Psalms 144:3 → Psalm 8:4

"O LORD, what is man, that You regard him, the son of man that You think of him?" (Ps 144:3). The question here is whether Psalm 8 is a genuinely live donor or whether Job 7:17 (already documented as its own pair) is the true parent — and the morphology, verified at source, adjudicates for both, with Psalm 8 supplying the form: Psalm 144:3 reproduces Psalm 8:4's distinctive two-colon frame — mah (H4100) + a noun for man, answered by ben (H1121) + a second noun for man, each colon carrying its own verb of divine attention — which Job 7:17 does not have (Job's line opens mah-enosh but has no son-of-man colon at all; its second half is "that You set Your heart on him"). Within that inherited frame David swaps the noun-pair chiastically — Psalm 8:4 runs enosh… ben-adam (H582 … H1121+H120); Psalm 144:3 runs adam… ben-enosh (H120 … H1121+H582) — and replaces the verbs (zakar/paqad, H2142/H6485, "mindful/care for" become yada/chashav, H3045/H2803, "regard/think of"), the free variation of an author reworking his own line rather than copying a source. The Reference Type is Allusion because the bicolon structure and full lexical inventory recur without verbatim wording; the superscription marks both psalms as David's, and Psalm 144 is demonstrably anthological (its opening verses rework Psalm 18). The Connection Method is Longitudinal Theme because the verse is a station on the canon's what-is-man anthropology thread — Genesis 1:26-28 sung as wonder in Psalm 8, inverted into lament in Job 7:17, and here re-asked by the aged warrior-king with mortality in view: Psalm 144 immediately answers its question not with Psalm 8's "crowned with glory and honor" but with "Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow" (144:4). The reuse does not retract the wonder; it deepens it — the astonishing thing is no longer only that the Creator of the stars is mindful of man, but that He regards a breath, trains its hands for battle (144:1), and subdues peoples under it (144:2). The existing Job 7:17 pair rightly stands beside this one: Job supplies the lament register, Psalm 8 the doxological frame, and Psalm 144 holds them together. The thread runs on to Hebrews 2:6-9, where the question David asked twice is finally answered by a sighting — the Son of Man who took the breath-like flesh of 144:4, tasted death in it, and is crowned with the glory Psalm 8 sang — so that the fragility that stunned David becomes the very place where God's mindfulness of us is most worth savoring.