Twenty-four verses of a man being destroyed by someone he used to pray beside. The first movement is panic and a wish for wings; the second is a city patrolled by its own corruption; the hinge is verse 14, where the enemy is finally identified as a friend; the last third is a decision to trust taken without any report that the situation improved. In the cycle that reads the whole book across thirty days it falls on the tenth. Grammatically it is a good place to meet the cohortative, the I would form ending in -a: verses 7 to 9 give you I would fly, I would settle, I would hurry.
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ בִּנְגִינֹת
מַשְׂכִּיל לְדָוִד
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
בִּנְגִינֹת
bin-gi-NOT
with stringed music
For the leader, with stringed instruments.
מַשְׂכִּיל
mas-KIL
a maskil
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
A maskil of David.
The heading gives the scoring and the genre before any trouble is named. A maskil is a psalm marked for instruction, so what follows is meant to teach and not only to vent.
The first request is not for rescue but for attention. The negative half asks God not to do the one thing the psalm fears, which is to withdraw and go quiet.
Three imperatives in a row, then the reason. The speaker admits he is not composed: the verb of complaint is followed by a verb for the noise an animal makes.
and oppression and deceit never leave its public square.
The square is where business is done and disputes are judged in public. Naming it as the place the corruption never leaves says the institutions are gone, not only the people.
For it is not an enemy who taunts me, then I could bear it;
לֹא
lo
not
מְשַׂנְאִי
me-san-I
the one who hates me
עָלַי
a-LAI
against me
הִגְדִּיל
hig-DIL
has made himself great
וְאֶסָּתֵר
ve-e-sa-TER
and I would hide
מִמֶּנּוּ
mi-me-NU
from him
it is not one who hates me who rose over me, then I could hide from him.
The hardest verse here to construe, and the argument runs on two conditions: an enemy would have been survivable, because an enemy is a thing you can see coming and avoid.
The accusation lands. Three terms of closeness stacked in five words, and the pronoun opening the verse is the emphatic one, which is what makes the sentence a wound.
The curse. It asks the ground to open on people who are still walking about, which is this psalm's way of saying the rot has already finished its work.
17
אֲנִי אֶל אֱלֹהִים אֶקְרָא
וַיהֹוָה יוֹשִׁיעֵנִי
אֲנִי
a-NI
as for me
אֶל
el
to
אֱלֹהִים
e-lo-HIM
God
אֶקְרָא
ek-RA
I will call
As for me, I call to God,
וַיהֹוָה
vai-ho-VA
and the LORD
יוֹשִׁיעֵנִי
yo-shi-e-NI
will save me
and the LORD will save me.
The turn. Nothing in the situation has changed and nothing is claimed to have changed; what moves is the direction the speaker is facing.
He has ransomed my soul in peace from the battle against me,
כִּי
ki
for
בְרַבִּים
vra-BIM
with many
הָיוּ
hai-U
they were
עִמָּדִי
i-ma-DI
with me
for they were many, ranged with me.
A rescue reported in the perfect tense while the danger is still being described as numerous. The last two words are the hardest in the psalm to settle.
God will hear and will answer them, He who is enthroned from of old. Selah.
אֲשֶׁר
A-sher
those who
אֵין
ein
there are no
חֲלִיפוֹת
cha-li-FOT
changes
לָמוֹ
la-MO
for them
Those who have no changes,
וְלֹא
ve-LO
and not
יָרְאוּ
yar-U
they fear
אֱלֹהִים
e-lo-HIM
God
and do not fear God.
The counterweight to the enemy's confidence. The charge laid against them is not cruelty but never having been altered by anything that happened to them.
21
שָׁלַח יָדָיו בִּשְׁלֹמָיו
חִלֵּל בְּרִיתוֹ
שָׁלַח
sha-LACH
he sent out
יָדָיו
ya-DAV
his hands
בִּשְׁלֹמָיו
bish-lo-MAV
against those at peace with him
He put out his hands against those at peace with him;
חִלֵּל
chi-LEL
he profaned
בְּרִיתוֹ
bri-TO
his covenant
he profaned his covenant.
Back to the friend, and now in the third person. Hands go out against people who were at peace with him, which is the whole definition of the crime.
Four images, all of them about texture. Soft speech is set against a heart that is a battlefield, and the last word turns the words themselves into blades.
But You, God, will bring them down to the pit of destruction;
אַנְשֵׁי
an-SHEI
men of
דָמִים
da-MIM
bloodshed
וּמִרְמָה
u-mir-MA
and deceit
לֹא
lo
not
יֶחֱצוּ
ye-che-TZU
will they halve
יְמֵיהֶם
ye-MEI-hem
their days
men of blood and deceit will not reach half their days.
וַאֲנִי
va-a-NI
but as for me
אֶבְטַח
ev-TACH
I will trust
בָּךְ
bach
in You
But I will trust in You.
Two futures set beside each other, and the psalm ends on the shorter of the two sentences. The final word is the pronoun for God.
♦ 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
Three movements. Verses 2 to 9 are distress and end in a fantasy of escape: wings, wilderness, a shelter from a storm. Verses 10 to 16 turn to the city and find the danger inside the walls, where it has a face and a name. Verses 17 to 24 are a decision to trust, taken with no report that anything outside the speaker got better. The hinge is וְאַתָּה (ve-a-ta, v.14), an emphatic pronoun put first in its clause: up to that point the trouble is an enemy, from there it is a friend. Note that the escape is never taken. The dove flight is stated as a wish and then dropped without comment.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The consonants q-r-b run through the psalm in two senses the ear cannot separate. Inside: my heart writhes inside me in verse 5, inside her in verses 11 and 12, inside them in verse 16. Combat: וּקְרָב (uk-rav, v.22), his heart was war, and מִקְּרׇב (mik-rov, v.19), from the battle against me. A psalm about what is inside a person is built on the word for close fighting. Two readings stay unsettled and this page does not settle them. The first word of verse 16, יַשִּׁי (ya-shi, v.16), is written one way and read another in the Masoretic tradition, and translations divide between a verb, may He incite death against them, and a reading built on a noun for desolation; it is disputed. The last word of verse 19, עִמָּדִי (i-ma-di, v.19), plainly means with me, which is why some render for they were many against me and others for many were on my side, and the verse can be read either as rescue from a crowd or as rescue by one.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Traditional commentary identifies the friend of verses 14 and 15 with Ahithophel, David's counsellor, who went over to Absalom's revolt in 2 Samuel 15 to 17 and whose advice the book says was treated like an oracle. On that reading the shared walk to the house of God is not a general memory of friendship but a working relationship inside the court. Verse 18 names three times of prayer, evening and morning and noon, in that order, and the same three times appear in Daniel 6:11; the pair is a fixture in discussions of why the day carries three fixed prayers. One structural detail is worth holding onto: הַשְׁלֵךְ (hash-lech, v.23) is the only imperative in twenty-four verses that is addressed to a person rather than to God.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The psalm uses two divine names and does not scatter them at random. The name read as God carries the appeals of verses 2 and 17 and the judgment of verse 24; the four letter name appears at the moment of rescue in verse 17 and in the instruction of verse 23. In the standard reading of the two names, one is strict measure and the other is mercy, so the psalm crosses from the first to the second while the circumstances stay exactly as they were. The wilderness of verse 8 is read in this key not as flight from the world but as the place where nothing stands between a person and the source, which is why the wish is answered in a form the speaker did not ask for: the shelter arrives, the wings do not.
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).