Seventeen verses that open as a summons to a festival and then, halfway through verse 6, hand the microphone to God. The instruments are named one by one, the horn is blown, and a voice that was never introduced says I removed his shoulder from the burden and does not stop until the psalm ends. This is the psalm of the day for Thursday, and verses 4 and 5 are why it is tied to Rosh Hashanah; in many rites they stand among the shofar verses of the additional service. Watch the pronouns: from verse 9 the whole people is addressed as a single you.
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ עַל הַגִּתִּית
לְאָסָף
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
עַל
al
upon
הַגִּתִּית
ha-gi-TIT
the gittith
For the leader, on the gittith.
לְאָסָף
le-a-SAF
of Asaph
Of Asaph.
The heading assigns the psalm to Asaph and to something called the gittith, a term the Bible never explains. It heads two other psalms, 8 and 84, and nothing in any of the three says what it is.
The one instrument here that carries no melody, and the only date in the psalm. Which day is meant depends entirely on how the fourth word is read, and that reading is contested.
The celebration is reclassified as law. Two legal nouns are used, and the phrase the God of Jacob comes back from verse 2 to close the opening section on the words it started with.
The verse changes speaker in the middle. It starts as a report about Egypt and ends with an unnamed someone saying he hears a speech he does not know, which is the doorway into the divine speech that fills the rest of the psalm.
God quotes his own rescue in the most physical terms available: a shoulder coming out from under a load, hands leaving a carrying basket. No theology, just weight lifted off a body.
Three moments compressed into one line: the cry, the answer out of thunder, the test at Meribah. The order matters, because the rescue comes first and the testing after, and it is God who does the testing.
The imperative that opens the Shema, said here by God to the people rather than by the people to each other. Then the sentence breaks off: the if is never given its consequence.
The first commandment, restated without the word commandment. Note the order: the prohibition comes first and the self-introduction only in the next verse, the reverse of how it stands at Sinai.
I am the LORD your God who brought you up from the land of Egypt.
הַרְחֶב
HAR-chev
open wide
פִּיךָ
pi-CHA
your mouth
וַאֲמַלְאֵהוּ
va-a-mal-e-HU
and I will fill it
Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.
The self-introduction arrives one verse late, and what follows it is not a further demand but an invitation to eat. The verb for filling has the mouth as its object, so the size of the gift is set by how wide the mouth opens.
So I let him go in the stubbornness of their heart,
יֵלְכוּ
yel-CHU
they walked
בְּמוֹעֲצוֹתֵיהֶם
be-mo-a-tzo-TEI-hem
in their own counsels
to walk in their own counsels.
The punishment is that nothing further is done. They are released into their own judgement, and the release is the whole of the sentence passed. Note the singular him sliding into the plural their inside one line.
First item on the list of things that were not given. The hand that would be turned against the foes is the same hand that brought them up out of Egypt in verse 11.
The psalm stops in the middle of an offer. The last word swings from him to you, so the food that the people of verse 12 refused is put in front of whoever is reading the line.
♦ 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
Two movements with no join. Verses 2 to the first half of 6 are addressed to a congregation: sing, shout, lift the melody, strike the timbrel, blow the horn, because the day is a statute. From the second half of verse 6 to the end, God speaks and nobody answers. That speech runs through Egypt, the thunder at Sinai and the waters of Meribah, states the first commandment, reports that it was refused, and then spends four verses on the good a listening people would have had. Nothing returns to the festival that was being called for at the start, and the final word is singular, addressed to one person.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The dated word at בַּכֵּסֶה (ba-ke-se, v.4) is the crux of the psalm. Read against the Aramaic and Akkadian terms for the full moon, it puts the horn at mid month, where the pilgrimage festivals fall. Read from the Hebrew root for covering, it puts the horn on the day the moon is hidden, the first of the month, and the Talmud in tractate Rosh Hashanah takes it that way and names the festival as Rosh Hashanah. Both readings are live and the choice decides which day the psalm belongs to. Two more knots sit in verse 6: the name at בִּיהוֹסֵף (bi-ho-sef, v.6) is spelled with an extra letter, Yehosef rather than Yosef, and the clause running from שְׂפַת (sfat, v.6) to אֶשְׁמָע (esh-ma, v.6) has no stated subject, so it is read either as Israel hearing an unknown language in slavery or as the psalmist hearing the voice that then takes over the poem. At עִתָּם (i-tam, v.16) the possessive has no unambiguous owner, and their time forever is read both as the enemies' sentence lasting and as Israel's own time lasting.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The extra letter at בִּיהוֹסֵף (bi-ho-sef, v.6) was not treated as a spelling variant. The Talmud in tractate Sotah reads it as a letter of the divine name added to Joseph when he was taught the languages of the nations, which ties it directly to the unknown speech four words later in the same verse. The invitation at הַרְחֶב (har-chev, v.11) and פִּיךָ (pi-cha, v.11), open your mouth wide and I will fill it, was read off food and onto study and prayer: what a mouth is opened for is words, and the measure of the asking sets the measure of the answer. On that reading verse 11 is not a change of subject after the commandment of verse 10 but its reward, and the wheat and the honey of the last verse are the same gift seen from the other end.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The psalm turns on a voice that arrives unannounced. Someone reports hearing a speech he did not know, and from that half verse onward the poem is that speech. Mystical readings take verse 6 as a description of how revelation is received rather than as a note about foreign languages: what is unfamiliar is not the vocabulary but the direction it comes from, and the hearer cannot place it because it does not originate on his side. The horn of verse 4 belongs in the same reading. It is the one instrument with no words and no melody, sounded on a day when the moon shows nothing, and it stands at the head of a psalm that ends with a mouth held open and filled.
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).