Thirteen verses built almost entirely out of plural imperatives: sing, bless, proclaim, recount, ascribe, bow, tremble, say. Nobody in this psalm asks for anything. It is one of the psalms of Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday evening, and a version of it appears in 1 Chronicles 16 as the song sung when the ark was brought up. For a learner it is the best drill in the book for the imperative plural, because the same verb form comes back ten times with different objects, and the last three verses hand the verbs over to the sea, the field and the trees.
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The command is issued twice, first with an object and then with an audience, which is the pattern the whole psalm runs on. The adjective follows its noun, as it always does in Hebrew.
Three imperatives, and the third is the verb behind the noun that later becomes gospel or good tidings. Praise is turned into reporting, and reporting is put on a daily schedule.
The second line drops the verb and keeps only the pair of nouns, which is the standard economy of biblical parallelism. The audience widens from Israel to everyone.
The first reason given in the psalm, and the first half of it is quoted word for word from Psalm 48. The last word is the plural that means gods here and God elsewhere, which the next verse exploits.
Two pairs of abstract nouns and no verb at all, so the line reads like an inventory. The move from before Him to in His sanctuary brings the psalm indoors for one verse.
A new imperative takes over, literally give, and it is addressed to the nations rather than to Israel. The same two nouns of the previous verse are now something outsiders are told to hand over.
The abstract demand becomes a physical one: something is carried and someone walks in. The word for offering is the ordinary grain gift, not a costly sacrifice.
Bow down to the LORD in the splendour of holiness,
חִילוּ
chi-LU
tremble
מִפָּנָיו
mi-pa-NAV
from before Him
כׇּל
kol
all
הָאָרֶץ
ha-A-retz
the earth
tremble before Him, all the earth.
The verb of trembling is the same root used in Psalm 48 for the writhing of terrified kings, here turned into an act of worship. The address to all the earth closes the loop opened in verse 1.
The centre of the psalm and the only line given as a direct quotation. Kingship, a stable world and impartial judgment are presented as one fact stated three ways.
The imperatives stop and the jussive takes over, so the verbs stop giving orders to people and start letting the world act. The sea is given the noise a crowd would make.
The one word for then changes the tense of the whole line: the trees are not being told to sing, they are reported as singing once the rest has happened.
He will judge the world with righteousness, and peoples in His faithfulness.
The doubled phrase is a rhythmic device, not a scribal slip, and it is the only repetition in the psalm with nothing added the second time. Judgment arrives here as the reason for the joy rather than as a threat.
♦ 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 has four blocks and no petition anywhere. Verses 1 to 3 give three commands to sing and report; verses 4 to 6 give the reason, stated as a comparison the other gods lose by default; verses 7 to 9 repeat the pattern with a different verb, give, and aim it at the nations rather than at Israel; verse 10 is the sentence everything else exists to deliver, three claims in one breath, that the LORD reigns, that the world is therefore stable, and that judgment will be even-handed. Verses 11 to 13 hand the verbs to the heavens, the sea, the field and the trees. Note that the human voices fall silent for the last three verses, and that the psalm ends on the word for faithfulness, not on the word for power.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three things a learner can check. First, verses 1 to 13 appear, with differences, in 1 Chronicles 16:23 to 33, set there as the song at the bringing up of the ark; whether Chronicles is quoting the psalm or both draw on an older liturgy is disputed and cannot be settled from the text alone. Second, the two words of מָלָךְ (ma-lach, v.10) and the name before it can be read either as a stative, the LORD reigns, or as an event, the LORD has become king; Sigmund Mowinckel built a whole reconstruction of an annual enthronement festival on the second reading, and the debate over it is still open. Third, אֱלֹהִים (e-lo-him, v.4) and אֱלִילִים (e-li-lim, v.5) sit one verse apart and turn on the same trick: the plural noun that means God in one verse means rival gods in the next, and the second verse answers it with a word that means empty or worthless things, a deliberate downgrade by sound as much as by sense.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The psalm is one of the six recited at the start of Kabbalat Shabbat, the Friday evening service arranged by the kabbalists of Safed in the sixteenth century, where the sequence of psalms is counted against the six days of the week before Shabbat itself is welcomed. That placement gives the new song of חָדָשׁ (cha-dash, v.1) a specific reading in later tradition: not a fresh composition each week but the song appropriate to a world that has finally been set right, sung in advance. Read this way the trees of יָעַר (ya-ar, v.12) are not decoration. The claim of the last verses is that judgment is what the non-human world is waiting for, and that a creation currently unable to speak will get its voice back when it comes.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In the mystical reading the sequence of the psalm matters more than any single line: it moves from voice, to name, to glory, to splendour and majesty, to sanctuary, and only then to kingship. That is a descent from what cannot be grasped down to a throne that can be spoken about, and the imperatives are addressed to a world that has to be assembled into a single choir before the descent can complete. The doubled coming of the last verse is read as two arrivals rather than one emphasis, an approach that is prepared and an approach that lands, and the closing word, faithfulness, is taken as the measure by which what came down is held steady rather than withdrawn.
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).