A father to the fatherless: what Psalm 68:5–6 means

"A father to the fatherless" is Psalm 68:5. It says that the God of Israel, enthroned in his holy dwelling, takes the side of the children with no father to protect them, and of the widows with no husband to speak for them. The NIVUK puts it this way:

A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.

Psalm 68:5 (NIVUK)

The King James Version, which this page quotes unless it says otherwise, says "a father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows". The verse after it goes further: God "setteth the solitary in families" (Psalm 68:6, KJV). Below is where the verse sits in the psalm, what its Hebrew words say, what to make of a hard line in verse 6, and how the rest of the Bible turns the promise into an instruction. For why Christians call God Father at all, see Songs about God as Father.

What does "a father to the fatherless" mean?

In ancient Israel, a child whose father had died had lost the person whose job it was to provide for them and to speak for them in a dispute. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915) says the Old Testament names the fatherless "as typical instances of the unprotected and necessitous", usually beside "the widow and the stranger".

So the psalm is making a claim about who God is for. The word translated "judge" in the KJV and "defender" in the NIVUK is dayyan, the judge who hears a case and sees justice done. The widow had no husband to plead for her. God does.

The verse calls God two things at once. He is "in his holy habitation", above everything, and he is the father of the child nobody is looking after. The psalm does not see these as opposites. It puts them in one sentence.

Where does the verse sit in Psalm 68?

Psalm 68 is a victory song with a procession in it. It opens with the words Moses said whenever the ark of the covenant set out through the wilderness:

And it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up, LORD, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee.

Numbers 10:35 (KJV)

The psalm begins "Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered" (Psalm 68:1, KJV), and the nineteenth-century commentators Keil and Delitzsch read the opening as "a repetition of those memorable words" from Numbers. Later, the procession reaches the sanctuary: "They have seen thy goings, O God; even the goings of my God, my King, in the sanctuary. The singers went before, the players on instruments followed after" (Psalm 68:24–25, KJV).

In between, verse 4 tells the people to praise the God "that rideth upon the heavens" (Psalm 68:4, KJV). The very next line is our verse. The God who rides the heavens is the father of the fatherless.

"His holy habitation" has a history of its own. The same two Hebrew words appear in Deuteronomy 26:15, in a prayer the law gives to every household. In the third year, each family gives its tithe to "the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow" (Deuteronomy 26:12, KJV). Then they pray:

Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest unto our fathers, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

Deuteronomy 26:15 (KJV)

The phrase turns up in a few other places too (Jeremiah 25:30, Zechariah 2:13 and 2 Chronicles 30:27, where the KJV has "holy dwelling place" for the same Hebrew), so Psalm 68 is not quoting Deuteronomy. But the echo fits. In the law, the prayer to the God in his holy habitation comes straight after the fatherless have been fed.

Psalm 68 is also one of the hardest psalms in the Bible to read, and has been for a long time. The Methodist commentator Adam Clarke began his notes on it: "I know not how to undertake a comment on this Psalm: it is the most difficult in the whole Psalter". In 1950–51 the archaeologist W. F. Albright argued that it is not one poem but a list of the opening lines of many separate poems, "a collection of incipits or poem fragments", as the scholar Murray Lichtenstein later summed up his view (1972). Verses 5 and 6 are among its clearer lines. Even so, one word in verse 6 is still argued over, as the next section shows.

What do the Hebrew words say?

Here are verses 5 and 6 phrase by phrase, in three English translations, with the word-for-word glosses from Bible Hub's interlinear.

Four of those words are worth stopping on.

The fatherless. Yetomim is the ordinary Hebrew word for orphans, and it centres on the father. Lamentations 5:3 shows it: "We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows" (KJV). The mothers are alive. The children are still orphans.

