A coronation prayer, and the best place in the book to learn one verb form: almost every line is a third person jussive, the wish form, so the psalm reads as a chain of "may he" rather than a report of what a king did. Only two psalms carry Solomon's name in the heading, this one and 127. It closes Book II of the Psalter, which is why verses 18 and 19 sound like a benediction rather than a continuation of the argument, and why verse 20 is a note from an editor rather than a line of poetry. Watch where the psalm puts its one word for because: the whole map of tribute in verses 8 to 11 hangs on the reason given in verse 12.
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The psalm opens as a petition, not a description. Judgment and righteousness are things the king receives, and both nouns carry the suffix Your, so the standard he rules by is on loan.
2
יָדִין עַמְּךָ בְצֶדֶק
וַעֲנִיֶּיךָ בְמִשְׁפָּט
יָדִין
ya-DIN
may he judge
עַמְּךָ
am-CHA
Your people
בְצֶדֶק
ve-TZE-dek
with righteousness
May he judge Your people with righteousness,
וַעֲנִיֶּיךָ
va-a-ni-yei-CHA
and Your poor ones
בְמִשְׁפָּט
ve-mish-PAT
with justice
and Your poor with justice.
The first jussive of the chain. The test of the gift asked for in verse 1 is immediate and social: how the poor fare under it, and they too are called Yours, not his.
Duration enters, measured against the sun and the moon rather than against a reign. This is also the one verse where the ancient versions clearly read a different Hebrew verb.
The horizon widens to the whole map. The identical pair of limits appears in Zechariah 9:10, which suggests a fixed formula for universal dominion rather than a geography.
The vocabulary of imperial submission arrives, and with it the harshest image in the psalm. Who exactly is bowing depends on how the third word is read.
The kings of Tarshish and the islands will render tribute,
מַלְכֵי
mal-CHEI
the kings of
שְׁבָא
shva
Sheba
וּסְבָא
us-VA
and Seba
אֶשְׁכָּר
esh-KAR
a gift
יַקְרִיבוּ
yak-ri-VU
they will offer
the kings of Sheba and Seba will offer a gift.
Named kingdoms, from the far west to the south of Arabia. The two lines are built as an exact mirror, four elements each, which is the psalm's way of saying every direction.
The two lines flatten every distinction: all kings, all nations. The scope is total, which is exactly why the next verse has to explain what it is for.
The hinge, and it is a single word: for. Every prostration and every caravan of tribute in the previous four verses is justified here by one thing, that this king answers a cry nobody else answers.
Pity, not policy. The verb for saving is held to the end of the line, where Hebrew puts the weight, and it is the same verb used of the king back in verse 4.
The verb for redeem is the one used of a kinsman buying back family land or a family member. The reason the poor matter is then put in the language of price.
So may he live, and may gold of Sheba be given to him,
וְיִתְפַּלֵּל
ve-yit-pa-LEL
and may one pray
בַּעֲדוֹ
ba-a-DO
for him
תָמִיד
ta-MID
continually
and may prayer be made for him continually,
כׇּל
kol
all
הַיּוֹם
ha-YOM
the day
יְבָרְכֶנְהוּ
ye-var-chen-HU
may he bless him
all the day may he be blessed.
The gold that came in as tribute in verse 10 now moves back toward the one who was rescued, and prayer moves back toward the king. The circuit closes. The verbs have no stated subject, which is why translations differ over who gives and who prays.
May there be a spread of grain in the land, on the mountain tops;
יִרְעַשׁ
yir-ASH
may it rustle
כַּלְּבָנוֹן
kal-va-NON
like Lebanon
פִּרְיוֹ
pir-O
its fruit
may its fruit rustle like Lebanon;
וְיָצִיצוּ
ve-ya-tzi-TZU
and may they blossom
מֵעִיר
me-IR
from a city
כְּעֵשֶׂב
ke-E-sev
like grass of
הָאָרֶץ
ha-A-retz
the earth
and may they blossom out of the city like grass of the earth.
