One of the fifteen Songs of Ascents, and the one that describes arriving. The speaker is quoted secondhand in verse 1, standing inside the gates by verse 2, and from verse 6 he stops describing the city and starts talking to it. That turn is the grammar lesson: from verse 6 to the end almost every line carries a second person feminine singular suffix, your gates, those who love you, your walls, your palaces, within you, for you, because the addressee is a city and cities are feminine in Hebrew. In many Ashkenazi communities the Songs of Ascents are said after Minchah on the Shabbatot between Sukkot and Passover.
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I rejoiced when they said to me: let us go to the house of the LORD.
The joy is dated to the invitation, not to the arrival. What the speaker reports is the moment other people included him in their plural verb, let us go.
A participle plus the verb to be, which in Hebrew stretches an action out in time: not we arrived but we have been standing there. The pronoun has already turned from I to our.
The first thing said about the city is architectural: it is dense, its buildings touch, there are no gaps. The verse offers that as a description of a people as much as of masonry.
a testimony for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the LORD.
The compactness of verse 3 gets its explanation: this is where separate tribes converged. The word for going up is the same root as the ascents in the heading.
The second reason to come up, next to worship: this is where cases were heard. The verb is the ordinary one for sitting, with thrones as its subject, so the furniture is what sits.
Two zones named in order, the defensive wall and the buildings behind it, and a different word for calm in each. The outer one asks for peace, the inner one for quiet.
The second reason, matching the first phrase of verse 8 word for word, and the psalm closes where verse 1 pointed: at the house. Seeking good is an action, not a wish.
♦ 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
Nine verses in two halves. Verses 1 to 5 look at Jerusalem and report: an invitation, feet in the gates, a compact city, tribes coming up, thrones for judgment. Verses 6 to 9 turn and speak to it. The two halves are joined by what the city is for, which the psalm gives twice, once as worship in verse 4 and once as justice in verse 5, and then repeats in reverse at the end, friends in verse 8 and the house in verse 9. Notice that עֹמְדוֹת (om-dot, v.2) and הָיוּ (hai-u, v.2) are a participle plus a past tense verb, a construction that holds an action open in time, so the standing is not a snapshot.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verse 6 is built on one consonant cluster repeated four times: שַׁאֲלוּ (sha-a-lu, v.6) ask, שְׁלוֹם (shlom, v.6) the peace of, יְרוּשָׁלָ͏ִם (ye-ru-sha-la-yim, v.6) Jerusalem, יִשְׁלָיוּ (yish-lai-u, v.6) may they be at ease. The name of the city carries the sound of peace inside it, and the verse makes that audible rather than arguing it. Two words are commonly mistranslated. בְּחֵילֵךְ (be-chei-lech, v.7) is a rampart, the outer defensive work, not wealth, though the two are spelled alike. שֶׁחֻבְּרָה (she-chub-ra, v.3) is a passive of the verb to join, so the city is joined to itself, which older translations render compact. The name in יְרוּשָׁלָ͏ִם (ye-ru-sha-la-yim, v.2) is written short in the consonants and pointed as a dual by the Masoretes, and what the ending means, two cities or an old locative form, is disputed.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The two institutions of verses 4 and 5, the pilgrimage and the court, are what made the city a destination, and later readers took the pairing as a claim that worship without justice has no address. The joining of verse 3 attracted a long line of reading in which the city below is matched by a city above and the two are fastened to each other, so that praying for Jerusalem's peace is not local politics. That reading is repeated widely in later literature and is not stated in the verse itself. The instruction in verse 6 is one of the few in the book that tells you what to say rather than what to feel, and it has been treated as an obligation on anyone who benefits from the place, which is the logic verse 8 spells out.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
In the mystical reading the city is a receiver, which is why the whole second half addresses it in the feminine and asks that it be filled rather than that it act. Verse 7 names two vessels in order, the rampart and the palaces, and asks for a different quality in each, peace at the boundary and stillness inside, which is the standard shape of a container being prepared. The joining of שֶׁחֻבְּרָה (she-chub-ra, v.3) is read as the seam between what is above and what is below, and the ascents of the heading as the fifteen steps of that climb. The last word of the psalm is for you, so the whole movement ends by handing everything it gathered back to the place it came for.
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).