A Song of Ascents about an ordinary house, read at weddings in many communities. It is the best short drill in the book for the second person masculine singular suffix, because after the opening verse almost every noun in it carries one: your palms, your wife, your house, your sons, your table, your life, your sons again. Count them and you have the whole paradigm. The psalm also moves outward in a straight line, from a pair of working hands to a table, then to Zion, Jerusalem, grandchildren and the nation, and the last three words are the same three that end Psalm 125.
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The opening word is the one the book of Psalms begins with, and it is a noun rather than an adjective, closer to the happinesses of than to happy. The subject is still general here, everyone, and it will narrow to a single you in the next verse.
The first thing said to the man directly, and it is about eating what he made. The word for happy now carries a suffix, the only time in the book it does, so the general blessing of verse 1 is handed to one person.
Your wife is like a fruiting vine in the recesses of your house;
בָּנֶיךָ
ba-nei-CHA
your sons
כִּשְׁתִלֵי
kish-ti-LEI
are like the saplings of
זֵיתִים
zei-TIM
olive trees
סָבִיב
sa-VIV
around
לְשֻׁלְחָנֶךָ
le-shul-cha-ne-CHA
your table
your sons like olive saplings around your table.
Two plants, and both of them are slow. A vine takes years to bear and an olive longer, so the picture of a full house is also a picture of time already spent. The table in the last word is where the two halves meet.
4
הִנֵּה כִי כֵן
יְבֹרַךְ גָּבֶר יְרֵא יְהֹוָה
הִנֵּה
hi-NE
behold
כִי
chi
indeed
כֵן
chen
thus
See, it is just so:
יְבֹרַךְ
ye-vo-RACH
shall be blessed
גָּבֶר
GA-ver
a man
יְרֵא
ye-RE
one who fears
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
a man who fears the LORD is blessed.
The psalm stops describing and points at what it has described. The phrase who fears the LORD comes back from verse 1 word for word, which closes the first half as a frame.
The house opens onto the city. The blessing is given a direction, out of Zion, and what the man is told to look at is not his own table any more but the welfare of a place he does not own.
6
וּרְאֵה בָנִים לְבָנֶיךָ
שָׁלוֹם עַל יִשְׂרָאֵל
וּרְאֵה
ur-E
and see
בָנִים
va-NIM
sons
לְבָנֶיךָ
le-va-nei-CHA
belonging to your sons
And may you see sons belonging to your sons.
שָׁלוֹם
sha-LOM
peace
עַל
al
upon
יִשְׂרָאֵל
yis-ra-EL
Israel
Peace upon Israel.
The same verb as the middle of verse 5, used a second time so that seeing the city and seeing grandchildren are one request. The last three words leave the household entirely and are not attached to it by any grammar.
♦ 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 with a hinge. Verses 1 to 3 describe: someone who fears the LORD, eats what his own hands made, and has a wife and children around a table. Verse 4 stops and points at it. Verses 5 and 6 turn from description into blessing, and the verbs change with them, from statements to wishes. The direction of the whole is outward: hands, food, house, table, Zion, Jerusalem, a second generation, Israel. Nothing in the psalm is extraordinary, and that is its argument, since what it calls blessed is a working man eating his own bread.
רמז · Remez: allusion
אַשְׁרֵי (ash-rei, v.1) is the word that opens the book of Psalms, and it is a plural noun in the construct rather than an adjective, so the line reads closer to the happinesses of everyone who fears than to happy is he. Its form with a suffix in אַשְׁרֶיךָ (ash-rei-cha, v.2) occurs nowhere else in the book. יְגִיעַ (ye-gi-a, v.2) is not work but the product of work, the toil itself put on the table, and כַּפֶּיךָ (ka-pei-cha, v.2) is the palms rather than the hands. גָּבֶר (ga-ver, v.4) is not the general word for a person but the one for a man in his strength, which is why some read verse 4 as narrowing the everyone of verse 1. בְּיַרְכְּתֵי (byar-ktei, v.3) means the innermost or furthest parts, and how to take it here is disputed: one reading hears a statement about a wife kept in the interior of the house, another simply locates the vine where vines were grown, against the inner wall of the courtyard, and the Hebrew supports either.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The psalm has long been used at weddings, and the reason is in verse 3 rather than in any legal content: it describes a household as something that grows and is measured in years rather than as a contract. The pairing of plants was noticed early, since a vine is trained and an olive is planted and left, and the two together cover both kinds of patience. Verse 2 draws its own comment because eating what your hands made is presented as a blessing rather than as a bare fact, which implies the ordinary case in which a man works and someone else eats it. On the closing phrase, the shift from a private table to the whole nation is abrupt, and the same three words close Psalm 125, the only other place in the book where they appear.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading follows the widening as a deliberate order. What is blessed first is the smallest and most private thing, a pair of palms, and the blessing is then said to come from Zion, a place outside the house entirely, so the flow is inward from a source and outward again in results. The wife inside the house and the children around the table are read as an interior that receives and an exterior that shows, which is the shape this literature gives to any vessel that works. Seeing in וּרְאֵה (ur-e, v.5) and וּרְאֵה (ur-e, v.6) is the same verb twice, and it is the only thing the man is asked to do in the second half: not build, not keep, only look at what is good in a place larger than his own house, and then at a generation he will not live inside.
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).