1For the lead player on the gittith, for the Korahites, a psalm.
2How lovely Your dwellings,
O LORD of Armies!
3My being longed, even languished,
for the courts of the LORD.
My heart and my flesh
sing gladness to the living God.
4Even the bird has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for itself,
that puts its fledglings by Your altars,
LORD of Armies, my king and my God.
5Happy are those who dwell in Your house,
they will ever praise You.
selah
6Happy the folk whose strength is in You,
7who pass through the Valley of Baca,
yes, the early rain cloaks it with blessings.
8They go from rampart to rampart,
they appear before God in Zion.
9LORD, God of Armies, hear my prayer.
Hearken, O God of Jacob.
selah
10Our shield, O God, see,
and regard Your anointed one’s face
11For better one day in Your courts
than a thousand I have chosen,
standing on the threshold in the house of my God,
than living in the tents of wickedness.
12For a sun and shield is the LORD,
God is grace and glory.
The LORD grants, He does not withhold
bounty to those who go blameless.
13O LORD of Armies,
happy the man who trusts in You.
PSALM 84 NOTES
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2. How lovely Your dwellings. The term translated as “lovely,” yedidot, is associated with dod, “lover,” and dodim, “lovemaking,” and conveys a virtually erotic intensity in the speaker’s longing for the Temple on Mount Zion. (The King James Version, entirely missing the register, translates yedidot as “amiable.”) This text, then, is one of the pilgrim psalms, expressing the speaker’s powerful longing to enjoy the aura of God’s presence in the Temple. The repeated epithet “LORD of Armies” (YHWH tsevʾaot) does not appear to tap the military connotations of that designation in the present context.
4. Even the bird has found a home. This image provides the most poignant focus for the speaker’s longing. Small birds such as swallows may well have nested in the little crevices of the roughly dressed stones that constituted the Temple façade. The speaker, yearning for the sacred zone of the Temple, is envious of these small creatures happy in the Temple precincts, whereas he, like an unrequited lover, only dreams of this place of intimacy with the divine. “Sing gladness” in the previous line may have been the associative trigger for thinking about the birds.
6. Happy the folk. The Hebrew ʾadam means “person,” “human being,” or “man” (as it is translated at the end of the poem). The translation choice here of “folk” is to facilitate the transition, otherwise odd in English, from the singular in this verset to the plural in the second verset (“their heart”).
the highways in their heart. If the received text is correct, this would most likely mean, “their every thought is on the pilgrim highways leading to Jerusalem.”
7. they make it into a spring. It seems that a miraculous manifestation of divine grace is vouchsafed to the pilgrims. As they come through the Valley of Baca on their way up to Mount Zion, springs gush.
the early rain cloaks it with blessings. The descent of the early rain complements the bursting forth of springs. Alternately, as ibn Ezra proposes, moreh could be a place-name in parallel with the Valley of Baca. That would yield the following: Moreh is cloaked in blessings.
8. from rampart to rampart. “Rampart” is one of several meanings of the Hebrew hayil and makes good sense in this context of pilgrims making their way up to Jerusalem. However, hayil also means strength, and “to go from strength to strength” has become proverbial in Hebrew as in English.
they appear before God in Zion. The vocalization could be, as elsewhere, a euphemistic substitution for “they see God,” although the usual object of the verb, “the face of,” is absent, and the preposition ʾel (“to” or “before”) is unusually introduced. All this might be the result of tampering by pious scribes.
10. Our shield. The reference, as the second verset makes clear, is to the king. The pilgrim longing for Zion, which is also the capital of the kingdom, asks God to show favor to the anointed king. But in verse 12, it is God who is invoked as shield.
11. than a thousand I have chosen. “I have chosen,” baharti, looks redundant in relation to “better than.” Some scholars emend it to beḥadri, “in my chamber.”
than living in the tents of wickedness. The imperfect parallelism with the first verset might be an argument for the proposed emendation, “in my chamber.” A private chamber empty of God’s presence is a sorry thing, only a step away from the tents of wickedness.