Two questions and a list. Someone stands at the gate of the sanctuary and asks who is allowed in, and the answer names no sacrifice, no lineage and no ritual, only how a person handles a tongue, a neighbour, an oath and money. Five verses, and after the opening question almost every line is built the same way: a participle or a perfect verb with lo in front of it, so the profile is drawn as much by what the man has not done as by what he has. Psalm 24 asks the same question in the same words and answers it differently, which makes the two worth reading together.
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The two verbs are not synonyms. The first is what a guest does, staying somewhere that is not his; the second is settled dwelling. The question is asked twice and raised each time.
Three participles: walking, working, speaking. The answer opens with conduct in general before it gets specific, and the last item moves inward, to speech nobody else hears.
and has not taken up a reproach against the one close to him;
Three negatives in a row, and all three concern the same neighbour. Speech comes first, action second, and third the passive offence of repeating what someone else said.
in whose eyes a contemptible man counts as rejected,
וְאֶת
VE-et
and (object marker)
יִרְאֵי
yir-EI
the fearers of
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
יְכַבֵּד
ye-cha-BED
he honours
but who honours those who fear the LORD;
נִשְׁבַּע
NISH-ba
he has sworn
לְהָרַע
le-HA-ra
to his own hurt
וְלֹא
ve-LO
and not
יָמִר
ya-MIR
he will change
who swears to his own cost and does not go back on it;
The one item on the list about judgement rather than behaviour: what a person is impressed by. The oath clause is the sharpest test, since keeping it costs something.
Money closes the list, in both directions: what he refuses to charge and what he refuses to accept. Then the verdict, which answers the question of verse 1 with a promise about standing rather than a permit.
♦ PARDES analysis: פרדס
The four levels of Jewish reading of the sacred text: פשט Peshat (literal meaning), רמז Remez (symbolic allusion), דרש Drash (midrashic interpretation), סוד Sod (mystical meaning). The word פרדס means "orchard", each level is a fruit.
פשט · Peshat: literal meaning
This is an entrance liturgy. The form is a question put at the gate and an answer given from inside, and the same exchange appears at the start of Psalm 24 and again in Isaiah 33. What is striking is the content of the answer: nothing about offerings, purity or descent, only tongue, neighbour, oath and money. Note the pair of verbs in verse 1, יָגוּר (ya-gur, v.1) for the temporary stay of a guest and יִשְׁכֹּן (yish-kon, v.1) for settled dwelling, and note that the closing promise is not admission but stability, never to be shaken.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The word for interest at בְּנֶשֶׁךְ (bne-shech, v.5) comes from the verb to bite, so lending at interest is named after what it does to the borrower rather than after the arithmetic. The opening of verse 4, נִבְזֶה (niv-ze, v.4), is a genuine crux and the translations split: it can mean that a contemptible person is rejected in this man's eyes, or that he is despised and rejected in his own eyes, that is, holds a low opinion of himself. The line about swearing is disputed the same way: he swears to his own hurt and does not retract, or he swears to do harm and then does not carry it out. Both readings are defensible from the consonants and both are old.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The Talmud in Makkot reads this psalm as a compression of the whole Torah: the tradition there counts six hundred and thirteen commandments given to Moses, then has David reduce them to eleven in this psalm, Isaiah to six, Micah to three, and so on down to a single principle. The count of eleven is the rabbinic reading of the list; modern commentators divide the same lines differently and arrive at other numbers. What the reading captures is the psalm's own logic, that the qualification for the sanctuary is stated entirely in terms of how a person treats other people.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading takes the two verbs of verse 1 as two stages rather than two synonyms. Sojourning is the soul's condition in this world, a guest in a tent that is not its own, and dwelling is what the same soul does when the tent turns out to be a mountain. On this reading the eleven qualities are not entrance conditions imposed from outside but a description of what a person who can bear that presence already looks like, and the closing verb, never to be shaken, is the technical term for a vessel steady enough to hold what is poured into it.
Hebrew text: Miqra according to the Masorah (MAM), after the Aleppo Codex, via Sefaria, CC BY-SA. English: The Holy Scriptures, a New Translation (JPS 1917), via Sefaria, public domain. Transliteration generated by this site's own engine (assets/translit.js).