TheBibleNet: Psalm 2

Psalms:

Bk 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Bk 2: 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Bk 3: 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Bk 4: 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Bk 5: 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119a 119b 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132
133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Additional Psalms: 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 Samuel Chronicles

Essays: Intro - Music - Form & Language

Like Psalm 1, Psalm 2 is anonymous, and regarded by most scholars are prefatory to the collection; the remainder of Book One is entirely "attributed" to David.

Note the use of rhyme, albeit inconsistently through the verses; but when rhyme does occur it is always by repetition of the same suffix, at the ends of lines and in caesural pauses.

2:1 LAMAH RAGSHU GOYIM U LE'UMIM YEHGU RIK

לָמָּה רָגְשׁוּ גוֹיִם וּלְאֻמִּים יֶהְגּוּ רִיק

KJ (King James translation): Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

BJ (BibleNet translation): Why are the nations in uproar? And why so much empty prattling {pointless activity} from the people?

RAGSHU: The root is Ragash, "to make noise" or "to rage".

U LE'UMIM YEHGU RIK: inverted parallelism - is the root of YEHGU "yahag" (prattling) or "nahag" (behaving)? Either way it echoes (perhaps unintentionally) a key phrase in the previous Psalm. And is that sheva beneath the Hey in fact pronounced: YEHEGU? No, a sheva under the second letter denotes a closing of the syllable, so it is definitely silent.

RIK: from the root "ruk", meaning "vain/empty/futile".

I have a sense of empty vessels making much noise over nothing that merits it. Though Leonard Bernstein would unquestionably disagree - he made a rather splendid noise out of it, using Psalm 2 alongside Psalm 23 for the second section of his Chichester Psalms; with Psalms 100 and 108 for Parts 1 and 2, and 131 and 133 for Part 3. You can listen to them here, and read about the writing of them here.

2:2 YITYATSVU MALCHEY ERETS VE ROZNIM NOSDU YACHAD AL YHVH VE AL MESHIYCHO

יִתְיַצְּבוּ מַלְכֵי אֶרֶץ וְרוֹזְנִים נוֹסְדוּ יָחַד עַל יְהוָה וְעַל מְשִׁיחוֹ

KJ: The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,

BN: All the secular rulers of the Earth have gathered for a conference, {N} the clerical rulers are in synod, to determine who shall represent YHVH as the priest-king.

YITYATSVU MALCHEY ERETS: "Yityatsvu" occurs in Exodus 8:16, meaning "they presented themselves before YHVH", in the sense of a Vatican Council or an extraordinary general meeting of the Sanhedrin, rather than a prayer-fest. How KJ reached the opposite outcome in its translation is not something I am able to expain.

ROZNIM: are those who bear moral authority, which is not necessarily the same as "rulers", though it is used poetically for "princes" and "kings", allowing the assumption of superior morality.

NOSDU: is the Niphil (passive-causative) form of YASAD = "to take counsel together".

AL YHVH VE AL MESHIYCHO: This is complicated; if the Psalm is read as First Temple, then "Meshiycho" alludes to the earthly king; if Second Temple to the future Redeemer. This does not preclude both from being possible, the text written for the former, still extant in the latter, but with the understanding of its meaning changed; however that is unlikely, because there are actually two different words in Yehudit, and no doubt I will draw attention to this multitudes of times through these commentaries on the Psalms, so let us get the matter clear from the outset: there is MASHIYACH, which is the royal title, the sacred priest-king of the fertility cult; and there is MOSHI'A, the other name for most of the Judges previously, but now the future redeemer, a mystical concept, but manifest only in YHVH himself, and not in any human or semi-human Prophet et cetera. Mashiyach is spelled Mem-Sheen-Yud-Chet (משיח), Moshi'a Mem-Sheen-Yud-Ayin (משיע): similar, but still different words. Christianity, since Saul of Tarsus, has mistaken the latter for the former, and thereby got both wrong.

2:3 NENATKAH ET MOSROTEYMO VE NASHLIYCHAH MIMENU AVOTEYMO

נְנַתְּקָה אֶת מוֹסְרוֹתֵימוֹ וְנַשְׁלִיכָה מִמֶּנּוּ עֲבֹתֵימוֹ

KJ: Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

BN: Let us break their fetters and throw away their shackles.

NENATKAH ET MOSROTEYMO: the first from NATAK = "to tear"; the second from MOSER = "bonds". EYMO is an archaic form, the same one that gives MAYIM (מיים) for water and SHAMAYIM (שמיים) for the skies, as well as Elohim (אלהים) for the pantheon of the gods. The trick is that this is a multiple plural, not MOSRIM or MOSROT but MOSROTAYIM, suffixed by the third person plural pronoun. Straightforward. A grammatical abbreviation of "moserotayim shel hem" = "their bonds".

