Somebody Else’s Mail (6)

The word Selah appears in the Old Testament a total of 74 times, primarily in the Psalms, but also a few times in the prophecy of Habakkuk. If that seems odd, you may want to read this post and possibly this one. Hebrew scholars entertain the possibility that in the midst of his prophetic utterances, Habakkuk quoted something constructed very much like a traditional Hebrew psalm (though not one preserved in the Psalter). If that is in fact the case, it should not surprise us to find the prophet using the language of a psalmist. Selah is one of those words peculiar to Psalms.

We are about to encounter it for the first time in Psalm 3.

Selah

My ESV provides this footnote to the first occurrence of Selah in the Psalms, at the end of verse 2: “The meaning of the Hebrew word Selah, used frequently in the Psalms, is uncertain. It may be a musical or liturgical direction.” Strong’s Concordance defines selê (transliterated into English as “Selah”) as “a technical musical term probably showing accentuation, pause, interruption”.

Thanks. You or I could have drawn that conclusion from observing the use of the word in scripture. David especially used Selah like a form of punctuation, employing it whenever the content of his psalms demanded the equivalent of a paragraph mark. You may have seen these symbols [¶] in your word processor. We call them pilcrows, a typographic character employed to tell the reader a different train of thought is coming; that this is the end of whatever I just said, and it is now time to move on to my next subject.

One school of thought interprets the Hebrew Selah that way, as if it is the equivalent of Amen. (Bypassing any consideration of why the psalmist didn’t just use Amen instead. It was already there.) Another school considers the possibility that it was an instruction to the Levite musicians accompanying the Psalm to insert an instrumental break. A third proposal is that we’ve got the vowels wrong (there are no vowels in Hebrew) and the word should actually be sollah, meaning “loud”. If that’s the case, Selah would be the equivalent of fortissimo in musical notation. Yet another line of thinking is that it comes from a Hebrew verb meaning to “lift up”, and is therefore an instruction to praise the Lord. Still others suggest its meaning is “stop and reflect”.

Other ideas about the meaning of Selah have cropped up here and there over the last two thousand years. Interestingly, even the earliest commentators on the Psalms had no idea what the word meant. (The ones we have were hundreds of years downstream.) I tend to lean toward the pilcrow theory, because a change in subject so frequently follows a Selah, but I also like the “stop and reflect” suggestion, because it explains the presence of an occasional Selah at the end of a Psalm.

In the end, the meaning we assign to the word changes almost nothing about the way we read the Psalms, since Selah is never part of a sentence and is therefore impossible to interpret contextually. Its presence serves as a useful reminder that we are well over 3,000 years down the road from the writing of the earliest portions of scripture, and will sometimes encounter a few things we don’t understand.

That’s not astonishing to me. It’s entirely to be expected. What’s truly impressive, considering the age of the Bible, is how infrequently the translation problem arises and how little it affects our understanding of it.