Thirteen verses of communal lament attributed to Asaph, spoken after the sanctuary has been sacked and while the dead are still lying unburied. The shape is the standard one for this kind of psalm: report of the disaster, the question how long, a demand for justice, a petition, and a vow of praise at the end. Verses 6 and 7 are the Shefoch Chamatcha of the Passover seder, said with the door open. Watch how the enemy is handled grammatically: always a plural they, never named, never given a king.
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The lament opens with the fact and no framing: a foreign army inside the sanctuary. Three verbs land in a row with no conjunction between them, came, defiled, made, which is how Hebrew reports a sequence at speed.
They have given the corpses of Your servants as food to the birds of the sky,
בְּשַׂר
be-SAR
the flesh of
חֲסִידֶיךָ
cha-si-dei-CHA
Your faithful ones
לְחַיְתוֹ
le-chai-TO
to the beasts of
אָרֶץ
A-retz
the earth
the flesh of Your faithful ones to the beasts of the earth.
The desecration moves from the building to the body. The word for the faithful ones is built on the root of chesed, so the dead are named here by the covenant loyalty they kept, not by their tribe or their rank.
They have poured out their blood like water all around Jerusalem,
וְאֵין
ve-EIN
and there is no one
קוֹבֵר
ko-VER
burying
and there is no one burying them.
Blood like water is not only a figure for quantity. Water is what you pour out without collecting it again. The unburied dead are the second half of the horror, and in Israelite terms the worse half.
The view turns from the dead to the survivors. What the survivors suffer is not physical: it is being watched. Three nouns for contempt pile up in the second half with no verb to carry them.
The hinge of the psalm. Everything before it is report and everything after it is petition, and between the two stands the question that nearly every communal lament in the book asks in these two words.
Pour out Your wrath on the nations that have not known You,
וְעַל
ve-AL
and upon
מַמְלָכוֹת
mam-la-CHOT
kingdoms
אֲשֶׁר
A-sher
that
בְּשִׁמְךָ
be-shim-CHA
on Your name
לֹא
lo
not
קָרָאוּ
ka-ra-U
have called
and on kingdoms that have not called on Your name.
The imprecation, and it is addressed to God as a request rather than performed by the speaker. That distinction is the point: vengeance is handed over instead of taken.
7
כִּי אָכַל אֶת יַעֲקֹב
וְאֶת נָוֵהוּ הֵשַׁמּוּ
כִּי
ki
for
אָכַל
a-CHAL
he has devoured
אֶת
et
(the object marker)
יַעֲקֹב
ya-a-KOV
Jacob
For he has devoured Jacob,
וְאֶת
VE-et
and (the object marker)
נָוֵהוּ
na-ve-HU
his dwelling place
הֵשַׁמּוּ
he-sha-MU
they have laid waste
and they have laid waste his dwelling place.
The reason clause for verse 6. The verb for devouring is singular while the verb for laying waste is plural, so one sentence holds both the individual invader and the collective enemy.
Help us, God of our salvation, for the sake of the glory of Your name;
וְהַצִּילֵנוּ
ve-ha-tzi-le-NU
and rescue us
וְכַפֵּר
ve-cha-PER
and atone
עַל
al
for
חַטֹּאתֵינוּ
cha-to-tei-NU
our sins
לְמַעַן
le-ma-AN
for the sake of
שְׁמֶךָ
shme-CHA
Your name
and rescue us, and atone for our sins, for the sake of Your name.
The centre of the petition and the argument that carries the psalm. The ground of rescue is named twice, and both times it is Your name rather than our worth.
Let the avenging of Your servants' spilled blood be known among the nations, before our eyes.
The taunt of the nations is turned into leverage. If Israel is finished, the question Where is their God is left standing unanswered, so the psalm makes God's reputation the stake in the case.
by the greatness of Your arm, leave alive those marked for death.
From nations back to single bodies. The prisoner groans, and what is asked is not comfort but survival: the ones already assigned to death are to be left over.
And return sevenfold into the bosom of our neighbours
חֶרְפָּתָם
cher-pa-TAM
their reproach
אֲשֶׁר
A-sher
with which
חֵרְפוּךָ
cher-fu-CHA
they reproached You
אֲדֹנָי
a-do-NAI
my Lord
their reproach, with which they reproached You, my Lord.
The one request for retaliation, and it is measured rather than open ended. Into the bosom is the image of payment dropped into the fold of a garment, and the insult being repaid is the one aimed at God.
And we, Your people and the flock of Your pasture,
נוֹדֶה
no-DE
we will give thanks
לְּךָ
le-CHA
to You
לְעוֹלָם
le-o-LAM
forever
will give You thanks forever;
לְדוֹר
le-DOR
to generation
וָדֹר
va-DOR
and generation
נְסַפֵּר
ne-sa-PER
we will recount
תְּהִלָּתֶךָ
te-hi-la-te-CHA
Your praise
generation after generation we will recount Your praise.
The vow that closes almost every lament. Nothing in the situation has changed by the last verse. What changes is that the speaker commits to a future in which there is something left to tell.
♦ 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
The psalm divides cleanly. Verses 1 to 4 report what happened, in finished verbs and with almost no adjectives: they came, they defiled, they made, they gave, they poured out. Verse 5 asks how long. Verses 6 and 7 ask for the wrath to be redirected. Verses 8 to 12 are the petition proper, and verse 13 is the vow of praise. Note that the temple appears once, in verse 1, and is then dropped. What the rest of the psalm is about is people: servants, faithful ones, neighbours, prisoners, us.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verses 6 and 7 stand almost word for word in Jeremiah 10:25, where the verbs of verse 7 are plural throughout. Here אָכַל (a-chal, v.7) is singular and הֵשַׁמּוּ (he-sha-mu, v.7) is plural inside one sentence. Whether that is a scribal slip or a deliberate collapse of the invading army into a single devourer is disputed, and the psalm gives no way to decide. The word חֲסִידֶיךָ (cha-si-dei-cha, v.2), built on the root of chesed, is the term a later generation took as a group name, and 1 Maccabees 7:17 quotes verses 2 and 3 of this psalm over the bodies of the Hasideans killed under Alcimus.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
שְׁפֹךְ (shfoch, v.6), pour out, opens the passage said at the seder when the door is opened. Its position in the evening is deliberate: it falls after the grace after meals and before the rest of Hallel, so the harshest lines in the Haggadah sit between an act of hospitality and a song of praise. The date of the psalm is itself disputed. Read one way, verse 1 is the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE and the temple is Solomon's. Read another way, the desecration is the Seleucid one, and the psalm and the book of Maccabees are near contemporaries rather than old text and later citation. The psalm names no king and no empire, so nothing in it settles the question.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The argument of verse 9 is made twice inside a single verse: help us for the sake of the glory of שְׁמֶךָ (shme-cha, v.9), and atone for the sake of שְׁמֶךָ (shme-cha, v.9). Nothing at all is claimed for Israel's merit. In the mystical reading the name is not a label but the aspect of God turned toward the world, so a ruined sanctuary and a mocked people register as damage to the name itself, and repairing one is repairing the other. Verse 12 then reads as more than revenge: what is to be returned שִׁבְעָתַיִם (shiv-a-ta-yim, v.12) is specified as the reproach aimed at God, not the one aimed at us.
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).