The vocabulary is dominated by the word “Lord” which appears five times, more than any other word. This word is conspicuous not only in its frequency, but in its location. Consider its placement in the lines:
Come, bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord,
who stand by night in the house of the Lord!Lift up your hands to the holy place
and bless the Lord!May the Lord bless you from Zion,
he who made heaven and earth!
If one tampers with the scansion a bit, one might also read:
Come, bless the Lord,
all you servants of the Lord,
who stand in the house of the Lord
by night.Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord!
May the Lord bless you from Zion,
he who made heaven and earth!
When asking whether such adjustments are at all reasonable, one notes that the positioning of “by night” after “Lord” is found in the Hebrew Vorlage, and that Hebrew meter in general is less strictly confined to syllables and rhymes, and includes a sort of “meter of ideas” which arranges, e.g., two concepts in each of the two lines of a couplet in order to “balance” the ideas in a way analogous to the way one might balance syllables.
The revised scansion makes more obvious how the word “Lord” might function as a way to end most of the lines. In terms of the music — this Psalm, like most or all Psalms, was probably composed as a performance piece — the word “Lord” might have had a whole note, coming after a series of quarter notes, or be metrically distinguished in some other way. Likewise, the word may have landed on the tonic in terms of pitch, giving a sense of finality, or it may have had a relatively high or relatively low note, or been in some other way distinctive.
The word “holy” has no preposition such as “in” or “toward” in the Hebrew Vorlage, and is a noun which can mean holiness or sanctuary. This poses a challenge for any translator.
The first two couplets are clearly in the second person plural, and the final couplet is in the second person singular. One can easily envision the first two couplets being sung by a soloist, and the final couplet by a choir.
Given the pilgrimage title of the Psalm, the soloist would be the traveler approaching the Temple, exhorting and encouraging the Temple staff, who ensured that worship never ceased, but continued all day and all night. The choir would be the Temple staff, bestowing a blessing on the pilgrim after his long journey.
Some commentators have hypothesized that the final couplet referred to a group, and that the second person singular was used to indicate that the pilgrims had such a unity among themselves that they might well be addressed in this way. This could allow for the possibility that two choirs were used, one singing the first part of the Psalm, and other singing the second part.
The first two couplets contain four verbs, all in the imperative: bless, stand, lift, bless. The final couplet contains a verb with the force, if not strictly the form, of a jussive (bless) and simple indicative verb (made).
