Seven verses, a royal psalm built on two oracles: one in verse 1 about a throne, one in verse 4 about a priesthood, each introduced by a formula and each followed by its expansion. It is short, famous, and hard. Verse 3 is one of the most textually difficult verses in the whole book, and the ancient versions do not agree with the Masoretic text about what it says; this page prints the Masoretic text and says where the other readings come from. Watch the right hand: in verse 1 the king is seated at God's, and by verse 5 the Lord stands at the king's.
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The utterance of the LORD to my lord: sit at My right hand,
עַד
ad
until
אָשִׁית
a-SHIT
I set
אֹיְבֶיךָ
oi-vei-CHA
your enemies
הֲדֹם
ha-DOM
a footstool
לְרַגְלֶיךָ
le-rag-lei-CHA
for your feet
until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.
An oracle quoted rather than spoken. Note the vowels on the fifth word: it is my lord with a first person suffix, the form used for a human superior, and not the divine name, which would be pointed differently.
The LORD will send out the staff of your strength from Zion:
רְדֵה
re-DE
rule
בְּקֶרֶב
be-KE-rev
in the midst of
אֹיְבֶיךָ
oi-vei-CHA
your enemies
rule in the midst of your enemies.
The first oracle expanded outward. The staff goes out from one place before the rule extends, and the second half is a fresh command put in the king's hand rather than a description of him.
Your people come willingly on the day of your muster,
בְּהַדְרֵי
be-had-REI
in the splendours of
קֹדֶשׁ
KO-desh
holiness
מֵרֶחֶם
me-RE-chem
from the womb
מִשְׁחָר
mish-CHAR
of the dawn
in holy splendour, from the womb of the dawn,
לְךָ
le-CHA
to you
טַל
tal
the dew of
יַלְדֻתֶיךָ
yal-du-tei-CHA
your youth
yours is the dew of your youth.
The broken verse. Word by word it holds a people volunteering, a day of mustering, holiness, a womb, a dawn, dew and youth, and no reading joins those into a sentence that everyone accepts. Any translation of it, including the one printed here, is a decision.
The second oracle, this time under oath. What is granted is a priesthood rather than a throne, and the model for it is a figure out of Genesis rather than anyone in Aaron's line.
The positions swap. In verse 1 the king sits at God's right hand; here God stands at the king's, and the verb turns violent for the first time in the psalm.
He judges among the nations, filling them with corpses;
מָחַץ
ma-CHATZ
He has crushed
רֹאשׁ
rosh
the head
עַל
al
over
אֶרֶץ
E-retz
a land
רַבָּה
ra-BA
wide
He crushes the head over a wide land.
Three clauses of judgment with nothing joining them. The head is singular against nations plural, which is why some read it as one specific ruler rather than as a general slaughter.
The scale drops from nations to one man stopping at a stream. The head that was crushed in verse 6 is the same word as the head lifted here, and the psalm ends on the second.
♦ 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
Two oracles, two expansions and a coda. Verse 1 gives the throne and verses 2 and 3 unfold it; verse 4 gives the priesthood and verses 5 and 6 unfold what a priest-king does; verse 7 is a single picture at the end. The clearest structural fact is a pair of right hands: at לִימִינִי (li-mi-ni, v.1) the one addressed is told to sit at God's right hand, and at יְמִינְךָ (ye-min-cha, v.5) the Lord is at his. The second pair is a head: רֹאשׁ (rosh, v.6) is crushed and רֹאשׁ (rosh, v.7) is lifted, the same word both times. Two of the seven verses, 3 and 6, are difficult enough that translating them is a choice rather than a rendering, and readers should know which choice they are being handed.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verse 3 is the crux, and every clause in it has been read more than one way. נְדָבֹת (ne-da-vot, v.3) is an abstract plural, willingnesses or freewill offerings, standing where a verb or an adjective is wanted, so the line comes out either as your people volunteer or as your people are willingness itself. חֵילֶךָ (chei-le-cha, v.3) is force, army or wealth, which makes the day either a muster or a battle. בְּהַדְרֵי (be-had-rei, v.3) in the Masoretic text is the splendours of, giving in holy splendour; a nearly identical spelling, one letter away, would give the mountains of, and translations that print on the holy mountains follow that reading rather than the pointed text. מֵרֶחֶם (me-re-chem, v.3) and מִשְׁחָר (mish-char, v.3) give from the womb of the dawn, an image with no parallel elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. טַל (tal, v.3) and יַלְדֻתֶיךָ (yal-du-tei-cha, v.3) give the dew of your youth, read either as troops arriving like dew or as the king's own youth renewed. The ancient Greek translation vocalized the last words differently and produced a verb of begetting instead of the noun youth, which is why Greek and Latin bibles read from the womb before the morning star I have begotten you. On the Masoretic pointing the verse says nothing about begetting. One more vocalization matters, in verse 1: לַאדֹנִי (la-do-ni, v.1) is pointed la-doni, my lord, the ordinary form for addressing a human superior, and not as the divine name. Translations that render it as a second divine title are reading against the vowels this page prints.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Jewish reading of this psalm has long refused to leave the one addressed unplaceable, and it has produced more than one answer. A passage in the Talmud at Nedarim 32b takes up verse 4 in connection with Genesis 14 and Melchizedek and reads the priesthood as something transferred rather than shared. Medieval Jewish commentary largely follows that direction and identifies the addressee as Abraham, which turns verses 5 and 6 into the defeat of the kings in Genesis 14 and verse 7 into the stream Abraham drinks from on the road home. A second Jewish line reads the addressee as David himself, spoken of in the third person by one of his own court singers, which is the simplest explanation of the awkward my lord. A third reads it of the messianic king. In Christian tradition the psalm is read of Jesus and it is among the psalms the New Testament quotes most; that reading depends on taking the fourth word of verse 1 as a divine title, which the Masoretic vowels do not support, and on the Greek rendering of verse 3 rather than the Hebrew. The disagreement is old and it is genuinely a disagreement about which text is being read, not only about what it means.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
One figure holds two offices that the rest of the Hebrew Bible keeps apart. Kings are not priests and priests are not kings, and the single Genesis figure who is both is named here at מַלְכִּי (mal-ki, v.4) and צֶדֶק (tze-dek, v.4) as two separate words, my king and righteousness, and he stands entirely outside the covenant line. Mystical reading takes that as the point: the priesthood promised here is older than Aaron and older than Sinai, which is why the oath at נִשְׁבַּע (nish-ba, v.4) has to be one that cannot be revoked. The imagery of verse 3 works the same way from the other side. Womb, dawn and dew are all images of something that arrives before anyone has worked for it, and dew in particular falls unasked and unwatched. Read that way, the difficulty of the verse is not only damage in transmission but the subject itself, since what is being described is an origin, and an origin is the part that resists being put into a sentence.
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).