, his sinfulness goes far deeper than just outward acts that break God’s holy will. His whole being is racked with sin. He is sinful by nature, and as such, is under God’s judgment and is what Paul calls an object of “[God’s] anger.” (See Ephesians 2:3.) Now David is saying that this has been the case from the very beginning of his existence. When was that? David looks back. The first milestone of his early existence he comes to going backwards from where he is at is his birth. But he says that he can go back farther yet. He can go all the way back to his conception, the very time when he came into being as an individual separate from his mother and father. That was the time of his conception. David seems to be completing his thought with the final clause, going back as far as he possibly can go. At that time already he was a human being, answerable to God for his sinfulness and in need of the LORD’s unfailing love and compassion.
When does human life begin? This passage teaches the doctrine of original sin. As such, if David’s guilt before God began at conception, then that is the time when he became an individual human being. In other words, a person’s existence begins at conception.