Ten verses, an evening prayer, and the verse everyone knows is the second: let my prayer stand as incense before You, my lifted palms as the evening offering. What is unusual is what the speaker asks for first. Most psalms of this shape ask to be protected from enemies; this one asks to be protected from becoming one, with a guard posted on his own mouth and a request not to sit down at their table. Then verses 5 to 7 fall apart. They are among the hardest Hebrew in the book, the standard translations disagree with each other line by line, and the honest reading says so instead of smoothing them. Verses 8 to 10 come back to plain language and to the imagery of traps.
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All urgency: four verbs of appeal in two short lines, with the calling stated at the start and repeated at the end so the verse closes where it opened.
to busy myself with wicked deeds beside men who work iniquity,
וּבַל
u-VAL
and let not
אֶלְחַם
el-CHAM
me eat
בְּמַנְעַמֵּיהֶם
be-man-a-MEI-hem
of their delicacies
and let me not taste their delicacies.
The longest verse, and the danger moves outward in stages: the heart leans, then the deeds are shared, then he is eating at their table. The last item is the smallest and the most concrete.
Their judges were flung down by the hands of the rock,
וְשָׁמְעוּ
ve-sham-U
and they heard
אֲמָרַי
a-ma-RAI
my words
כִּי
ki
that
נָעֵמוּ
na-e-MU
they were sweet
and they heard my words, that they were sweet.
One of the most obscure verses in the book. Judges, a rock and sweet words are all there, and how the three connect is not recoverable with any confidence.
Like someone cleaving and splitting open the ground,
נִפְזְרוּ
nif-ze-RU
were scattered
עֲצָמֵינוּ
a-tza-mei-NU
our bones
לְפִי
le-FI
at the mouth of
שְׁאוֹל
she-OL
Sheol
our bones are scattered at the mouth of Sheol.
Scattered bones at the mouth of Sheol, introduced by a comparison whose subject is never stated. The plural our arrives here without warning and does not return.
Let the wicked fall into his own nets, all of them together,
אָנֹכִי
a-no-CHI
I myself
עַד
ad
while
אֶעֱבוֹר
e-e-VOR
I pass by
while I myself pass by.
The trap is turned around, and the closing word is not triumph but passage. He wants to get past, not to win.
♦ 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
The shape is clear even where the words are not. Verses 1 and 2 ask to be heard and set the standard for being heard, the evening service. Verses 3 and 4 ask for restraint, first on the mouth, then on the heart, then on the company kept and the food eaten with it. Verses 5 to 7 are the obscure centre. Verses 8 to 10 return to plain Hebrew and to hunting imagery: eyes lifted, refuge taken, traps, snares, nets. The unusual thing is the direction of the first request. Most psalms of this kind ask for protection from enemies; this one starts by asking for protection against joining them, and only reaches the enemies at the end.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verses 5 to 7 are among the hardest Hebrew in the book, and the translations in circulation differ so widely that they cannot all be renderings of the same understood text. At שֶׁמֶן (she-men, v.5) oil of the head can be choice oil or oil for anointing. The verb at יָנִי (ya-ni, v.5) has no securely identified root and is often emended. At בִידֵי (vi-dei, v.6) the phrase reads by the hands of a rock, which is not idiomatic Hebrew for anything, and the subject, their judges, arrives after the verb. Verse 7 opens with a comparison whose subject is left unstated and ends with עֲצָמֵינוּ (a-tza-mei-nu, v.7), our bones, a first person plural found nowhere else in the psalm. Editors have proposed reconstructions and none has won agreement. The description that fits the evidence is that the text here may be damaged. What survives clearly is the vocabulary: kindness, rebuke, oil, prayer, judges, sweetness, bones, Sheol. The links between them do not.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 2 is the verse the psalm is known by, and the reading that made it famous is that a prayer can occupy the slot an offering occupied. The incense of Exodus is burned in the morning and at dusk, and the daily offering has its second lamb toward evening, so the two halves of the verse point at the two evening acts of the sanctuary and pair them with two human ones, speech and lifted hands. Hosea makes the same move in chapter 14 with the words of the lips in place of bulls. Verse 3 has been taken in the other direction, not as substitution but as ethics: a guard is asked for the mouth in the same breath in which the mouth is offered, so the organ that prays is also the one that has to be watched. Read together the two verses make speech both the offering and the risk.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The choice of incense rather than a slaughtered animal carries the mystical reading. Incense leaves nothing behind, no meal and no hide, and the whole of it goes up as smoke, which makes it the offering that matches a prayer nobody hears. The lifted palms of כַּפַּי (ka-pai, v.2) are the body copying that motion. Evening is associated in kabbalistic writing with judgement rather than with kindness, and an evening prayer therefore asks to be received rather than to be granted. That is why every request in this psalm is a restraint: guard the mouth, do not incline the heart, do not pour out the soul, keep me from the trap. Even the last verse asks only for passage, אֶעֱבוֹר (e-e-vor, v.10), and not for a victory.
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).