The solitary. Yechidim is the plural of yachid, a word meaning "only" or "only one". It is what God calls Isaac in Genesis 22:2, "thine only son" (KJV). It is what the psalmist calls himself in Psalm 25:16: "Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and afflicted" (KJV). "Desolate" there is yachid. The standard Hebrew lexicon, Brown-Driver-Briggs, reads the word in Psalm 68 as "solitary, isolated ones", people it describes as "friendless wanderers or exiles".

In families. Baytah is singular. It means "to a home". "Families" is a fair translation of the idea, and the NIVUK's footnote offers another, "the desolate in a homeland". Either way, what God gives the lonely is somewhere to live.

With chains, with singing, or into prosperity? Kosharot appears only here in the Bible, and nobody is sure what it means. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon gives "prosperity". Some medieval Jewish readers, Radak among them, read it as if it began with a different Hebrew letter, which gives "chains" (Mitchell First, The Jewish Link, 11 May 2023). The "singing" in the WEB and NIVUK rests on a related word in Ugaritic, an ancient language close to Hebrew, ktrt, which some scholars read as "female singers". Murray Lichtenstein, writing in the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society in 1972, doubted that reading. I am not going to pick one. Whatever the word means, the prisoners come out.

One practical note. Hebrew Bibles count the psalm's title as verse 1, so their verse numbers run one ahead of English ones. If a lexicon cites "Psalm 68:7", it means the English 68:6.

"God setteth the solitary in families": what does verse 6 promise?

A home. Verse 5 says who God is for; verse 6 says what he does about it. He takes the person who is the only one, the yachid, and sets them in a house.

My 2017 essay on loneliness put the verse this way: "As the bible says, he plants the lonely in a family."

Psalm 68 says God is a father to the fatherless, and then immediately says he sets the lonely in families. I have been writing out of those two sentences for twenty years. "Father to the fatherless" is the heading of the About page on this site.

The New Testament gives the family a new shape. When Jesus was told his mother and brothers were outside, he looked at the people sitting round him:

And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

Mark 3:34–35 (KJV)

For Christians, that is where verse 6 lands. The family God sets the solitary in is very often a church: the people who learn your name, feed you when you are ill and notice when you are missing. When a church does that, it is doing what the psalm says God does.

What about "the rebellious dwell in a dry land"?

Verse 6 ends with a hard line. After the lonely are given a home and the prisoners are let out, "the rebellious dwell in a dry land" (KJV). Two of the top results on Bing UK for "father to the fatherless meaning" on 20 October 2026, Bible Hub's question page and GotQuestions, do not mention it. The psalm itself comes back to it, twelve verses later:

Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive: thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them.

Psalm 68:18 (KJV)

Both of verse 6's words come back here. The Hebrew for "the rebellious" (sorerim) and for "dwell" (shakan) reappear in verse 18. The translations differ on how the rebellious fit in. The words "for" and "among them" are in italics in the KJV, because the translators supplied them. The WEB reads "among the rebellious also, that Yah God might dwell there", and the NIVUK "even from the rebellious". However the verse is translated, the rebellious who dwell in a dry land in verse 6 are back in the procession in verse 18, and the verse ends with God coming to dwell there.

Paul quotes the first half of verse 18 in Ephesians 4:8 and applies it to Christ's ascension: "When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men" (KJV). He changes "received" to "gave". The commentator John Gill noted in the eighteenth century that the Aramaic Targum and the Syriac version both read the verse that way: "thou hast given gifts to men". Paul does not quote the words about the rebellious, so I will not claim he had them in mind.

What else does the Bible say about the fatherless?

Psalm 68:5 is not a one-off. The Bible says the same thing about God many times, and again and again, alongside it, it tells God's people to act on it. Here are the main passages, with who is expected to do something.

Two of those deserve a note. In John 14:18 the Greek word behind "comfortless" is orphanous, "orphans", which is how the WEB translates it: "I will not leave you orphans." Jesus says it the night before he dies, to friends about to lose him. And in James 1:27 the same Greek word is the KJV's "fatherless". James defines "pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father" first by whether we visit them.

