Sixteen verses of protection, and one of the most used psalms in the book. It is said at the bedtime Shema, on Saturday night after Vihi Noam, and at a burial. The psalm has no heading and asks for nothing, which is rare here: it is all reassurance, arranged by the clock and the compass, night and day in verse 5, dark and noon in verse 6, your side and your right hand in verse 7. Watch who is speaking, because it changes three times: verse 1 describes a man, verse 2 is a first person confession, verses 3 to 13 address a you, and from verse 14 God speaks and the you becomes a him. Four names of God appear in the first two verses alone. In the printed monthly cycle of Tehilim it falls on the nineteenth day.
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The opening is a sentence without a main clause: a participle and a verb of lodging, and no statement yet about what happens to the man. Two names of God arrive before any action does.
The person changes without warning. Someone steps forward in the first person and turns the description of verse 1 into a claim of his own, using two military words for a walled place.
The two categories of danger the psalm will keep reusing: the hunter who sets a trap, and the disease that arrives on its own. Both are treated as things a person is caught by.
A bird and a soldier in the same verse. The image of wings comes first and is warm, then the same protection is restated as two pieces of armour, and the thing doing the protecting turns out to be an attribute rather than a limb.
5
לֹא תִירָא מִפַּחַד לָיְלָה
מֵחֵץ יָעוּף יוֹמָם
לֹא
lo
not
תִירָא
ti-RA
will you fear
מִפַּחַד
mi-pa-CHAD
the terror of
לָיְלָה
lai-LA
night
You will not fear the terror of the night,
מֵחֵץ
me-CHETZ
the arrow that
יָעוּף
ya-UF
flies
יוֹמָם
yo-MAM
by day
nor the arrow that flies by day,
The first half of a four-part list built on opposites. Night is paired with day here, and dark with noon in the next verse, so the coverage is total by construction.
A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand:
אֵלֶיךָ
e-lei-CHA
to you
לֹא
lo
not
יִגָּשׁ
yi-GASH
will it come near
it will not reach you.
The promise is stated at its hardest. Others do fall, and they fall close enough to touch. Nothing is said about preventing that, only about the distance between it and you.
Because you have made the LORD, my refuge, the Most High,
שַׂמְתָּ
sam-TA
you have made
מְעוֹנֶךָ
me-o-ne-CHA
your dwelling
your dwelling place,
The most awkward verse in the psalm. My refuge belongs to the speaker of verse 2, but the sentence is addressed to someone else, and the two voices collide inside one line.
The mechanism, given for the first and only time. The guard is delegated, and the word for the guards is the ordinary word for a messenger sent on an errand.
After plague and arrows and ten thousand dead, the danger named is stubbing a foot. The scale drops on purpose, and the care described is the care given to a child.
Because he clings to Me in love, I will set him free;
אֲשַׂגְּבֵהוּ
a-sag-ve-HU
I will set him high
כִּי
ki
because
יָדַע
YA-da
he knows
שְׁמִי
shmi
My name
I will lift him beyond reach, because he knows My name.
God takes over the speaking, and the addressee becomes a third person. Two reasons are given, and both are the man's, not God's: desire and knowledge of the name.
The close promises length of days rather than escape from days, and the last verb returns to sight, the same faculty the man was given back in verse 8.
♦ 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 psalm of protection with no petition in it, which is unusual. The threats come in two families, hunting and disease, and they keep trading metaphors, so a plague can be a trap and an arrow can behave like a fever. The structure is a set of oppositions that between them cover everything: night and day, dark and noon, your side and your right hand, the body in verse 10 and the tent it sleeps in. Nothing here promises that the danger stays away from other people. Verse 7 has a thousand falling close enough to touch and verse 8 has you watching it. What is promised is that it does not arrive at you, and at verse 14 God says why, in terms that are entirely about what the man did first.
רמז · Remez: allusion
אַתָּה (a-ta, v.9) is the crux of the psalm. The line runs because you, the LORD my refuge, and the persons collide: the possessive in my refuge belongs to the speaker of verse 2, אֹמַר (o-mar, v.2), not to the you being addressed. Some read it as a quotation, the addressee repeating verse 2 back; others take the form as archaic and read it without possessive force. It is genuinely unsettled, and translations diverge here more than anywhere else in the psalm. וְסֹחֵרָה (ve-so-che-ra, v.4) appears nowhere else in the Bible, so its sense is read off the shield standing next to it and comes out as buckler or encircling armour. מִקֶּטֶב (mi-ke-tev, v.6) belongs to a small family of nouns for destruction that later tradition treats as proper names of harmful spirits, which is part of why this psalm ends up on amulets. And שַׁחַל (sha-chal, v.13) opens a line of four animals in two matched pairs, a big cat and a snake each time.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Psalm 90 is headed a prayer of Moses and this one carries no heading of its own, so the tradition reads it as Moses still speaking, with the wilderness as the danger in view. Verse 11, the messengers charged to guard you, became the seat of the idea that a person acquires guardians by conduct rather than by birth, which is why מַלְאָכָיו (mal-a-chav, v.11) is usually rendered angels rather than messengers in translation. Rabbinic sources know the psalm as the song of afflictions and record its use against harm, and the same body of sources records a sharp objection to whispering verses over a wound. Both attitudes survive in practice, which is roughly why the psalm sits at the edges of the day and of the week rather than in the middle of the service: at the bedtime Shema, at the close of Shabbat, and at a burial.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Four names of God are used in the first two verses: עֶלְיוֹן (eli-on, v.1) and שַׁדַּי (sha-dai, v.1) in the opening line, then the four letter name and my God in verse 2. The kabbalistic reading takes the sequence as a descent through degrees of concealment, from a name that cannot be possessed to one a person can attach a suffix to, which is what the word seter, the hiding place of the first line, is already doing. The verb of חָשַׁק (cha-shak, v.14) is a verb of desire rather than obedience, so the protection described in the previous thirteen verses is presented as a response to longing. The last verse, אֹרֶךְ (o-rech, v.16), gives length of days rather than exemption from them, and in many rites that verse is said twice when the psalm is recited on Saturday night, so the psalm ends by returning to its own final measure instead of resolving past it.
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).