Two psalms sharing one page, and the seam is visible. Verses 2 to 11 give thanks for a rescue that has already happened; verses 13 to 18 beg for a rescue that has not, and that second half turns up again almost word for word as Psalm 70. For a learner the opening line is the clearest example in the book of the Hebrew intensifier, an infinitive laid on the finite verb of the same root. The line everything turns on is verse 7: what God wants is not the offering.
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ לְדָוִד מִזְמוֹר
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the choirmaster
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
For the choirmaster. Of David. A psalm.
The heading, and the word order is not the one Psalm 38 uses. Here the choirmaster comes first, so the piece is filed for performance before it is filed for David.
The infinitive doubles the verb, which is how Hebrew says a thing intensely. Two verbs answer it, bending down and hearing, and both of them belong to God.
He brought me up from a roaring pit, out of the miry clay,
וַיָּקֶם
va-YA-kem
and He set up
עַל
al
upon
סֶלַע
SE-la
a rock
רַגְלַי
rag-LAI
my feet
and He set my feet upon a rock,
כּוֹנֵן
ko-NEN
He made firm
אֲשֻׁרָי
a-shu-RAI
my steps
He made my steps firm.
The rescue in four movements: lifted, out of noise and mud, set on rock, steadied. Pit and rock stand as opposites in one line, and the last verb is about staying put afterwards.
And He put a new song in my mouth, a praise to our God;
יִרְאוּ
yir-U
they will see
רַבִּים
ra-BIM
many
וְיִירָאוּ
ve-yi-ra-U
and they will fear
וְיִבְטְחוּ
ve-yiv-te-CHU
and they will trust
בַּיהֹוָה
bai-ho-VA
in the LORD
many will see and fear, and will trust in the LORD.
The new song is put into the mouth, not composed by it. What follows is the public effect, which makes a private rescue into evidence other people can use.
and has not turned to the arrogant or to those who swerve to falsehood.
The beatitude formula, the same construction that opens the book of Psalms. Trust gets defined by its opposite, which makes it a direction to face rather than a feeling to have.
Many things You have done, O LORD my God, Your wonders and Your thoughts toward us;
אֵין
ein
there is none
עֲרֹךְ
a-ROCH
to set in order
אֵלֶיךָ
e-lei-CHA
beside You
there is nothing to set beside You.
אַגִּידָה
a-gi-DA
let me declare
וַאֲדַבֵּרָה
va-a-da-be-RA
and let me speak
עָצְמוּ
atz-MU
they are too many
מִסַּפֵּר
mi-sa-PER
to be counted
Were I to declare and speak them, they are too many to be counted.
The count breaks down mid verse. He starts enumerating, interrupts himself to say there is nothing to line up alongside God, then admits the list is longer than telling allows.
burnt offering and sin offering You did not ask for.
The pivot, and one of the sharper lines in the book: four kinds of offering named, two verbs of divine wanting negated, and in the middle a strange clause about ears being dug.
The answer to verse 7 is not a better sacrifice but a person showing up. The scroll is named as something already written, so obedience arrives as a text he did not draft.
The two halves of the answer: the will carried out on the outside, the teaching held on the inside. The word for inward parts is the gut, so the law is put where appetite lives.
I have announced righteousness in the great assembly;
הִנֵּה
hi-NE
behold
שְׂפָתַי
sfa-TAI
my lips
לֹא
lo
not
אֶכְלָא
ech-LA
I will restrain
see, I do not hold back my lips.
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
אַתָּה
a-TA
You
יָדָעְתָּ
ya-da-TA
know
O LORD, You know.
The vocabulary turns public: a great assembly, lips unrestrained, and then the shortest clause in the psalm. The witness God does not need is offered anyway.
I have not covered Your righteousness inside my heart;
אֱמוּנָתְךָ
e-mu-nat-CHA
Your faithfulness
וּתְשׁוּעָתְךָ
ut-shu-at-CHA
and Your deliverance
אָמָרְתִּי
a-mar-TI
I have spoken
I have spoken of Your faithfulness and Your deliverance;
לֹא
lo
not
כִחַדְתִּי
chi-chad-TI
I have concealed
חַסְדְּךָ
chas-de-CHA
Your kindness
וַאֲמִתְּךָ
va-a-mit-CHA
and Your truth
לְקָהָל
le-ka-HAL
from an assembly
רָב
rav
great
I have not concealed Your kindness and Your truth from the great assembly.
