Nineteen verses, the last of the psalms attributed to Asaph, and one of the most direct: a nation names the alliance forming against it, then asks God to break that alliance the way he broke earlier ones. It is widely said in Israel in times of war, and it is the psalm people reach for when the threat is collective rather than personal. For a learner it is a compact drill in two things: the plural enemy verbs of verses 3 to 6, which all arrive in the same shape, and the comparative prefix that runs through verses 10 to 15, one small letter doing all the work of the word like. Notice that the psalm never asks for victory. It asks that a name be known.
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1
שִׁיר מִזְמוֹר לְאָסָף
שִׁיר
shir
a song
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
לְאָסָף
le-a-SAF
of Asaph
A song. A psalm of Asaph.
Two genre words instead of the usual one, then the guild name that heads the group of psalms this one closes.
Three ways of saying the same thing, which is what a person does when the first way does not feel like enough. The whole request of the psalm is that God stop being quiet.
The reframe on which the entire psalm depends: the attackers are introduced as God's enemies, not the speaker's, before anything has been said about what they are doing.
and they take counsel against Your treasured ones.
Now the target narrows from God to the people, and both terms for them are possessive. The word for the plan and the word for the people share the idea of something concealed.
They have said, come, let us erase them from nationhood,
וְלֹא
ve-LO
and not
יִזָּכֵר
yi-za-CHER
will be remembered
שֵׁם
shem
the name of
יִשְׂרָאֵל
yis-ra-EL
Israel
עוֹד
od
any more
and let the name of Israel be remembered no more.
The enemies get a line of direct speech, and it is the only quotation in the psalm apart from verse 13. What they want is not land or tribute but the end of a name.
Covenant is the word used of the bond between God and Israel, and the verb for making one is to cut. Here the same two words describe the alliance formed on the other side.
7
אׇהֳלֵי אֱדוֹם וְיִשְׁמְעֵאלִים
מוֹאָב וְהַגְרִים
אׇהֳלֵי
o-ho-LEI
the tents of
אֱדוֹם
e-DOM
Edom
וְיִשְׁמְעֵאלִים
ve-yish-me-e-LIM
and the Ishmaelites
The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,
מוֹאָב
mo-AV
Moab
וְהַגְרִים
ve-hag-RIM
and the Hagrites
Moab and the Hagrites,
The list begins, and it begins with relatives. Edom, Ishmael, Moab and Hagar are all attached to Abraham's household in Genesis.
The request finally comes, and it is not for a new deliverance but for a repeat of two old ones. Both precedents are from the book of Judges.
11
נִשְׁמְדוּ בְעֵין דֹּאר
הָיוּ דֹמֶן לָאֲדָמָה
נִשְׁמְדוּ
nish-me-DU
they were destroyed
בְעֵין
ve-EIN
at the spring of
דֹּאר
dor
Dor
who were wiped out at En-dor,
הָיוּ
hai-U
they became
דֹמֶן
DO-men
dung
לָאֲדָמָה
la-a-da-MA
for the ground
who became dung for the ground.
A place name the Judges account of that battle does not use, and an image no one would choose for a hymn. The defeated end as fertiliser, which is contempt and also, uncomfortably, use.
and all their chieftains like Zebah and like Zalmunna,
Four Midianite commanders from the Gideon narrative, named in the order the book of Judges kills them. The psalm asks for the leadership, not the armies.
The first personal address in the psalm, my God, arrives here and nowhere earlier. From this point the images stop being historical and become weather.
The comparison escalates from something the wind moves to something that consumes what it touches. The verse has no main clause; it waits for the next one.
Immediately after the possibility of them seeking the name, four verbs that leave no one to seek it. Readers have never agreed on how to hold verses 17 and 18 together.
And let them know that You alone, whose name is the LORD,
עֶלְיוֹן
eli-ON
Most High
עַל
al
over
כׇּל
kol
all
הָאָרֶץ
ha-A-retz
the earth
are Most High over all the earth.
The psalm ends on knowledge, not on ruins. The last word is the earth, which is wider than the ten nations and wider than the land they wanted.
♦ 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 national emergency prayer in three movements. Verses 2 to 6 report a coalition forming and quote its intention. Verses 7 to 9 name ten peoples, arranged roughly by distance, with the empire last. Verses 10 to 19 ask God to act, first by precedent, using two victories from the book of Judges, then by image, using wind and fire, and finally by stating the purpose. No battle is described and no army of Israel appears. The speaker has no force to report on, which is why the whole poem is addressed upward.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The psalm is built on hiddenness. In verse 4 the plan the enemies lay, סוֹד (sod, v.4), and the people they lay it against, צְפוּנֶיךָ (tze-fu-nei-cha, v.4), come from adjacent ideas of what is kept out of sight: a closed council on one side, a stored treasure on the other. The same root behind צְפוּנֶיךָ (tze-fu-nei-cha, v.4) is the ordinary verb for putting something away for safekeeping. Then there is the frame: what the enemies want abolished in verse 5 is שֵׁם (shem, v.5), a name, and what the psalm wants established in verse 19 is שִׁמְךָ (shim-cha, v.19), a name. כַגַּלְגַּל (cha-gal-gal, v.14) is a real crux, since the noun means a wheel and is used elsewhere of something that rolls, so translators give whirling dust, tumbleweed, or a wheel driven along, and the choice is not settled.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Two questions have kept this psalm in discussion. The first is historical: no recorded war matches all ten nations at once, and proposals range from the coalition of Moab, Ammon and Seir faced by Jehoshaphat in Chronicles, where the levite who answers is from the sons of Asaph, to much later settings. None of the proposals is established, and the psalm gives no date. The second is moral: וִיבַקְשׁוּ (vi-vak-shu, v.17), let them seek Your name, reads as a request for the enemies to turn, and the verse straight after asks for them to perish. Some readers take verse 17 as the real goal and verse 18 as what happens to those who refuse it. Others take the pair as unresolved on purpose. The disagreement is genuine and this page does not settle it.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading takes the silence of verse 2 seriously as a condition rather than a mood. דֳּמִי (do-mi, v.2) asks God not to be still, and the request is for a concealed presence to become an active one, which is the same movement the psalm asks for in its own people, described in verse 4 as the hidden ones. Enemy and covenant appear as mirrored structures: they cut a covenant in verse 6 using the exact vocabulary of the covenant at Sinai, so what is fought is a counterfeit of the real bond rather than a mere threat. סֶלָה (se-la, v.9), the pause marker at the end of the list, falls exactly between the naming and the asking, and readers of this tradition treat that gap as the point where a person stops counting the enemy and starts addressing God.
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).