Six verses, and the last of them ends the book: Psalm 150 is the doxology that closes the fifth and final book of Tehilim and the whole collection with it. That is why there is no petition in it, no history and no complaint. The root for praise occurs thirteen times in thirty-seven words. It is said every morning as the last of the six psalms of Pesukei deZimra. Two things to watch: the four-letter name never appears, only the short Yah and El, and the prefix on the instruments is the same two-letter preposition every time, showing up as be, bi and vi depending on the sound that follows, doing the work of both with and in. The one exception is in verse 2, where a different prefix gives according to.
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Two locations named before a single instrument is, one on the ground and one above it. The divine names here are the short Yah and El, and the four-letter name appears nowhere in the psalm.
The only verse that says why. Everything after it says how. Two grounds are given, a list of things done and an attribute that was never done, and they are not ranked.
The instruments begin, and they begin with the one that is not musical. The horn is a signal blown in single blasts, and it is placed ahead of the strings rather than among them.
The only verse containing something that is not an instrument. Dance sits in the middle of a list of things you play, which quietly makes the body one of them.
Cymbals twice, with two different words for the noise they make. This is the loudest point in the psalm and it is placed immediately before the quietest.
6
כֹּל הַנְּשָׁמָה תְּהַלֵּל יָהּ
הַלְלוּ יָהּ
כֹּל
kol
every
הַנְּשָׁמָה
han-sha-MA
the breath
תְּהַלֵּל
te-ha-LEL
let it praise
יָהּ
yah
Yah
Let every breathing thing praise Yah.
הַלְלוּ
hal-LU
praise
יָהּ
yah
Yah
Praise Yah.
The last verse of the last psalm, and it puts the instruments down. What is required at the end is breath, which is the one thing every listener already has and nobody had to acquire.
♦ 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
Six verses and no argument in any of them. Verse 1 gives the where, verse 2 the why, verses 3 to 5 the how, verse 6 the who. The how is a list of instruments in pairs, one pair per half-verse, running through the whole ensemble: horn, then harp and lyre, then drum and dance, then strings and pipe, then cymbals twice. Verse 6 then sets all of it aside, because nothing named in verses 3 to 5 is needed for כֹּל (kol, v.6) הַנְּשָׁמָה (han-sha-ma, v.6), every breathing thing, and the psalm closes on the two words it opened with, הַלְלוּ (hal-lu, v.6) יָהּ (yah, v.6). The count of instruments depends on decisions the text does not make for you: whether וּמָחוֹל (u-ma-chol, v.4) is an instrument or a movement, and whether the two cymbals of verse 5 are two kinds or one kind named twice.
רמז · Remez: allusion
הַנְּשָׁמָה (han-sha-ma, v.6) is the word for breath and it is also the word for the soul, and the verse works because Hebrew does not separate them. Read as breathing thing it means everything alive; read as soul it means every soul, and the line is doing both at once. A reading repeated widely in later literature takes the phrase distributively, every breath rather than every breather, so that praise is owed once per inhalation, and what makes that reading possible is the noun itself and not anything added to it. Two of the instruments are uncertain. בְּמִנִּים (be-mi-nim, v.4) is usually rendered strings and וְעֻגָב (ve-u-gav, v.4) pipe, but both are rare and the identifications are inferred from context rather than known. שָׁמַע (sha-ma, v.5) and תְרוּעָה (te-ru-a, v.5) are two words for cymbal noise, and whether they name two instruments or two ways of striking one is not decidable from the text.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The psalm is treated as a summary of the book it closes. Where earlier psalms complain, accuse, remember and bargain, this one only commands, and the traditional reading of that is not that the trouble was resolved but that the book has run out of things to say that are not praise. The instruments have been read as a catalogue of ways to serve, with the horn as the one requiring no training and the strings as the one requiring years, so that the beginner and the expert end up in consecutive verses with the same imperative over both. The last verse is read as the widest statement in the book: the condition for praising is not knowledge, not lineage and not innocence. It is breath.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Verse 1 names two locations, a holy place and an expanse of strength, and mystical readings take them as the lower sanctuary and the upper one, so the psalm stands in both from its first line. The thirteen occurrences of the root for praise are counted and given weight, and the instruments are read as the range of created things, each producing a different sound out of the same air or the same string. The end is the argument. Breath is what is given at the beginning of the human story and it is what is asked for at the last verse of the book, which makes the ending a return rather than a conclusion. The final two words are the two the psalm began with, so the collection closes by handing the reader an instruction and no more text in which to carry it out.
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).