Eight verses in which a king writes down the rules of his own house. Ten of the verbs are first person, most of them future: I will sing, I will study, I will walk, I will set, I will destroy, I will not know. The negative comes six times, always standing in front of its verb, which makes this the cleanest drill in the book for that word order. The psalm also holds one of the strangest half lines in the Psalter: in the middle of the resolutions the speaker breaks off to ask when God will come to him, then carries on as if nothing had happened, and nobody has settled what that question is doing there. In the monthly cycle that reads the whole book it falls on the twentieth day, with Psalms 97 to 103.
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Two words set the whole programme: chesed, the loyalty that goes past what is owed, and mishpat, the judgment that is owed exactly. The rest of the psalm is one man trying to hold both at once.
The interruption. Three words of direct address break into a list of resolutions, get no answer, and vanish; the sentence picks up where it left off. Note that the walking is indoors.
I will set no worthless thing in front of my eyes.
עֲשֹׂה
a-SO
the doing of
סֵטִים
se-TIM
deviations
שָׂנֵאתִי
sa-ne-TI
I have hated
I hate doing crooked things;
לֹא
lo
not
יִדְבַּק
yid-BAK
it shall cling
בִּי
bi
to me
it shall not cling to me.
One completed tense sits among the futures: I have hated. The dislike is already in place and the policy follows from it, not the other way round. The last verb is the ordinary word for a thing that sticks.
4
לֵבָב עִקֵּשׁ יָסוּר מִמֶּנִּי
רָע לֹא אֵדָע
לֵבָב
le-VAV
a heart
עִקֵּשׁ
i-KESH
twisted
יָסוּר
ya-SUR
shall turn away
מִמֶּנִּי
mi-me-NI
from me
A twisted heart shall keep away from me;
רָע
ra
evil
לֹא
lo
not
אֵדָע
e-DA
I will know
evil I will not know.
Third organ in three verses, after the eyes and the inner house. To know here is nearer to keeping company with than to having information about.
Two portraits, each closing with the object pronoun placed before the verb for weight. The last clause stops short: I am not able, with nothing after it, so every translator has to supply the missing word.
My eyes are on the faithful of the land, that they may live with me;
הֹלֵךְ
ho-LECH
one who walks
בְּדֶרֶךְ
bde-RECH
in the way of
תָּמִים
ta-MIM
the blameless
הוּא
hu
he
יְשָׁרְתֵנִי
ye-shar-te-NI
shall serve me
one who walks the way of the blameless, he will serve me.
The hinge from exclusion to admission, and the first verse with anyone in it the king wants. The phrase he applied to himself in verse 2 is now the entry test for everybody else.
No one who works deceit shall live inside my house;
דֹּבֵר
do-VER
one who speaks
שְׁקָרִים
shka-RIM
lies
לֹא
lo
not
יִכּוֹן
yi-KON
shall be established
לְנֶגֶד
le-NE-ged
in front of
עֵינָי
ei-NAI
my eyes
no one who speaks lies shall hold his place in front of my eyes.
Two phrases from earlier come back word for word, inside my house from verse 2 and in front of my eyes from verse 3. What the king first imposed on himself he now imposes on the staff.
Morning by morning I will silence all the wicked of the land,
לְהַכְרִית
le-hach-RIT
to cut off
מֵעִיר
me-IR
from the city of
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
כׇּל
kol
all
פֹּעֲלֵי
po-a-LEI
the workers of
אָוֶן
A-ven
iniquity
cutting off from the city of the LORD all who work harm.
The scope opens out in the final verse from a household to a city. Jeremiah 21:12 tells the house of David to give judgment every morning, so the line reads as a daily court sitting rather than a purge.
♦ 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
This is a job description written in the first person. Verse 1 names the two values, verses 2 to 4 cover the king's own conduct, verses 5 to 8 the people he will admit and the people he will remove. The repeated vocabulary makes the join visible and is worth tracing on the page: the way of the blameless at בְּדֶרֶךְ (bde-rech, v.2) is what he studies, and the same phrase at בְּדֶרֶךְ (bde-rech, v.6) is what qualifies a servant; in front of my eyes at לְנֶגֶד (le-ne-ged, v.3) returns at לְנֶגֶד (le-ne-ged, v.7); inside my house at בְּקֶרֶב (be-ke-rev, v.2) returns at בְּקֶרֶב (be-ke-rev, v.7). Nothing is demanded of anyone that the speaker has not first taken on himself, and the order is deliberate, self first and staff second.
רמז · Remez: allusion
מָתַי (ma-tai, v.2) is the difficulty. Four words of prayer sit inside a list of policies with no connective before or after. Readings divide between a request for the ark or the divine presence to arrive at this house, so that the resolutions are the preparation for it, and a reading in which the question is a lament that the presence has not come yet; a minority treat the half line as displaced from somewhere else. It is unresolved, and a page that told you otherwise would be inventing. Two smaller points: מְלׇשְׁנִי (mlosh-ni, v.5) is a verb built straight off the noun for tongue, and the root is rare, appearing in a different stem at Proverbs 30:10. And וּרְחַב (ur-chav, v.5) calls a wide heart a fault, while the same phrase at 1 Kings 5:9 in the Hebrew numbering, 4:29 in English Bibles, is the praise given to Solomon for breadth of understanding. Same words, opposite verdict, decided entirely by context.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Read as a charter, the psalm has always been applied past kings to anyone who runs a household or an office, since almost every clause is about hiring, admitting and dismissing rather than about war. The question of verse 2 gets pulled into the narrative books: 2 Samuel 6 has the ark brought up to the city, and in 2 Samuel 7 David proposes building a house for it and is told he will not be the one to build it. Read against that, the resolutions become an argument the king is making about the house he already has, and the sequence of the psalm answers a hard question, which is what a person does with a promise that has been deferred. He writes down the rules for the interval.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The two nouns of the first verse carry the weight. In kabbalistic vocabulary chesed and din are the poles of divine action, generosity that gives without measure and judgment that gives exactly what is due, and mishpat is the word for their balance rather than a synonym for either. To sing of both together is therefore not a summary of two topics but a claim to be holding a tension. On that reading the house of בֵּיתִי (bei-ti, v.2) is the self before it is a building, and בְּקֶרֶב (be-ke-rev, v.2), the word for inside, is the same word used for the inward part of a person elsewhere in the Psalms, so the whole survey of doorways, servants and dismissals is also a description of what a person admits into himself, morning by morning, as verse 8 puts 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).