The first of the five psalms that close the book, each of which opens and closes with Halleluyah, and the one you will meet earliest in practice: it is said every morning in Pesukei deZimra. Ten verses, and the middle of them is a run of participles, each naming something God is doing right now rather than something done once. Three of those lines are also morning blessings said on waking: He opens the eyes of the blind, He straightens the bent, He frees the bound. Learn the participle here and a large part of the siddur opens up.
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1
הַלְלוּ יָהּ
הַלְלִי נַפְשִׁי אֶת יְהֹוָה
הַלְלוּ
hal-LU
praise, all of you
יָהּ
yah
Yah
Halleluyah.
הַלְלִי
hal-LI
praise, you
נַפְשִׁי
naf-SHI
my soul
אֶת
et
the object marker
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
Praise the LORD, O my soul.
The psalm turns on itself in the first line. The command is given in the plural, then repeated at once in the singular to a single listener, the speaker's own soul.
The hinge of the psalm, and it is a warning rather than a claim about God. Trust is treated as a finite thing, so the only question is where it gets placed.
Three clauses about the same instant. What perishes is not the body, which the verse has already dealt with, but the planning, which was the part that looked durable.
Happy is the one who has the God of Jacob as his help,
שִׂבְרוֹ
siv-RO
his hope
עַל
al
is upon
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
אֱלֹהָיו
e-lo-HAV
his God
whose hope is on the LORD his God.
The answer to the warning is not an instruction to trust but a description of someone who already does. Help and hope are two different words here, and the verse names both.
The credentials start at the largest possible scale, then land on something that is not a scale at all. Keeping faith is listed in the same breath as making the sea.
The verse that supplies three lines of the morning blessings. Each clause has the identical shape: the name, a participle, and a group defined by what has gone wrong with them.
The three vulnerable of Deuteronomy, then a fourth clause running the other way. The last verb is the opposite of the one used in verse 8: what straightens the bent bends the wicked.
The reign is stated flatly, then narrowed to one city and stretched across generations. The final word is the psalm's first word, which closes the frame.
♦ 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 a frame with an argument inside it. Verses 1 and 10 are the same word, so the whole psalm sits between two Halleluyahs. Inside, verses 2 to 4 set up a problem about lifespan: I will praise as long as I live, and a man's life ends the day his breath goes out. Verse 5 answers with a beatitude, and verses 6 to 9 are its proof, a chain of participles that never once uses a past tense. That is the technical point of the psalm. A participle in Hebrew names an ongoing action, so the list is not history but a description of what is happening, which is exactly what a mortal patron cannot offer. The chain descends deliberately, from heaven and earth down to a specific hungry person and a specific prisoner.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verses 3 and 4 turn on a pair of words the ear catches immediately: אָדָם (a-dam, v.3), man, and לְאַדְמָתוֹ (le-ad-ma-to, v.4), his soil, which are the same three consonants with a prefix and a suffix. The line is Genesis 3:19 compressed into two verses, where the man made of soil goes back to it. עֶשְׁתֹּנֹתָיו (esh-to-no-tav, v.4), his plans, is a noun that appears nowhere else in the Bible; a verb that may come from the same root turns up in Jonah 1:6, where the sailors hope God will give them a thought. שִׂבְרוֹ (siv-ro, v.5) is not the usual word for hope either. It comes from a root of looking out for something, so the beatitude describes a posture of watching rather than a feeling. The last verb of verse 9, meaning to twist or make crooked, is the exact reverse of זֹקֵף (zo-kef, v.8), to straighten, and putting them in adjacent verses is not an accident.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Three clauses of this psalm are said aloud every morning before anything else, as blessings on waking: פֹּקֵחַ (po-ke-ach, v.8) over opening the eyes, זֹקֵף (zo-kef, v.8) over standing up, מַתִּיר (ma-tir, v.7) over the body being loosed from sleep. The blessings read the psalm's list of the afflicted as a description of a person getting out of bed, so the difference between a prisoner and a sleeper becomes a matter of degree. יִמְלֹךְ (yim-loch, v.10) closes the Kedushah, where it is said standing, so the verse that ends the psalm also ends the congregation's declaration of holiness. The triad of verse 9, stranger, orphan and widow, is the standard legal grouping of Deuteronomy, people with no family structure behind them, and the psalm puts God in the position the family would have occupied.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The psalm names two of the words for the inner person and puts them at opposite ends of its argument. The soul addressed in verse 1 is the one commanded to praise; the breath that leaves in verse 4 is a different word, the one that returns upward while the body returns to soil. Between them sits the question of what a person is for the length of a life. The reading that follows from this takes the descending chain of verses 6 to 9 as a description of divine attention narrowing from the whole created order down to one bent back, and understands the bent and the blind and the bound as conditions of the soul before they are conditions of the body. The reign announced at the end is then not a later event but the state that the whole list has been describing all along.
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).