The first of the fifteen Songs of Ascents, and the one furthest from the destination. Nothing in it is Jerusalem: the speaker is among foreigners, surrounded by lying talk, and the climb the collection is named for has not started. Fourteen of the fifteen headings read a song of the ascents; Psalm 121 alone reads it with a different preposition. The grammar to watch here is the nominal sentence, a whole clause with no verb in it. Verse 4 has none, verse 7 opens with none, and the last line of the psalm is four words that put a man and a war side by side and leave you to supply the collision. In many Ashkenazi communities the Songs of Ascents are said after Minchah on the Shabbatot between Sukkot and Passover.
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The psalm opens with the problem already solved, in the past tense, and then spends six verses in trouble. Note that the distress is not called mine by a suffix but by a separate little word after it, which is an older way of saying it.
The danger is speech, and it is named twice by the organ that makes it rather than by the person who owns it. Both halves are built the same way: from, a body part in the construct state, then the thing it produces.
The speaker stops addressing God and turns on the tongue itself. The two questions are one question asked twice, and the second raises the first: not only what, but what more.
4
חִצֵּי גִבּוֹר שְׁנוּנִים
עִם גַּחֲלֵי רְתָמִים
חִצֵּי
chi-TZEI
the arrows of
גִבּוֹר
gi-BOR
a warrior
שְׁנוּנִים
shnu-NIM
sharpened
A warrior's arrows, sharpened,
עִם
im
with
גַּחֲלֵי
ga-cha-LEI
the coals of
רְתָמִים
re-ta-MIM
broom wood
with coals of broom wood.
Six words and no verb, so the verse can be the answer to verse 3 or a description of what the tongue already is, and both readings are current. Either way the two images are speed and slow heat, which is the pair the psalm keeps returning to.
Two verbs of living somewhere, the first meaning to reside as an outsider without rights, the second the ordinary word for dwelling. The two places named are nowhere near each other, which is the first sign that this is a figure rather than an address.
The same verb as the second half of verse 5, now in the past and with a measure of time in front of it. The enemy is finally described, and the description is not a nation or a name but a disposition.
7
אֲנִי שָׁלוֹם
וְכִי אֲדַבֵּר
הֵמָּה לַמִּלְחָמָה
אֲנִי
a-NI
I
שָׁלוֹם
sha-LOM
am peace
I am peace,
וְכִי
ve-CHI
and when
אֲדַבֵּר
a-da-BER
I speak
and when I speak,
הֵמָּה
he-MA
they
לַמִּלְחָמָה
la-mil-cha-MA
are for war
they are for war.
Not I am peaceful but I am peace, a pronoun and a noun with nothing between them, and the same construction closes the verse for the other side. Speech, which was the weapon in verses 2 to 4, is now what the speaker offers and what they refuse.
♦ 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
Seven verses that go the wrong way. Verse 1 reports a call that was answered; verses 2 to 7 are the trouble, and it does not lift. The subject throughout is speech: lying lips, a deceitful tongue, a tongue addressed to its face, and finally the speaker's own words, which are peace and are heard as an opening for war. Verse 5 places him among foreigners and verse 6 gives the length of it. Read as the first step of the collection, the psalm establishes what the ascent is from: not a siege or an illness, but living far away among people whose words cannot be trusted.
רמז · Remez: allusion
בַּצָּרָתָה (ba-tza-ra-ta, v.1) carries an ending that is unusual on this noun, and the possessor is supplied by the separate word after it rather than by a suffix, so the phrase reads in the distress, the one that is mine. מֶשֶׁךְ (me-shech, v.5) and קֵדָר (ke-dar, v.5) are the crux: elsewhere in the Bible one is a people of the far north and the other an Arabian tribe, and no one lives in both, so the pair is generally read as a figure for exile among strangers rather than as a location. רְתָמִים (re-ta-mim, v.4) is the desert broom, named here because its charcoal is reputed to hold heat long after other coals have died, which is the point of pairing it with arrows: one wound arrives fast, the other keeps burning. Whether verse 4 answers verse 3 or describes the tongue is disputed, since the verse has no verb to settle it. רַבַּת (ra-bat, v.6) turns up again as the first word of the body of Psalm 129, also a Song of Ascents, in the same sense of long enough.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The psalm was read early as being about the tongue rather than about geography, and the reading has a foothold in the text: the two named places are unreachable from each other, while lying lips are portable. On that reading the exile of verse 5 is the condition of living where speech has stopped meaning anything, and Meshech and Kedar are its two ends. The weapons of verse 4 have been taken as measure for measure, a mouth answered by things that come out of a mouth, an arrow and a burning coal, which is why the verse gives no subject for the giving. Verse 7 has been used as the standard case of the person who cannot be at peace unilaterally: he is peace, and it changes nothing, because peace made by one side is not yet peace.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The collection climbs fifteen steps and this is the ground floor, so the psalm describes the state before any ascent: distant, surrounded by false speech, and unable to be understood. In the mystical idiom that is the condition of a soul in a body that speaks a language the world answers with war, and the pairing in שָׁלוֹם (sha-lom, v.7) and לַמִּלְחָמָה (la-mil-cha-ma, v.7), peace and war set as bare predicates, is read as two whole systems facing each other with no verb to mediate. The answer already given in וַיַּעֲנֵנִי (va-ya-a-ne-ni, v.1) is then the thing to hold on to: the psalm reports that the call was heard before it says anything about the trouble, so the trouble is described from inside a rescue that has already happened and has not yet arrived.
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).