Fourteen verses, a royal psalm, commonly read as the companion to Psalm 20: there the king goes out and the people pray for him, here he comes back and the psalm counts what he was given. The grammar to watch is the ending -kha, Your, glued onto noun after noun: Your strength, Your salvation, Your hand, Your right hand, Your might. Running against it is the ending -o, his, on everything that belongs to the king: his heart, his head, his glory. Two possessive suffixes arguing about who owns the victory, for thirteen verses, until the last one switches to we.
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♪ TuningE A D G B E
| AmAm | EmEm | AmDm | EmAm |
~70 BPM · 4/4 · gentle thumb-index-middle arpeggio · one bar per stich, two bars per verse · to reset the progression:
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the choirmaster
For the choirmaster.
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
A psalm of David.
The heading files the psalm under the temple musician before a word of content arrives. Genre and author come after the performance instruction, not before it.
The first thing said about the king is that he is glad, and both halves of the gladness sit inside a noun carrying Your. He owns the joy, God owns the strength.
The glory is his, but the preposition puts its source outside him. Two abstract nouns are laid on him the way the crown was laid on him in the verse before.
and through the kindness of the Most High he will not be shaken.
The hinge of the psalm. Everything up to here was gift; this verse names the single thing the king does, trust, and the negative that follows is the whole promise.
with Your bowstrings You will take aim at their faces.
The last picture is archery. The enemy is turned around and the string is drawn at his face, the mirror of the face the king was gladdened by in verse 7.
The only verse in the plural. Thirteen verses about one man end with a congregation singing, which is what keeps the psalm sayable after the king is gone.
♦ 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
Two halves and a frame. Verses 2 to 8 are a report made to God about the king: what he asked for, what he was given, why he will not be shaken. Verses 9 to 13 are a threat against enemies. Verse 14 turns the whole thing into a congregational song, the only place in the psalm where anyone says we. Read verse 5 slowly, because it carries the argument: the king asked for life and was given length of days for ever and ever, which is more than was asked, and the gap between request and gift is what the first half is about.
רמז · Remez: allusion
From verse 9 the pronouns go slippery. יָדְךָ (yad-cha, v.9), Your hand, can belong to God, who has been the You of the whole psalm, or to the king, who has been the him. The 1917 English in the source file hesitates in exactly this way: inside verse 9 it writes Thy hand with a capital and those that hate thee with a small letter, then drops to lowercase for the rest. The Hebrew marks nothing. Watch the noun for face as well: at פָּנֶיךָ (pa-nei-cha, v.7) it is joy at Your presence, at פָּנֶיךָ (pa-nei-cha, v.10) it is the time of Your face, and the same word carries the reward and the burning. The verb of setting behaves the same way, placing a crown at תָּשִׁית (ta-shit, v.4) and setting enemies alight at תְּשִׁיתֵמוֹ (tshi-te-mo, v.10).
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Read as prophecy rather than court poetry, the king here is the messianic king, and verse 5 stops being flattery: life asked for, length of days for ever and ever granted, becomes a statement about the world to come rather than a long reign. The crown of עֲטֶרֶת (a-te-ret, v.4) and פָּז (paz, v.4), fine gold set on the head before any battle is mentioned, is read the same way, as the end of the story placed at the beginning. This is a reading and not the plain sense, and it is worth holding the two apart: the plain sense of verse 4 is a coronation, with a real crown and a real head.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The abstract nouns of this psalm are, in kabbalistic vocabulary, names of the sefirot, and they arrive in a run: kindness at וּבְחֶסֶד (uv-che-sed, v.8), splendour at הוֹד (hod, v.6) and majesty at וְהָדָר (ve-ha-dar, v.6), strength at בְּעֻזֶּךָ (be-u-ze-cha, v.14) and might at גְּבוּרָתֶךָ (gvu-ra-te-cha, v.14). Read that way the psalm is not listing a king's assets but naming the channels through which he receives, and the closing verb, we will sing, is what a receiver does once the channel is open. The crown of verse 4 is set on the head from outside rather than grown from within, which in this vocabulary is the mark of a light that surrounds and is never contained.
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).