The verse is built out of things not hidden: righteousness uncovered, deliverance said aloud, kindness and truth not held back. Restraint is treated as a failure here, not a virtue.
You, O LORD, will not withhold Your mercies from me;
חַסְדְּךָ
chas-de-CHA
Your kindness
וַאֲמִתְּךָ
va-a-mit-CHA
and Your truth
תָּמִיד
ta-MID
continually
יִצְּרוּנִי
yitz-ru-NI
they will guard me
Your kindness and Your truth will guard me continually.
The verb is the one he used of his own lips in verse 10: he did not hold them back, and now he asks God not to hold mercy back. Kindness and truth, his subject a line earlier, are now asked to work.
The seam. Without warning the tense turns and the rescued man is surrounded again, and the count that failed in verse 6 fails here too, this time on the side of the evils.
The plea proper, two verbs and two names. It is the request Psalm 38 ends on, in the same words, which is how the two psalms come to be heard together.
Let those who seek my life to sweep it away be ashamed and humiliated together;
יִסֹּגוּ
yi-so-GU
let them be turned back
אָחוֹר
a-CHOR
backward
וְיִכָּלְמוּ
ve-yi-kal-MU
and let them be disgraced
חֲפֵצֵי
cha-fe-TZEI
those who delight in
רָעָתִי
ra-a-TI
my harm
let those who delight in my harm be turned back and disgraced.
The enemies are answered with shame rather than harm. Every verb here is passive, so the speaker asks for their collapse without asking to be the one who causes it.
The taunt gets quoted verbatim and it is barely a word, an interjection of gloating repeated twice. What is asked is that their own shame be the thing that stops it.
let those who love Your deliverance say continually: the LORD be magnified.
The mirror of verse 15, same grammar and same shape, but rejoicing instead of shame. The sentence they are given to say is about God, not about the speaker.
The last verse holds both halves of the psalm at once: poor and needy, and already rescued. The final word asks God not to be late, which leaves the psalm deliberately unfinished.
♦ 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 psalms sharing a page. Verses 2 to 11 are thanksgiving, past tense throughout: a pit, a rescue, a new song, a public telling. Verses 13 to 18 are lament in the present, the speaker surrounded again and asking for the help he has just finished describing as received. Verse 12 is the joint, and it faces both ways, taking the kindness and truth of the thanksgiving and asking them to work as protection from here on. The most direct reading is chronological: the man telling the rescue story is in trouble again while telling it, and the psalm never resolves the tension that creates.
רמז · Remez: allusion
קַוֺּה (ka-o, v.2) and קִוִּיתִי (ki-vi-ti, v.2) are the same root twice, an infinitive laid on a finite verb, which is how biblical Hebrew intensifies: not waited, but waited and waited. מִבּוֹר (mi-bor, v.3) and סֶלַע (se-la, v.3), the pit and the rock, are set as opposites inside one line. The crux is אׇזְנַיִם (oz-na-yim, v.7) with כָּרִיתָ (ka-ri-ta, v.7), ears and a verb meaning to dig or bore. Read one way the ears were opened so they could hear, which fits verses 8 and 9 exactly. Read another way it is a mark cut into the ear, and the picture behind it is the servant of Exodus 21 who chooses to stay, though the verb used there is a different one. The Greek translation of the psalm renders the clause with a different noun altogether, which is why translations of this line diverge so widely.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 7 is the line that had to be handled, because on its face it says God does not want the offerings the Torah commands. The reading that answers it does not treat the verse as abolishing sacrifice but as ranking it: what is wanted first is the ear that hears and the will that follows, and an offering brought without those is the thing being refused. The same move is made with Samuel's line to Saul that obeying is better than sacrifice, and with the complaints in Isaiah 1 and Hosea 6. Verse 8 then reads as the person himself arriving where the offering used to go, which is why the scroll is mentioned in the same breath: he comes carrying a text rather than an animal.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The geography of the psalm is a vertical line: a pit of noise and mud at the bottom, rock underfoot, a mouth given a song, an assembly told. In the mystical idiom that is the standard shape of a descent that turns out to have been for the sake of the ascent, and the noise of the pit is not incidental, since what is drawn up carries something of where it was. The pairing of חַסְדְּךָ (chas-de-cha, v.11) and וַאֲמִתְּךָ (va-a-mit-cha, v.11), kindness and truth, is read as two attributes that must travel together, one giving without measure and one holding the limit, and the plea of verse 12 is that they arrive as a pair rather than one without the other.
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).