Eleven verses about one weapon, the tongue. The enemies here carry no swords; they sharpen their speech into one, aim it from cover, and the psalm answers them with the same two words turned around, arrow and suddenly. For a learner it is a drill in the third person plural: verses 4 to 7 run on eight of those verbs in four verses, all ending in the same vowel, plus one first person plural that nobody has explained. Watch the roots for seeing and for fearing, which share two consonants and trade places across the psalm. In the monthly cycle that reads the whole book it falls on the eleventh day, with Psalms 60 to 65.
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| AmAm | EmEm | AmDm | EmAm |
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
לְדָוִד
le-da-VID
of David
For the leader. A psalm of David.
A direction for performance and an attribution, and no occasion at all, which leaves the ambush described below with no date and no names.
The request is not that the plot fail but that the speaker be kept alive inside it. The word he uses for his own praying is not the usual one; it covers musing, complaining and talking to oneself.
The weapons are grammar. A sword and an arrow, each carrying the possessive ending -am, and each set in apposition to a piece of speech. The verb used of the arrow is the one for treading, which is what Hebrew says for bending a bow.
The target is singular, the shooters plural. The last two words set the psalm's hinge: what these men lack is fear, and fear is what everyone will have by verse 10.
The same old poetic word closes the first clause and the last, meaning for themselves at one end and them at the other. Their confidence rests on a question about being seen, and the psalm has an answer for it.
They hunt out crimes: we have finished a search well searched.
וְקֶרֶב
ve-KE-rev
and the inward part of
אִישׁ
ish
a man
וְלֵב
ve-LEV
and the heart
עָמֹק
a-MOK
is deep
The inward part of a man, and the heart, are deep.
The hardest verse in the psalm. A first person plural appears without warning inside a description of them, and the second half has no verb at all. The readings are set out below under remez.
8
וַיֹּרֵם אֱלֹהִים חֵץ
פִּתְאוֹם הָיוּ מַכּוֹתָם
וַיֹּרֵם
va-yo-REM
and He shot them
אֱלֹהִים
e-lo-HIM
God
חֵץ
chetz
an arrow
But God shot them with an arrow;
פִּתְאוֹם
pit-OM
suddenly
הָיוּ
hai-U
were
מַכּוֹתָם
ma-ko-TAM
their wounds
suddenly their wounds were there.
The reversal, in six words. Arrow and suddenly, the two things the plotters owned, come back in one verse with God as the subject, and the tense drops into the past as though it were already done.
The weapon of verse 4 returns as the thing that trips them. The Hebrew of the first clause is compressed to the edge of sense, with a plural verb and a singular object, and translations differ over who falls on whom.
The fear the plotters did not have in verse 5 arrives here and belongs to everybody. Two verbs follow it, telling and understanding, in that order: the report comes before the comprehension.
The righteous one rejoices in the LORD and shelters in Him;
וְיִתְהַלְלוּ
ve-yit-hal-LU
and shall glory
כׇּל
kol
all
יִשְׁרֵי
yish-REI
the upright of
לֵב
lev
heart
and all the upright in heart give praise.
The last verse reverses the first ambush exactly. There, one blameless man faced a plural in hiding; here one righteous man is joined by a plural in the open.
♦ 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 ask for two things, a hearing and a hiding place. Verses 4 to 7 describe the plot in rising detail, from the weapon to the ambush to the planning session to the boast. Verses 8 and 9 turn it over. Verses 10 and 11 report the public result. The turn is made with borrowed vocabulary rather than with an argument: חִצָּם (chi-tzam, v.4), their arrow, becomes חֵץ (chetz, v.8), an arrow, and פִּתְאֹם (pit-om, v.5), suddenly, becomes פִּתְאוֹם (pit-om, v.8), suddenly. Their tongue at לְשׁוֹנָם (le-sho-nam, v.4) is the same word as their tongue at לְשׁוֹנָם (le-sho-nam, v.9), once as the weapon and once as what brings them down. Nothing new is introduced to defeat them; their own equipment is turned round.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verse 7 is the crux of the psalm. תַּמְנוּ (tam-nu, v.7) is a first person plural, we have completed, standing in the middle of a sentence about them, and readers have gone three ways with it: as the plotters' own words quoted without warning, as a form to be read with different vowels so that the sense becomes they are finished or it is hidden, or as damage in the text that cannot be repaired. All three are current and none has won. The half verse after it, וְקֶרֶב (ve-ke-rev, v.7) to עָמֹק (a-mok, v.7), has no verb, so even the punctuation is a decision. A quieter thread runs through the same area: the root of seeing in יִרְאֶה (yir-e, v.6) and רֹאֵה (ro-e, v.9) and the root of fearing in יִירָאוּ (yi-ra-u, v.5) and וַיִּירְאוּ (va-yir-u, v.10) differ by the position of one consonant, and the psalm sets them beside each other at the two moments that matter, the boast that nobody will see and the fear that follows when everyone does. Whether that is design or the ordinary friction of Hebrew is a judgement call.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Read as a psalm about slander rather than about warfare, which the vocabulary invites: a tongue is sharpened, a word is bitter, a matter is passed between people until it becomes a snare. The image of the tongue as a weapon is not confined to this psalm; Jeremiah 9:7 in the Hebrew numbering calls the tongue a sharpened arrow, and the rabbinic discussion of slander gathers in the Talmud at Arakhin 15b. On that reading verse 9 stops being a poetic reversal and becomes a description of how the thing actually works: the speech goes out, circulates, and arrives back at the speaker, and the head shaking of the onlookers is the ordinary social outcome rather than a divine punishment.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The psalm is organised around what is hidden. The speaker asks to be hidden at תַּסְתִּירֵנִי (tas-ti-re-ni, v.3); the enemies gather in a hidden council at מִסּוֹד (mi-sod, v.3) and shoot from hiding places at בַּמִּסְתָּרִים (ba-mis-ta-rim, v.5), and those three words come from the same root. Both sides want cover, and the psalm gives it to only one of them. The plotters then push the search inward, into וְקֶרֶב (ve-ke-rev, v.7) and עָמֹק (a-mok, v.7), the inward part of a man and the deep heart, which is the furthest in this vocabulary can go, and their answer is that a person is unreadable. The mystical reading takes the psalm's reply to be a claim about depth rather than about surveillance: the same interior they consider unsearchable is where the answer is already at work, which is why the wound of verse 8 has no visible cause. The word for their council at מִסּוֹד (mi-sod, v.3), sod, is also the word later tradition uses for the hidden level of Torah, the level this section is named after.
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).