1A song of ascents.
all his torment
2when he swore to the LORD,
vowed to Jacob’s Champion:
3“I will not come into the tent of my home,
I will not mount my couch,
4I will not give sleep to my eyes
nor slumber to my lids
5until I find a place for the LORD,
a dwelling for Jacob’s Champion.”
6Look, we heard of it in Ephratha,
we found it in the fields of Jaar.
7Let us come to His dwelling,
let us bow to His footstool.
8Rise, O LORD, to Your resting place,
You and the Ark of Your strength.
9Let Your priests don victory,
and let Your faithful sing gladly.
10For the sake of David Your servant,
do not turn away Your anointed.
11The LORD swore to David
a true oath from which He will not turn back:
“From the fruit of Your loins
I will set up a throne for you.
12If your sons keep My pact
and My precept that I shall teach them,
their sons, too, evermore
shall sit on the throne that is yours.”
13For the LORD has chosen Zion,
He desired it as His seat.
14“This is My resting place evermore,
Here will I dwell, for I desired it.
15I will surely bless its provisions,
its needy I will sate with bread.
16And its priests I will clothe with victory,
and its faithful will surely sing gladly.
17There will I make a horn grow for David,
I have readied a lamp for my anointed.
18His enemies I will clothe with shame,
but on him—his crown will gleam.”
PSALM 132 NOTES
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1. Recall, O LORD, for David / all his torment. The suffering referred to would be the tribulations David underwent as a warrior king until his conquest of Jerusalem and to his self-sacrificing dedication to finding a “resting place” (verse 8) for the Ark of the Covenant. This psalm is related to the royal psalms, but it places a distinctive emphasis on the story about bringing up the Ark to Jerusalem, which is told in 2 Samuel 6–7.
3. I will not come into the tent of my home, / I will not mount my couch. The psalmist uses poetic-archaic terms for both “house” (“the tent of my home”) and “bed” (“couch,” ʿeres yetsuʿai).
4. I will not give sleep to my eyes. No such vow involving renunciation of sleep is reported in the narrative in 2 Samuel, but this appears to be a widespread literary motif. Several Mesopotamian texts have a monarch vowing not to sleep until he restores the image of his god to its temple.
6. we heard of it. The “it” is the Ark. Although the poem reconstructs the moment when the Ark is brought forth from its temporary resting place and carried up to Jerusalem, it is very unlikely that the psalm is actually contemporaneous with David. In fact, verse 10 seems to designate “David,” then “Your anointed” as two separate figures: David is the faithful founder of the dynasty for whose sake God is implored to stand by the current incumbent of the throne, the anointed one. Scholars bent on recovering cultic settings for the various psalms have proposed an annual ritual commemorating the introduction of the Ark to Jerusalem, but, as with the theory of an enthronement festival (which has also been applied to this psalm), there is no real evidence for the conjecture.
the fields of Jaar. This place-name (“fields” is in the singular in the Hebrew) seems to be an alternate designation for Kiriath-Jearim, mentioned in 1 Samuel 7:2 as the place where the Ark was kept for two decades. “Jaar” (yaʿar) means “forest.”
7. His dwelling / . . . His footstool. Both terms seem to refer to the Ark itself rather than to Jerusalem, because the move to Jerusalem is introduced only in the next verse.
9. don victory. The noun tsedeq, which elsewhere in Psalms often means “justice” or “righteousness,” here probably has its other sense of “victory” because of the analogous line in verse 16, “And its priests I will clothe with victory” as well as the antithetical line at the end of the psalm, “His enemies I will clothe with shame.” (“Shame” often is used to indicate military defeat, and tsedeq, “victory,” and yeshaʿ, “rescue,” are paired terms for triumph in battle.) Perhaps the victory in question is David’s original conquest of Jerusalem.
15. provisions, / . . . bread. “Bread,” as elsewhere, is a synecdoche for “food.” Providing sustenance for the city is linked with the theme of victory because a walled town under siege, as many biblical texts remind us, would be reduced to starvation.
17. make a horn grow. As elsewhere, the horn is a symbol of strength.
18. his crown will gleam. Most scholars construe the verb yatsits in this fashion, though its more common meaning is “to blossom.” The cognate noun tsits means “diadem” (perhaps because the crown was imagined as a glorious efflorescence or was wrought with floral motifs), so perhaps the verb here might mean something like “will be a splendid diadem.”