A wedding song for a king, and the only psalm in the book that announces itself as one. Eighteen verses in two halves: the poet addresses the groom, then turns and addresses the bride. Grammatically it is the best place in Tehilim to learn the two second-person sets side by side, because the same suffix appears in its masculine form all through verses 3 to 10 and in its feminine form all through verses 11 to 16. It has no fixed slot in the daily service and most people meet it in the monthly cycle of reading the whole book. Watch the poet keep intruding: he opens by talking about his own tongue and closes by promising to keep the name alive.
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Four labels stacked with no verb between them: a tune, a guild of singers, a genre, and a subject. The last one is what makes this psalm unusual in the book.
The poet describes himself before he describes anyone else, which no other psalm of praise does at this length. He claims a commission and a craft, not inspiration.
Beauty first, then speech, then the blessing that explains both. The verb in the first word doubles its own root, a form the language keeps for superlatives.
for the cause of truth and humility and righteousness;
וְתוֹרְךָ
ve-tor-CHA
and may it teach you
נוֹרָאוֹת
no-ra-OT
awesome things
יְמִינֶךָ
ye-mi-ne-CHA
your right hand
and let your right hand teach you awesome deeds.
The king is told what to ride for, and the three words naming it are moral, not territorial. Humility standing between truth and righteousness is the odd one and the point.
Three fragments with no connecting words, so the reader supplies the sequence. The last line can attach to the arrows or to the peoples, and the Hebrew does not decide.
a sceptre of equity is the sceptre of your kingship.
The most argued verse in the psalm, because the second word can be read as an address, as a possessor, or as a description of the throne. What follows is unargued: the throne is measured by the fairness of the rod.
You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness;
עַל
al
upon
כֵּן
ken
so
מְשָׁחֲךָ
me-sha-cha-CHA
has anointed you
אֱלֹהִים
e-lo-HIM
God
אֱלֹהֶיךָ
e-lo-hei-CHA
your God
therefore God, your God, has anointed you
שֶׁמֶן
SHE-men
the oil of
שָׂשׂוֹן
sa-SON
gladness
מֵחֲבֵרֶךָ
me-cha-ve-re-CHA
more than your companions
with the oil of gladness above your companions.
The second time the psalm gives a reason with the same two words for therefore. The kingship is presented as earned by a preference, not conferred by birth.
the consort stands at your right hand in gold of Ophir.
The bride arrives without being introduced, identified only by where she is standing. Ophir is the trade name for the best gold the Hebrew Bible knows.
The reward for the forgetting in the previous verse, stated as a consequence. The same word for beauty was used of the groom in verse 3, in its masculine form.
One word carries the whole difficulty here, and it can mean inside the palace, inside the chamber, or inwardly. The gold in the next line is set the way gems are set.
I will make your name remembered in every generation;
עַל
al
upon
כֵּן
ken
so
עַמִּים
a-MIM
peoples
יְהוֹדוּךָ
ye-ho-du-CHA
will praise you
לְעֹלָם
le-o-LAM
forever
וָעֶד
VA-ed
and ever
therefore peoples will praise you forever and ever.
The poet closes on himself, as he opened. What survives the king is not the dynasty of the previous verse but the song, and the psalm says so plainly.
♦ 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 court poet writes a wedding song and performs it at the ceremony. Verses 2 to 10 face the groom: he is handsome, well spoken, armed, enthroned, perfumed, attended. Verses 11 to 16 face the bride: she is told to leave her family behind, and then she is described arriving. Verses 17 and 18 turn back to the king with a promise about sons and a promise about the song. The two halves are marked grammatically, not by a heading, since every possessive suffix switches gender at verse 11. The king is not named and the bride is not named, which is why the psalm has been reused for so many weddings and so many kings.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three cruxes worth knowing. כִּסְאֲךָ (kis-a-cha, v.7) followed by אֱלֹהִים (e-lo-him, v.7) can be read as an address to the king with the divine word as a vocative, as a statement that the throne belongs to God, or as a description meaning a divine throne, and translations still divide over which; the dispute is live and old. מִנִּי (mi-ni, v.9) is a single short word read either as a preposition meaning from, or as a clipped form of the noun for strings, giving stringed instruments, and there is no way to settle it from the consonants alone. שֵׁגַל (she-gal, v.10) is a rare word for a royal consort that turns up only a couple of times elsewhere in the Bible, once in Nehemiah of a Persian queen, which is part of why some place this psalm late. Also notice וְשִׁכְחִי (ve-shich-chi, v.11): the command to forget people and father's house uses the vocabulary of Abraham's call in Genesis, applied to a bride.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The tradition of reading this king as the messianic king is very old and remains the standard homiletical use of the psalm. Once the king is read that way, the bride is read as Israel or as the assembly, and וְשִׁכְחִי (ve-shich-chi, v.11), forget your people, stops being advice to a foreign princess and becomes a demand to leave an old allegiance. A second line of reading takes מָהִיר (ma-hir, v.2), the skilled scribe, as the psalm's own self-portrait and treats the whole poem as a statement about what praise is for. Both readings are widespread; neither is the plain sense, and the plain sense of a royal wedding has never been abandoned.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Read mystically the psalm is about union and the preparation each side does for it. The groom's half is all outward equipment: sword, throne, oil, spice, the gold of a foreign trade route. The bride's half is all subtraction: forget, incline, leave. In the kabbalistic vocabulary the right hand of verse 10 and the sceptre of verse 7 belong to the giving side and the standing, listening, receiving figure to the other, and the wedding is the standard image for the two being brought into one. The verse the readers of that tradition dwell on is verse 14, glory within, because it locates the bride's worth in the place no procession can display.
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).