Sixteen verses, and the only psalm in the Hebrew text with a day of the week in its heading. The Levites sang it in the Temple on Shabbat; it is still the psalm of the day on Shabbat morning and is said on Friday night at the end of Kabbalat Shabbat, just before Psalm 93. Two things hold it together. The first is the infinitive to tell, which opens verse 3 and opens verse 16, so everything between sits inside a single stated purpose. The second is the root for flourishing: the wicked sprout in verse 8, the righteous flourishes in verse 13, the planted blossom in verse 14, three kinds of growing from the same three letters.
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1
מִזְמוֹר שִׁיר
לְיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת
מִזְמוֹר
miz-MOR
a psalm
שִׁיר
shir
a song
A psalm. A song.
לְיוֹם
lyom
for the day of
הַשַּׁבָּת
ha-sha-BAT
the Sabbath
For the Sabbath day.
A title and a rubric at once. No other psalm in the Hebrew text is assigned to a named day, so this heading is doing liturgical work, not just labelling.
Good is the first word, and it is a verdict on the act of thanking rather than on the one being thanked. Note the switch from about God in the first line to speaking to God in the second.
The instruments are named because this is Temple practice, not private feeling. The word rendered murmuring music is a technical term whose exact sense is no longer known.
Two exclamations, one outward and one inward: size in the works, depth in the thinking behind them. The depth is what the next verse says a fool cannot reach.
The fool here is not wicked, only unable to read what he is looking at. What he cannot understand is this, and this is spelled out in the verse that follows.
The one place the psalm repeats a whole clause before completing it. The third line breaks the pattern and names who the enemies actually are, using the same phrase as verse 8.
A horn is strength carried where it can be seen. Oil that is fresh is oil poured now rather than stored, so both images are about the present moment, not a reputation.
my ears hear of the evildoers who rise against me.
Eye and ear, and in Hebrew neither verb takes a plain object: the sense is looking on and hearing about, with something like satisfaction, which is why translations of this verse diverge so widely.
The counter-image to verse 8, built from the same verb. Palm and cedar are the slowest and longest lived trees a Judean would name, against grass that comes up in a week.
Planted is passive: the tree did not pick its ground. And the ground is architectural, the Temple courts, so the botany and the building are now the same image.
Old age as the proof rather than the decline. Fruit late is the one thing grass can never produce, so the argument of verse 8 is answered on its own terms.
The purpose named in verse 3 comes back as the purpose of the whole life just described. The last statement is about God, not about the righteous who made it.
♦ 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
The psalm is built around verse 9. Verses 2 to 4 are the act of praise and the instruments it uses, 5 and 6 the reason, 7 and 8 the man who cannot see the reason, and 9 is one short line naming God on high for ever. Then it runs back out in the other direction: 10 to 12 the enemies, 13 to 15 the righteous, 16 the purpose restated. The subject is time. The wicked are fast and the righteous are slow, and only a vantage point that lasts can tell the difference between the two, which is what a weekly day of stopping is for. Notice that nothing in the psalm asks for anything. It is the rare psalm with no petition in it at all.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The heading is unique in the Hebrew Psalter: no other psalm there is assigned to a day of the week. The Greek translation adds day headings to several other psalms, so the practice of pairing psalms with days was known early, and this is the one case where it stands in the Hebrew. בַּלֹּתִי (ba-lo-ti, v.11) is a real crux. The Masoretic form is usually read as I am anointed or I am soaked, from the root for mixing, though the form is irregular; the Greek read the same consonants as a form of the root for growing old and rendered the line as my old age in rich oil. Verse 12 is elliptical in a similar way: the verbs of seeing and hearing take a preposition instead of an object, and what the eye actually sees is left unsaid, so translators supply it.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The Mishnah, in tractate Tamid, lists the psalm the Levites sang on each day of the week and gives this one for Shabbat, glossing the title as a song for the time to come, for the day that is entirely Shabbat and rest for everlasting life. That reading turns the psalm from a description of the seventh day into a description of what the seventh day is a sample of, and it explains a puzzle in the text: why a psalm for a day of rest spends verses 7 to 12 on enemies and fools. Because the rest is not yet general. An older tradition also assigns the psalm to Adam, said when the first week ended. Both readings agree on the same move, which is to read the Sabbath as a viewpoint rather than a date.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In the order of Kabbalat Shabbat the six weekday psalms have already been sung and Lekha Dodi has already welcomed the day, so this psalm is not sung to bring Shabbat in. It is sung from inside it, which is why it can afford to have no request in it. The two trees are read as two modes of growth, the palm that bears and the cedar that rises, and verse 14 ties both to a location rather than to an effort: planted in the house, they blossom in the courts. Verse 15 is then the claim that matters here, that sap and greenness belong to age and not to youth, which only works as a statement about something other than a body.
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).