Ten verses carrying twenty-two lines: an alphabetical acrostic, but not one that runs verse by verse. The opening Hallelujah stands outside the pattern. After it, every half line begins with the next letter, so verses 1 to 8 carry two letters each, aleph and bet in verse 1 through samekh and ayin in verse 8, and then verses 9 and 10 carry three each, pe, tsade and qof, then resh, shin and tav. Sixteen plus six is the whole alphabet, used once. That is why the lines break where they do on this page: the letters decide it, not a translator's ear. Psalm 112 runs the identical scheme and takes up this psalm's last verse as its first, which is why the two are learned together. Notice how little of the psalm is a sentence with a subject and a verb; most of it is nouns stacked around what God has done.
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in the council of the upright and in the assembly.
The alphabet starts at the third word, so the call to praise sits outside the scheme. Note that heart here has no possessive ending, unusual in a line like this, which leaves it open between my whole heart and a whole heart.
The subject of the psalm arrives in its second word and stays: the works. The line does not say the works are admired but that they are searched into, which is a different activity and the one this psalm is doing.
3
הוֹד וְהָדָר פׇּעֳלוֹ
וְצִדְקָתוֹ עֹמֶדֶת לָעַד
הוֹד
hod
splendour
וְהָדָר
ve-ha-DAR
and majesty
פׇּעֳלוֹ
po-o-LO
are His work
Splendour and majesty are His work,
וְצִדְקָתוֹ
ve-tzid-ka-TO
and His righteousness
עֹמֶדֶת
o-ME-det
stands
לָעַד
la-AD
for ever
and His righteousness stands for ever.
Two nouns of royal display, then one of moral durability, joined by nothing but a conjunction. The second half returns word for word as the last line of the psalm and again twice in Psalm 112, applied there to a human being.
The wonders are not repeated, they are remembered, and the memorial is presented as something deliberately made. The two adjectives are the pair from Exodus 34:6, in reverse order.
5
טֶרֶף נָתַן לִירֵאָיו
יִזְכֹּר לְעוֹלָם בְּרִיתוֹ
טֶרֶף
TE-ref
food
נָתַן
na-TAN
He gave
לִירֵאָיו
li-re-AV
to those who fear Him
He gave food to those who fear Him;
יִזְכֹּר
yiz-KOR
He remembers
לְעוֹלָם
le-o-LAM
for ever
בְּרִיתוֹ
bri-TO
His covenant
He remembers His covenant for ever.
The word for food is elsewhere the word for prey, what a predator tears, which gives the line a rougher texture than the English can carry. Covenant appears here and again in verse 9, both times with for ever.
The only verse that names a historical event, and it names it obliquely: land that belonged to others changed hands. Telling comes before giving in the word order, which fits a psalm about a memorial.
The pivot from what God did to what God commanded, made without a connective. The claim is that both are the same kind of thing, and the shared word is works.
The first word is physical, the participle for something leaned on a support, so the precepts of verse 7 are described the way a structure is. Everything in this verse is passive: they are held up and they were made, and the agent is left out.
Three letters instead of two, so the verse runs in three short clauses rather than the balanced pair used up to here. The acceleration is audible, and it happens at the word redemption.
good understanding belongs to all who practise them;
תְּהִלָּתוֹ
te-hi-la-TO
His praise
עֹמֶדֶת
o-ME-det
stands
לָעַד
la-AD
for ever
His praise stands for ever.
The turn from God to the person, in the last three letters. Them in the second clause has no clear antecedent in this verse and reaches back to the precepts of verse 7, so wisdom is defined here as something done rather than known.
♦ 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
A psalm of praise with almost no narrative in it. Verse 1 sets the scene, a thanksgiving spoken in company. Verses 2 to 4 are the works in general, verses 5 and 6 the specific ones, food, covenant and land, verses 7 and 8 the precepts, verse 9 redemption and the name, verse 10 the conclusion, which for the first time is about a human being rather than about God. The acrostic explains the texture. Because every colon has to open with a fixed letter, the psalm cannot build a long argument across a sentence boundary; it proceeds by short self contained clauses, each one a complete claim. That is why it reads as a list, and why it is easy to learn by heart.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The scheme is worth watching closely, because two letters are handled with a licence. The shin slot at שֵׂכֶל (se-chel, v.10) is filled by a word spelled with sin, the same letter under a different point, which the acrostic treats as interchangeable with shin; Psalm 112 fills the same slot with a real shin, so between them the pair uses both. And the whole of הַלְלוּ (hal-lu, v.1) and יָהּ (yah, v.1) sits outside the count, which is the standard treatment of that call in the acrostic psalms. The last verse has close relatives elsewhere: Proverbs 1:7 makes the fear of the LORD the beginning of knowledge and Proverbs 9:10 makes it the beginning of wisdom with a different word for beginning. Which sense רֵאשִׁית (re-shit, v.10) carries here is disputed, since it can mean the first step, the thing you start with, or the chief part, the best of the thing, and the two produce quite different pieces of advice.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
This psalm and Psalm 112 form a pair, and the join is verifiable rather than a matter of taste. Psalm 111 ends on the fear of the LORD; Psalm 112 opens with the man who fears the LORD. Psalm 111:3 says of God that His righteousness stands for ever; Psalm 112:3 says exactly that of the man, and 112:9 says it again. Psalm 111:4 calls God gracious and compassionate; Psalm 112:4 uses the same two words of the righteous person and adds a third. Read together, the pair makes a claim that neither psalm makes alone: the descriptions that belong to God are the descriptions a life can come to carry. The order matters, since the human psalm comes second and borrows, not the reverse.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Sefer Yetzirah treats the twenty two letters as the material out of which the world is made, and an acrostic read in that light is not a memory aid but a statement of completeness: this praise uses the alphabet once through, with nothing left over and nothing said twice. The psalm keeps returning to a related idea in its own vocabulary. זֵכֶר (ze-cher, v.4), a memorial, is something made rather than something that survives by itself, and the same is true of the precepts at סְמוּכִים (smu-chim, v.8), which are propped up rather than standing on their own. On this reading the works of God and the letters of the alphabet are described in the same terms, as things constructed and then held in place, and the closing line about praise standing for ever is the last of them.
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).