Twenty one verses in two unequal halves. The first ten are a sleepless man asking six questions about whether God has changed; the last ten are the sea splitting, told as if the speaker were watching it happen. Verse 11 is the hinge and the hardest line in the psalm to construe. For a learner it is a good place to meet the cohortative, the first person form ending in a long vowel that means let me remember or I would remember: it appears four times, and each time the same act of memory does something different to the speaker. The heading assigns the psalm to Jeduthun, named in Chronicles as one of the levitical singers, and to Asaph.
♫ Guitar suggestion, hover a chord to explore or change
♪ 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:
Active voicings · printable
The voicing displayed for each chord is the one you selected in its popup. Navigate with the popup arrows to change.
1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ עַל יְדוּתוּן
לְאָסָף מִזְמוֹר
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the choirmaster
עַל
al
on
יְדוּתוּן
ye-du-TUN
Jeduthun
For the choirmaster, on Jeduthun.
לְאָסָף
le-a-SAF
of Asaph
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
Of Asaph, a psalm.
The heading names a performer and a composer rather than a king. Nothing here is attributed to David, and the psalm argues with itself rather than with an enemy.
The same three words twice, with a different verb attached each time. The first attempt produces noise, the second produces hearing, and the psalm never explains what happened in between.
The insomnia is addressed to God in the second person and blamed on Him directly. A poet reporting that he cannot speak is already a paradox the verse does not resolve.
6
חִשַּׁבְתִּי יָמִים מִקֶּדֶם
שְׁנוֹת עוֹלָמִים
חִשַּׁבְתִּי
chi-shav-TI
I reckoned
יָמִים
ya-MIM
days
מִקֶּדֶם
mi-KE-dem
from of old
I thought over days of old,
שְׁנוֹת
shnot
the years of
עוֹלָמִים
o-la-MIM
ages past
the years of ages past.
The mind reaches backwards for relief and goes past yesterday, past a lifetime, into the distant past. The distance is the point: nothing recent is usable.
Four verbs of inner activity in eight words. The searching is done by the spirit, which in verse 4 was the thing that failed, so the faculty that broke is now the one at work.
The first of six questions, and the mildest. Each one tests a different divine attribute, and they are asked in the order a person actually loses confidence.
9
הֶאָפֵס לָנֶצַח חַסְדּוֹ
גָּמַר אֹמֶר לְדֹר וָדֹר
הֶאָפֵס
he-a-FES
has it ceased
לָנֶצַח
la-ne-TZACH
for eternity
חַסְדּוֹ
chas-DO
His kindness
Has His kindness ceased for good,
גָּמַר
ga-MAR
has it finished
אֹמֶר
O-mer
the word
לְדֹר
le-DOR
for generation
וָדֹר
va-DOR
and generation
has the promise run out for generation after generation?
Kindness and spoken promise are put on trial together. Pairing them measures God against covenant rather than against mood, which is the only test that could be lost.
The sharpest of the six. Not whether God is angry but whether anger has permanently closed something that was open. Then Selah, and the questioning stops mid breath.
11
וָאֹמַר חַלּוֹתִי הִיא
שְׁנוֹת יְמִין עֶלְיוֹן
וָאֹמַר
va-o-MAR
and I said
חַלּוֹתִי
cha-lo-TI
my sickness
הִיא
hi
it is
And I said: this is my sickness,
שְׁנוֹת
shnot
the years of
יְמִין
ye-MIN
the right hand of
עֶלְיוֹן
eli-ON
the Most High
the years of the right hand of the Most High.
The turn, and the most contested verse in the psalm. Whatever the two disputed words mean, the speaker has stopped interrogating God and named the trouble as something happening in himself.
The verb of verse 4 comes back and now cures instead of wounding. Nothing has changed except the object: God remembered in the abstract hurt, God remembered as a specific act does not.
The same verb used for the sleepless muttering of verse 7 is used again here. The activity is identical; only the direction of attention has moved outward.
The six questions never get answers. They get replaced by a seventh question with an obvious answer, which is how the psalm changes the subject without pretending the first ten verses did not happen.
The wonder that was private memory one verse earlier is now something with witnesses. Public testimony is what the speaker had lost and is now recovering.
