Fourteen verses in three movements: what God has already done (2 to 4), what the community is asking for now (5 to 8), and an answer that is heard rather than requested (9 to 14). The root sh-v-b, turn or return, is the spine and appears in all three: You turned back the fortunes, You turned back from Your anger, turn us, will You not turn again, let them not turn back. Verse 11 is the line everyone knows, and it repays slow reading because both verbs are physical: two pairs of abstractions that meet in the street and kiss. In the cycle that reads the whole book across thirty days it falls on the seventeenth.
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~70 BPM · 4/4 · gentle thumb-index-middle arpeggio · one bar per stich, two bars per verse · to reset the progression:
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1
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
לִבְנֵי קֹרַח מִזְמוֹר
לַמְנַצֵּחַ
lam-na-TZE-ach
for the leader
For the leader.
לִבְנֵי
liv-NEI
for the sons of
קֹרַח
ko-RACH
Korah
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
Of the sons of Korah, a psalm.
The heading assigns the psalm not to David but to the Korahite singers, the guild credited with a group of psalms that includes 42, 84 and 87.
2
רָצִיתָ יְהֹוָה אַרְצֶךָ
שַׁבְתָּ שְׁבִית יַעֲקֹב
רָצִיתָ
ra-tzi-TA
You have favoured
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
אַרְצֶךָ
ar-tze-CHA
Your land
You have shown favour to Your land, LORD,
שַׁבְתָּ
shav-TA
You have turned back
שְׁבִית
shvit
the captivity of
יַעֲקֹב
ya-a-KOV
Jacob
You have brought back the fortunes of Jacob.
The psalm opens in the past tense, with what has already been done. Whether that past is a memory or a confidence about what is coming is the question the rest of it lives on.
The answer opens with a condition attached to it: near to those who fear Him. The verb for dwelling is the one used of a presence settling in a sanctuary.
Righteousness goes in front as a herald and then turns into the road itself. The psalm closes on movement rather than on arrival.
♦ 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
Three movements and a change of posture. Verses 2 to 4 report five completed acts of favour: You favoured, You turned back, You lifted, You covered, You gathered in. Verses 5 to 8 then ask for what the first movement has just said already happened, which is the whole problem of the psalm in miniature. Verses 9 to 14 are an answer, introduced by a speaker who stops petitioning and listens. Whether the past tense of the opening is memory of a real return or the confident perfect of prophecy is the oldest question about this text, and the psalm does not resolve it. The verb at נָשָׂאתָ (na-sa-ta, v.3) is the ordinary word for picking up a load, so forgiveness here is weight carried off rather than weight cancelled.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The root sh-v-b, turn or return, is the spine, and each occurrence has a different subject: שַׁבְתָּ (shav-ta, v.2) in the report, שׁוּבֵנוּ (shu-ve-nu, v.5) in the petition, תָּשׁוּב (ta-shuv, v.7) in the question, יָשׁוּבוּ (ya-shu-vu, v.9) in the warning. The sequence runs God, us, God, us. Verse 2 also carries a crux that translations show plainly. The two words at שַׁבְתָּ (shav-ta, v.2) and שְׁבִית (shvit, v.2) are read either as returned the captivity, from the root for taking captive, or as restored the fortunes, from the root for turning, and the choice decides whether the psalm is remembering an exile or a change in the weather. It is disputed. The last three words of verse 9 are abrupt in Hebrew, and translators differ over whether לְכִסְלָה (le-chis-la, v.9) closes the divine speech or is the psalmist's own aside about his people.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The four nouns of verse 11 are the cast of a well known midrash. Bereshit Rabbah 8:5, commenting on the plural in let us make man at Genesis 1:26, has kindness, truth, righteousness and peace argue over whether the human being should be created at all; kindness and righteousness argue for it, truth and peace against, and truth is thrown to the ground. The very next verse here, תִּצְמָח (titz-mach, v.12), truth will sprout from the earth, is read as what happens after the throwing. Taken that way the psalm is not describing four qualities that agree, it is describing four qualities reconciled after a quarrel, which is a harder and more interesting claim.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In the kabbalistic vocabulary the four terms of verse 11 are positions rather than qualities. Kindness and truth belong to the right side and the centre, righteousness names the receiving end of the structure and peace the channel that reaches it, so נִפְגָּשׁוּ (nif-ga-shu, v.11) and נָשָׁקוּ (na-sha-ku, v.11), met and kissed, describe a joining rather than an agreement reached in an argument. The two directions of verse 12 hold the same picture from another angle: something rising from below and something inclining from above. In this reading the human contribution is the sprouting one, and nothing arrives from above that was not first grown from underneath.
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).