A wisdom poem sitting inside the Psalter, closer in vocabulary to Proverbs and Job than to the prayers around it. It is not addressed to Israel and it does not ask God for anything: it summons all peoples, rich and poor together, and argues one case, that money buys nothing at the only transaction that matters. In many communities it is the psalm said in a house of mourning, replaced by Psalm 16 on days when the penitential prayers are omitted. For a learner it is a workout in the third person plural possessive: their wealth, their houses, their dwellings, their soul, their form, ending each time in the same syllable.
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ לִבְנֵי קֹרַח מִזְמוֹר
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
לִבְנֵי
liv-NEI
of the sons of
קֹרַח
ko-RACH
Korah
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
For the leader. Of the sons of Korah. A psalm.
The same guild of Temple singers as Psalm 42, with the three heading words in a different order and no genre label attached.
The audience is everyone alive, which is unusual in the Psalter. Two imperatives in parallel, the second one drawn from the vocabulary of the wisdom books rather than from prayer.
both children of Adam and children of a man of rank,
יַחַד
ya-CHAD
together
עָשִׁיר
a-SHIR
rich
וְאֶבְיוֹן
ve-evi-ON
and needy
rich and needy alike.
Two Hebrew phrases that look identical in translation are being used as opposites: ordinary people and people of rank. The verse then says the plain version of it, rich and poor, so the reader cannot miss the pairing.
4
פִּי יְדַבֵּר חׇכְמוֹת
וְהָגוּת לִבִּי תְבוּנוֹת
פִּי
pi
my mouth
יְדַבֵּר
ye-da-BER
shall speak
חׇכְמוֹת
choch-MOT
wisdoms
My mouth shall speak wisdom,
וְהָגוּת
ve-ha-GUT
and the murmuring of
לִבִּי
li-BI
my heart
תְבוּנוֹת
te-vu-NOT
understandings
and the murmuring of my heart, understanding.
Both abstract nouns are plural in Hebrew, a poetic way of saying wisdom in quantity rather than one wise remark. Mouth and heart are set as an outer and an inner channel for the same content.
The teacher listens before he speaks: he inclines his own ear to the parable, as if receiving it. Calling the teaching a riddle warns that what follows is not a slogan.
The thesis arrives as a question, and it runs on into the next verse, so the two must be read as one sentence. The object of the fear is named only at the end: it is rich men.
The verb is doubled in the Hebrew, an infinitive stacked on the finite form, which is how the language says it absolutely cannot be done. Redemption and ransom are both commercial words, used here for the one purchase that is refused.
9
וְיֵקַר פִּדְיוֹן נַפְשָׁם
וְחָדַל לְעוֹלָם
וְיֵקַר
ve-ye-KAR
and costly is
פִּדְיוֹן
pid-ON
the redemption of
נַפְשָׁם
naf-SHAM
their soul
Too costly is the redemption of their soul,
וְחָדַל
ve-cha-DAL
and it ceases
לְעוֹלָם
le-o-LAM
forever
and it is given up forever.
Not that the price is unpaid, but that the price is out of reach. The verse says the attempt stops permanently, and the syntax runs on again into verse 10.
10
וִיחִי עוֹד לָנֶצַח
לֹא יִרְאֶה הַשָּׁחַת
וִיחִי
vi-CHI
that he should live
עוֹד
od
on
לָנֶצַח
la-ne-TZACH
forever
that he should go on living forever,
לֹא
lo
not
יִרְאֶה
yir-E
should he see
הַשָּׁחַת
ha-sha-CHAT
the pit
that he should never see the pit.
What the money was for, stated only now: not comfort, not power, but permanence. The pit is the grave, and seeing it is a Hebrew idiom for arriving there.
The evidence is empirical and available to anyone: he sees it. Wisdom does not exempt, and stupidity does not accelerate, so the wealth changes hands either way.
Naming a piece of ground after yourself is the cheapest form of permanence, and the psalm treats it as evidence of the same delusion as buying one. The verse describes what the rich think privately, not what they say.
