Twenty-one verses, one for each letter the psalm actually uses. It runs alef to tav in order and skips one letter: no verse begins with nun, so the mem verse at 13 is followed straight away by the samekh verse at 14. Said three times a day in the liturgy, where it is called Ashrei after the two verses fixed to its front and closed with a verse borrowed from Psalm 115. There is no enemy addressed here, no complaint and no request. The only people in it who come to harm appear in the last four words of verse 20.
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This is the only psalm in the book whose heading calls it a praise, which is the word the whole collection is named after. The acrostic begins at the third word, and the first thing said is a title: my God the King.
The commitment is made twice over, once as a daily habit and once as an endless span. The second half of the verse repeats the second half of verse 1 with a single word changed, bless becoming praise.
Praise is stated and then declared impossible to finish, in the same breath. The remaining eighteen verses proceed anyway, which is the psalm's method rather than a contradiction in it.
One generation shall commend your works to the next,
וּגְבוּרֹתֶיךָ
ug-vu-ro-tei-CHA
and your mighty acts
יַגִּידוּ
ya-gi-DU
they shall declare
and shall declare your mighty acts.
Praise is handed on rather than produced. From here to verse 12 nearly every verb is a speaking verb, and the speakers keep changing between the one voice and everybody.
They shall pour out the memory of your great goodness,
וְצִדְקָתְךָ
ve-tzid-kat-CHA
and your righteousness
יְרַנֵּנוּ
ye-ra-ne-NU
they shall sing
and sing aloud of your righteousness.
Memory here carries the sense of reputation, what gets said about someone when he is not in the room. The verb for pouring out is used of water and of speech that cannot be held back.
The formula from Exodus 34, quoted in the shortened form that recurs across the prophets and the psalms. Here it is given as the ground of the praise rather than, as usually happens, as a plea for mercy.
9
טוֹב יְהֹוָה לַכֹּל
וְרַחֲמָיו עַל כׇּל מַעֲשָׂיו
טוֹב
tov
good is
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
לַכֹּל
la-KOL
to all
The LORD is good to all,
וְרַחֲמָיו
ve-ra-cha-MAV
and his mercies
עַל
al
are over
כׇּל
kol
all
מַעֲשָׂיו
ma-a-SAV
his works
and his mercies are over all his works.
The word all enters here and does not leave the psalm again. From this verse the subject is the reach of the care rather than its intensity.
Two choirs are set side by side, everything that was made and the people who keep faith, and they are given parallel verbs. Nothing in the line ranks one above the other.
Kingdom appears as a noun for the first time and the vocabulary turns political. Glory, might, dominion: this is the language of a royal court, applied to the God addressed as King in verse 1.
The purpose clause the last eight verses were waiting for. All that telling has an audience, and the audience is not God: it is people who would otherwise not know.
The kingship claim at full extent, measured in time rather than in territory. Some manuscripts and ancient versions carry an extra line at this point, beginning with the letter the psalm otherwise skips.
The first verse in which God does something for people in trouble. Both verbs are participles, so the holding up and the straightening are ongoing rather than finished events.
Every creature is facing the same direction and waiting. The rare verb in the fourth word is the one used for watching out for something you expect to arrive.
The verse the liturgy singles out of the whole psalm. A hand opens and everything alive is filled, and the last word is not food but favour, so what arrives is more than what was needed.
Two words used throughout the psalms to describe good people are turned around and used of God, and each is qualified by in all, which is the harder claim of the two.
The one place the psalm narrows. The first half says all who call, the second half repeats it and adds a condition, and the condition is about the caller rather than about what is asked for.
Three verbs in a row, and the order is strange: the desire is done, and only afterwards the cry is heard. The word for desire is the same word translated favour at the end of verse 16.
The single hard clause in the psalm, placed one verse from the end. Both halves are built the same way, so keeping and destroying are set out in one line as two applications of the same attention.
and let all flesh bless his holy name for ever and ever.
The mouth of verse 1 returns and then opens outward: my mouth, then all flesh. The final two words are the ones that ended verses 1 and 2, so the psalm closes on the phrase it began with.
♦ 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
An alphabet used as an argument. Each verse takes the next letter and adds one item to a single claim: this King is great, and his greatness is exercised as care. The first half is about speech, who does it and to whom, and the hinge is verse 12, which finally states that the point of all the telling is that people should know. From verse 14 the psalm stops describing praise and starts describing what is being praised: the fallen held up, everything alive fed, nearness to whoever calls. The sequence is not complete. Twenty-one verses carry twenty-one letters, alef through tav in order, and no verse begins with nun; the mem verse at מַלְכוּתְךָ (mal-chut-cha, v.13) is followed immediately by the samekh verse at סוֹמֵךְ (so-mech, v.14).
רמז · Remez: allusion
The gap falls between מַלְכוּתְךָ (mal-chut-cha, v.13) and סוֹמֵךְ (so-mech, v.14). A copy of this psalm found at Qumran carries a line in exactly that position beginning with the missing letter, and the Greek and Syriac versions carry a matching line, usually rendered as God is faithful in his words and gracious in all his deeds. Whether that line fell out of the text the Masoretes preserved or was supplied later by someone completing the alphabet is disputed, and the manuscripts on their own do not settle it. One detail worth weighing either way: the supplied line closes with the same three words that close the tsadi verse here, וְחָסִיד (ve-cha-sid, v.17) to מַעֲשָׂיו (ma-a-sav, v.17). On a smaller scale, אֶרֶךְ (e-rech, v.8) and אַפַּיִם (a-pa-yim, v.8) read literally as long of nostrils, the Hebrew idiom for a slow temper, which is why the phrase cannot be put into English without losing the face it is describing.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The Talmud in tractate Berakhot asks straight out why this psalm has no nun verse, and answers that the letter would have started the word for falling, which is not something an alphabet of praise was going to carry. The same passage then points at the verse that does follow, סוֹמֵךְ (so-mech, v.14), which opens with the samekh of upholding: the fall is left unwritten and the holding up is written in its place. That passage is also where the practice of saying this psalm three times a day is grounded, and it singles out one verse as the reason, פּוֹתֵחַ (po-te-ach, v.16) to יָדֶךָ (ya-de-cha, v.16), you open your hand. The codes take that seriously enough to rule that a person who says the psalm without attending to that verse says it again.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Read as a ladder, the psalm climbs from one mouth to all flesh, and the rungs are the letters. Kabbalistic reading treats the alphabet as the set of instruments the world was made with, so an alphabetical psalm is the whole toolkit turned back toward its owner. That makes the absent letter the point rather than a defect: the one thing the instruments are not used to spell is the fall, and the psalm passes it in silence and goes straight to the verse about holding people up. The open hand is read in the same key, as the standard image for an outflow that is not measured against the worth of what receives it, which is why the verse can say every living thing and leave it unqualified.
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).