Twelve verses aimed at judges who have stopped judging. It opens as a question put to the bench, runs through a chain of images for what corrupt power actually is, turns into a curse, and ends with a verdict spoken by ordinary bystanders. The psalm has no fixed place in the service, so most readers meet it going through the book in order. Two things to watch. The words al tashcheth in the heading, do not destroy, also head psalms 57, 59 and 75, and are usually taken as the name of a tune rather than a plea. And three of the four verbs addressed to the judges in verses 2 and 3 end in an extra nun, an old poetic ending that lengthens the line without changing the sense.
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| 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 אַל תַּשְׁחֵת
לְדָוִד מִכְתָּם
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
אַל
al
do not
תַּשְׁחֵת
tash-CHET
destroy
For the leader. On al tashcheth, do not destroy.
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
מִכְתָּם
mich-TAM
a michtam
Of David. A michtam.
The heading is a tune name rather than an instruction to the reader. The same two words head four psalms, three of them consecutive, and the sense of michtam is not known.
Is it truly in silence that you speak what is right?
מֵישָׁרִים
mei-sha-RIM
with equity
תִּשְׁפְּטוּ
tish-PTU
do you judge
בְּנֵי
bnei
the sons of
אָדָם
a-DAM
man
Do you judge the sons of man with equity?
The psalm opens by cross-examining the court. The first word is the interrogative that expects the answer no, and the question is not whether these judges can judge but whether they ever meant to.
in the land you weigh out the violence of your hands.
The answer to the question. The last verb is a scale verb: the instrument that should be measuring justice is measuring how much violence the hands can deliver.
From what they do to what they are. The claim is pushed back to birth, which is read either as hyperbole about how set a habit becomes or as a statement about origin, and the two readings have never been reconciled.
The cobra image is completed, and the detail is precise. Snake charming was a working trade, so this is not a creature nobody could reach. It is a creature that will not be reached.
Two more images of vanishing, both taken from things that were never fully there. The snail image is usually explained by the trail it leaves, read as the animal melting away as it moves.
The hardest verse in the psalm and one of the hardest in the book. Translations ancient and modern do not agree on it, and the disagreement is about the plain sense, not the nuance.
The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance,
פְּעָמָיו
pe-a-MAV
his feet
יִרְחַץ
yir-CHATZ
he shall wash
בְּדַם
bdam
in the blood of
הָרָשָׁע
ha-ra-SHA
the wicked one
he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.
The verse most readers stumble on. What is celebrated is the verdict, but the psalm refuses to keep the picture clean: it puts the righteous man on his feet in the middle of the field.
And a man will say: there is fruit for the righteous after all;
אַךְ
ach
surely
יֵשׁ
yesh
there is
אֱלֹהִים
e-lo-HIM
God
שֹׁפְטִים
shof-TIM
judging
בָּאָרֶץ
ba-A-retz
in the earth
there is, after all, a God who judges in the earth.
The conclusion is handed to nobody in particular. Not the judges, not the righteous, but a person, the same word as the sons of man the corrupt court was supposed to be judging in verse 2.
♦ 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
Four movements. Verses 2 and 3 question a court and then answer their own question. Verses 4 to 6 describe the judges as a species rather than as people, estranged from the womb and deaf by choice. Verses 7 to 10 ask God to disarm them, and every request is a subtraction: teeth out, water drained, a snail gone, a birth that never saw daylight. Verses 11 and 12 step outside the courtroom and report what onlookers conclude. The frame is worth reading twice. The psalm opens with בְּנֵי (bnei, v.2) and אָדָם (a-dam, v.2), the sons of man, as the people being judged, and ends with אָדָם (a-dam, v.12), a man, as the one pronouncing the verdict on the judges. The bench and the public have changed places.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Two cruxes and one grammatical tic. The first crux is אֵלֶם (e-lem, v.2). The Masoretic vocalization gives the noun for silence, which is how the older translations read the line, while many modern ones revocalize the same consonants as a plural for gods or mighty ones and take the line as a direct address to the judges themselves. The consonants allow both and the reading is disputed. The second is verse 10, where סִּירֹתֵכֶם (si-ro-te-chem, v.10), your pots, אָטָד (a-tad, v.10), thornbush, and חָרוֹן (cha-ron, v.10), which is the ordinary word for burning anger but here may only mean heat, combine into a sentence nobody has settled. The tic is the extra nun on תְּדַבֵּרוּן (te-da-be-run, v.2), תִּפְעָלוּן (tif-a-lun, v.3) and תְּפַלֵּסוּן (tfa-le-sun, v.3), a poetic ending that adds weight rather than meaning, and all three of those verbs are aimed at the judges.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The deaf cobra of verses 5 and 6 became a standard image for someone who has heard the argument and sealed the ear on purpose, which is a heavier charge than ignorance. The charmer of חוֹבֵר (cho-ver, v.6) and חֲבָרִים (cha-va-rim, v.6) is a working professional, not a magician in a story, and that is the force of the image: the technique exists, and this creature is immune to it. The last verse turns on a grammatical oddity. שֹׁפְטִים (shof-tim, v.12) is a plural participle, judging, attached to a subject usually treated as singular. The same word for God is used elsewhere in the Torah for human judges, in the courtroom passages of Exodus 22, so the closing line can be heard as saying that God judges the earth, or that there are judges in it after all. Which of the two the verse intends is not settled.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Read as a map of one faculty, the psalm is about the ear and the mouth. The judges are asked about their speech in verse 2, they weigh violence with their hands in verse 3, and by verse 5 they have become a creature that has closed the single opening through which correction could arrive, אׇזְנוֹ (oz-no, v.5), its ear. The requests of verses 7 to 10 all attack that same head: the teeth inside the mouth, then the fangs, then the whole body run off as water. What is asked for is not pain but the removal of an instrument. The close reverses the direction. Speech comes back, but from outside the court, and the psalm ends on a mouth that says something true after eleven verses of mouths that could 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).