Twenty two lines of complaint after the superscription, and the whole psalm is one sick man's inventory: flesh, bones, loins, wounds, heart, eyes. For a learner it is the best place in the book to collect body nouns carrying the first person suffix, because nearly every line supplies one. Watch verse 16, where the psalm stops describing and starts addressing, and notice that nothing is cured by the end. The last thing asked for is speed.
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1
מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד
לְהַזְכִּיר
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
A psalm of David.
לְהַזְכִּיר
le-haz-KIR
to bring to remembrance
To bring to remembrance.
The heading gives a purpose rather than an occasion. It files the psalm as something brought before God, not merely something sung.
Almost word for word the opening of Psalm 6, with one noun of anger swapped for another. The request is not that the discipline stop, only that it not be delivered hot.
3
כִּי חִצֶּיךָ נִחֲתוּ בִי
וַתִּנְחַת עָלַי יָדֶךָ
כִּי
ki
for
חִצֶּיךָ
chi-tzei-CHA
Your arrows
נִחֲתוּ
ni-cha-TU
have sunk down
בִי
vi
into me
For Your arrows have sunk into me,
וַתִּנְחַת
va-tin-CHAT
and it has come down
עָלַי
a-LAI
upon me
יָדֶךָ
ya-de-CHA
Your hand
and Your hand has come down upon me.
Two pictures of one blow: arrows already landed, and a weight still pressing. The speaker takes the illness as God's own doing, which is what gives him standing to argue with it.
There is no soundness in my flesh because of Your indignation;
אֵין
ein
there is no
שָׁלוֹם
sha-LOM
peace
בַּעֲצָמַי
ba-a-tza-MAI
in my bones
מִפְּנֵי
mip-NEI
because of
חַטָּאתִי
cha-ta-TI
my sin
there is no peace in my bones because of my sin.
Two clauses with identical shape, each naming a cause. The first blames God's indignation, the second the speaker's own sin, and the psalm never separates the two again.
Water and weight inside one verse: guilt first floods above the head, then sits on the shoulders. Sin is described entirely in the vocabulary of physics.
The catalogue circles back to the body and repeats the phrase from verse 4 word for word. The repetition is how the psalm shows that nothing has moved.
The one loud verb in the psalm, the word used of a lion, and it rises out of a heart that is only groaning. Noise and exhaustion turn out to be the same event.
Those who love me and my companions stand back from my affliction,
וּקְרוֹבַי
uk-ro-VAI
and my kinsmen
מֵרָחֹק
me-ra-CHOK
from far off
עָמָדוּ
a-ma-DU
they have stood
and my kinsmen have stood far off.
The illness becomes social. Two verbs of standing frame the verse so that nobody in it moves closer, and the thing they keep away from is the affliction itself.
The hinge of the psalm. The silence was not weakness: the defence has been handed to someone else, and three divine names arrive in the space of two lines.
when my foot slips they magnify themselves against me.
What he fears is not death but their pleasure. A slipping foot is the ordinary image for a life losing its footing, and they are watching for exactly that.
A strange thing to admit inside a plea: he says he is ready to fall. The pain stands in front of him, using the same word he used in verse 10 for standing before God.
19
כִּי עֲוֺנִי אַגִּיד
אֶדְאַג מֵחַטָּאתִי
כִּי
ki
for
עֲוֺנִי
a-o-NI
my iniquity
אַגִּיד
a-GID
I declare
For I declare my iniquity,
אֶדְאַג
ed-AG
I am anxious
מֵחַטָּאתִי
me-cha-ta-TI
because of my sin
I am anxious because of my sin.
Confession stated flatly, in the present. Declaring the iniquity and worrying about it sit side by side, so admission is not presented as relief.
The exchange is spelled out with the same preposition twice: evil for good, hostility for the pursuit of good. Doing right is given as the cause of the attack.
The plea returns to the volitive negative that opened the psalm in verse 2, and what it asks for is presence rather than a cure.
23
חוּשָׁה לְעֶזְרָתִי
אֲדֹנָי תְּשׁוּעָתִי
חוּשָׁה
chu-SHA
hurry
לְעֶזְרָתִי
le-ez-ra-TI
to my help
Hurry to my help,
אֲדֹנָי
a-do-NAI
my Lord
תְּשׁוּעָתִי
tshu-a-TI
my salvation
my Lord, my salvation.
Four words, and the last is a title rather than a request. The psalm ends with no cure, holding on to speed and to a name.
♦ 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 body, then a social circle, then a courtroom. Verses 2 to 11 catalogue the illness from the inside; verses 12 and 13 pull back far enough to show friends withdrawing and enemies moving into the gap; verses 14 to 21 are the speaker's conduct under that pressure, which turns out to be silence, confession, and no self defence. The hinge is הוֹחָלְתִּי (ho-chal-ti, v.16), the verb of waiting, and it explains everything before it, because a man who has handed his case over has no reason to argue his own corner. Nothing is healed by the end. The final two verses ask only that God stay close and come fast.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The opening of verse 2 is the opening of Psalm 6 with one word of anger substituted for another, close enough that the two are regularly noted together. מְתֹם (me-tom, v.4), glossed here as soundness, is a rare noun from the root meaning whole or complete, so the complaint is not that something hurts but that nothing in him is intact. קֹדֵר (ko-der, v.7) means darkened, and the same word is used elsewhere of people in mourning dress and of a sky going black, which is why the line can be read as clothing or as mood. And לְהַזְכִּיר (le-haz-kir, v.1), the only real word in the superscription, shares a root with the memorial portion burned from the grain offering in Leviticus 2, which lets the psalm present itself as an offering rather than as a song.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The reading tradition takes the superscription at its word: a psalm said to bring something to remembrance is one a person recites when he wants his own case raised, which turns the whole catalogue of symptoms into evidence submitted rather than complaint vented. The silence of verses 14 and 15 is the part most often expanded. Plainly read, a man too weak to answer keeps quiet; read the other way, the silence is deliberate, a decision not to defend himself in front of people because the defence has already been filed in verse 16. On that reading the psalm is not really about illness. It is about what to do while under accusation. In Christian liturgy it is counted among the seven penitential psalms, which is a fact about its reception rather than about its text.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Read mystically the catalogue stops being medical. The psalm counts downward through flesh, bones, loins, wounds, heart and eyes, and in the kabbalistic idiom the body is the lower map of a whole structure, so organs that have stopped working are describing channels that have stopped conducting. סְחַרְחַר (schar-char, v.11), a heart going round in circles, and the light leaving the eyes in the same verse are the two directions of that flow slackening at once. This is also why the request of verse 22 makes sense exactly as it stands: not repair, but that the source not withdraw, since a channel with nothing above it has nothing left to carry.
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).