A national lament built around one refrain said three times, at verses 4, 8 and 20: restore us, light up Your face, and we are saved. Watch the divine name in front of it grow each time, from God, to God of hosts, to LORD God of hosts, while the request itself never changes a word. Between the second and third refrain the psalm stops speaking plainly and tells the story of a vine brought out of Egypt, planted, spread to the sea, and then left with its walls broken so that anyone passing can help themselves. It is said in many communities on fast days and at times of public trouble. For a learner it is the best short lesson in the possessive suffix on a feminine noun: from verse 9 to verse 13 almost every second word ends in her.
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A musical direction whose meaning is no longer recoverable, followed by the word testimony, which is the one term in the heading that also belongs to the psalm's subject.
Two images of God stacked in one verse, a herdsman on foot and a king on a throne. The verb at the end belongs to light breaking out, and it sets up the refrain about a face that shines.
Three tribes and no others. They are the descendants of Rachel, and in the wilderness camp they march together on the same side of the ark, which is why they are the tribes God would be walking in front of.
The refrain in its shortest form. Note the causative verb הֲשִׁיבֵנוּ (ha-shi-ve-nu, v.4): the people do not ask to return, they ask to be returned, and the salvation at the end is passive too.
how long will You smoulder at Your people's prayer?
The complaint is sharper than it looks. It is not that prayer goes unanswered but that praying is itself what draws the anger, which makes the psalm a prayer that admits it may make things worse.
Grief served as rations, in the two forms a host provides, solid and liquid. The last word is a unit of volume, so the weeping is being issued rather than merely suffered.
The subject of the damaging verb is still You. Throughout this section the enemies are instruments and God is the agent, which is what gives the refrain something to ask for.
The allegory begins without announcing itself. The verb of moving the vine is the one used for a camp striking tents and setting off, so the exodus is still being described, in a different register.
God prepares and then stops acting; the vine takes over as the subject of the verbs. That handover is what makes the later damage feel like an interruption rather than a policy.
11
כׇּסּוּ הָרִים צִלָּהּ
וַעֲנָפֶיהָ אַרְזֵי אֵל
כׇּסּוּ
ko-SU
were covered
הָרִים
ha-RIM
the mountains
צִלָּהּ
tzi-LAH
its shade
Mountains were covered by its shade,
וַעֲנָפֶיהָ
va-a-na-fei-A
and its boughs
אַרְזֵי
ar-ZEI
the cedars of
אֵל
el
God
and mighty cedars by its branches.
A vine covering cedars is a deliberate impossibility. The last two words can be read as cedars of God or as divine cedars, and either way the plant has outgrown the scale of a plant.
The two borders of the promised territory, west and east, given as the reach of a plant rather than as a map. This is the high point, and the next word is why.
The hinge of the whole psalm, and it is a question rather than an accusation. What was removed is not the vine but its fence, so the ruin comes from being left open, not from being attacked.
One named animal and one unnamed thing. The vagueness of וְזִיז (ve-ziz, v.14) does more work than the boar does: the vineyard is now open to anything at all.
The plea turns the refrain's verb around: instead of bring us back, it says come back Yourself. The demonstrative at the end points at the vine as if the two of them were standing in the ruined field.
The Hebrew of the second half is difficult and the reading is disputed: the same phrase turns up again at the end of verse 18, and some hold that it was copied in here by accident while others read it as deliberate, the branch of the vine and the son of the people named by one word.
The face returns, and here it destroys. The refrain asks for that same face to shine instead, so the psalm is asking for a change in the direction of one thing, not for a different God.
Third and last, with the full name at the front and the conjunction dropped from the middle. The psalm ends on the request it started with and never reports an answer.
♦ 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 spine is the refrain at verses 4, 8 and 20. Its words do not change; the name in front of it does, going from God, to God of hosts, to יְהֹוָה (a-do-nay, v.20) with the full name, so the psalm gets louder by addressing rather than by asking for more. Between the refrains are two blocks. The first, verses 5 to 7, is plain complaint with God as the subject of every damaging verb. The second, verses 9 to 18, is an allegory of a vine, and it runs a complete arc: transplanted from Egypt, given cleared ground, grown past all proportion to the sea and the River, then left unfenced and eaten. The question at verse 13 is the turn. Nothing in the psalm reports that the request was granted.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three details worth stopping on. First, שֹׁשַׁנִּים (sho-sha-nim, v.1) in the heading is either the name of a melody or the word for lilies, and no one now knows which; the following word, testimony, is a legal term, so the heading pairs a flower with a courtroom. Second, the tribes of verse 3 are Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh, the sons and grandsons of Rachel, and in the wilderness camp of the book of Numbers they travel together on the west side, which is why they and no others are the tribes God is asked to walk in front of. Joseph in verse 2 stands for the same group. Third, the hardest words in the psalm are the end of verse 16. The phrase there matches the end of verse 18 almost exactly, and בֵּן (ben, v.16) against בֶּן (ben, v.18) is a son in both cases, but in verse 16 the surrounding words are about a plant. Whether verse 16 is an accidental duplication or a deliberate pun on a shoot and a son is disputed, and the difficulty is old enough that ancient translations already disagree with one another here.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The vine is the standing image for Israel in the prophets, and this psalm is the version told from inside, as a complaint rather than a verdict: elsewhere the vineyard is torn down because it produced bad fruit, and here no fault at all is named, only walls that were removed. Reading the two together is what generates the traditional question the psalm invites, which is whether the exile is punishment or abandonment, and the psalm answers by refusing to say. The man of the right hand in verse 18 has been read as the king, as the people personified, and in later tradition messianically, since a son of man raised strong for God is exactly the figure such readings look for. The three occurrences of the refrain have also been counted as three exiles, with the escalating name marking how much further away the speaker feels each time.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The whole psalm turns on the face. The refrain asks for וְהָאֵר (ve-ha-er, v.4), make Your face shine, and verse 17 shows the same face turned the other way, where its blast destroys. This is the language of the priestly blessing, where the LORD makes His face shine on you, so the congregation is asking to be put back inside a blessing they already know the words of. In the mystical reading the hiding of the face is not absence but concealment: the light is undiminished and the vine is unwatched only from below. That is why the request is never for a new gift but for a return of the same one, and why the refrain has to be said three times without changing, since what changes is the one saying it. The vine, rooted downward and spreading to the two waters, is read in the same tradition as the shape by which what is above gets planted below and is expected to fill the land.
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).