Eight verses and a courtroom. God stands up inside an assembly, charges its members with judging crookedly, and sentences them to die like men. It is the psalm of the day for Tuesday. For a learner it is the cleanest drill in the book on one root: the verb for judging appears in verses 1, 2, 3 and 8 in four different forms, third person, second person plural, plural imperative and singular imperative, the root turning through the grammar while the psalm turns through its argument. Watch also who is speaking. Verse 1 is a narrator, verses 2 to 7 are God, and verse 8 is the psalmist answering from outside the room.
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The scene is set in one line: a standing figure, an assembly, and judgement happening inside it rather than over it. Everything that follows is spoken in that room.
The charge. Judging injustice and lifting faces are two ways of naming one offence: deciding by who is standing in front of you instead of by what happened.
3
שִׁפְטוּ דַל וְיָתוֹם
עָנִי וָרָשׁ הַצְדִּיקוּ
שִׁפְטוּ
shif-TU
judge
דַל
dal
the weak
וְיָתוֹם
ve-ya-TOM
and the orphan
Judge the weak and the orphan;
עָנִי
a-NI
the afflicted
וָרָשׁ
va-RASH
and the destitute
הַצְדִּיקוּ
hatz-di-KU
declare righteous
declare the afflicted and the destitute in the right.
The job description, delivered as commands, which means it was never unknown to them. Four categories, all of them people with nobody to lean on.
An aside, and the only verse addressed to nobody. Bad judging is described as a failure of sight, and then the scale jumps: the earth itself loses its footing.
The sentence opens by conceding the status. They really were called divine and sons of the Most High, which is what makes the next verse a demotion rather than an insult.
for You shall hold all the nations as Your inheritance.
The psalmist speaks for the first time since verse 1. If the appointed judges are being removed, the bench is empty, and the request is that God take the whole earth himself.
♦ 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
A trial in which the defendants are judges. Verse 1 is stage direction, verse 2 is the charge, verses 3 and 4 restate the neglected duty as four imperatives, verse 5 is an aside about their blindness and what it costs, verses 6 and 7 pass sentence, and verse 8 is the psalmist asking God to take the office over. Who stands in the dock is the psalm's open question, and the text does not settle it. Read one way, the elohim of אֱלֹהִים (e-lo-him, v.1) and אֱלֹהִים (e-lo-him, v.6) are human judges and the psalm is about corrupt courts. Read the other way they are members of a divine council, and the psalm is about God dismissing the powers set over the nations. Both readings are ancient and both are still held.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The root of judging runs through four forms: יִשְׁפֹּט (yish-pot, v.1), third person, He judges; תִּשְׁפְּטוּ (tish-ptu, v.2), second person plural, you judge; שִׁפְטוּ (shif-tu, v.3), plural imperative, judge; שׇׁפְטָה (shof-ta, v.8), singular imperative with the long ending, judge, this time addressed to God. The psalm is that root conjugated. וּפְנֵי (uf-nei, v.2) with תִּשְׂאוּ (tis-u, v.2) is the idiom for partiality, literally lifting the faces of the wicked, and it is the same pair of words that means showing favour when God is the subject and means corruption when a judge is. אָרֶץ (a-retz, v.5) has earth without the article and הָאָרֶץ (ha-a-retz, v.8) has it with, which is the difference between foundations giving way somewhere and the whole earth changing hands. The hardest word is the one in אֱלֹהִים (e-lo-him, v.6), since the identical form in אֱלֹהִים (e-lo-him, v.1) has to mean God himself: one noun, two referents, sometimes inside a single verse.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 6 was also read as a statement about Israel rather than about judges. In that reading the words you are divine beings were said at Sinai, the status conferred there was real, and verse 7 records what happened when it was forfeited, so that dying like a man is a return to a condition that had briefly been lifted. The reading is traditional and it competes with the plain courtroom sense, which keeps the addressees on the bench from verse 1 through verse 7. What both readings share is a refusal to treat the title as empty flattery. The psalm does not say you were never gods. It says you will die anyway.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
What the psalm shows collapsing is judgement without its counterweight. יִמּוֹטוּ (yi-mo-tu, v.5), the verb used of the foundations, is the same verb the psalms use for a person being shaken, so the picture is the earth losing its footing the way a man does, and the cause named is not violence but bad courts. In the mystical idiom, strict judgement operating alone cannot hold a world together; it needs the side that gives without weighing first. Verse 8 is then not only a request for a better judge but a request for a different mode of judging, since the ground given is ownership rather than verdict: judge the earth, because it is already Yours.
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).