The only psalm whose heading names Moses, and the one that opens the fourth book of the Psalter. It is the shortest serious statement in the Bible about how long a human life is and what that fact should do to a person: seventy years, eighty with strength, against a God for whom a thousand years is last night. Verse 17 begins the Saturday night service in the Ashkenazi rite, which is the moment the working week starts again. For a learner this is the counterpart of Psalm 51: almost everything here is first person plural, so the suffix to watch is the one meaning us and our, and it lands on days, years, iniquities, hands.
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The first noun after the heading is a house. Before anything is said about how short life is, the psalm establishes where the short lives have been living.
Both verbs are birth words, one passive for the mountains and one active for the earth. The oldest things anyone can point at are given a birthday, and the point of the verse is that someone was already there.
The same root carries both halves: God turns man back, then tells him to turn back. Whether the second turning is death or repentance is left open, and the ambiguity is the verse.
Not a thousand years feel like a day, but like a day already over. Then the unit shrinks again to a night watch, a few hours a guard stands and does not remember afterwards.
One day, start to finish, standing in for a lifetime. The morning of verse 5 repeats here, which is how the psalm marks that a whole cycle has gone by in one line.
7
כִּי כָלִינוּ בְאַפֶּךָ
וּבַחֲמָתְךָ נִבְהָלְנוּ
כִּי
ki
for
כָלִינוּ
cha-li-NU
we are consumed
בְאַפֶּךָ
ve-a-pe-CHA
by Your anger
For we are finished by Your anger,
וּבַחֲמָתְךָ
u-va-cha-mat-CHA
and by Your wrath
נִבְהָלְנוּ
niv-hal-NU
we are terrified
and by Your wrath we are terrified.
The turn from observation to complaint, and the first appearance of we. Mortality has stopped being a fact about grass and become something being done to the speakers.
A reason is offered for the anger of the previous verse. The hidden things are not hidden from the one they are placed in front of, and the light named is his own face.
The most quoted number in the book, and the source of the phrase threescore years and ten. Eighty is granted only as a concession, and what is added is not enjoyment but effort.
11
מִי יוֹדֵעַ עֹז אַפֶּךָ
וּכְיִרְאָתְךָ עֶבְרָתֶךָ
מִי
mi
who
יוֹדֵעַ
yo-DE-a
knows
עֹז
oz
the strength of
אַפֶּךָ
a-pe-CHA
Your anger
Who knows the strength of Your anger,
וּכְיִרְאָתְךָ
uch-yir-at-CHA
and like the fear of You
עֶבְרָתֶךָ
ev-ra-te-CHA
is Your fury
and Your fury, as the fear of You deserves?
A real question, not a rhetorical one, and the psalm does not answer it. It measures anger against fear and finds that nobody is calibrated correctly.
The hinge of the psalm and its only practical request. What is asked for is not more days but the ability to count the ones there are, which is presented as something that has to be taught.
The imperative given to human beings in verse 3 is handed back to God here, in the same word. After eleven verses of description the psalm finally asks for something to change.
The morning that killed the grass in verses 5 and 6 comes back as the hour of kindness. Same word, opposite outcome, and that reversal is the argument.
The generations of verse 1 return at the end, now as the people who will see what the speakers may not. A short life is answered by handing the sight forward.
And let the pleasantness of my Lord our God be upon us;
וּמַעֲשֵׂה
u-ma-a-SE
and the work of
יָדֵינוּ
ya-dei-NU
our hands
כּוֹנְנָה
kon-NA
establish
עָלֵינוּ
a-lei-NU
for us
and the work of our hands establish for us;
וּמַעֲשֵׂה
u-ma-a-SE
and the work of
יָדֵינוּ
ya-dei-NU
our hands
כּוֹנְנֵהוּ
kon-ne-HU
establish it
and the work of our hands, establish it.
The last clause is said twice, the only exact repetition in the psalm, and the second time the verb takes the object suffix meaning it. After eighty years of toil the request is that the work outlast the worker.
♦ 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
Four movements. Verses 1 and 2 set the scale: God as dwelling place, and a time before mountains. Verses 3 to 6 put a human life inside that scale using a thousand years, a night watch, and grass that starts and finishes in one day. Verses 7 to 11 name the cause, which is anger, and connect it to iniquities set in plain light, ending with a question nobody can answer. Verses 12 to 17 are the response, and they are all imperatives: teach, return, satisfy, gladden, let be seen, establish. The pivot is לִמְנוֹת (lim-not, v.12), to number, which asks for arithmetic rather than for more time. Notice that nothing in the last movement asks for a longer life. The request is that a short one be filled and that its work stand.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The psalm turns on a small number of hard words. דַּכָּא (da-ka, v.3) is read by most as crushed matter, dust or the point of being crushed, and the older English versions read it as contrition instead, which changes the verse from a description of death into a call to repent; the reading is disputed. תָּשֵׁב (ta-shev, v.3) and שׁוּבוּ (shu-vu, v.3) are the same root, so God turns man back and then tells man to turn back, and a translation has to choose whether that echo is deliberate. יַחֲלֹף (ya-cha-lof, v.5) means both to pass on and to sprout again, and both senses are used in the neighbouring verses, which is why one English version has grass that grows up and another has grass that vanishes. הֶגֶה (he-ge, v.9) is a murmur, a sigh, or something spoken under the breath; older translations give a tale that is told, modern ones a sigh, and the noun is rare enough that neither can be proved.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The heading assigns the psalm to Moses, and the traditional reading takes that seriously: a man who watched an entire generation die in the desert over forty years, addressing the God who set the term. Read that way שִׁבְעִים (shiv-im, v.10), seventy, is not a statistic but a verdict already carried out, and the plural throughout is the community rather than a poetic habit. The classical commentators connect verse 17 to the completion of the Tabernacle, where Moses blesses the people that the divine presence rest on the work of their hands. In the Ashkenazi rite that verse opens the Saturday night service, so the last words of the prayer of Moses are the first words said as the working week begins. Whether the psalm is by Moses or written in his voice is an old question and the text does not settle it.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
מָעוֹן (ma-on, v.1), dwelling place, is also the name a talmudic tradition gives to one of the seven heavens, and the mystical reading holds the two senses together: the shelter human generations live in is not a place inside the world but one of its upper stories, which is how a house can be older than the mountains. Verse 4 is the seed of the reading that measures the world in divine days, a thousand years to each, and builds a cosmic week out of them; that scheme is a later construction and the verse itself only says that a thousand years look brief from where God stands. נֹעַם (no-am, v.17), pleasantness, is read as the light that rests on finished work and makes it permanent, which is why the request in the final line is not for success but for establishment. Counting days, in this reading, is how a creature bounded by time gets a share in what is not.
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).