VE NASHLIYCHA MIMEYNU AVOTEYMO: However, there is also the fact that it is EYMO and not EYHEM; as is also the case in the second half of the verse with AVOTEYMO. Is it perhaps an early form of "eyhem"- certainly this is how most translators read it. If so, does it prove longevity? Can we use grammar as a form of carbon-dating?

AVOTEYMO: The root appears to be "avah" = "to be thick/fat". How does this turn into "cords"? To which the answer is, again, by the same trick of the multiple plural. The difference this time is that IM is the masculine ending, OT the feminine.

2:4 YOSHEV BA SHAMAYIM YISCHAK ADONAY YIL'AG LAMO

יוֹשֵׁב בַּשָּׁמַיִם יִשְׂחָק אֲדֹנָי יִלְעַג לָמוֹ

KJ: He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.

BN: The sky-god merely plays with them; Adonis retorts with mockery.

ADONAI here, rather than YHVH. We need to be aware of this distinction, because it is fundamental to the beliefs that lie behind these hymns: there is YHVH, who is the sun-god and father of the world, the number seven which is the Zayin, the male organ of fertility; then there is YAH, his consort, the moon-goddess who also controls the fertility of the Earth as the womb - the Rechem - as well as the behaviour of her partner (Mercy and Compassion are both womb-words: Rachum and Rachamim; paralleled in the Moslem-Arabic namng of al-Lah). And finally there is Adonis, or Adonay in the Yehudit, the annually-dying annually-reborn Earth-god, Adam and David, Arthur and Jesus, Tammuz and Osher (Osiris), depending on which version of the cult you follow, in which part of the world.

HOWEVER: and it is a huge however: by the time these Psalms were redacted into the Biblical texts, both Yah and Adonis had been removed, or reduced, or amalgamated, or absorbed, various variations in different texts, but the Omnideism of YHVH exalted in each case. So we will find the text itself repeatedly treating YAH as YHVH, or Adonis as YHVH, and will need to dig into meaning, and especially cosmology, to see what it would have been in the original hymn.

YISCHAK: usually translated as "laugh", but that would surely be "yitschak", as in the son of Av-Raham and Sarah. There are, however, occasions in the Tanach when Yitschak is himself rendered as Yischak, meaning "to sport" - see my link to his name, but also my note to Genesis 21:6 - so it is possible that this variation is also in play here (forgive the pun; LESACHEK means "to play").

There is also an entirely different root, SHACHACK = "to rub" or "beat in pieces" or "wear away", which is used for "enemies" in Psalm 18:43. As a noun SHACHACK means "dust", and is used both for thin clouds and for the firmament of the heavens. But this would make no sense in the context of this verse. I take the translation of this as "laugh" as an attempt to parallelise the next phrase.

ADONAY YIL'AG: as with "LUTS" in the previous Psalm = "speak in a foreign tongue/barbarously", also "to stammer"; but it is commonly used for "mockery" and "derision".

LAMO: Note the grammatical variation again here, where we would expect "lahem". As with "thee/ye" and "thou/you" in English, the variation here, like the ones in verse 3, provide clues to either the temporal or geographical location of the text (for the information, the English difference is a consequence of alphabet: the Norse had a letter they called "thorn" to represent the sound "th", where the southern Anglo-Saxons wrote the two letters "t" and "h"; when the printing press arrived, from the Saxon world in Germany, there was no "thorn", so they used the little-used "y", and did most "t" sounds with an "i". And then people started assuming "thou" and "thee" were supposed to be pronounced "you" and "ye", because that is how they were written...).

2:5 AZ YEDABER ELEYMO VE APHO U VA CHARONO YEVAHALEMO

אָז יְדַבֵּר אֵלֵימוֹ בְאַפּוֹ וּבַחֲרוֹנוֹ יְבַהֲלֵמוֹ

KJ: Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure:

BN: Then he will speak to them in his rage, and in his fury strike them with terror.

I am surprised to find a lower case on three occasions in the KJ translation of this verse: is the "He" in question not the deity? Not that I use the upper case myself, or even approve of doing so, but it suggests that the KJ translators did not think this was about the deity; and if not, then who? Are they perhaps also understanding Adonis, but unwilling, on theological grounds, to be explicit?

AZ YEDABER ELEYMO VE APHO: wonderful idiom for anger! We have seen it throughout the Torah, most especially in the Mosaic stories: the bull whose nostrils flare up when he is riled (humans do the exact opposite, pulling in the nostrils by taking an intense deep breath to try to calm ourselves when riled). Note again the variant "eleymo" where we would expect "elahem"; and again with YEVAHALEMO.

