The confession psalm, headed by the one moment in David's life he would least want quoted, and then read for three thousand years by everyone else. Verse 17, the request that God open the speaker's lips, is said silently at the start of every Amidah, so most of this psalm's users meet it one line at a time without knowing where the line comes from. For a learner it is the best drill in the book for the imperative with an object suffix: wash me, purify me, create for me, restore to me, uphold me, deliver me. Count how many verbs end in the same two letters and the grammar teaches itself.
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♪ TuningE A D G B E
| AmAm | EmEm | AmDm | EmAm |
~70 BPM · 4/4 · gentle thumb-index-middle arpeggio · one bar per stich, two bars per verse · to reset the progression:
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
For the leader.
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
A psalm of David.
A performance note before a private confession. Whatever this was when it was said, it was filed as music for the choirmaster.
The superscription names the episode of 2 Samuel 11 and 12 and refuses to soften it. Note that the name Bath-sheba is two Hebrew words, the second the woman's own name.
Be gracious to me, God, according to Your kindness;
כְּרֹב
krov
according to the abundance of
רַחֲמֶיךָ
ra-cha-mei-CHA
Your mercies
מְחֵה
me-CHE
wipe out
פְשָׁעָי
fe-sha-AI
my transgressions
according to the abundance of Your mercies, wipe out my transgressions.
The measure asked for is not justice but the size of the other party's kindness. The verb translated wipe out is what you do to writing, not to a stain.
Three different words for wrongdoing appear in two verses, and each takes its own verb of removal. The washing verb is the one used for laundering cloth.
The pronoun is redundant in Hebrew and therefore emphatic: nobody has to inform him. What follows is not a discovery but something he cannot get out of his field of vision.
The hardest line in the psalm, since there were two other people in the story. The claim is jurisdictional rather than moral: the verdict he is accepting is God's, and he concedes it in advance.
The plea widens from an act to a condition. Whether this describes human nature or is the exaggeration of a man at his lowest is exactly what readers have argued about.
The vocabulary here is priestly, taken from ritual purification rather than from the law court. The speaker asks to be handled like an object that can be made fit for use again.
Guilt is described as a physical injury, and the one who caused it is the one asked to undo it. Hearing comes before rejoicing: the news arrives first.
11
הַסְתֵּר פָּנֶיךָ מֵחֲטָאָי
וְכׇל עֲוֺנֹתַי מְחֵה
הַסְתֵּר
has-TER
hide
פָּנֶיךָ
pa-nei-CHA
Your face
מֵחֲטָאָי
me-cha-ta-AI
from my sins
Hide Your face from my sins,
וְכׇל
ve-CHOL
and all
עֲוֺנֹתַי
a-o-no-TAI
my iniquities
מְחֵה
me-CHE
wipe out
and wipe out all my iniquities.
Everywhere else in the psalms a hidden face is the disaster being complained about. Here it is the request, and only the sins are to be out of view.
The centre of the psalm and the point where cleaning stops being enough. The verb is the one used for the creation of the world, and in the Bible it never takes a human subject.
The fear named is not punishment but dismissal. Saul is the model in the background: a king from whom the spirit departed and who was not told how to get it back.
Not the salvation itself, which he still has, but the joy of it, which he has lost. Third of three requests built on the word for spirit, after steadfast and holy.
Deliver me from bloodguilt, God, God of my deliverance;
תְּרַנֵּן
te-ra-NEN
will sing out
לְשׁוֹנִי
le-sho-NI
my tongue
צִדְקָתֶךָ
tzid-ka-te-CHA
Your righteousness
let my tongue sing out Your righteousness.
The one word in the psalm that points at a specific crime rather than at sin in general. What the freed tongue is to sing is not the speaker's innocence but the judge's rightness.
Then You will desire sacrifices of righteousness, burnt offering and whole offering;
אָז
az
then
יַעֲלוּ
ya-a-LU
they will offer up
עַל
al
upon
מִזְבַּחֲךָ
miz-ba-cha-CHA
Your altar
פָרִים
fa-RIM
bulls
then they will offer up bulls upon Your altar.
The offerings refused three verses earlier are accepted here, and the word doing the work is then. Nothing about the altar has changed except the order of events.
♦ 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 verses of heading, then four movements. Verses 3 to 11 ask for the record to be erased and the man to be washed, in the vocabulary of laundry and ritual purity. Verses 12 to 14 stop asking for cleaning and ask for manufacture: בְּרָא (bra, v.12), create, and then renew and restore. Verses 15 to 19 turn outward, promise a lesson, and redefine what an offering is. Verses 20 and 21 leave the individual entirely for Zion and its walls. Those last two verses ask for a rebuilt city and working sacrifices right after the psalm has said that sacrifices are not what is wanted; many readers take them as a later addition made when the psalm entered communal use, and others read the whole thing as one composition that moves deliberately from the person to the nation. The question is disputed and the text gives no way to settle it.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The cleansing words are borrowed from the sanctuary. בְאֵזוֹב (ve-e-zov, v.9), hyssop, is the plant used in the Torah to sprinkle the blood on the doorposts in Egypt, to purify a person healed of the skin affliction, and in the water of purification made with the red heifer. So the speaker is asking to be treated as a contaminated object handled by a priest, not as a defendant. Against that, בְּרָא (bra, v.12) is a different register altogether: it is the verb of Genesis 1, and in biblical Hebrew only God is ever its subject, so what is asked for in verse 12 is not repair but a new thing. הֶרֶב (he-rev, v.4) is an imperative meaning make much, used adverbially, which is why English versions say thoroughly. מִדָּמִים (mi-da-mim, v.16) is literally bloods, plural, and it can mean bloodguilt or a violent death; which one David is asking to be spared is not decided by the grammar.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The tradition reads verse 15 as the answer to an obvious question: why is this in the book at all, and why with the heading naming Nathan and Bath-sheba. The reading is that the fall is recorded so that the repentance can be, and that a man who had not fallen could not have taught this. So the psalm is treated as the working manual for teshuvah rather than as one king's private business, which is why it belongs to the penitential material rather than to the historical books. Two of its lines were then lifted out and given jobs of their own: שְׂפָתַי (sfa-tai, v.17), my lips, opens every Amidah, and verse 12 is sung on its own to more tunes than any other verse here. Read that way, the psalm answers Nathan's accusation not by defending anything but by making the accusation public property.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading takes verse 19 literally as a theory of offerings: the altar receives what is broken, and a whole heart has nothing to put on it. Breaking is therefore not the damage that has to be repaired before service can start, it is the material of the service. לֵב (lev, v.19), heart, is described as both broken and crushed, two words for the same state, and the reading turns the crushing of verse 10 into the currency of verse 19. Alongside this runs the reading of verse 12 as creation from nothing performed inside a person: the old heart is not cleaned, it is replaced, and the request is possible only because the verb belongs to the one who made the world out of no prior thing. The two readings meet at the same place, which is that nothing usable survives the process except what is given back.
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).