Twelve verses with a hinge you can hear. The first half is a man lying down among lions; the second half is the same man with a harp, and the two are joined by the refrain of verse 6, which returns unchanged as verse 12. Verses 8 to 12 turn up again, almost word for word, as the opening of Psalm 108, so this ending had a life of its own outside this psalm. The superscription puts it in a cave while David runs from Saul, and the book of Samuel gives him two caves, Adullam in chapter 22 and En Gedi in chapter 24, without saying which one this is.
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Four labels stacked before the psalm starts: a tune, an author, a genre word and a scene. Two of the four are not understood, and the scene is the only one that dates it.
and in the shadow of Your wings I will take refuge,
עַד
ad
until
יַעֲבֹר
ya-a-VOR
it passes over
הַוּוֹת
ha-u-OT
destruction
until the destruction passes by.
The plea is doubled, then given a reason. What is asked for is the smallest cover in the book, a bird's wing, and it is asked for only until something has finished passing overhead.
3
אֶקְרָא לֵאלֹהִים עֶלְיוֹן
לָאֵל גֹּמֵר עָלָי
אֶקְרָא
ek-RA
I call
לֵאלֹהִים
le-lo-HIM
to God
עֶלְיוֹן
eli-ON
Most High
I call to God Most High,
לָאֵל
la-EL
to the God
גֹּמֵר
go-MER
who completes
עָלָי
a-LAI
for me
to the God who carries it through for me.
Two names for God across one line, and a participle that means finishing rather than beginning. What is requested is completion of something already under way.
The image is not left as an image. It is decoded inside the verse: the lions are people, and the parts that maim are the mouth twice over, teeth and then tongue.
The refrain cuts into a complaint that has not been settled. Nothing in the cave has changed; the request is only that God be high enough to be seen from it.
Three wakings in one verse: himself, the instruments, then the dawn. The last one changes person, from an imperative to a first person verb, so the sun is not asked but woken.
The refrain returns with one difference: the definite article on the word for heavens is gone. The same sentence, said now by a man who has already started singing.
♦ 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 halves and a repeated line. Verses 2 to 5 are pursuit: refuge asked for, an insult received, teeth and tongues described. Verses 8 to 11 are music: a steady heart, instruments woken, an audience of nations. Between them sits verse 6, and the same words close the psalm as verse 12. Verse 7 is the pivot in the plot rather than in the mood, because it is the one place where something actually happens: the trap works on the trappers. Notice that nothing in the man's situation is reported as changed between verse 5 and verse 8. He is still in the cave. What changes is the heart, and the psalm gives that its own word, נָכוֹן (na-chon, v.8), meaning set firm or established.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three words in the first line are unsettled. תַּשְׁחֵת (tash-chet, v.1) belongs to the phrase al tashchet, do not destroy, which stands over Psalms 57, 58, 59 and 75 and is generally taken as the name of a known tune rather than as a prayer. מִכְתָּם (mich-tam, v.1), michtam, heads six psalms and has been derived from a root for gold, for inscription and for covering, with no agreement. Inside the psalm, חָסָיָה (cha-sa-ya, v.2) is a feminine perfect with an unusual ending, and לֹהֲטִים (lo-ha-tim, v.5), those who blaze, is hard enough that translators split between people who are on fire, people who devour, and a word for flames. The clearest crux is כָּפַף (ka-faf, v.7): the verb has no expressed subject, so the line reads either as the enemies bowing my soul down or as my soul being bowed, and both readings are in print. Verses 8 to 12 recur as Psalm 108:2 to 6, which is a fact about the manuscripts rather than a theory.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The Talmud, in tractate Berakhot, tells of a harp that hung above David's bed and sounded on its own when the north wind struck it at midnight, so that he rose and studied until morning. Verse 9 is read there against the plain sense of a man waking up: he wakes the dawn, the dawn does not wake him. That reading takes אָעִירָה (a-i-ra, v.9) at full strength, as a transitive verb with שָּׁחַר (sha-char, v.9) as its object, which is what the Hebrew actually has. The cave in the superscription is read as the setting for the whole psalm, so that the promise to sing among the nations in verse 10 is made by a man with no audience at all, and the refrain asking God to rise above the heavens is said by someone underground. Where the psalm is applied to Israel rather than to David, the lions of verse 5 become the empires, and the pit of verse 7 becomes the standard image for a plan that turns on its planner.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The shadow of the wings in verse 2 is read as protection that works by proximity rather than by strength: a shadow requires no wall, only nearness to something that stands between you and the light. In this reading the word rendered my glory in verse 9 is the soul rather than reputation, so the three wakings of that verse are a sequence: the soul wakes first, then the instruments of the body, then the world outside. Waking the dawn is then the claim that the inner order precedes the outer one, and that the day begins where a person begins it. The two halves of the psalm are the same person at two depths, which is why the refrain can be said unchanged from either.
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).