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Psalm 93 differs dramatically from the psalms that precede it. It feels ancient, archaic, primarily because it repeats like an incantation and its terse clauses fly fast. There are six conjugated verbs in the first verse alone, each half-line its own statement. The first, middle, and last verses have all the psalm’s verbs, leaving the intervening verses to nouns and modifiers and prepositions. Clauses burst, then pause, burst, then pause, and one last time.

The three-line middle of the psalm has the same subject and verb three times: “rivers” and “lift,” with only two changes:

Rivers have lifted | Lord             

rivers have lifted | their voice

rivers lift | their crashing (3).

The verb-first experience of the Hebrew presents instants of wonder that arise, moment by moment. “They have lifted” comes first, then the subject “rivers.” Because the psalm began with an inversion, “the Lord” as intensified subject before the verb “reign,” we wonder briefly who has lifted, before wondering whether the rivers have lifted the Lord. But no, that first line of verse 3 is calling the Lord. The voices of the psalm’s reciters re-enact the lifting of voice that the rivers have done. As grammatical subjects stay the same, the object comes into focus: the rivers’ crashing IS their voice, which IS the voice of worshippers, calling “Lord.”

The second transformation through these three lines is the shift from two perfect-form verbs to an imperfect-form: “have lifted” and “have lifted” become “lift.” The move occurs all over biblical poetry. What has happened still happens, the very emblem of tradition. This is not some cosmic battle with the sea. It is the voice of rising rivers and fertile floods. Its energy and motion contrast well with the solid foundation metaphors at the psalm’s beginning (“how firm the world is” 1) and end (“your stelae | are stood so true” 5), while its emphatic rising is continuous with both the standing up of the law and the temple at the psalm’s end and the coronation imagery at the start.

If the shift from perfect to imperfect tense is important to register at the center of the psalm, it’s equally important to register it at the beginning of the psalm, where four suffixed, perfective verbs are followed by two prefixed, imperfective verbs: “has been king, “has put on,” “has put on,” and “has strapped it on,” followed by “is firm” and “does not fall.” That “has been king” is tricky in English, but nothing else besides “has reigned” quite works. “The Lord reigns,” the nearly universal translation, captures important features of the Hebrew verb form. Like the verb “to know” in Hebrew, “to be king” is a perfect-form verb that works best in the present tense: “to have known” in English sounds too much of the past, whereas the Hebrew really means more “to have learned,” i.e., “to know.” The point of the Hebrew here isn’t that the Lord is no longer the king, but that the Lord’s being king has always been the case. The most accurate paraphrase of the first half line of Psalm 93 is unwieldy: “It’s the Lord who’s been king all along.”

Other translators and critics balk at the suggestion that one could use anything other than an eternal present tense here—Kraus, for instance, seems outraged at the idea. But the psalm uses the perfect form as part of a pattern, and its nuance is important. In response to psalms like Psalm 89, which worry about the loss of a human king, Psalm 93 answers, together with Psalms 97 and 99 and more, that the Lord needs no human to be king.