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Classed by scholars as a royal psalm, a coronation hymn, Psalm 2 centers, in verses 6-9, on a performative exchange of voices. The Lord speaks. The king speaks. The king quotes the Lord. In the process, the Lord inaugurates, the king confirms, and the king reports the Lord’s private speech. The psalm is clearly royal, in both speech and deed, relying on the common ancient Near Eastern vision of monarchy in which the king serves as a god’s adopted son.
What surrounds the crowning, however, is a fantasy of world domination, complete with chains and saber-rattling. The psalm starts with a double question, though who asks is not clear: Why is the rest of the world in a tizzy? What’s with these people and their useless groans? Verse 2 turns to foreign kings arraying themselves and huddling, hatching plots and threatening siege. But how do the first two verses relate? Is it one long question: why is all of this happening? Or is verse 2 the answer to verse 1’s questions: are the others of the world upset because kings and princes are gathering force?
Who speaks? Who speaks verse 3? It’s a wish to be set free, but whose? Are the nations hoping to snap their shackles, or is Israel? Who thrust the ropes on them? “Earth’s kings”? Or “the Lord and his anointed”? Almost all English translations stifle the ambiguity by adding “saying” to the end of verse 2. But the ambiguity is precisely the thing. The Bible’s art is more oblique. Meanings flesh out if we let them.
The verses that follow depict God’s response. Verse 4 imagines the Lord laughing— at foreign jailors, we assume. And if, as it seems to be, verse 5 is a continuation of the first four verses, then God’s rage clearly targets those foreign princes who have, figuratively or literally, besieged the Israelites.
This all sets up a matrix of verbs.
v. 1: (they) have fussed, moan 4: (God) laughs, mocks
2: (they) amass, have schemed 5: (God) speaks, stupefies
3: let’s shatter and let’s buck 6: I inaugurate
Four times in this pattern, grammatical person shifts: from 3rd plural to 1st plural to 3rd singular to 1st singular. In response to the four third-person verbs of the nations’ chatter, God is said (by the third-person narration) to utter four verbs of his own. Their noisy fussing and moaning, their deliberative conspiring and scheming, are met with noisy laughing and mocking, then clear and potent speech and silencing. In response to the first-person-plural hopes of verse 3, the first-person singular of verse 6 declares, with proclamation and performance, “I inaugurate my king.” The verb here is rare and international, and it’s preceded by the explicit pronoun I, which is usually left implicit. In sum, the impact of the first half of Psalm 2 is to answer encircling armies word for word. You have your jabber, I have mine. And as to this wish to be set free? Have a king.
If only one of the sharp rebellious images of verse 3 is paralleled by verse 6, that’s just because we haven’t yet gotten to verse 7. This is the turn of the psalm, one of the more important verses to messianic Judaism and Christianity.
I recount the decree the Lord said to me
my son you I today bear you
It is choppy in English this way, without an explicit “are” between “my son” and “you,” but it’s not crabbed. The original conveys intimacy and resonance at the rebounding of “you” and “me,” especially at that magnetic click of “my son you / I today.” There’s no actual linebreak or caesura in Hebrew, but the synapse is there. That moment between “you” and “I” is the pivot of the poem, the fulcrum where “I bear you” crosses back to meet “my son.”
How a father can say to a son “I today bear you” is a pregnant question. “Today you are born,” “today you become my son,” “today I adopt you”—these all make literal sense. Historians offer possible ritual explanations: adoption rites, for instance. But in the text itself, this is no normal human gestation.
In verse 8, that click of “you” and “I” in verse 7 (`etta `ani) is mashed up to “I give” (ve`ettenah). What is being given?
ask me and I give others as your legacy
your assets the edges of earth
you batter them with iron rods
like terra cotta you shatter them .
If the crowning in verse 6 was one response to the prisoners’ wish in verse 3, verse 9 is a second. The prisoners want to break shackles and ropes; God’s offspring king beats the others to a pulp. The moral of the story for the kings of the others?
Now kings look smart
take your beating rulers
serve the Lord with fear
whirl with trembling
The last verse, verse 12, has led to controversies for centuries: is nassequ-bar supposed to mean “kiss the son,” in which case it is not Hebrew, but Aramaic, the international language? Or is it “kiss discipline,” which is all Hebrew, but more abstract than this Psalm has been? Traditional Christian commentators sift for messianic allusions like ore. Traditional commentators respond with linguistic purity, and tend to read “discipline” as a figure for instruction. Others speculate whether there might be some ancient legalese at work here, vassals doing obeisance to the signet ring or something similar. But in the text we have, the phrase is open, elliptical, and euphemistic in just the way that captors speak: brutally, evasively. Wouldn’t want nothing should happen to you. Little accident, maybe? We can play this how you want to.
At the end, the King James is more than pious: “Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.” That’s great cadence, lovely music with the two-beat “blessed” hopping against the two-beat “all they” before loping off with graceful iambs. But the word isn’t “blessed” and here it’s not “trust”— there are better words in Hebrew for those things. It’s “all set” (see Psalm 1) and “seek shelter”: all who nest in him are all set.
You only get to the floaty “put their trust in him” if you have forgotten or are willing to overlook those iron rods, those prisoners’ groans.
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2:1 have the others | fussed The word goyim is generally translated as “nations.” In the modern world, we can’t help hearing the political, territorial idea of nation-states or countries. In the Bible, the term usually refers somewhat pejoratively to cultures and ethnicities of people who are different from the ancient Israelites. (For examples of exceptions, see Psalm 33:12 and Psalm 106:5.) Understanding this, the KJV often uses the word “heathen,” which introduces unwanted notes of stubborn immorality.
The word “fussed,” usually rendered “rage” is less about anger than commotion.
2:1 moan in vain The word “moan” is the same used in 1:2 (rendered there as “purr”). The noise is the thing.
2:2 amass… and have schemed The verbs are martial and conspiratorial, the monarchs array themselves and the rulers have huddled. Biblical Hebrew poetry often shifts between imperfect or prefixed verbs and verbs that are perfect or suffixed. It’s more complicated than this, given that both prefixed and suffixed forms can be changed in aspect and mode by a single added syllable. Many translations, recognizing the flexibility, even fluidity, of Hebrew verbs, allow perfect verbs to be translated by the present tense: “why do the nations rage” and “rulers take counsel.” That choice loses an important datum, however: there is a subtle shift in many verses between perfect and imperfect verbs. Smoothing over the difference flattens the text: others have fussed… communities now moan, kings now amass, princes have schemed. The timing is there in the original, and it’s patterned chiastically. There’s no reason not to note it.
2:5 stupifies | with seething rage The heat of the Lord’s rage very literally disquiets the others.
2:6 inaugurate The word nasakti likely means “I have set,” and may derive from Assyrian or Ugaritic. Dahood believes it to be passive—”I have been anointed,” which requires reframing Zion as “his” hallowed hill.
2:7 my son you | I today See the introductory note to Psalm 2
2:9 terra cotta Lit. “the vessel of a potter”
2:10 look smart / take your beating Lit., “show wisdom and let yourselves be admonished”
2:12 kiss the king Dahood reads as neshe qaber, “men of the grave.” That seems unlikely.
2:12 it’s best if you go with him Literally, “happy all who shelter in him,” which sounds flatter and more complacent in English than it does in Hebrew. There’s a quiet veiled threat here that’s essential to the psalm.
The Book of Psalms 