1For the lead player, on shoshanim, for the Korahites, a maskil, a song of love.
2My heart is astir with a goodly word.
I speak what I’ve made to the king.
My tongue is the pen of a rapid scribe.
3You are loveliest of the sons of man,
grace flows from your lips.
Therefore has God blessed you forever.
4Gird your sword on your thigh, O warrior,
your glory and your grandeur.
5And in your grandeur pass onward,
mount on a word of truth, humility and justice,
and let your right hand shoot forth terrors,
6your sharpened arrows—
peoples fall beneath you—
into the heart of the king’s enemies.
7Your throne of God is forevermore.
A scepter of right, your kingship’s scepter.
8You loved justice and hated evil.
Therefore did God your God anoint you
with oil of joy over your fellows.
9Myrrh and aloes and cassia
all your garments.
From ivory palaces
10Princesses are your cherished ones,
the consort stands at your right in gold of Ophir.
11Listen, princess, and look, incline your ear,
and forget your people, and your father’s house.
12And let the king yearn for your beauty,
for he is your master,
and bow down to him.
13Daughter of Tyre, with tribute
the people’s wealthy will court your favor.
14All the princess’s treasure is pearls,
filigree of gold her raiment.
15In embroidered stuff she is led to the king,
maidens in train, her companions.
16They are led in rejoicing and gladness,
they enter the palace,
brought to you, king.
17In your fathers’ stead your sons will be.
You will set them as princes in all the land.
18Let me make your name heard in all generations.
Therefore do peoples acclaim you forevermore.
PSALM 45 NOTES
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1. on shoshanim. This is still another unknown musical term, though the literal meaning is “lilies.”
a song of love. This designation for a psalm occurs only here. This is a royal psalm, as the ensuing praise of the king’s beauty and his martial prowess makes clear. But what is distinctive about this among the royal psalms is that it appears to celebrate the king’s wedding, with a foreign princess (verses 10–16). That occasion would justify “a song of love,” shir yedidut, making this poem a kind of epithalamium.
2. My heart is astir with a goodly word. This psalm differs from all others in the canonical collection both rhetorically and stylistically. Only here do we have a poet who begins by celebrating his own art—a gesture that might well be appropriate for a court poet; he announces at the outset that his tongue is like the pen of a rapid—that is, skilled—scribe.
3. You are loveliest. The Hebrew verb yafyafita, formed from the adjective yafeh, “lovely,” is unique to this poem and looks like an elegant stylistic flourish suited to the celebratory language of the psalm.
4. Gird your sword. From loveliness and grace, the poem quickly moves on to military might, something the kings of the ancient Near East proverbially needed to exercise in order to maintain securely the grandeur of their courts even in times of peace, such as the wedding occasion for this poem.
5. pass onward. The verb tsalaḥ can also mean “to prosper,” but the juxtaposition with “mount” argues for its other use as a verb of motion.
7. Your throne of God. Some construe the Hebrew here to mean “Your throne, O God,” but it would be anomalous to have an address to God in the middle of the poem because the entire psalm is directed to the king or to his bride. Others emend the text to keep the throne unambiguously royal.
8. God your God. As elsewhere, this odd phrasing is the result of an editorial substitution of ʾelohim ʾelohekha for YHWH ʾelohekha.
9. lutes gladdened you. The Masoretic Text reads mini (“from”?), but minim, “lutes,” with the support of one ancient witness, makes the otherwise enigmatic verse entirely intelligible.
10. the consort. The Hebrew shegal is probably an Akkadian loanword. Other features of the poem’s style are archaic, and some commentators, given the wedding with a Tyrian princess (see verse 13), have been tempted to see the psalm as a product of Solomon’s court.
11. princess. The Hebrew says “daughter” (bat), but the context suggests that this is an ellipsis for bat melekh, “princess” because princesses have just been referred to in the plural as benot melakhim. The poet, having focused on the royal consort while still addressing the king (verse 10), now turns to the consort and addresses her directly.
12. And let the king yearn for your beauty, / for he is your master. This verse offers a capsule version of royal marriage in a patriarchal society. The bride provides the beauty, which rouses the king’s desire, but he is her master.
14. All the princess’s treasure is pearls. The Masoretic Text reads literally “all the princess’s treasure is inward,” which Jewish tradition has taken as a slogan for the virtuous wife’s conjugal modesty. But the immediately following word has a superfluous mem at the beginning. If one moves it back to the end of the previous word and inserts a second nun for the mem in the middle of the word, instead of penimah, “inward,” the consonantal text would read peninim, “pearls,” which makes more sense and a much better parallelism. There is also a syntactic problem here, because “princess” would have to be a vocative (“All the treasure, princess”), but because the royal bride is spoken of in the third person in the last half of the verse, the translation does not represent the vocative.
treasure. The Hebrew kevudah should be construed as a noun, “treasure,” not as an adjective modifying “princess,” a construction some interpreters have proposed.
15. in train. The Hebrew says literally “behind her.”
17. In your fathers’ stead your sons will be. As in the Renaissance epithalamium, the celebration of the beauty of bride and groom and the evocation of the pomp and circumstance of the wedding is followed by a blessing of fertility on the union about to be consummated.
18. Let me make your name heard. Though some interpreters understand “you” to refer to God and read this final verse as a stock psalmodic ending, it is more plausible to see it as a conclusion of the address to the king. This would be in keeping with our understanding of verse 7, “Your throne of God is forevermore,” as well as with “Therefore has God blessed you forever” in verse 3.