(lyric, the Qorachites)

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Psalm 48 celebrates Mount Zion. God’s mountain is cast as a center of power. Topically the song falls neatly into five stanzas: (a) an overview of “the city of our God,” “the bliss of all earth” (1-3); (b) a short narrative of kings running away in terror (4-6); (c) a stanza bearing witness to victories, “as we heard | so we saw” (7-8); (d) an overwrought stanza heavy on theological terminology (9-11), and (e) an exhortation to “Walk around Zion | round her all the way” (12-13). There’s a problematic coda in verse 14, however, which is just the beginning of the challenges in this psalm.

All kinds of matchings work hard to pull the song together. The first word gadol,  “massive,” is called back in migdalehah “her towers” in verse 12, linking the first and fifth stanzas. The root of the word “praise” appears in verse 1 and verse 10, linking the first and fourth stanzas. And both the Lord’s name and “In the city of our God” show up in verse 1 and verse 8, linking stanzas one and three. Zion is named in verses 2, 11, and 12, linking stanzas one, four, and five. The long word for citadels (3, 13) also links the first and fifth stanzas. In the second stanza hammelakim no`adu (4) recalls noda` (3) and melek (2) from the first stanza.

Despite this wordplay, there’s a deeper logic going on. For example, the first stanza appears to locate Mount Zion on the slopes of Zaphon, the word meaning “north” that names the northerly mountain that is hallowed by the Hurrians and is lauded in Ugaritic poetry, Mount Zaphon. The mention of “east” in verse 7 adds an intriguing dimension, especially when combined with the ships of Tarshish, another foreign element and another cardinal direction, clockwise from north. Sure enough, the word “south” shows up quietly in verse 10 as “your right hand,” alongside “the edges of earth.” And the word “west” shows up in the formulation ledor ’acharon, which has the obvious meaning of “for the age after” but could also mean “to Dor in the west,” an important Phoenician harbor. These directions, in this order, coupled with the imperative directions in the fifth stanza to “Walk around Zion | round her all the way” (12) makes the psalm a circumambulatory map of Jerusalem that does on the horizontal plane what Psalm 47 did on the vertical axis: it subordinates other gods and peoples to ’Elohim. Other people’s important places are being demoted both linguistically and ritually. Merely to walk around Zion and count her great towers (12) is to account for the world in every direction and to recount for the next generation (13).

Verse 13’s final move to generations combines space and time—both the west and the future age. It also powerfully contrasts with the temporal and spatial dislocations of Psalms 42/43 and Psalm 44, both of which imagined walking in Jerusalem while lamenting having been removed from the rescues of a past age. Psalm 43 asked, “why must I walk around / darkening | with the enemy compressing”; it asked for God’s help to “bring me | to your hallowed hill” (43:2, 3). Psalm 44 reported parents’ stories about God that “You your hand | the others / you ousted | so you could plant them” (44:2). To these dislocations, Psalms 46-48 all respond. Psalm 46 responds with a new creation of the kind the parents described: “at the facing of dawn / others clamored | realms faltered / he gave his voice | and land dissolved” (46:5-6). Psalm 47 responds with enthronement: “God has become king | over the others” (47:8). Now, finally, Psalm 48 responds with a walk around citadels that were before only remembered, a walk in which the enemy is no longer “compressing” but pressed out into mere geographical fact, flung to the edges of earth.

This compelling reading, however, does not account for the second stanza (48:4-6), which stands out for having a narrative rather than a spatial logic. The stanza’s presence breaks what might have been a tidier psalm of halves, each culminating with a refrain that’s curiously inverted: ’eloheinu ’elohim… ‘ad ‘olam in verse 8, ’elohim ’eloheinu … ‘olam ve‘ad in verse 14. The reading also does not explain the psalm’s baffling last half-line: “he guides us | up death,” which might mean “above death” or “above Mot,” the Canaanite death deity. The phrase ‘al mut shows up in the superscription to Psalm 9, so the term could be musical. More proximately, the word ‘alamot, with no changes to the consonantal text, shows up at the beginning of Psalm 46, where it, too, seems to have been a musical notation. One possibility—grammatically solid but completely speculative—is that the word ‘alamot refers to maidens in both places, as it does elsewhere (e.g., Ps 68:25, Songs 6:8), in which case it bookends the female voices. The maschil headings of 42, 44, and 45 could, perhaps, then have indicated male voices, which would make for a compelling meeting in the epithalamion of Psalm 45, which indeed does turn from a male king to female princess. An entire vocal performance of this Qorachite unit starts to seem possible. Wildly, exuberantly conjectural, but possible.

The Masoretic pointing, however, allows for another reading, that God “guides us” not “over” but right “unto death.” This far darker reading is also conjectural but possible. And given the tone of the Qorachite psalm that follows, Psalm 49, the dark reading might even be preferable.