Agricultural excess, described in Hebrew nobody has fully solved. Grain standing on mountain tops and city dwellers sprouting like grass are both deliberately impossible pictures.
may men bless themselves by him, may all nations call him happy.
The name outlasts the man. This is the verse that carried the messianic reading, and its central verb is the one word of the psalm that nobody can define with confidence.
Not part of the psalm's argument. This is the doxology the editors set at the seam between two books of the Psalter, and the same formula closes Books I, III and IV.
The blessing widens from the God of Israel to the whole earth, and the double amen is a congregational response written into the text, not a poetic flourish.
20
כׇּלּוּ תְפִלּוֹת דָּוִד בֶּן יִשָׁי
כׇּלּוּ
ko-LU
they are ended
תְפִלּוֹת
tfi-LOT
the prayers of
דָּוִד
da-VID
David
בֶּן
ben
son of
יִשָׁי
yi-SHAI
Jesse
The prayers of David son of Jesse are ended.
A librarian's note rather than a line of poetry. It closes a collection that once stopped here, which is why psalms headed with David's name keep appearing after 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
A prayer at a coronation, in three movements. Verses 1 to 7 ask for justice and describe it as weather and harvest. Verses 8 to 11 widen to the whole map, sea to sea, every king, every nation. Verse 12 then gives the reason with a single word, for, and the psalm spends verses 12 to 14 on one subject only: the needy who cries out, the poor with no helper, the life bought back from fraud and violence. Read in that order, the empire of verses 8 to 11 is not the point but the payment. Verses 18 to 20 belong to the book rather than to the poem: two verses of doxology closing Book II, then the colophon at כׇּלּוּ (ko-lu, v.20) noting that David's prayers end here.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The psalm is built out of rare words, and three of them are cruxes. יִנּוֹן (yi-non, v.17) occurs nowhere else in this form; it is usually connected either to a root meaning to sprout or to the noun for offspring, and translations range from endure to take root to propagate. פִסַּת (fi-sat, v.16) is a single occurrence too, guessed from context as an abundance or a spread of grain. צִיִּים (tzi-yim, v.9) is read either as the nomads who camp in the wilderness or as the wild creatures that live there, the same word that appears among the desert animals in Isaiah 13:21, and the two readings pull the verse in different directions. Two further notes. At יִירָאוּךָ (yi-ra-u-cha, v.5) the Masoretic text has they shall fear You, while the Greek reads he shall endure with the sun, which implies a different Hebrew verb; the difference is one of consonants, not of sense, and it is disputed which is original. And מִיָּם (mi-yam, v.8) begins a formula, from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth, that appears word for word in Zechariah 9:10.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The verb at יִנּוֹן (yi-non, v.17) produced a name. In the Talmud at Sanhedrin 98b the schools of the sages each derive a name for the Messiah from a verse, and the school of Rabbi Yannai derives Yinnon from this psalm. That single reading did a great deal of work: it licensed reading the whole psalm forward, so that the king who receives judgment in verse 1 is not only Solomon but the king still awaited, and the tribute of verses 10 and 11 is not a report of the tenth century but a description of the end. Note what the psalm itself never does: it never names the king, and it never says he is righteous. It asks that righteousness be given to him, which leaves the office and the man carefully separated.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In the kabbalistic reading a king is a receiver before he is a ruler. Verse 1 sets the pattern, since judgment and righteousness both arrive with the suffix Yours, and everything the king then does in the psalm is a passing on of what he was given. The rain of verse 6 is the standard image for that flow: it does not belong to the field, it does not stop at the field, and it is measured out onto grass already cut. Read this way the two divine names of בָּרוּךְ (ba-ruch, v.18) and the widening of glory to fill the whole earth in verse 19 are not an appendix but the same movement finishing, from a single throne outward until nothing is outside it.
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).