Five verses in the middle of the Songs of Ascents, and unlike Psalm 120 this one has arrived: the first two verses stand in the hills around Jerusalem and look at how the city is held. The psalm names no person. Everyone in it is a participle or an adjective, those who trust, the righteous, the good, the upright, those who bend aside, those who do wrong, so the whole argument is about kinds of people rather than about anybody in particular. Verse 3 is the hinge and the surprising part: the reason given for limiting how long oppression may last is not the suffering it causes but what it would do to the people under it.
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The comparison is to a mountain, and the two verbs that follow it are unremarkable ones: it is not moved, it sits. The claim is stability rather than height, which matters because Zion is not the highest ground in view.
One word does the work twice, around, first of the hills and then of God, so the second line is the first line with the terms swapped. Neither half has a verb in Hebrew, which leaves the arrangement standing rather than happening.
so that the righteous do not put out their hands to wrongdoing.
The verse concedes that the rod is there, and only denies that it will settle. The purpose clause is the point: prolonged pressure is treated as a thing that would eventually turn honest hands, and the limit exists to prevent that.
The first request in the psalm, and it comes after the description rather than before it. The verb and its object are the same root, do good to the good, which in Hebrew reads as a claim about fitness rather than as a pun.
But those who bend off into their twisted ways, may the LORD march them away
אֶת
et
together with
פֹּעֲלֵי
po-a-LEI
the workers of
הָאָוֶן
ha-A-ven
iniquity
with the workers of wrong.
שָׁלוֹם
sha-LOM
peace
עַל
al
upon
יִשְׂרָאֵל
yis-ra-EL
Israel
Peace upon Israel.
The last three words are not attached to the sentence before them by anything, and they introduce a word the psalm has not used until now. After four verses of sorting people into two groups, it ends by saying one thing over all of them.
♦ 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
Two verses of description, one of limit, two of prayer. The description works by a single image held from two sides: those who trust are like the mountain, and the mountain is itself ringed by mountains, so the psalm gets from geology to protection without arguing for it. Verse 3 then admits what the first two verses seemed to deny, that a rod of wickedness can lie on the land of the righteous, and restricts only its duration. Verses 4 and 5 turn the description into two requests pointing opposite ways, and the final phrase steps outside both.
רמז · Remez: allusion
יִמּוֹט (yi-mot, v.1) and the corresponding word in Psalm 93 verse 1 are the same verb, not be shaken, said there of the world and here of the person who trusts, which is the whole comparison in one root. שֵׁבֶט (she-vet, v.3) is the ordinary word for a rod or a sceptre, and also the word for a tribe, so it carries both the beating and the authority that permits it. גּוֹרַל (go-ral, v.3) is the lot, the word for land assigned by casting lots, so what the rod rests on is not property but an allotment, something received rather than earned. עֲקַלְקַלּוֹתָם (a-kal-ka-lo-tam, v.5) occurs nowhere else in the book: a reduplicated form of the root for crooked, so the ways are not merely bent but bent and bent again. אֶת (et, v.5) is disputed. Read as the object marker it makes the crooked ones and the workers of wrong one group; read as the preposition with, which is how most translations take it here, it makes them two groups sent off together.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The reasoning of verse 3 is the part that gets discussed, because it does not say oppression will end for the sake of the oppressed. It says it will end so that the righteous do not stretch out their hands to wrongdoing, which treats sustained injustice as corrosive to the people enduring it, and reads the limit as protection of their integrity rather than of their comfort. The final phrase has been read two ways that both survive in use: as a blessing pronounced over the whole people once the sorting of verses 4 and 5 is done, and as a liturgical closing that turns a psalm about two classes into a prayer for one nation. The same three words end Psalm 128, and those two verses are the only places in the book where they appear.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading takes the two circles of verse 2 as one figure drawn twice. The hills around Jerusalem are visible and fixed, and the surrounding named in the second half is neither, so the verse teaches how to read the invisible from the visible rather than instead of it. Trust in הַבֹּטְחִים (ha-bot-chim, v.1) is a participle, a continuous action and not a decision made once, which is why the psalm can compare a person to a mountain without claiming that the person is strong. On this reading verse 3 describes a limit built into the structure itself: the rod may pass over the allotment but cannot take up residence on it, because what is allotted was never the rod's to hold.
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).