Midway through Psalm 6, the sufferer fires off three quick pleas in a row — (1) shuvah שׁוּבָה, then (2) “rescue me,” then (3) “save me” — and everything hangs on the first. Most English Bibles translate it “Return, O LORD” (Ps 6:4, v. 5 in Hebrew). A few say something quite different: “Relent.”

It’s one word, yet it potentially conveys two entirely different pictures of what has gone wrong.

“Return” assumes absence. On this reading, the psalmist feels abandoned — God has withdrawn, gone away, and the prayer begs him to come back. The sufferer is alone in the dark, calling into an empty room.

“Relent” assumes the opposite problem. Here God is not absent at all — he is present, and that is precisely the trouble. The psalm opens with him angry: “do not rebuke me in your anger, do not discipline me in your wrath.” Read against that opening, the plea isn’t “come back.” It’s “turn back” — stop, let go of the anger, change course from punishment to mercy. The scholars note that when this verb stands alone with God as its subject, it regularly carries exactly this sense: to relent, to turn away from wrath.

The Scriptura team lands on “relent,” and it re-tunes the whole psalm. The sufferer’s agony isn’t that God has gone missing. It’s that God is near, and his hand is heavy. The prayer is not, “Come back to me.” It is, “Stop.”

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org → The Meaning of שׁוּבָה in Psalm 6:5