Nine verses, said on Friday evening as the fifth of the six psalms that open Kabbalat Shabbat, and the last of the group of enthronement psalms that runs from 93 through here. It is built around a refrain that says holy three times, at the end of verse 3, the end of verse 5 and inside verse 9, and those three points cut the psalm into three sections of decreasing distance: the peoples, then the footstool, then three men with names. For a learner it is a compact drill in the plural, singular and possessive of one noun: a people, the peoples, all the peoples, and then the same consonants again as a verb meaning He answered them.
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He sits enthroned on the cherubim; let the earth shake.
Two statements of fact, each followed by an ordered reaction. The kingship is not argued for anywhere in the psalm; it is announced and the world is told to respond.
A location and a rank in one line. Greatness is placed somewhere specific, which is what separates this psalm from a general claim about divine power.
3
יוֹדוּ שִׁמְךָ גָּדוֹל וְנוֹרָא
קָדוֹשׁ הוּא
יוֹדוּ
yo-DU
let them praise
שִׁמְךָ
shim-CHA
Your name
גָּדוֹל
ga-DOL
great
וְנוֹרָא
ve-no-RA
and awesome
Let them praise Your name, great and awesome.
קָדוֹשׁ
ka-DOSH
holy
הוּא
hu
is He
Holy is He.
The address turns to the second person for the first time, and the verse ends on the two words that will come back twice more. The refrain is the shortest sentence in the psalm.
The hardest sentence in the psalm to construe, and also the point where power is given a content. Strength is not the ability to do anything but the preference for one thing, justice.
Exalt the LORD our God and bow down at the footstool of His feet.
קָדוֹשׁ
ka-DOSH
holy
הוּא
hu
is He
Holy is He.
Two opposite motions in one command: raise Him, lower yourself. The place named is the lowest part of the throne, which is as close as the psalm lets anyone approach.
The psalm drops from cosmic scale to three names, all of them intercessors rather than kings. The answer is put in a form that means it happened repeatedly, not once.
they kept His testimonies and the statute He gave them.
The exchange is described as two-way and habitual. He spoke and they kept, in that order, so obedience is the answer to speech rather than the price of it.
The one verse in the psalm that holds two incompatible things together and does not resolve them. Forgiveness and reckoning are stated of the same subject in the same breath.
Exalt the LORD our God and bow down at His holy mountain,
כִּי
ki
for
קָדוֹשׁ
ka-DOSH
holy
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
אֱלֹהֵינוּ
e-lo-hei-NU
our God
for the LORD our God is holy.
Verse 5 repeated with two changes: the footstool becomes the mountain, and the refrain stops saying He and says the name instead. The distance has closed and the psalm ends.
♦ 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 sections marked by three closing refrains. Verses 1 to 3 are the widest shot, kingship announced to the peoples and the earth. Verses 4 and 5 narrow to what the kingship consists of, justice established in Jacob, and to a place, the footstool. Verses 6 to 9 narrow again to three named men who spoke and were answered. Watch the pronoun in the refrain: קָדוֹשׁ (ka-dosh, v.3) and קָדוֹשׁ (ka-dosh, v.5) both say holy is He, and קָדוֹשׁ (ka-dosh, v.9) says the LORD our God is holy, so the third repetition drops the pronoun and names Him. Watch the location too. Verse 5 sends the worshipper to the footstool and verse 9 to the mountain, which is the same instruction given twice with the second one closer in.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verse 4 is the standing crux of the psalm. Its first words, וְעֹז (ve-oz, v.4) and מֶלֶךְ (me-lech, v.4), sit in the sentence without an obvious verb, and the readings divide: some take the strength of the king as a continuation of the praise in verse 3, some read it as a fresh subject with the loving of justice as its predicate, and some translations insert a break and start over at You have established. The dispute is real and the Hebrew supports more than one solution. In verse 8, נֹשֵׂא (no-se, v.8) is a participle from the root meaning to lift or carry, used elsewhere of carrying away guilt, while וְנֹקֵם (ve-no-kem, v.8) is the participle for taking vengeance, and it is contested whether their deeds means the wrongs the fathers committed or the wrongs done to them. Note also לָמוֹ (la-mo, v.7), a poetic form of the ordinary word for to them, which appears mostly in older verse and marks the register of the line.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 6 calls Moses one of His priests, which is a problem the Torah does not obviously allow, since the priesthood is given to Aaron and his sons. The traditional answer is that Moses served as priest during the seven days of the Tabernacle's consecration, before the office passed to Aaron's line, so the verse is exact rather than loose. The grouping is itself an argument. Moses, Aaron and Samuel are three men remembered chiefly for standing between God and a people about to be punished, and they are produced immediately after verse 5 has put everyone on the ground at the footstool. The psalm answers the question a reader would ask at that point, which is whether anything said from that position is ever heard. Verse 6 says it was, and verse 8 says the answering did not cancel the accounting.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The word holy appears three times, and Isaiah 6:3 has the same threefold holy in the mouths of the seraphim. The psalm gives no sign of quoting Isaiah, and the resemblance may be no more than a shared liturgical habit, but the pairing has shaped how the psalm is heard. Read with the enthronement psalms that precede it, the sequence moves from a throne above the flood to a throne on the cherubim to a throne with a footstool that human beings are told to touch their heads to, so the mystical reading takes the psalm as a controlled descent rather than a description of height. לַהֲדֹם (la-ha-dom, v.5), the footstool, is elsewhere in Scripture the ark and the Temple, which puts the lowest point of the divine throne inside a room in Jerusalem. That is the whole geography of the psalm: exalted above all the peoples in verse 2, and reachable at floor level by verse 5.
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).