Nine verses in three blocks of three, and the grammar changes with each block. Verses 1 to 3 are past tense: He has done, He has made known, He has remembered. Verses 4 to 6 are plural imperatives aimed at people: shout, break out, sing, make music. Verses 7 to 9 are jussives aimed at things that cannot obey: let the sea thunder, let the rivers clap. It belongs to the run of enthronement psalms and is one of the six said at the start of Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday night. The one thing to watch is the last word of each block, because the psalm moves from a victory already won to a judgment still coming and treats both as reasons to sing.
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| AmAm | EmEm | AmDm | EmAm |
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His right hand and His holy arm have won Him the victory.
The shortest heading in the book, one word, and then the command and its reason in the same breath. The song is new because something happened, not because the old one wore out.
before the eyes of the nations He has revealed His righteousness.
Two verbs of disclosure, made known and revealed, with the nations as witnesses rather than as the beneficiaries. What happened to Israel is staged in public.
He has remembered His kindness and His faithfulness to the house of Israel;
רָאוּ
ra-U
have seen
כׇל
chol
all
אַפְסֵי
af-SEI
the ends of
אָרֶץ
A-retz
the earth
אֵת
et
(object marker)
יְשׁוּעַת
ye-shu-AT
the salvation of
אֱלֹהֵינוּ
e-lo-hei-NU
our God
all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.
The private half and the public half of the same act, in one verse. Kindness and faithfulness are owed to one house; the seeing runs to the edges of the map.
The instrument named twice in six words, once at the end of the first line and once at the start of the second, so the two halves interlock on the same object.
The instruments turn ceremonial: metal trumpets and the horn are what sounds at a coronation, and the verse ends by naming the one being crowned.
7
יִרְעַם הַיָּם וּמְלֹאוֹ
תֵּבֵל וְיֹשְׁבֵי בָהּ
יִרְעַם
yir-AM
let thunder
הַיָּם
ha-YAM
the sea
וּמְלֹאוֹ
um-lo-O
and all that fills it
Let the sea thunder, and all that fills it,
תֵּבֵל
te-VEL
the world
וְיֹשְׁבֵי
ve-yosh-VEI
and those who dwell
בָהּ
vah
in it
the world and those who live in it.
The third block begins and the verbs stop being commands. Nobody can order the sea, so the form shifts to a wish, and the noise the sea already makes is counted as part of the music.
8
נְהָרוֹת יִמְחֲאוּ כָף
יַחַד הָרִים יְרַנֵּנוּ
נְהָרוֹת
ne-ha-ROT
the rivers
יִמְחֲאוּ
yim-cha-U
let them clap
כָף
chaf
a hand
Let the rivers clap their hands,
יַחַד
ya-CHAD
together
הָרִים
ha-RIM
the mountains
יְרַנֵּנוּ
ye-ra-ne-NU
let them sing for joy
let the mountains sing out together.
Water gets hands and rock gets a voice. The verb for singing out is the same one given to people in verse 4, which is what ties the two blocks together.
He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with fairness.
The reason for all the noise arrives last and it is a courtroom. Judgment is presented as the thing the sea and the mountains are cheering, not the thing they are bracing for.
♦ 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 blocks of three verses, and the tense tells you which block you are in. Past in verses 1 to 3, imperative in 4 to 6, jussive in 7 to 9. The subject widens at the same rate: God alone acts in the first block, people are told to respond in the second, and in the third the response is handed to sea, rivers and mountains. The last verse closes the circuit by giving the reason, and the reason is not the victory of verse 1 but a judgment that has not happened yet. Note that בָא (va, v.9) is a participle, He is coming, an action already under way rather than scheduled.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The opening phrase, a new song, recurs across the psalms and the prophets, and it is never a song about the past: it marks something that has no precedent and therefore no existing setting. In הוֹשִׁיעָה (ho-shi-a, v.1) and לּוֹ (lo, v.1) the verb takes a dative of its own subject, saved for Him, an odd construction that keeps the victory from being anybody else's achievement. The strangest line is verse 5, where the word for lyre appears twice with the same prefix, at בְּכִנּוֹר (be-chi-nor, v.5) and בְּכִנּוֹר (be-chi-nor, v.5). The repetition sits in the Masoretic text and readers split over it: either an emphatic doubling or a copyist writing the phrase twice, and nothing in the text settles the question. In כָף (chaf, v.8) the noun is singular, a hand, where English needs a plural.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
This is one of the psalms that describes God becoming king, and the group it belongs to was read as being about a future enthronement rather than a past one, which is why the song is called new. The move that gets the most attention is the last: a judgment on the earth treated as good news. The reading usually offered is that judgment here means a case finally being heard, and that the parties cheering in verses 7 and 8 are the ones who have been waiting for a verdict rather than fearing one. Its place at the opening of Friday night, among the psalms said before the Sabbath is welcomed in, puts that future judgment at the start of every week's rest.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The kabbalistic reading hears the three blocks as three levels of one act sounding downward: the deed above in verses 1 to 3, its report in human voices and instruments in 4 to 6, and its arrival in the material world in 7 to 9, where water and rock resonate because they are made of the same thing. On this reading the instruments of verses 5 and 6 are not decoration, they are the point at which breath becomes audible matter, which is why the ram's horn and not the lyre is the one that stands before the King. The judgment of בְּמֵישָׁרִים (be-mei-sha-rim, v.9), translated with fairness, is a word about level and straightness, and the mystical reading takes it as the restoration of proportion rather than a sentence handed down.
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).