Eleven verses headed michtam, a word nobody has convincingly explained. There is almost no petition here: one imperative in verse 1, then ten verses of a man taking inventory of what he already holds. The vocabulary is borrowed from land law, portion, share, lot, measuring lines, inheritance, and then applied to God instead of to a field. Psalm 16 opens the ten psalms of the Tikkun HaKlali, and verse 8 is the verse written on the shiviti plaque set in front of a prayer leader.
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The verb is written with a second person ending and read as a first person one, one of the better known scribal cruxes in the book. Whichever way it is read, the claim is that no good stands outside God.
they are the noble, and all my delight is in them.
The Hebrew here is broken enough that no two translations agree on the syntax. What survives every reading is that the speaker's loyalty runs sideways, to a group of people, and not only upward.
Many are the sorrows of those who hurry after another god.
בַּל
bal
not
אַסִּיךְ
a-SICH
will I pour out
נִסְכֵּיהֶם
nis-KEI-hem
their libations
מִדָּם
mi-DAM
of blood
I will not pour out their libations of blood,
וּבַל
u-VAL
and not
אֶשָּׂא
e-SA
will I lift up
אֶת
et
(marks the object)
שְׁמוֹתָם
shmo-TAM
their names
עַל
al
upon
שְׂפָתָי
sfa-TAI
my lips
and I will not lift their names onto my lips.
The counterweight to verse 3. Having named who he belongs with, he names what he will not touch, and the refusal is specific: not the blood, and not even the names.
Measuring lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
אַף
af
indeed
נַחֲלָת
na-cha-LAT
an inheritance
שָׁפְרָה
shaf-RA
is lovely
עָלָי
a-LAI
to me
indeed, the inheritance is lovely to me.
The rope is the surveyor's, the one used to mark out a field at the allotment. He is saying his boundary fell in a good place, and the good place is not a place.
Counsel by day and correction by night, and the night organ is the kidneys, which biblical Hebrew treats as the seat of conscience rather than the heart.
Three parts of a person, heart, glory and flesh, all reacting to the stance taken in verse 8. The body is included deliberately, which is what sets up verse 10.
The verse that made this psalm a graveside text. What is denied is abandonment, and the denial is made twice, once about the soul and once about the faithful one.
The psalm closes on direction rather than on possession: a path, a face, a right hand. The final word is a term of duration, not of place.
♦ 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
An inventory, not a plea. One imperative opens the psalm and nothing else is asked for. Verses 2 to 4 sort out where loyalty goes: first upward, then to the holy ones in the land, then away from another cult and its offerings. Verses 5 and 6 borrow the vocabulary of the tribal land allotment, חֶלְקִי (chel-ki, v.5) and חֲבָלִים (cha-va-lim, v.6) are the share and the measuring ropes of an inheritance, and hand it to God instead of to a field. Verse 8 states the reason the whole structure holds, and verses 9 to 11 are what follows from it in a body that expects to keep living.
רמז · Remez: allusion
אָמַרְתְּ (a-mar-te, v.2) is written with the ending of a second person verb and read as a first person one, which is why translations split between "you said" and "I said" without either side treating the matter as settled. עַצְּבוֹתָם (atz-vo-tam, v.4) is open in a different way: the noun can mean sorrows or idols, and the whole line reads differently depending on the choice. כִלְיוֹתָי (chil-o-tai, v.7) is the kidneys, which biblical Hebrew uses as the organ of counsel and conscience, so the night half of that verse describes being corrected from inside rather than taught from outside.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 8 has had the widest afterlife of anything here. The Rema opens his gloss on the Shulchan Aruch by quoting it and calling it a great principle, and the same words are what gets written on the shiviti plaque hung before a prayer leader, so a sentence about inner posture became a piece of synagogue furniture. The kidneys of כִלְיוֹתָי (chil-o-tai, v.7) are read literally as organs that advise: the Talmud in Berakhot lists the kidneys among the organs that give counsel, which makes the night instruction of that verse self-instruction. Psalm 16 also stands first among the ten psalms of the Tikkun HaKlali, the sequence Rebbe Nachman of Breslov named as a general remedy.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The shiviti tradition takes verse 8 as a practice and not a report. The verb means to place, and also to make level or equal, and the reading it invites is that keeping the Name in view flattens the difference between what frightens a person and what does not. In the kabbalistic vocabulary the right hand of בִּימִינְךָ (bi-min-cha, v.11) is the side of expansion and giving, so ending there rather than on the left is itself part of the claim. Notice also that the psalm asks for nothing after its first line: a soul that has already received its portion has no petition left to make, only a path it needs shown.
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).