Five verses, the only Song of Ascents attached to Solomon, and the only one in the group that argues instead of praising. The first two verses are about effort that comes to nothing, and they turn on one word repeated three times that means emptiness or futility. The last three are about children, which is what the psalm offers as the thing that does get built. Whether the two halves began as one poem is disputed; they are joined by the ordinary Hebrew word for a house, which means a building in verse 1 and a household everywhere after. Verse 2 ends with one of the more contested lines in the book: it can be read as He gives His beloved sleep, or as He gives to His beloved while he sleeps, and the difference decides what kind of consolation the psalm is offering.
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The thesis, stated twice in the same shape: a condition about God, then a verdict of emptiness on the human work. Building and guarding are the two things a settlement needs, and both are handed upward in the same breath.
The argument moves from institutions to a person's day. Rising early and sitting late are the two ends of overwork, and what is eaten between them is called the bread of pain, not the bread of effort.
The turn. What was called futile is not replaced by nothing but by children, and both nouns in the verse are transactional: an inherited portion and a wage. Neither is something a person can work harder to obtain.
The simile is military rather than domestic. Arrows exist to be released, so the image already contains the children leaving the hand that holds them, which is the point of having them early.
Happy is the man who has filled his quiver with them.
לֹא
lo
not
יֵבֹשׁוּ
ye-vo-SHU
they will be put to shame
כִּי
ki
when
They will not be put to shame
יְדַבְּרוּ
ye-dab-RU
they speak
אֶת
et
with
אוֹיְבִים
oi-VIM
enemies
בַּשָּׁעַר
ba-sha-AR
in the gate
when they speak with enemies in the gate.
The reward becomes concrete, and it is not affection. The gate is where legal cases were heard, so what the psalm counts as the payoff is having people beside you in a dispute.
♦ 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 halves that share a subject. Verses 1 and 2 say that building, guarding and overwork produce nothing on their own; verses 3 to 5 say what does arrive, and it arrives as a gift rather than as a wage earned. The bridge between them is the word house, which in verse 1 is a structure with builders and in verse 3 becomes a family, since Hebrew uses the same noun for both. Read that way the psalm is not two poems awkwardly joined but one argument that changes what it means by the word it started with. The word for emptiness appears three times, twice in verse 1 and once at the head of verse 2, and each time it is placed first in its clause, before the work it is about to cancel.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verse 2 is the crux. The last word, שֵׁנָא (she-na, v.2), is spelled with a final aleph, a spelling found nowhere else for the ordinary noun meaning sleep, and how it functions in the sentence is disputed: as a direct object it gives He grants sleep to His beloved, and read adverbially it gives He grants to His beloved while asleep. The two readings turn the verse into different arguments, one about rest and one about effortless provision, and both are current. There is also a name buried in the line. The word לִידִידוֹ (li-di-do, v.2), His beloved, is built on the same root as Yedidyah, the name Nathan gives Solomon in 2 Samuel 12:25, and the heading of this psalm names Solomon. In verse 5 note that the particle אֶת (et, v.5) looks identical to the object marker at אֶת (et, v.5) but is the preposition meaning with, which is why the sons speak with enemies rather than speaking them.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Solomon built the house in Jerusalem, and the tradition has generally read the house of verse 1 as that one, which makes the opening line something close to self criticism attributed to the builder himself. The word carries a second sense in the same breath, since a house in Hebrew is also a dynasty, and both of Solomon's houses were promised to him rather than achieved. Verse 2 has had a long life outside the psalm as an argument against anxious labour, and the emphasis it usually receives falls on the futility rather than on the sleep. The psalm never says that work is worthless, only that work without the condition in verse 1 is empty, and the difference between those two claims is where most of the commentary lives.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading works from the two verbs of verse 1, building and keeping, and treats them as the two operations that any vessel requires: it has to be made, and then it has to be held. Human effort can perform both and neither will hold without what is above them, which is why the verse gives the same verdict twice. Sleep in verse 2 is then not an image of laziness but of the one state in which a person stops adding to himself, and the reading takes it as the condition for receiving anything at all. Children in verse 3 are the plainest case of that, since nothing in the process is earned by the one who receives them, and the arrows of verse 4 make the point again from the other side: the value of a thing you are given is that it leaves.
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).