LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.
Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is. Not a pious prayer such as Psalms 90:12, or as Psalms 119:84, but an impatient demand to know when his life, which is co-extensive (in his view) with his suffering, is to end. This he follows up, in Psalms 39:5-6, with lamentations on the shortness of life, a hardship aggravated, as he impatiently represents it, by the withholding of all solid happiness from man during that short term. This was the strain of Job's complainings also (Job 6:8-11; Job 7:1-7; Job 14:1; Job 16:22).
That I may know how frail I am - literally, 'how FAILING I am' х chaadeel (H2310)]: Job 14:6, 'Turn from him, that he may cease,' margin (the same Hebrew as here). The objections to the English version are-the sense requires not a pious prayer that he may be taught his frailty, so as spiritually to profit by it. He needed not to be taught that, because he knew it too well, as he bitterly describes it in Psalms 39:5. Translate, therefore, 'Let me know what ceasing I (am to have);' when am I to cease from suffering and from life together?