Ten verses from the sons of Korah, and the fastest way into the plural imperative: clap, shout, sing, sing, sing. Every command is addressed to the peoples rather than to Israel, which is unusual and is the point of the psalm. In the Rosh Hashanah service it is recited seven times immediately before the shofar is sounded, on the strength of verse 6, where God goes up amid a blast and the sound of a ram's horn. Notice the tense: verse 3 calls God a great king, verse 9 says He has taken the throne.
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ לִבְנֵי קֹרַח מִזְמוֹר
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
לִבְנֵי
liv-NEI
for the sons of
קֹרַח
ko-RACH
Korah
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
For the leader; of the sons of Korah, a psalm.
A performance heading, not a line of the poem. The sons of Korah are a guild of temple singers, which fits a psalm whose whole content is instructions to sing.
The psalm opens by giving orders to everyone except its own audience. Both verbs are plural imperatives, and both belong to the noise of a coronation rather than to prayer.
The first appearance of us in the psalm, and it arrives as conquest. Hold this line against verse 10, where the same peoples are standing in the assembly rather than lying under it.
The only line in the psalm that reports an event rather than issuing a command or stating a fact. Everything before it is preparation and everything after it is response.
The nobles of the peoples are gathered, the people of the God of Abraham;
כִּי
ki
for
לֵאלֹהִים
le-lo-HIM
to God belong
מָגִנֵּי
ma-gi-NEI
the shields of
אֶרֶץ
E-retz
earth
for the shields of the earth belong to God;
מְאֹד
me-OD
greatly
נַעֲלָה
na-a-LA
He is exalted
He is greatly exalted.
The psalm ends with the foreign rulers inside the assembly rather than underfoot, and with the only patriarch it names, the one whose covenant was said to reach the nations.
♦ 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 movements built the same way. Verses 2 to 5 order the peoples to clap and shout, then give the grounds: a great king, nations subdued, an inheritance assigned. Verses 7 to 10 order them to sing, then give the grounds again: God is king of all the earth, seated on a throne, the nobles gathered. Verse 6 stands between the two and is the only line that reports something happening. Note that every verb of praise is a plural imperative aimed at the peoples, and that Israel appears in the middle only as the inheritance being chosen, never as the party being told what to do.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The verb in יַדְבֵּר (yad-ber, v.4) is built on the root that normally means to speak. Here it is read as to subdue, and the same three letters also give a word for pasture, so the line has been taken as a shepherd driving flocks as well as a king pressing nations down. The reading is disputed and translations split. מַשְׂכִּיל (mas-kil, v.8) is the second crux: the word appears as a heading over other psalms, and here it lands as the last word of a command to sing, so it is read either as sing a maskil or as sing skilfully. Verse 10 leaves a third gap: the syntax does not say whether the nobles are gathered with the people of the God of Abraham or as that people, and the difference is the difference between an alliance and a conversion.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The psalm is recited seven times before the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. The two things in it that earn it that place are עָלָה (a-la, v.6), where God goes up amid a blast of the ram's horn, and the name of Abraham at the end, whose story supplies the ram the tradition connects to the shofar. The number of repetitions is explained in more than one way and no single explanation is standard. The traditional reading also sets verse 4 against verse 10 deliberately: in the first the peoples are under our feet, in the second their nobles are gathered into the assembly, and the second is taken as the correction of the first rather than as a second conquest.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In the kabbalistic reading the psalm has two motions and they run opposite ways. The blast of עָלָה (a-la, v.6) is a sound going up, and the ascent it accompanies is a withdrawal to the throne of קׇדְשׁוֹ (kod-sho, v.9), kingship established at a height. The shofar is what answers that distance: a cry with no words in it, the one utterance that needs no language, which is why it belongs in a psalm whose commands are given to all peoples at once. The shields of the earth in verse 10 are then its rulers, handed over rather than broken, and exaltation is the last word because nothing is left below that could hold.
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).