Pistis Sophia 36.3 · 36.3

The psalm is doing double duty, and the book expects you to hear both voices at once. On the surface it is David’s: an old man praying not to be shamed, ringed by men who want him down. Underneath, in Peter’s reading, every line belongs to Sophia: shamed before the aeons, begging the Light for a firm place to stand after her long fall through the regions. The Coptic makes the psalm’s architecture of safety very physical — a God of nashte, of protective strength; a ma eftajrēu, a place made firm; a ma m-pōt, literally a place of fleeing, a bolt-hole.

Two Greek loanwords anchor the psalm’s theology. Hypomonē — endurance, the capacity to remain under a weight — answers Peter’s own anexe from the last passage: he said we cannot bear this woman, and now recites that God is what bears. And dikaiosynē, righteousness, is the medium of rescue, not its reward: save me IN your righteousness — salvation happens inside someone else’s integrity. For Sophia, who trusted the wrong light, the line is a diagnosis and a cure in one.

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