Twenty-four verses in the voice of someone who has already lived a long time and is asking not to be dropped at the end of it. The Hebrew gives this psalm no heading at all, which is unusual in this part of the book, and its first verse is identical to the opening line of Psalm 31, with the two verses after it reworking the same material more loosely. Three roots carry the argument: shame in verses 1, 13 and 24, abandon in 9, 11 and 18, and the word for always in 3, 6 and 14. In the thirty-day reading cycle it falls on the thirteenth day.
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1
בְּךָ יְהֹוָה חָסִיתִי
אַל אֵבוֹשָׁה לְעוֹלָם
בְּךָ
be-CHA
in You
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
חָסִיתִי
cha-si-TI
I have taken refuge
In You, LORD, I have taken refuge;
אַל
al
let not
אֵבוֹשָׁה
e-vo-SHA
I be ashamed
לְעוֹלָם
le-o-LAM
for ever
let me never be ashamed.
The verb is already in the past tense: refuge was taken before any trouble is described. The only request is that the choice not turn out to have been a mistake.
Four imperatives in one breath, three of them carrying the object suffix meaning me. The rescue is asked for on the basis of God's righteousness, not the speaker's.
A rock is a place you reach, so what is asked for is a standing right of entry rather than one deliverance. The last clause quietly turns the request into a statement of fact.
from my mother's body You are the one who brought me out;
בְּךָ
be-CHA
of You
תְהִלָּתִי
te-hi-la-TI
is my praise
תָמִיד
ta-MID
always
my praise is of You always.
Dependence is pushed back behind memory, to the womb. If leaning on God is the oldest fact about him, being dropped now would break something older than the present trouble.
7
כְּמוֹפֵת הָיִיתִי לְרַבִּים
וְאַתָּה מַחֲסִי עֹז
כְּמוֹפֵת
kmo-FET
like a portent
הָיִיתִי
ha-yi-TI
I have become
לְרַבִּים
le-ra-BIM
to many
I have become a portent to many,
וְאַתָּה
ve-a-TA
but You
מַחֲסִי
ma-cha-SI
are my refuge
עֹז
oz
of strength
but You are my strong refuge.
A portent is something people stare at and read as a sign, and it can point either to favour or to disaster. He knows he is being read as a public case.
The psalm's central fear, said twice in one verse with two different verbs. Old age is not described as weakness in general but as the point where strength runs out mid-sentence.
and those who watch for my life have taken counsel together,
The enemies get their own verse and their own meeting. They are watching him closely, which makes them the exact mirror of the God he is asking not to look away.
Their logic quoted in their own words: they read his suffering as proof of abandonment. Their verb for abandon is the same one he uses in his own prayer.
I will bring to mind Your righteousness, Yours alone.
The mighty acts belong to God, and he arrives carrying them the way a witness arrives carrying evidence. The last word insists the record is nobody else's.
Youth comes back, this time as the start of an education rather than of trust. Everything from then to this moment is presented as one unbroken stretch of teaching.
And even to old age and grey hair, God, do not abandon me,
עַד
ad
until
אַגִּיד
a-GID
I declare
זְרוֹעֲךָ
ze-ro-a-CHA
Your arm
לְדוֹר
le-DOR
to a generation
until I declare Your arm to a generation,
לְכׇל
le-CHOL
to all
יָבוֹא
ya-VO
who will come
גְּבוּרָתֶךָ
gvu-ra-te-CHA
Your might
Your might to all who are to come.
The longest verse, and the one that gives a reason for wanting more years: not comfort but handover. He wants to stay alive long enough to pass something on.
And Your righteousness, God, reaches to the height,
אֲשֶׁר
A-sher
who
עָשִׂיתָ
a-si-TA
have done
גְדֹלוֹת
gdo-LOT
great things
You who have done great things,
אֱלֹהִים
e-lo-HIM
God
מִי
mi
who
כָמוֹךָ
cha-mo-CHA
is like You
God, who is like You?
The prayer stops asking and looks upward. The closing question is not rhetoric filling a line; it is what the two verses about teaching were building toward.