APHO: Apho means "his nose", but the source of the word is worth a comment, because Apis, as the Greeks called him, or Hap, or Hep, or Hapi-Ankh (but not plain Hapi, who was the goddess of the river Nile), depending on the time-period, was the name of the Egyptian bull-god, the great destroyer, and probably both Aph for "the nose", and Ephes, for the reduction to absolute nothingness, are linguistically rooted (though there is also Babylonian Apsu or Absu as the source of Ephes). Apis, rather than Hor (Horus), who was also depicted as a bull, or Hat-Hor, who was depicted as a cow, is thought by some scholars to have been the origin of the Golden Calf in Exodus 3, though this is unlikely to be correct (everything in Egyptian history and mythology indicates that the Golden Calf was the annually reborn Hor).

U VA CHARONO YEVAHALEMO: "charun" = "heat"; "bahal" here is in the Pi'el (intensive) form = "strike with terror".

2:6 VA ANI NASACHTI MALKI AL TSI'ON HAR KADSHI

וַאֲנִי נָסַכְתִּי מַלְכִּי עַל צִיּוֹן הַר קָדְשִׁי

KJ: Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

BN: I myself am the priest-king who rules on Tsi'on, the holy mountain.

Which verse completes verse 2: the decision has been made, and executed.

VA ANI: Who is the "I" of this? YHVH? Does the deity himself speak through the Psalms? This is a new idea which needs considerably more thought before I can take the enterprise any further, but my initial response is that this is the methodology used to achieve what I shall describe in the very next note.

MALKI: Before David captured Yeru-Shala'im and made it his capital, the ruling deity of the city was Moloch, who gives his name to the Yehudit Melech = "king", and it is highly likely that the allusion here is a confirmation that this is a very old hymn, pre-Yisra-Eli, but retained, and later adapted, in exactly the same way that pre-Christian gods, heroes and festivals can still be identified in those that became Christian later on.

So we can say that, in this Psalm at least, Adonis is equated with David: Earth-god with Earth-god, the syncretisation, presumably, of two (or more) peoples.

2:7 ASAPRAH EL CHOK YHVH AMAR ELAI BENI ATAH ANI HA YOM YELIDETICHA

אֲסַפְּרָה אֶל חֹק יְהוָה אָמַר אֵלַי בְּנִי אַתָּה אֲנִי הַיּוֹם יְלִדְתִּיךָ

KJ: I will declare the decree: the LORD said unto me: Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee.

BN: I will share with you the law which YHVH shared with me: You are my son. Today I have begotten you.

YELIDETICHA: The same verb that is used throughout the Toldot, the genealogical tables of the patriarchs, and the word TOLDOT itself, of course, comes from the same root.

2:8 SHE'AL MIMENI VE ETNAH GOYIM NACHALATECHA VA ACHUZAT'CHA APHSEY ARETS

שְׁאַל מִמֶּנִּי וְאֶתְּנָה גוֹיִם נַחֲלָתֶךָ וַאֲחֻזָּתְךָ אַפְסֵי אָרֶץ

KJ: Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

BN: Ask it of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, the four corners of the Earth as your possession.

Can we see the word SHE'AL and not hear the words SHA'UL and SHE'OL?

The Nachal (inheritance) and the Achuzat (possession) are the two terms used throughout Deuteronomy (and elsewhere, but particularly there, for the conquest) for the Promised Land.

2:9 TERO'EM BE SHEVET BARZEL KICHLI YOTSER TENAPTSEM

תְּרֹעֵם בְּשֵׁבֶט בַּרְזֶל כִּכְלִי יוֹצֵר תְּנַפְּצֵם

KJ: Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

BN: You will break them with a rod of iron; like a potter's vessel you will dash them in pieces.

Am I again recognising grammatical forms that are not of the norm? And if so, is that a function of this being a particular moment in the history of language, or is it a consequence of its being originally a "foreign" text?

What the King James translation misses however is the syntax, which here introduces a method that we will witness throughout the Psalms: reverse echo-lines. Each half of the verse essentially says the same thing; the first starts with the verb and follows with the noun, the second starts with the noun and follows with the verb. And to make the echo complete, both nouns are followed by an adjective of identical form (made of iron, belonging to the potter).

2:10 VE ATAH MELACHIM HASKIYLU HIVASRU SHOPHTEY ARETS

וְעַתָּה מְלָכִים הַשְׂכִּילוּ הִוָּסְרוּ שֹׁפְטֵי אָרֶץ

KJ: Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth.

BN: You, the secular rulers - learn wisdom from this; and you who judge the Earth, practice discernment.

HASKIYLU: the root also gives Haskalah, the 18th century Jewish equivalent of the European Enlightenment. And several Psalms later on, which come under the title MASKIL (see my introductory essay to the Psalms).

