Four verses, one of the fifteen Songs of Ascents, and the clearest short demonstration of how Hebrew poetry builds by repeating a root rather than by rhyming. The word for eye appears four times in the first two verses; the root for showing favour three times across verses 2 and 3; the root for having had enough twice; the word for contempt twice. Nothing in the psalm is narrated and nothing is described. The whole thing is a posture, eyes raised and held there, and the only event in it is a request. In many Ashkenazi communities the Songs of Ascents are said after Minchah on the Shabbatot between Sukkot and Passover.
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One person, one gesture, and an address that is a participle rather than a name. The speaker is singular here and will be plural from verse 2 to the end of the psalm.
Behold, like the eyes of servants toward the hand of their masters,
כְּעֵינֵי
ke-ei-NEI
like the eyes of
שִׁפְחָה
shif-CHA
a maidservant
אֶל
el
toward
יַד
yad
the hand of
גְּבִרְתָּהּ
gvir-TAH
her mistress
like the eyes of a maidservant toward the hand of her mistress,
כֵּן
ken
so
עֵינֵינוּ
ei-nei-NU
our eyes
אֶל
el
toward
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
אֱלֹהֵינוּ
e-lo-hei-NU
our God
עַד
ad
until
שֶׁיְּחׇנֵּנוּ
shey-cho-ne-NU
He is gracious to us
so are our eyes toward the LORD our God, until He is gracious to us.
The longest verse in the psalm and the only comparison in it. Two households are set out, one male and one female, before the third clause finally says what they were being used for.
The request, doubled, and the first time the psalm says what is wrong. Everything before this was posture; this is the petition the posture was holding.
The complaint expanded and given owners. Contempt is not anonymous here: it belongs to people who are comfortable, and the psalm names their comfort before it names their scorn.
♦ 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 verses in two halves that meet on one root. Verses 1 and 2 are posture: eyes lifted to a throne, then two households in which a servant watches a hand. Verses 3 and 4 are the request and the reason for it. The hinge is שֶׁיְּחׇנֵּנוּ (shey-cho-ne-nu, v.2), until He is gracious to us, which closes the first half, and חׇנֵּנוּ (cho-ne-nu, v.3), be gracious to us, which opens the second: the same root, first as a hope and then as a demand. The image in verse 2 is precise and easy to read past. Servants do not watch the master's face, they watch the hand, because the hand is where the next instruction and the next portion both come from, and the watching is continuous rather than occasional.
רמז · Remez: allusion
הַיֹּשְׁבִי (ha-yosh-vi, v.1) is grammatically odd. It is the definite article plus a participle, which would ordinarily give the one who sits, but it carries an extra yod on the end that the sense does not need. The same ending turns up in a small number of poetic lines elsewhere in the Bible, and the usual account is that it preserves an old case ending kept for effect, though what it originally marked is not settled. The last two words are the hardest in the psalm. The received text divides the consonants into לִגְאֵי (lig-ei, v.4) and יוֹנִים (yo-nim, v.4), and that division has itself been questioned; the second element is not clearly attested anywhere else, and translations split between the proud oppressors, the arrogant, and readings that emend the consonants. The sense here is printed as the received division gives it and should be treated as disputed.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The two households of verse 2 are read as one argument made twice, and the doubling is taken as deliberate: a male servant with male masters, then a female servant with a female mistress, so that nobody hearing it can place themselves outside the comparison. The eye is the psalm's only instrument, and it is the organ that cannot act, only wait and receive, which is why there is no verb of doing anywhere in the psalm except the lifting in verse 1. Readers have also noticed that what the servant in the comparison waits for is not rescue but attention, and that the psalm never asks for the contempt to stop. It asks for favour, and favour is what a hand gives when it owes nothing.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The psalm is built on the smallest possible movement, eyes going up, and it gives that movement a destination in the first verse and then stays there for the remaining three. In the kabbalistic reading the raised eye is a standard image for a vessel turned toward its source, and the hand-watching of verse 2 is the same idea in daylight: the flow is constant and what varies is whether anyone is looking. The doubled request of חׇנֵּנוּ (cho-ne-nu, v.3) and חׇנֵּנוּ (cho-ne-nu, v.3) is read as two different askings, one for the favour and one for the capacity to hold it, which is why the verse repeats a word instead of adding one. The psalm ends on the word for the arrogant, so nothing is resolved inside the text. The resolution is the looking.
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).