Read down the right-hand column and the pattern is plain. Again and again, where God is called the defender of the fatherless, his people are told to behave like him.

What does it mean today that God is a father to the fatherless?

It means that no child is outside his care, whatever happened in their home. Charles Spurgeon put it in Victorian terms in The Treasury of David: "He is the President of Orphanages, the Protector of Widows."

It also means less than people sometimes want it to. The verse does not say that losing a father does not matter, or that a father's absence leaves no mark. Israel's law would not have needed all those commands if it did not. It does not say that earthly fathers are unnecessary because God will cover for them. And it does not promise that the ache goes away. Another psalm holds both the loss and the promise in a single line:

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.

Psalm 27:10 (KJV)

If your father was absent, or present and hard to love, Psalm 68:5 is for you before it is for anyone else. It says God sees it, takes your side and means to give you a home. And it asks the rest of us, especially the men in a church, to be part of how he keeps that promise.

Through

"Psalm 68:5 was my verse from my teenage days, when God told me, 'He will father me himself.'" If you want the story behind Padre, the opening track of the Father album, it is on its page.

The same verb is in Through, released on 2 November 2018 on the Father album. Psalm 68:5 is the first verse listed under it. The second verse asks "where are you?" Then the next lines begin: "Defender of The fatherless / Came to my rescue, Father me with a smile".

The third verse turns outward, to children who "have no papa, have no mama to call", and tells the listener to "Show them love, Give them hope". It is the same move this page has traced through the Bible: the promise first, then the instruction to pass it on. The same verse borrows Hebrews 13:5, "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee" (KJV), for its promise to those children: "He'd never leave, never forsake you". The acoustic video went up on 15 June 2019:

A prayer

Father, your word calls you "a father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows" (Psalm 68:5, KJV), and we come to you as our Father. Some of us had fathers who stayed, some had fathers who left, and some never knew theirs. You saw all of it. The psalmist said to you, "thou art the helper of the fatherless" (Psalm 10:14, KJV). Help us now. Where we are alone, set us in a family, as you promised you would. Where we are the family, open our doors. Your Son promised the night before he died, "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you" (John 14:18, KJV). Let him come to us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sources

Scripture

• Scripture quotations are from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown's patentee, Cambridge University Press.
• Scripture quotations marked NIVUK taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a registered trademark of Biblica UK trademark number 1448790.
• The World English Bible (WEB) is in the public domain.
• Psalm 68 and each passage in the table, Bible Gateway, in the KJV, WEB and NIVUK, read 20 October 2026

Hebrew and Greek

• Bible Hub interlinears for Psalm 68:5, Psalm 68:6, Psalm 68:18, Deuteronomy 26:15 and John 14:18; James 1:27 and Psalm 25:16 in the original text; read 20 October 2026
• Lexicon entries on Bible Hub, with Brown-Driver-Briggs: dayyan, 1781, yachid, 3173, kosharah, 3574 and maon, 4583, read 20 October 2026
• Mitchell First, "The Root 'Caf-Shin-Resh'", The Jewish Link, 11 May 2023, for Radak's reading
• Murray H. Lichtenstein, "Psalm 68:7 Revisited", Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 4 (1972): 97–112, for the Ugaritic reading and his doubts about it, and for his summary of Albright's view

Commentary

• International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), "Fatherless", D. Miall Edwards
• Adam Clarke, commentary on Psalm 68
• C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, commentary on Psalm 68
• John Gill, Exposition of the Bible, Psalm 68
• C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, Psalm 68
• W. F. Albright, "A Catalogue of Early Hebrew Lyric Poems (Psalm LXVIII)", Hebrew Union College Annual 23, part 1 (1950–51): 1–39

Yemi Alafifuni

• Through and Padre: song notes, verses and lyrics on this site
• Loneliness, journal, 2017; About