HIVASRU: The root is YASAR (יסר) = "to correct", and is sometimes used for language (cf Proverbs 9:7, which also uses the echo-form; also Job 4:3), sometimes with instruments of punishment (Deuteronomy 22:18 ff, multiple examples here).

Note again the full echo-line, as well as the specific internal echoes (melachim-shophtey, haskiylu-hivasru, the latter even echoing the binyan, the verbal declension).

2:11 IVDU ET YHVH BE YIR'AH VE GIYLU BIR'ADAH

עִבְדוּ אֶת יְהוָה בְּיִרְאָה וְגִילוּ בִּרְעָדָה

KJ: Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

BN: Serve YHVH with fear, and rejoice with passion.

YIR'AH: Not Emunah; we are still in the mythological age, not yet the metaphysical (the latter started in the 6th century BCE, the era of the Great Prophets). The notion that one "believes" in a deity, as an intellectual construct, belongs to the metaphysical age. Likewise the positive, rejoice, belongs to the heart, not the mind.

2:12 NASHKU VAR PEN YE'ENAPH VE TOVDU DERECH KI YIV'AR KIM'AT APO ASHREY KOL CHOSEY VO

נַשְּׁקוּ בַר פֶּן יֶאֱנַף וְתֹאבְדוּ דֶרֶךְ כִּי יִבְעַר כִּמְעַט אַפּוֹ אַשְׁרֵי כָּל חוֹסֵי בוֹ

KJ: Do homage in purity, lest He be angry, and ye perish in the way, when suddenly His wrath is kindled. {N} Happy are all they that take refuge in Him. {P}

BN: Worship his son especially, lest his nostrils become inflamed, and you die when he gores you with his horns. {N} Happy are they who take refuge with him. {P}

Elsewhere I have seen: "Do homage in purity, lest He be angry, and ye perish in the way, when suddenly His wrath is kindled. Happy are all they that take refuge in Him." But clearly, from verse 5, the image of the bull is intended here, and likewise helps us date the piece: the bull belongs to the age of Taurus, which preceded the shepherd-epoch with its Paschal Lamb of Aries, which was followed by the fishers-of-men and Ichthys epoch of Pisces.

NASHKU: Really this is the verb for "to kiss", and other translations besides the King James (click here) do indeed render it literally. Kissing, however, is a physical act, and requires the physical presence of the deity to achieve it. If YHVH is intended, then it cannot happen, because YHVH is an abstract deity, or the sun-god. But see my next note.

VAR: Which is really BAR, but the grammar requires the removal of the dagesh (click on the link for the explanation of this). BAR is corn, the most important of all the produce of the Earth, which is why Adonis (Tammuz, Jesus et al) is specifically the corn-god, though he is also the Earth-god. Adonis is also the son of YHVH, and in Aramaic BAR also means "son" (where the Yehudit prefers BEN), so there is a complex play-on-words in place here, which will be resumed in the appended phrase at the end of the verse.

KI YIV'AR KIM'AT APO: I have deliberately over-translated this, in order to bring out the full meaning. The inflaming of the nostrils we have already witnessed in verse 5, so we understand this as a metaphor for anger; but this is the outcome, and it includes still more word-play, aurally this time, VAR becoming YIV'AR, though in fact the words are unconnected in any other way, YIV'AR having a second-letter Ayin (ע).

KIM'AT (some phoneticists might insist on KIME'AT, which is the modern Ivrit pronunciation) can mean "almost", but literally means "just a little"; and DERECH is the road. So we have a figure of speech in which the bull-god comes charging along the road, and gores you in his fury (imagery of the matador and the bullfight!). And it only takes KIM'AT, so beware!

ASHREY KOL CHOSEY VO: Students should begin now to keep a list of all the occasions when ASHREY occurs; they will be many, and key to these hymns. ASHREY is spelled with an Aleph (א), and thus shares its root with the tribe Asher (אשר), who is also connected thereby to the Aramaic goddess Asherah (אשרה), the mother of Adonis in that version. But aurally we cannot hear Ashrey, or Asher for that matter, and not hear Osher, the Egyptian corn-god, their version of the selfsame divine beloved son, whose mother in this version is Eshet, which means "woman" - though we tend to know them by their Greek names, Osher as Osiris, and Eshet as Isis. Osher (עשר) is spelled with an Ayin (ע), not an Aleph (א).

The overall sense of this Psalm, and the probable reason why it is placed second, is a call to worship and prayer, with the gods mocking those humans, both the secular and clerical rulers, and the common folk, who think that they can make any meaningful decisions about their lives without the involvement of the gods. Fear the gods, trust the gods, and if you worship them properly they will look after you and you will live a happy life (and if you don't!..). "Submission" might be an apt term to choose to summarise this - and if I do choose it, it is because I know that the Arabic word for "submission" is Islam.

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Psalms:

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