Eleven verses and a thunderstorm crossing the country from the sea to the southern desert. The phrase to learn is the one that opens seven of the lines, the voice of the LORD, because it is a construct chain, two nouns welded into one unit with no word for of between them, which is how Hebrew builds most of its possessives. Count the divine name while you read: it appears eighteen times in eleven verses, and seven of those stand at the head of a line inside that same phrase. Said on Friday night at the close of Kabbalat Shabbat, and in the Ashkenazi rite while the Torah scroll is carried back to the ark on Shabbat morning.
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The psalm opens above the weather, in a heavenly court that is told twice in one verse to hand something over. Nothing has been given to the singer yet.
bow down to the LORD in the splendour of holiness.
The third and last imperative to give, followed by the one thing a court cannot manufacture: bowing. Worship is the protocol of the room, not its furniture.
The first casualty is the tallest tree in the region. The root for breaking is used twice, first as a participle and then as an intensive, so it happens and then happens harder.
Now the mountains move. A range that was being smashed a line ago is a calf jumping, and the violence turns into something closer to dancing without ever stopping.
7
קוֹל יְהֹוָה חֹצֵב לַהֲבוֹת אֵשׁ
קוֹל
kol
the voice of
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
חֹצֵב
cho-TZEV
hews out
לַהֲבוֹת
la-ha-VOT
flames of
אֵשׁ
esh
fire
The voice of the LORD hews out flames of fire.
The one verse with no second half, sitting at the centre of the seven. Lightning, described with the verb of a stonecutter rather than of a weapon.
The seventh and last voice, and the move indoors. Outside, cover is being torn off; inside, everything says the single word the heavenly court was ordered to hand over in verse 1.
Two verbs of sitting close the storm off. The water of verse 3 is named as the flood, and the one who was seated before it began is still seated after.
Strength comes back from verse 1, moving downward this time. What the court above was told to give is handed to the people below, and the psalm ends on a word it has not used once: peace.
♦ 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
A storm crosses the map. It starts over the water at קוֹל (kol, v.3), breaks the cedars of Lebanon in the north at verse 5, and shakes the wilderness of Kadesh in the south at verse 8, and the phrase the voice of the LORD stands at the head of a line seven times. The frame is what makes it a psalm and not a weather report: verses 1 and 2 are set in a heavenly court, verses 10 and 11 in the temple and among the people, and the last word is peace. Everything violent happens between two rooms where nothing moves.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three places where the Hebrew is contested. אֵלִים (e-lim, v.1) is either divine beings, members of a heavenly court, or mighty ones, human nobles, and the choice decides whether verse 1 is addressed to angels or to men. אַיָּלוֹת (a-ya-lot, v.9) is normally read as hinds, so the voice sends the deer into labour, but the parallel half-line strips the forests at יְעָרוֹת (ye-a-rot, v.9), and the same consonants can be read as a word for oaks, which would make both halves about trees. Sirion at וְשִׂרְיֹן (ve-sir-yon, v.6) is not a puzzle: Deuteronomy 3:9 states that Sirion is what the Sidonians called Mount Hermon, so verse 6 names the same range twice under two names.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The very last line of the Mishnah, at the end of tractate Uktzin, takes verse 11 as its closing proof text: the Holy One found no vessel that holds blessing for Israel except peace, as it says, the LORD will bless His people with peace. That is the traditional answer to why a psalm of thunder ends quietly, and it is why בַשָּׁלוֹם (va-sha-lom, v.11) carries more weight than its position suggests. One reading hears the seven voices as the voice at Sinai, and on that reading the wilderness of verse 8 is not scenery but the place where the Torah was given.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In kabbalistic reading the seven voices are the seven lower sefirot, the channels through which the world is built and unbuilt, which is why one voice can break cedars and another can hand over peace. The Safed kabbalists of the sixteenth century built the Friday night service out of six psalms, one for each weekday, and placed this one last, so the week ends on the psalm of seven voices and Shabbat enters on the word at בַשָּׁלוֹם (va-sha-lom, v.11). The divine name appears eighteen times here, and eighteen is the number written in Hebrew letters as chai, life.
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).