Psalm 16:4 opens with a line that modern translators have called difficult, uncertain, even obscure. The ESV reads, “The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply.” But the verb rendered “run after” doesn’t mean that in the form the Hebrew text has preserved. In that form, it appears only one other time in the Bible, in Exodus 22:16, where a man who seduces an unbetrothed woman must “give the bride-price for her and make her his wife.”

Read that way, the line becomes something sharper: “Their idols increase; they have paid the bride-price for another.” In Hebrew, the word “another” comes first in its clause, for emphasis, as if to say: yet another.

In Ancient Israel, the groom paid the bride’s family. The payment was costly, public, and binding. A man who paid it was committing himself to the marriage.

The prophets often described idolatry as adultery: for example, in Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Psalm 16 compresses that whole picture into a single verb. The worshipers are not drifting toward other gods. They are paying for them, the way a man would pay for a wife, and then doing it again.

Even the word for their idols may be a jab. The usual Hebrew word for “idols” is masculine. Here it appears in a rare feminine form that elsewhere means “pains” or “sorrows,” which is why many translations speak of sorrows multiplying. Several scholars read it as “idols,” with the echo of “pains” left in on purpose. Their idols are their griefs.

The psalmist answers in the next breath. He will not pour out their drink offerings of blood. He will not even let their names pass his lips.

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org → The Text and Grammar of Psalm 16:4