PSALM 19

    ¹To the lead player. A David psalm.

    ²The heavens tell God’s glory,

          and His handiwork sky declares.

    ³Day to day breathes utterance

          and night to night pronounces knowledge.

    ⁴There is no utterance and there are no words,

          their voice is never heard.

    ⁵Through all the earth their voice goes out,

          to the world’s edge, their words.

    For the sun He set up a tent in them—

          ⁶and he like a groom from his canopy comes,

                exults like a warrior running his course.

    ⁷From the ends of the heavens his going out

          and his circuit to their ends,

                and nothing can hide from his heat.

    ⁸The LORD’s teaching is perfect,

          restoring to life.

    The LORD’s pact is steadfast,

          it makes the fool wise.

    ⁹The LORD’s precepts are upright,

          delighting the heart.

    The LORD’s command unblemished,

          giving light to the eyes.

    ¹⁰The LORD’s fear is pure,

          outlasting all time.

    The LORD’s judgments are truth,

          all of them just.

    ¹¹More desired than gold,

          than abundant fine gold,

    and sweeter than honey,

          quintessence of bees.

    ¹²Your servant, too, takes care with them.

          In keeping them—great reward.

    ¹³Unwitting sins who can grasp?

          Of unknown actions clear me.

    ¹⁴From willful men preserve Your servant,

          let them not rule over me.

    Then shall I be blameless

          and clear of great crime.

    ¹⁵Let my mouth’s utterances be pleasing

          and my heart’s stirring before You,

                LORD, my rock and redeemer.

PSALM 19 NOTES

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2. The heavens tell God’s glory. The locus of contemplation of the speaker in this poem resembles that of the speaker in Psalm 8: he contemplates the splendid design of the heavens overhead and sees in it a manifestation of God’s beautiful work as creator. But the imagery and the movement of cosmic vision here immediately swerve in a very different direction from that of Psalm 8.

3. Day to day . . . / night to night. In the complementary parallelism of this line, we get a sense that the splendor of the creation is steadily manifested through the whole diurnal cycle, from the brilliance of sunlight to the lovely illumination of moon and stars. But as the poem proceeds, it focuses on the sun.

breathes. The literal, or at least etymological, sense of the Hebrew verb yabiʿa is to “well forth,” though it is used a few times in the biblical corpus in the extended sense of “express,” the meaning it bears in postbiblical Hebrew.

4. There is no utterance and there are no words. This seeming contradiction of verses 3 and 4 is, of course, only the underlining of a moving paradox. The heavens speak, but it is a wordless language, what the great twentieth-century Hebrew poet H. N. Bialik, in a poem akin to this one, would call “the language of images.” Thus the psalmist can go on from this affirmation of speechlessness and silence to the declaration in the next verse of speech going out to the ends of the earth.

5. For the sun He set up a tent in them. The poet now proceeds to a grandly mythological image of the sun—residing in a celestial pavilion, emerging from it at dawn like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, and then, in a switch of imagery, racing across the sky to the west like a warrior dashing across the battlefield. Some interpreters have viewed this section of the poem as a pagan hymn to a solar deity simply borrowed by the monotheistic poet from a poem written in Egypt by Judahites or Samaritans influenced by Egyptian religion. It makes better sense to view it as a monotheistic adaptation of mythological imagery. (The contemporary American scholar Nahum Sarna even suggests it may be a polemic against paganism.) Because the only plausible antecedent for the verb “set up” is God, the poet does seem to be saying that it is God who has ordained the circuit of the sun, and that the images in which we cast this daily celestial road of light—the bridegroom emerging from his canopy, the warrior racing on his way—are but poetic expressions of how the heavens tell God’s glory day after day.

7. and nothing can hide from his heat. The Hebrew conceals a neat pun, for the word that means “heat,” ḥamah, is also another name for the sun.

8. The LORD’s teaching is perfect. With these words, the psalm switches gears, from a celebration of the splendor of the heavens to praise for the life-sustaining perfection of God’s commandments. There has been some debate among scholars as to whether in fact Psalm 19 might be a splicing together of two unrelated poems belonging to different genres. Because cut and paste is a standard technique of literary composition in the Bible, one can say minimally that the redactor—or, perhaps, redactor-poet—saw the two parts of the poem as constituting a single whole. Sarna, pursuing the idea of a polemic response to pagan solar poetry, notes that the sun god, Shamash, is often associated with justice and truth or enlightenment. (In the Greek tradition, precisely this linkage appears in the figure of Apollo.) This poem, Sarna proposes, is a pointed transference of those attributes from the sun god to YHWH, the one God.

11. More desired than gold, / . . . and sweeter than honey. Until this point, the general quality of perfection of God’s teaching and its restorative force have been stressed. But with the images of this verse, the divine precepts are represented as sensually luscious—an object of desire and a source of sweetness.

quintessence of bees. Both halves of this compound term for honey, nofet and tsufim, mean “honey.” As elsewhere in biblical usage, when two synonyms are combined, as here, in a construct form (“x of y”), the semantic effect is to create a hyperintensification—the sweetest of imaginable honeys. The English equivalent offered here may sound like a turn of phrase one might encounter in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but it offers a good semantic match for the Hebrew.

13. Unwitting sins. The speaker, having affirmed the supreme value of God’s commandments, is impelled to confess that, even with the best of intentions, an imperfect human being can scarcely be sure of never having violated any of them. So he requests God’s indulgence for any unwitting transgressions of the laws he holds dear.

15. Let my mouth’s utterances. This verse forms an apt formal coda to the psalm, or at least to its second half, and has appropriately been adopted as the conclusion to the silent prayer recited three times daily in Jewish worship.

my heart’s stirring. The root of the noun higayon suggests murmuring (the same verb prominently used in Psalm 1), but that English term is avoided here because of the unfortunate suggestion of cardiac irregularity.