Nine verses that start at the far edge of the earth and end inside a tent. Everything the speaker asks for is high or covered: a rock too tall to climb unaided, a tower, a shelter under wings. Halfway through, the prayer stops speaking in the first person and prays for the king in the third, and whether that is the speaker referring to himself as king or a section added for public use is disputed. For a learner the psalm is a short course in two forms. First the lengthened imperative, an imperative with an extra vowel on the end that makes it a request rather than an order, which is how verse 2 asks twice to be heard. Then the cohortative, the first person volitive that also ends in a long vowel: let me dwell, let me take refuge, let me sing.
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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 עַל נְגִינַת לְדָוִד
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
עַל
al
on
נְגִינַת
ne-gi-NAT
stringed music
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
For the leader, on stringed music. Of David.
A performance heading rather than part of the prayer. It names string accompaniment in a singular form found in no other heading in the book, where the same instruction otherwise appears as a plural with a prefix.
Two verbs of listening with two objects. The first noun is a shout, the kind of sound a person makes before it has words; the second is a formed prayer. The line asks for the same attention to both.
The whole geography of the psalm in one line. The speaker is at the outer edge, his heart is giving way, and what he asks for is not to be brought home but to be put somewhere he could not climb to on his own.
The grounds for thinking the request reasonable: it has been granted before. Both images are static, a shelter and a tower, and the enemy is never fought, only kept on the outside of something.
let me take refuge in the covert of Your wings. Selah.
Two more shelters, one built and one alive, and both verbs are first person volitives asking permission. The verb rendered dwell is properly to stay as a resident alien, so the speaker is asking to be a lodger rather than an owner.
You have given the inheritance of those who fear Your name.
The hinge of the psalm. Asking stops and reporting starts: the vows have been heard, the portion has been handed over. Both verbs are past tense, which is what lets the second half of the psalm look outward.
may his years be like generation after generation.
The first of two verses about the king, and what is asked for is time. Days are stacked on days and years are stretched into generations, which is the language of a court rather than of a private prayer.
Kindness and truth are asked for as bodyguards, a pair of qualities handed a verb of guarding. The word standing between them and that verb is the hardest in the psalm and the versions do not agree on how to read it.
The ending returns to the first person and to the vows of verse 6. Singing is what pays them, and the last two words, one noun said twice, turn the payment into a daily obligation instead of a single performance.
♦ 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
The psalm has three parts and a clean seam between each. Verses 2 to 5 are a personal prayer from a distance, asking to be lifted and covered. Verse 6 changes tense and reports that the asking has already worked. Verses 7 and 8 pray for the king in the third person, and verse 9 comes back to the first person and closes the loop opened in verse 6: the vows that were heard are now the vows that are paid. Every image in the first part is vertical or enclosing, and none of them involves winning. A rock, a tower, a tent, a pair of wings. The enemy appears once, in verse 4, and only as something to be on the other side of.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three places reward slowing down. In verse 3 the phrase בְּצוּר (be-tzur, v.3) יָרוּם (ya-rum, v.3) מִמֶּנִּי (mi-me-ni, v.3) has no relative pronoun: it reads literally to a rock it is higher than I, which is ordinary Hebrew and awkward English, and it is the reason translations have to insert the word that. In verse 8 the word מַן (man, v.8) is a genuine crux. Read as an imperative it means appoint or assign, which is what most English versions choose; read as a question word it would mean who, which does not fit; and the ancient versions differ, so any translation of this line is a decision rather than a reading. The heading is also unusual: נְגִינַת (ne-gi-nat, v.1) is singular, and the six other headings that call for string accompaniment all use a plural with a prefix instead.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The two verses about the king sit oddly in a private prayer, and readers have taken them in opposite directions. One line of reading treats them as the speaker praying for himself in the formal third person, which is normal royal language and keeps the psalm whole. Another treats them as a liturgical addition that let a personal prayer be used in public worship, and points to the change of person as the seam. The heading attaches the psalm to David, and the combination of a speaker cut off from the sanctuary with a prayer for the king has invited readings that place it during one of his flights, but the text names no occasion and none should be supplied for it. What the psalm does say is that the inheritance in verse 6 belongs to those who fear the name, which makes the portion a matter of relationship rather than descent.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading takes the rock of verse 3 at its word: the point of the request is that the rock is higher than the one asking, so the prayer is for an elevation he cannot generate. The verbs make the same case grammatically, since the speaker never lifts himself in this psalm, he is led, sheltered, covered and given. The covert of the wings in verse 5 is read as a concealed place rather than a safe one, a level where something is hidden rather than defended, and the tent beside it as the temporary dwelling that a soul has in a body. In that reading verse 9 is the exchange: what was received in silence is repaid in sound, every day, for as long as the arrangement lasts.
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).