A Song of Ascents of eight verses, known everywhere by its first two words, out of the depths. It moves in four pairs: a cry, a question about sin, a wait, and then a promise made to the whole people rather than to the one speaking. Three different names for God appear in it, and the shortest of them, Yah, sits in the middle of the hardest verse. In many communities it is added to the morning service through the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and it is said for the sick and in trouble. The grammar to watch is verse 6, which contains no verb at all and borrows one from verse 5.
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The place is named before the one being called. The verb is a completed past, I have called and not I call, so the psalm opens after the cry rather than during it.
let Your ears be attentive to the sound of my pleading.
Two requests, the second longer and more careful than the first. Attentive is a state rather than an act, so what is asked for after the shout is not a reply but an open ear.
3
אִם עֲוֺנוֹת תִּשְׁמׇר יָהּ
אֲדֹנָי מִי יַעֲמֹד
אִם
im
if
עֲוֺנוֹת
a-o-NOT
iniquities
תִּשְׁמׇר
tish-MOR
You should keep
יָהּ
yah
Yah
If You kept a record of sins, Yah,
אֲדֹנָי
a-do-NAI
the Lord
מִי
mi
who
יַעֲמֹד
ya-a-MOD
could stand
Lord, who could stand?
The condition the rest of the psalm answers, and the verb is the ordinary one for guarding. Guard here means keep on file, so the question is about bookkeeping and the answer to it is nobody.
4
כִּי עִמְּךָ הַסְּלִיחָה
לְמַעַן תִּוָּרֵא
כִּי
ki
but
עִמְּךָ
im-CHA
with You
הַסְּלִיחָה
has-li-CHA
is the forgiveness
But with You there is the forgiveness,
לְמַעַן
le-ma-AN
so that
תִּוָּרֵא
ti-va-RE
You may be feared
so that You may be feared.
The pivot, and the hardest sentence in the psalm. Forgiveness is given as the cause of fear rather than its cure, which is the reverse of what the argument seems to be heading toward.
Three clauses and two different roots for waiting. The subject moves from I to my soul and back to I, which is one person described twice rather than two parties.
My soul is for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning,
שֹׁמְרִים
shom-RIM
watchmen
לַבֹּקֶר
la-BO-ker
for the morning
watchmen for the morning.
No verb anywhere in the verse. The waiting is carried across from verse 5, and then two words are repeated for no reason except duration, which is what a long night sounds like.
The address widens from one voice to a people. The reason given is not that the wait has ended but that the one waited on has supplies, which is a different kind of comfort.
8
וְהוּא יִפְדֶּה אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל
מִכֹּל עֲוֺנֹתָיו
וְהוּא
ve-HU
and He
יִפְדֶּה
yif-DE
will redeem
אֶת
et
the object marker
יִשְׂרָאֵל
yis-ra-EL
Israel
and He will redeem Israel
מִכֹּל
mi-KOL
from all
עֲוֺנֹתָיו
a-o-no-TAV
his iniquities
from all his iniquities.
Hope becomes a flat statement of what will happen. The word for iniquities is the same one as in verse 3, so what nobody could stand under at the start is the thing being redeemed from at the end.
♦ 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 pairs. Verses 1 and 2 are the cry and the request to be heard. Verses 3 and 4 are the problem and its answer, put as a question and a reason. Verses 5 and 6 are the wait, said once and then said again more slowly. Verses 7 and 8 turn outward and say the same thing about Israel that the speaker has been saying about himself. The movement is downward to upward and inward to outward at the same time, which is why it can be read as a private prayer and used as a public one. Note that nothing in the psalm is described as having happened. The rescue is still ahead in verse 8, and the only completed actions in the whole text are calling in verse 1 and waiting in verse 5.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The word in מִמַּעֲמַקִּים (mi-ma-a-ma-kim, v.1) is used elsewhere of deep water, so the depths are not a metaphor invented here but the ordinary word for where a drowning person is. קִוִּיתִי (ki-vi-ti, v.5) and קִוְּתָה (kiv-ta, v.5) are from the root kaf vav he, which gives the noun for hope and also words for a cord or line, so waiting in Hebrew is a taut thing rather than a passive one; הוֹחָלְתִּי (ho-chal-ti, v.5) is a second root entirely, and the verse uses both rather than repeating one. הַסְּלִיחָה (has-li-cha, v.4) carries the definite article, the forgiveness, so it is a specific possession and not a general disposition. תִּוָּרֵא (ti-va-re, v.4) is a passive, that You may be feared, and the logic of the verse is what makes it hard: three names for God appear across the psalm, and the shortest of them, יָהּ (yah, v.3), is placed inside the sentence about a record of sins.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 4 is the verse people argue with. If sins are forgiven, why would anyone fear? The reading the verse itself supports is that fear here is not fear of punishment: a system that only punishes produces calculation, and what produces awe is the discovery that the account could have been kept and was not. On that reading forgiveness is the more demanding of the two and the psalm has not softened anything. The other move worth watching is verse 7, where the speaker stops asking for himself and turns to Israel without having received an answer. The wait is not resolved before it is recommended to other people. In Christian use the psalm is one of the seven penitential psalms and is known by its Latin opening, de profundis; in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur many communities add it to the morning service, and the same eight verses do both jobs without adjustment.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
This is the eleventh of the fifteen Songs of Ascents, and the mystical reading takes the sequence as a climb, which makes the depths of verse 1 the bottom of it. The point that reading insists on is that the call comes from the depths rather than from a step already gained: nobody waits until they are higher to speak. Verse 6 supplies the image the tradition keeps returning to, watchmen at the end of a night shift, who do not make the sun rise and cannot hurry it, and whose whole work is to be awake when it does. The last verse gives the plural object, all his iniquities, so what began as one voice at the bottom ends as a whole people brought up, and the psalm never says when.
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).