Twenty-three verses of communal lament written after a sanctuary has been burned. It is not one of the seven daily psalms; it is what a community says when a building it thought permanent is gone and nobody can say how long the silence will last. Two things to watch. The second person singular suffix, -cha, Your, sits on almost every noun the psalm names: Your congregation, Your inheritance, Your meeting place, Your sanctuary, Your name, so that every loss is stated as God's loss before it is stated as the speaker's. And from verse 13 to verse 17 the word for You opens six clauses in a row, each with a verb in the perfect. The middle of the psalm is a list of things already done, laid out as an argument for doing them again.
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Why does Your anger smoke against the flock of Your pasture?
The opening is a question about duration, not about the event. Nothing is described yet, and already the sheep are called God's own property rather than the speaker's.
The argument steps down from sea monsters to the ordinary alternation of day and night, which is a harder thing to doubt and therefore a stronger claim.
The one verse that asks for something on behalf of a person rather than a building. The outcome requested is praise, which is what the sanctuary was for.
the uproar of those who rise against You, going up without stop.
It ends on the sound it started describing in verse 4, still rising. No answer is given and no resolution is written in.
♦ 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
Three movements. Verses 1 to 11 say what happened and ask two questions, why and how long. וֵאלֹהִים (ve-lo-him, v.12) turns the psalm: God is named King and the tense shifts from complaint to record. Verses 13 to 17 list what God has already done, six clauses each opening with אַתָּה (a-ta, v.13). Verses 18 to 23 are the petition, built almost entirely of imperatives: remember, look, arise, and twice do not forget. Watch one word travel the whole text. The word for perpetuity or for ever stands at לָנֶצַח (la-ne-tzach, v.1), נֶצַח (ne-tzach, v.3), לָנֶצַח (la-ne-tzach, v.10) and לָנֶצַח (la-ne-tzach, v.19): it is what the speaker fears about the rejection, what the ruins are called, what the insult threatens to become, and the last thing God is asked not to do.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verses 5 and 6 are among the most damaged in the book. Verse 5 does not parse cleanly in Hebrew and every rendering of it, including the one on this page, is a reconstruction; קַרְדֻּמּוֹת (kar-du-mot, v.5), axes, is the one word nobody argues about. נִינָם (ni-nam, v.8) is equally obscure and is usually read from a root meaning to oppress or to crush. The crux for dating the psalm is נָבִיא (na-vi, v.9): a text that says there is no prophet any more sits either after 586 BCE, when the Temple was burned, or in the Maccabean crisis, when the sanctuary was desecrated but not destroyed. Both dates are argued and neither is settled. לִוְיָתָן (liv-ya-tan, v.14) is the sea monster of Canaanite myth, and the psalm treats it as something already dealt with rather than as a threat.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The imperative זְכֹר (ze-chor, v.2), remember, is aimed at God three times here, and twice more in the negative form, do not forget. It is never aimed at the congregation. The human side of this psalm is presented as having nothing left to do except remind. A long-standing reading takes the giving of Leviathan as food in verse 14 as a feast for the righteous at the end of days, which turns the most violent verse in the psalm into a promise. תּוֹרֶךָ (to-re-cha, v.19), Your dove, is widely read as a name for Israel and the wild beast opposite it as whichever empire is current, and that pairing is what let the psalm be reused after every later destruction instead of only the first.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The six You clauses of verses 13 to 17 are all acts of separation: sea broken from land, springs opened, rivers stopped, day divided from night, summer from winter, boundaries set around the earth. In the kabbalistic idiom that is creation described as the drawing of limits, and the burned sanctuary is then the one limit that has failed. Asking God to remember is not a request for information in this reading but the standard movement of arousal from below: the human side acts by speaking, and the covenant of לַבְּרִית (lab-rit, v.20) is held up as the document that obliges the other side to answer.
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).