The first of the two closing lines. Honour is treated as lodging: you do not even get one night in it. The comparison to animals is not an insult about behaviour, it is about a shared ending.
and those who come after approve of what their mouth said. Selah.
The delusion is inherited. The next generation watches the whole thing end and repeats the sentences anyway, which is what makes the psalm worth addressing to all peoples.
and their form wears away in Sheol, with no lofty house left to it.
The harshest image in the psalm and also the most damaged text in it. The rich are livestock, death is the herdsman, and the houses of verse 12 are answered by a dwelling that no longer exists.
But God will redeem my soul from the hand of Sheol,
כִּי
ki
for
יִקָּחֵנִי
yi-ka-che-NI
He will take me
סֶלָה
se-LA
Selah
for He will take me. Selah.
The hinge. The verb refused to every buyer in verse 8 is now done by God, without payment, and the speaker switches from they to my for the first time since the introduction.
The answer to the question of verse 6, now in the imperative and addressed to the listener rather than asked of himself. Fear, not envy, is the emotion the psalm is treating.
The plainest verse in the psalm, and the reason the whole argument holds. Going down after him is funeral language: the possessions stop at the edge of the grave.
and they praise you when you do well for yourself,
The verse changes address in the middle, quoting the flattery directly at you, so the reader is briefly put in the rich man's place. Self congratulation and public applause are shown as the same sentence.
The generations that verse 12 hoped to own turn out to be the destination, not the inheritance. Not seeing light is the exact counterpart of not seeing the pit in verse 10.
The closing line repeats verse 13 with one word changed, and that word carries the whole psalm: what separates a person from an animal is not honour but understanding.
♦ 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 teacher gathers an audience of everyone alive and puts one question: why be afraid of rich men. His answer has three steps. First, no amount of money buys an exemption from death, because the price of a life is simply beyond the market. Second, the rich know this, because they watch wise and stupid people die at the same rate, and they build houses and name land after themselves anyway. Third, since nothing goes down into the grave with them, there is nothing there to fear. Read it as an argument, not as consolation: it never says the rich will be punished, only that they will be ordinary.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three cruxes. The rare word חָלֶד (cha-led, v.2) in the opening address means something like duration or lifespan, so inhabitants of it are people who live in time rather than in a place, which is already the argument. קִרְבָּם (kir-bam, v.12) as vocalized means their inward part, their private thought, but the ancient Greek and Syriac versions reflect a reading of the same consonants in a different order meaning their graves, giving their graves are their houses forever; the two readings are close to opposite and the choice is disputed. And מִזְּבֻל (miz-vul, v.15) sits in a verse that every commentator marks as textually damaged, with the ancient versions diverging from each other, so any translation of that last line is a reconstruction rather than a rendering. The word עֲקֵבַי (a-ke-vai, v.6) literally means my heels, and readings run from those who trail me to the sin that dogs my steps.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The verb in יִקָּחֵנִי (yi-ka-che-ni, v.16), He will take me, is the verb Genesis 5:24 uses of Enoch, who walked with God and was not, for God took him, and the same root carries Elijah upward in 2 Kings 2. On the strength of that echo the verse has long been read as pointing past Sheol rather than merely away from it, which is why this psalm belongs in a house of mourning: it is one of the few places in the Psalter that says outright that God buys back what money cannot. The two near identical closing lines, verse 13 and verse 21, differ by יָלִין (ya-lin, v.13) against יָבִין (ya-vin, v.21), two verbs of similar shape and unrelated sense. Whether that is a deliberate progression from not lasting to not understanding, or one line is a scribal variant of the other, is genuinely unsettled.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In the mystical reading the pairing in verse 3, אָדָם (a-dam, v.3) against אִישׁ (ish, v.3), is not social rank but two grades within a person, the earthbound aspect named for the ground and the aspect capable of standing upright, present in every listener at once. The psalm then reads as an address from one level of the soul to another, and the beast comparison stops being about rich men and starts being about what any person is when the understanding named in the last verse is asleep. Wealth in this reading is a garment: real, worn in the world, and taken off at the door. What God takes in verse 16 is not the man's possessions and not his body but his nefesh, the same word that could not be bought back for any price in verse 9.
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).