Thirteen verses that read like two different poems bolted together, and the bolt is the point: four verses of close portraiture of a wicked man, five verses of the widest imagery anywhere in the book, then a short prayer to keep the first away from the speaker. It is not one of the psalms fixed into the daily order of prayer the way Psalm 145 is, and most people meet it through a single line, verse 10. For a learner the useful stretch is verses 6 to 11, which put the same second person possessive ending on eight different nouns in a row: Your kindness, Your faithfulness, Your righteousness, Your judgments, Your wings, Your house, Your delights, Your light.
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| 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
לְעֶבֶד יְהֹוָה לְדָוִד
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the choirmaster
For the choirmaster.
לְעֶבֶד
le-E-ved
of the servant of
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
Of the servant of the LORD, of David.
The heading gives David a title before it gives his name, servant of the LORD, which is rare in the headings and sets up a psalm about two kinds of allegiance.
Transgression speaks to the wicked man deep inside my heart:
אֵין
ein
there is no
פַּחַד
pa-CHAD
dread of
אֱלֹהִים
e-lo-HIM
God
לְנֶגֶד
le-NE-ged
before
עֵינָיו
ei-NAV
his eyes
there is no dread of God before his eyes.
The psalm opens with an oracle delivered by the wrong speaker. What follows is a diagnosis rather than an accusation: the fault is located in something the man does not feel.
Two similes of scale, one reaching up and one reaching down, and then the surprise at the end: what all that height and depth protects includes animals.
Keep drawing out Your kindness to those who know You,
וְצִדְקָתְךָ
ve-tzid-kat-CHA
and Your righteousness
לְיִשְׁרֵי
lyish-REI
to the upright of
לֵב
lev
heart
and Your righteousness to the upright of heart.
The verb means to pull something out lengthwise, so what is asked for is duration rather than a new gift. Nothing here requests more than is already being given.
The end reports a fall the psalm never narrated. The claim stays deliberately small: they are down and cannot get up, not 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 panels and a prayer. Verses 2 to 5 are a portrait of one man, and everything in them is small and enclosed: his eyes, his mouth, his bed, his own flattering estimate of himself. Verses 6 to 10 open with no warning onto the largest scale available, heavens, clouds, mountains, the great deep, and the grammar changes with the view, from he to You. Verses 11 to 13 then ask for the first panel to be kept away from the speaker. The word for wickedness at אָוֶן (a-ven, v.4) returns at אָוֶן (a-ven, v.5) and once more in the closing verse at אָוֶן (a-ven, v.13), which is the clearest signal that the panels were built to be read as one poem rather than two.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The first word is the surprise. נְאֻם (ne-um, v.2) is the standard prophetic term for an oracle, normally followed by the divine name; here the one delivering the oracle is transgression itself. The Masoretic text then reads לִבִּי (li-bi, v.2), my heart, which places that oracle inside the speaker rather than inside the wicked man, while many manuscripts and the ancient versions read his heart instead, and modern translations still split over it. עֲדָנֶיךָ (a-da-nei-cha, v.9), Your delights, is built on the same three consonants as the name Eden, so the stream of verse 9 and the garden are one word doing two jobs. כְּהַרְרֵי (ke-har-rei, v.7) uses the divine name as an intensifier, mountains of God meaning the greatest mountains, and the parallel line answers it with the great deep.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The adverb at שָׁם (sham, v.13), there, has nothing in the psalm to point at. The wicked have not been placed anywhere, and the fall is reported as though the reader had just watched it happen. Readings divide over what to supply: some take there as the place of the scheming in verse 5, the bed itself becoming the site of the collapse; others read it as a scene set ahead of the speaker, the psalm jumping to a judgment it never otherwise describes. The Hebrew tense supports both, since the perfect is used for what is finished and for what is treated as certain. Either way the last word, קוּם (kum, v.13), to rise, keeps the claim modest: the wicked are not said to be destroyed, only to be unable to get back up.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Verse 10 is the line the psalm exists for, and the mystical reading takes it literally. With You is the source of life, and בְּאוֹרְךָ (be-or-cha, v.10), in Your light, is the only medium in which light can be seen at all. Perception of the divine is then not an achievement of the eye but something on loan from what is being perceived, which is the exact answer to the two failed pairs of eyes in the first panel, עֵינָיו (ei-nav, v.2) and בְּעֵינָיו (be-ei-nav, v.3), which could see everything except themselves. The wings of כְּנָפֶיךָ (kna-fei-cha, v.8) belong to the same picture: shelter here is not a wall but a shadow, and a shadow requires a body to be present before there is anything to sit under.
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).