Jacob is expected here; Joseph is not. Joseph standing for the northern tribes is a habit of the Asaph psalms, and it dates the sympathies of whoever collected them.
The sea is the subject and it is the one in terror. Everywhere else in the Bible water is what threatens; here it is what flinches, and the reversal is the whole argument.
A storm described from underneath it. The arrows are lightning, and the verb for their movement is the ordinary one for walking around, which makes them casual rather than aimed.
The sound of Your thunder was in the wheel of the storm,
הֵאִירוּ
he-i-RU
they lit up
בְרָקִים
vra-KIM
lightnings
תֵּבֵל
te-VEL
the world
lightnings lit up the world,
רָגְזָה
rag-ZA
it shook
וַתִּרְעַשׁ
va-tir-ASH
and it quaked
הָאָרֶץ
ha-A-retz
the earth
the earth shook and quaked.
Sound, then light, then the ground moving. The three senses are given in the order a person standing outside would receive them, which is why this reads as an eyewitness account of something the speaker never saw.
The word for way returns from verse 14, where it was in holiness; here it is in water and leaves no trace. A road that closes behind the one who walks it is the psalm's answer to a God who seems absent.
21
נָחִיתָ כַצֹּאן עַמֶּךָ
בְּיַד מֹשֶׁה וְאַהֲרֹן
נָחִיתָ
na-chi-TA
You led
כַצֹּאן
cha-TZON
like a flock
עַמֶּךָ
a-me-CHA
Your people
You led Your people like a flock,
בְּיַד
byad
by the hand of
מֹשֶׁה
mo-SHE
Moses
וְאַהֲרֹן
ve-a-ha-RON
and Aaron
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
The psalm stops here. The six questions are never answered, the sleepless night is never mentioned again, and the last thing said is that two men were holding the rope.
♦ 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
Verses 2 to 11 are one man at night; verses 12 to 21 are the sea at the exodus. The join is אֶזְכּוֹר (ez-kor, v.12), a plain future verb, I will call to mind. Read the two halves as one argument and the logic is this: the speaker has asked whether God has changed, and instead of an answer he sets a piece of the past in front of himself and looks at it until the question loses its force. Notice what the second half does not do. It never mentions the speaker's distress, never says he slept, never claims the questions were wrong. The last verse ends on Moses and Aaron and simply stops.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verse 11 is the crux and it is genuinely disputed. חַלּוֹתִי (cha-lo-ti, v.11) is read by some as a noun from the root for sickness, giving this is my sickness, and by others as a form of the verb for entreating, giving this is my plea. שְׁנוֹת (shnot, v.11) is equally open: the same consonants give either the plural construct of year, hence the years of the right hand, or an infinitive of the verb to change, hence the changing of the right hand. Translations pick one silently; the Hebrew does not. A second ambiguity sits in וְהַאֲזִין (ve-ha-a-zin, v.2), whose form can be read as a past tense, He gave ear, or as an infinitive continuing the cry. The storm of verses 18 to 20 shares vocabulary and images with the theophany in Habakkuk chapter 3, closely enough that the two texts are usually discussed together.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
One reading takes the psalm as a description of how prayer actually works when nothing is going well. The four cohortatives are the mechanism: the first two, in verses 4 and 7, are memory turned on the self and they make things worse; the second two, in verses 12 and 13, are memory turned on an event outside the self and they hold. On this reading the cure is not new information but a change of object. A second reading works on the last two verses. וְעִקְּבוֹתֶיךָ (ve-ik-vo-tei-cha, v.20) says the footprints were not known and בְּיַד (byad, v.21) says it happened by the hand of Moses and Aaron, so the sentence that denies any visible trace is immediately followed by the two visible men who led the march. Where a path leaves no mark, the people who walked at the front are the only evidence there was one.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In kabbalistic vocabulary the right hand is the side of chesed, expansive kindness, and the left is the side of judgment and restraint. Verse 11 as usually vocalized asks about the years of the right hand, which makes the whole complaint a complaint about kindness that has stopped flowing, and verse 9 has already named chesed explicitly. The second half then answers in the register of concealment rather than of supply: the way exists, it runs through the sea, and it leaves no footprints. Water in this reading is the covering itself, and the split at the exodus is the one moment when the covering opened and the road underneath became briefly visible to everyone standing on the shore.
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).