Eight verses, four couplets, and no name for God in the first six of them. The four letter name does not appear anywhere in this psalm at all; verse 7 uses two other words instead, and by then the sea has already fled and the mountains have already skipped. Verses 3 and 4 report what happened, verses 5 and 6 repeat them almost word for word as questions put to the sea and the hills, and verse 7 answers with an order rather than an explanation. It is the second psalm of the Hallel, said on festivals and at the Seder, where its last words close the half of the Hallel that comes before the meal. Short enough to learn by heart in an evening, and built out of pairs the whole way down.
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the house of Jacob from a people of foreign speech,
One long time clause with no main verb in it. The sentence does not finish until verse 2, which is why the psalm sounds like it starts already in motion.
The main clause at last, and it is not the one the exodus story leads you to expect. Not that Israel became free, but that it became a place: a sanctuary, and a territory under rule.
3
הַיָּם רָאָה וַיָּנֹס
הַיַּרְדֵּן יִסֹּב לְאָחוֹר
הַיָּם
ha-YAM
the sea
רָאָה
ra-A
saw
וַיָּנֹס
va-ya-NOS
and it fled
The sea saw and fled,
הַיַּרְדֵּן
ha-yar-DEN
the Jordan
יִסֹּב
yi-SOV
turned
לְאָחוֹר
le-a-CHOR
backward
the Jordan turned back.
Two events forty years apart, from two different books, set in one line as if they were one gesture. The verse does not say what the sea saw, and the missing object is the gap the whole later reading grows out of.
The dry land joins the water. The animals are chosen by size, so the big mountains get the ram and the small hills get the lamb, and the parallel holds down to the pairing.
The same nouns and the same verbs as verse 3, now with the question word in front and the verbs in the future. The psalm turns around and interrogates its own report.
The question extends to the hills and nothing new is said. All the force is in the change from telling to asking, which is the only thing these two verses do.
The answer arrives and it is not an answer but a command, and the first divine title in the psalm comes with it. The earth is told to do what the mountains were already doing in verse 4.
One act said twice, water out of stone and then water out of harder stone. The psalm ends on the water rather than on the one who made it, so the last word is the evidence.
♦ 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
Four couplets in a strict shape. First the going out and what it produced, a people that becomes a sanctuary and a domain. Then what the world did about it, water and land in one line each. Then the same two lines again as questions. Then the command to the earth and the reason, which is a God who converts rock into water. Notice that the grammatical subject of the whole thing is missing until verse 7 and even then arrives as a title rather than a name. Notice also that לְקׇדְשׁוֹ (le-kod-sho, v.2) makes Judah a holy thing rather than a holy people; the noun is holiness with a preposition and a possessive, not the word for temple.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Three details a learner can carry away. לֹעֵז (lo-ez, v.1) is a rare participle for speaking unintelligibly, and the root supplies the later Hebrew word for a foreign tongue. חוּלִי (chu-li, v.7) is a feminine singular imperative from the root chet vav lamed, to writhe or to whirl, the same root behind the word for a circle dance, so the command can be read as tremble or as dance and both are current; the earth is being told to do the thing the mountains did. הַהֹפְכִי (ha-hof-chi, v.8) and לְמַעְיְנוֹ (le-mai-no, v.8) both end in a vowel that adds nothing to the sense, the one who turns and into a spring of, and the usual grammatical explanation is an archaic linking ending kept in poetry. That ending is one of the marks of very old Hebrew verse.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Because verse 3 refuses to say what the sea saw, readers have filled it in, and the gap has been filled in more than one way: that the sea saw the God of Israel, that it saw the merit of the ancestors, that it saw the bones of Joseph being carried up out of Egypt, since Joseph is the one who fled in Genesis and the sea in this verse flees with the same verb. None of those is stated here, and the psalm gains from leaving it open. The other reading that attaches itself to this psalm is about order: nature is not described as obeying but as reacting, in the way an inferior gives way to a superior, which is why verses 5 and 6 can afford to be sarcastic. At the Seder the first half of the Hallel ends with verse 8, so flint into a spring of water is the last thing said before the meal.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The psalm has no name for God until verse 7 and never uses the four letter name, and the mystical reading takes the delay as the point: what acts in verses 3 and 4 is a presence not yet named, and creation recognises it before language does. Verse 2 is read as the moment a people becomes a vessel, a sanctuary and a rule, which is what the exodus was for. The rock of verse 8 is the standard image of a closed thing made to give, and its two halves are graded, ordinary stone and then flint, so the harder case is the second one. The last word of the psalm is water, which is where a psalm about a sea that fled would be expected to end, and does.
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).