A defence speech delivered to a judge. The heading calls it a prayer, tefillah, which only a handful of psalms in the book do, and everything after the first verse is either evidence, a request for cover, or a portrait of the prosecution. The grammar to watch is the object suffix on verbs: test me, refine me, answer me, guard me, hide me, surround me. The speaker is the object of almost every action in the psalm, God's and the enemies' alike. Track the body parts too, heart, lips, mouth, steps, feet, eye, ear, belly, and note that the last word of all is a face.
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give ear to my prayer, from lips with no deceit in them.
Three imperatives for listening stacked in one verse, each one louder than the last, and then the condition attached to the request: the mouth making it is clean.
The threat is finally named, and it is described as a closing circle rather than a single blow. The psalm will keep that circle shrinking for three more verses.
10
חֶלְבָּמוֹ סָּגְרוּ
פִּימוֹ דִּבְּרוּ בְגֵאוּת
חֶלְבָּמוֹ
chel-ba-MO
their fat
סָּגְרוּ
sag-RU
they have shut
They have shut up their own fat;
פִּימוֹ
pi-MO
their mouth
דִּבְּרוּ
dib-RU
they have spoken
בְגֵאוּת
ve-ge-UT
with arrogance
with their mouth they speak arrogance.
Fat here stands for the insulated heart, sealed off so nothing gets in. Closed inside, open outside: the two halves of the verse are one diagnosis.
from men of this passing world, whose share is in this life.
וּצְפוּנְךָ
utz-fun-CHA
and with what You have stored
תְּמַלֵּא
tma-LE
You fill
בִטְנָם
vit-NAM
their belly
You fill their belly from what You have stored,
יִשְׂבְּעוּ
yis-be-U
they have their fill of
בָנִים
va-NIM
sons
they have their fill of sons,
וְהִנִּיחוּ
ve-hi-ni-CHU
and they leave over
יִתְרָם
yit-RAM
their surplus
לְעוֹלְלֵיהֶם
le-ol-LEI-hem
to their little ones
and leave what is left over to their small children.
The hardest verse in the psalm and one of the hardest in the book. It reads either as a complaint that the wrong people prosper or as a request that they be paid off in exactly this currency and no other.
The last verse answers the previous one word for word: they are filled with sons and surplus, he is filled with a face. Both parties get what they were hungry for.
♦ 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
Read it as a case file. Verses 1 to 5 are the plea and the evidence, 6 to 9 the request for protective custody, 10 to 12 the description of the accused, 13 and 14 the sentence asked for, and 15 the closing line. The turn is at verse 9, where the danger stops being hypothetical and becomes a circle of people who are already moving. Notice that nothing in the psalm asks for the enemies to be removed from the picture; verse 13 asks that they be stopped, and verse 15 simply looks past them.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The psalm is held together by one root, the verb of being filled. יִשְׂבְּעוּ (yis-be-u, v.14) says the enemies have their fill of sons, and אֶשְׂבְּעָה (es-be-a, v.15) says the speaker will have his fill of a face; the two forms are the same verb, and the whole argument of the psalm sits in the gap between the objects. The metallurgical verb of צְרַפְתַּנִי (tze-raf-ta-ni, v.3) belongs to an assayer purifying metal, so the claim is not that the speaker was found good but that he was put through fire and nothing burned off. Two disputed spots: בְּנֶפֶשׁ (bne-fesh, v.9) is literally with a soul or with an appetite, and translators split between calling these deadly enemies and calling them greedy ones. מֵחֶלֶד (me-che-led, v.14) is a rare noun that elsewhere means a lifespan or the duration of a life, which is why the same verse is rendered both as men of the world and as men of this fleeting age.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
כְּאִישׁוֹן (ke-i-shon, v.8) to עָיִן (a-yin, v.8) pile up two separate words for the pupil, the little man and the daughter of the eye, and the shorter form of the phrase appears in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy where God is said to guard Israel that way in the wilderness. Reading the psalm through that verse turns a private plea into a national one, and the plural us that appears once, in verse 11, is usually taken as the seam where that reading shows through. The verb of בְהָקִיץ (ve-ha-kitz, v.15), waking, carries the psalm's afterlife: the same verb is used in Daniel of those who sleep in the dust of the earth and wake, which is why the verse has long been read as being about resurrection rather than about morning. The plain sense, a man who has spent the night under examination in verse 3 and opens his eyes at dawn, is not thereby cancelled; both readings run in the tradition side by side.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The last word, תְּמוּנָתֶךָ (tmu-na-te-cha, v.15), is the word the Torah uses for a form or likeness, and it appears in two places that pull against each other: the second commandment forbids making any such form, and Numbers says of Moses alone that he looks at the form of the LORD. Deuteronomy insists that at Sinai the people heard a voice and saw no form at all. The psalm ends by claiming for its speaker what those texts reserve or deny, and the mystical reading takes the claim seriously rather than softening it: what is seen is not an image but the condition of a person who has been refined until there is nothing left in him that distorts. The night of verse 3 and the waking of verse 15 then frame the whole psalm as one passage through darkness, and the satisfaction of the final line is the state of a vessel that no longer leaks.
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).