Fifteen verses in two halves that barely look like the same poem: a soldier's petition in verses 1 to 11, then a picture of sons, daughters, granaries and flocks in verses 12 to 15. The first half is assembled out of lines from Psalm 18 and a question borrowed from Psalm 8, which makes this a good page for seeing how a psalm can be built from older psalms. The last verse is the one every learner already knows by ear: it is the second line of Ashrei, said three times a day, paired there with a verse from Psalm 84. Watch the two verbs of verse 7, rescue me and deliver me, because verse 11 repeats them and the repetition is what holds the petition together.
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My faithful love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer,
לִי
li
for me
מָגִנִּי
ma-gi-NI
my shield
וּבוֹ
u-VO
and in Him
חָסִיתִי
cha-si-TI
I have taken refuge
my shield, and in Him I take refuge,
הָרוֹדֵד
ha-ro-DED
who subdues
עַמִּי
a-MI
my people
תַחְתָּי
tach-TAI
under me
who subdues my people under me.
Six titles stacked before the first finite verb arrives. Every one of them is defensive architecture except the first, which is why the first is the hard one.
After six titles for God, one flat question about the man saying them. The turn is abrupt on purpose: the fortress language of verse 2 has just made the speaker very small.
4
אָדָם לַהֶבֶל דָּמָה
יָמָיו כְּצֵל עוֹבֵר
אָדָם
a-DAM
a human being
לַהֶבֶל
la-HE-vel
to a breath
דָּמָה
da-MA
is like
A human being is like a breath,
יָמָיו
ya-MAV
his days
כְּצֵל
ktzel
are like a shadow
עוֹבֵר
o-VER
passing
his days are like a passing shadow.
The answer to the question, and it is not flattering. Breath and moving shadow are the standard pair for a life that leaves no mark.
The mood switches to command. Storm theophany language, taken from the older poems, aimed at a present emergency by a man who has just called himself a shadow.
Lightning as arrows, in a strict parallel: one weapon per line, one verb of dispersal per line. The trained hands of verse 1 are not what is being counted on here.
Water and foreigners land in the same breath, so chaos and enemy are one category. The pair of verbs here returns word for word in verse 11 and frames the whole petition.
The vow of praise arrives before the rescue does, which is the normal shape of a petition psalm. Nothing has happened yet and the instrument is already named.
who sets David His servant free from the evil sword.
The speaker names himself in the third person and calls himself a servant, which is how a king speaks about himself in a royal inscription rather than how a man speaks in prayer.
Set me free and deliver me from the hand of foreigners,
אֲשֶׁר
A-sher
whose
פִּיהֶם
PI-hem
their mouth
דִּבֶּר
DI-ber
has spoken
שָׁוְא
shav
falsehood
whose mouth speaks falsehood,
וִימִינָם
vi-mi-NAM
and their right hand
יְמִין
ye-MIN
is a right hand of
שָׁקֶר
SHA-ker
a lie
and whose right hand is a right hand of lies.
Verses 7 and 8 repeated almost exactly, with the many waters dropped. The repetition is structural: it shuts the petition and lets something else begin.
so that our sons are like saplings grown tall in their youth,
בְּנוֹתֵינוּ
bno-tei-NU
our daughters
כְזָוִיֹּת
che-za-vi-YOT
like corner pillars
מְחֻטָּבוֹת
me-chu-ta-VOT
carved
תַּבְנִית
tav-NIT
in the pattern of
הֵיכָל
hei-CHAL
a palace
our daughters like corner pillars carved for a palace.
The subject changes without warning, from a single fighter to a household, and the pronoun goes from me to our. This is the verse where the psalm stops being a petition.
our granaries full, supplying every kind of store,
צֹאונֵנוּ
tzo-vne-NU
our flocks
מַאֲלִיפוֹת
ma-a-li-FOT
bringing forth thousands
מְרֻבָּבוֹת
mru-ba-VOT
bringing forth ten thousands
בְּחוּצוֹתֵינוּ
be-chu-tzo-tei-NU
in our open fields
our flocks bringing forth thousands and ten thousands in our fields,
Blessing counted in reserves rather than in harvests: food already stored, animals already multiplying. Almost every noun in this verse is rare, which is one reason the section reads as a separate piece.
The verdict, then the correction. The first line could bless any prosperous nation, so the second line names what the prosperity is contingent on, and the two lines together became the opening of Ashrei.
♦ 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 joined by a word that will not quite hold them. Verses 1 to 11 are a king's war prayer: blessing, then the question of what a man is worth, then a demand that God come down with lightning, then the plea at מִמַּיִם (mi-ma-yim, v.7) to be pulled out of deep water and out of the hands of men who lie under oath, with verse 11 repeating that plea to close it. Verses 12 to 15 are something else entirely, a description of a household and a town at peace, with no petition in them and no enemy. The joint is אֲשֶׁר (a-sher, v.12), and it can be read as so that, giving the second half as the purpose of the rescue, or as a relative pronoun continuing the previous verse, which reads badly in Hebrew. Translators divide, and the division is visible in any two English Bibles set side by side.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The first half is largely quarried from older poems. The rock, the fortress, the stronghold, the deliverer and the shield of verse 2 are the same run of titles that opens Psalm 18, the bending of the heavens and the arrows of verses 5 and 6 come from the theophany in that same psalm, and the question at verse 3 is the question of Psalm 8:5 asked with two different verbs. The single word that will not settle is חַסְדִּי (chas-di, v.2). Read plainly it makes my faithful love a title for God, which occurs nowhere else in this bare form, and translators split between keeping it as an epithet and reading it as my faithful God. Two more. אַלּוּפֵינוּ (a-lu-fei-nu, v.14) is the word for a chief as well as for cattle, so the line is read either as our oxen are laden or as our leaders are burdened, and the choice changes the verse from an inventory to a complaint. And צֹאונֵנוּ (tzo-vne-nu, v.13) sits in a run of vocabulary so unusual that the last four verses are often treated as an independent composition attached here.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
אַשְׁרֵי (ash-rei, v.15) to the end of verse 15 is the second sentence of Ashrei, recited twice in the morning and once in the afternoon, where it is preceded by a verse from Psalm 84 and followed by Psalm 145. The effect of that placement is to make this line an introduction rather than a conclusion: a psalm that ends by naming the condition of happiness becomes, in the prayer book, the door into the psalm that describes it. The three negatives of verse 14 have also carried more than one reading. No going out is taken as no breaching of the walls and no exile, and also as nothing lost from the womb or the flock, since the verb is simply going out and the Hebrew does not specify. The readings diverge, and the text does not settle them.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading fastens on the instrument at verse 9: a new song on a harp of ten. Ten is the count of the sefirot, so the ten strings are read as the full set of channels through which anything is given, and a new song is the praise that the fixed order of prayer cannot carry, the part that has to be improvised because the situation has never happened before. Read that way the two halves of the psalm are one motion after all. צוּרִי (tzu-ri, v.1) calls God a rock, the hardest and least giving image in the language, and the psalm ends in granaries, flocks and children, which is what the rock turns into when it opens.
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).