I too will thank You with the lute for Your faithfulness, my God;
אֲזַמְּרָה
a-zam-RA
I will sing
לְךָ
le-CHA
to You
בְכִנּוֹר
ve-chi-NOR
with the lyre
קְדוֹשׁ
ke-DOSH
Holy One of
יִשְׂרָאֵל
yis-ra-EL
Israel
I will sing to You with the lyre, Holy One of Israel.
The instruments arrive. Thanks are tied to one specific attribute, faithfulness, which is the one that matters when a case has been running for decades.
My tongue too will speak of Your righteousness all the day,
כִּי
ki
for
בֹשׁוּ
vo-SHU
they are ashamed
כִי
chi
for
חָפְרוּ
chaf-RU
they are disgraced
מְבַקְשֵׁי
me-vak-SHEI
those who seek
רָעָתִי
ra-a-TI
my harm
for those who seek my harm are shamed and disgraced.
The last verse holds both halves at once, his speech all day long and their shame, and closes the psalm on the same root that opened it.
♦ 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
An old man's petition, in four movements. Verses 1 to 3 are the opening appeal, and they are not new: verse 1 is word for word the opening line of Psalm 31, and the next two reuse its vocabulary of rescue, ear, rock and fortress in a different order, so the appeal reads like a formula being invoked rather than a sentence being invented. Verses 4 to 13 are the crisis, with the specific fear stated in תַּשְׁלִיכֵנִי (tash-li-che-ni, v.9) and repeated at תַּעַזְבֵנִי (ta-az-ve-ni, v.18): not death, but being put down like something no longer worth carrying. Verse 14 is the hinge, and everything after it is praise, promise and instruments. The word to track is the one for always, which lands three times, at תָּמִיד (ta-mid, v.3), תָמִיד (ta-mid, v.6) and תָּמִיד (ta-mid, v.14), each time attached to something the speaker does rather than something he receives.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The psalm is built on one root, the root of shame, and the plot is which way it points. In אֵבוֹשָׁה (e-vo-sha, v.1) he asks not to be shamed; in יֵבֹשׁוּ (ye-vo-shu, v.13) he asks that his accusers be; in בֹשׁוּ (vo-shu, v.24) they are. Nothing else in the psalm is resolved that cleanly. A second root does the same work in the opposite direction: the enemies say in עֲזָבוֹ (a-za-vo, v.11) that God has abandoned him, and he uses their verb in his own request at תַּעַזְבֵנִי (ta-az-ve-ni, v.18), so their taunt and his prayer are the same word with the subject changed. The one genuinely obscure word is גוֹזִי (go-zi, v.6). Translations render it as the one who took me from the womb, but the verb is rare and its root is disputed, and the meaning here is reconstructed from the birth imagery around it rather than from parallel usage.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Read verse 18 as the psalm's real request and the whole thing changes shape. He does not ask for more years so that the years will be pleasant; he asks for enough time to declare God's arm to a generation that has not yet arrived, which makes length of days an obligation rather than a reward. On that reading the fear in verse 9 is not fear of dying but fear of being made irrelevant before the handover is complete. There is also the long standing habit of reading the psalms of the single sufferer as the voice of the whole people, and this one takes it easily: a nation held since the womb, told by onlookers in verse 11 that it has been abandoned, asking in verse 20 to be brought up again from the depths of the earth.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Two places in this psalm sit below the surface of the ground, and they answer each other. In מִמְּעֵי (mim-ei, v.6) the speaker comes out of his mother's body; in וּמִתְּהֹמוֹת (u-mit-ho-mot, v.20) he is brought back up from the depths of the earth. Between them, verse 20 uses the same verb twice, at תָּשׁוּב (ta-shuv, v.20) and תָּשׁוּב (ta-shuv, v.20), a verb of returning that turns both the reviving and the raising into a coming back rather than a first arrival. Later Jewish mysticism states the pattern as a rule, that the descent is for the sake of the ascent, and the verse supplies the grammar for it: the trouble is credited to God in the same breath as the rescue, one clause apart, with no attempt to separate the two hands.
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).