Most of the Bible’s hard words are hard because scholars disagree about them. A few are hard for a simpler reason: no one knows what they mean. The Psalms have more of these than any other book. They sit in the headings at the top of many psalms, and in one small word that appears at the end of lines throughout the book: “Selah”.
This article looks at what is known about them, what is guessed, and how a translation should handle a word whose meaning has been lost.
Selah
Psalm 3 is a prayer of David as he flees from his son Absalom. Verse 3 in our numbering (verse 2 in most English Bibles, for a reason explained below) reports what his enemies are saying:
Many [are] saying of my soul, “There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah
The last word in the Hebrew is סֶֽלָה, selâ. It appears 71 times in the Psalms and 3 times in the prayer of Habakkuk 3, and nowhere else. It usually stands at the end of a line or a section, and it never forms part of a sentence. It is not something the psalmist says to God or to anyone else. That alone suggests what kind of word it is: a direction for the people performing the psalm, not part of the psalm’s words.
Beyond that, the evidence is thin. The main suggestions are these.
- A pause or interlude. The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, renders it diapsalma, which seems to mean an interlude, perhaps a break in the singing while instruments played. This is the oldest interpretation we have, and the most widely followed.
- ”Lift up.” Some scholars connect it with a Hebrew verb meaning to lift or raise, so that it would mark a place to raise the voice, or the music, or perhaps the hands in prayer.
- ”Forever.” Some ancient Jewish translators, and Jerome in his Latin translation from the Hebrew, took it to mean “always”. This may be a guess from the places where it stands, often after words of praise.
None of these can be proved. The people who sang the psalms in the temple knew what the word meant, and they had no reason to explain it. By the time the Greek translators came to it, a few centuries before Christ, they may already have been unsure.
What Open Word Bible does with Selah
Our records make the same decision every time Selah appears, and mark it uncertain:
Selah: a word whose meaning is no longer known.
The reason given is the evidence above: it is probably a direction for singing or music, perhaps a pause or an interlude; the Greek translation renders it with a word meaning “interlude”; and it is not part of what is said. The alternatives listed are “pause”, “interlude” and “lift up”.
The rendering decision follows from that. Every level, Literal, Balanced and Readable alike, keeps the word “Selah” as it is, set apart from the sentence. The alternatives considered and rejected are printing “(pause)” and leaving it out. The reason is short: its meaning is unknown, so every level keeps the word rather than guess.
That is a deliberate choice, and other translations have made other ones. The King James Version keeps “Selah”. Some modern versions put a guess in its place; the New Living Translation, for example, prints “Interlude”. Others have at times moved it to the margin or a footnote. Printing a guess makes the text look clearer than our knowledge is. Leaving the word out hides something that is in the Hebrew text. Keeping it, with a decision that says plainly what we do and do not know, is the honest course, and it costs the reader only a moment’s pause, which may be what the word asked for in the first place.
One small adjustment is made. In a few verses the Hebrew puts Selah in the middle of the verse, after its first line, as in Psalm 57:4 and Habakkuk 3:3. Our rendering decision for those verses moves it to the end, so that the verse reads as a whole, and says so.
Psalm 46 shows how Selah can shape a psalm. It appears three times there, after verse 4 and after the refrain in verses 8 and 12, which sounds twice:
The LORD of Armies is on our side; the God of Jacob is our high fortress. Selah
The Selahs mark the psalm’s three sections. Whatever the word told the musicians to do, they did it at the turning points.
The headings
More than a hundred psalms have a heading: a line or two above the first verse naming the psalm’s author or collection, its kind, its tune or its instruments, and sometimes the moment in David’s life that it belongs to. Psalm 4 has a short one:
For the music director. With stringed instruments. A psalm of David.
The Hebrew begins לַמְנַצֵּ֥חַ, “for the director”, a phrase that heads 55 psalms. Then comes “with stringed instruments”, and then “A psalm of David”.
Why the verse numbers differ
The heading raises a practical point first. In the Hebrew text, the heading of a psalm is part of the psalm and is counted as its first verse. Most English Bibles print the heading without a number and begin verse 1 with the first line of the poem. So from Psalm 3 on, many verse numbers in Open Word Bible are one higher than in other English Bibles. The record for Psalm 3:1 explains this, and every heading’s record repeats it. Open Word Bible follows the numbering of the Hebrew text it translates. (See Chapter and verse numbers for how the numbering came about.)
Where the heading is very short, the Hebrew counts it together with the first line, and the numbers are the same. Psalm 32 is an example: “Of David. A maskil” is part of verse 1, with “How blessed is the one whose rebellion is forgiven”.
What the words in the headings mean
Some words in the headings are clear. מִזְמוֹר, mizmôr, is “a psalm”, a song sung to music. “Of David” ties a psalm to David, though the record for Psalm 3:1 notes that the small word “of” can mean written by, belonging to, for or about. Notes like “when he fled from his son Absalom” connect a psalm with a story elsewhere in the Bible, and our records give the passage (2 Samuel 15–17 for Psalm 3).
Others are partly clear. “For the director” is a form of a verb meaning to lead or oversee, and the record for Psalm 4:1 notes that 1 Chronicles 15:21 uses the verb for Levites who led the singing. It probably marks the psalm for the leader of the temple music. But the Greek translators read the same letters differently, as “for the end”, which shows how early the sense was in doubt. The decision is marked uncertain.
And some are almost entirely lost. Here is how our records treat a few of them.
- Miktam heads Psalms 16 and 56–60. The record calls it “a kind of psalm whose meaning is unknown”. The Greek translation took it as an inscription on a stone; others link it to a word for gold.
- Maskil heads thirteen psalms. It comes from a verb meaning to have insight or act wisely, so it may mark a song that teaches, or one composed with skill. Its exact sense is unknown.
- On alamoth (Psalm 46) is the plural of the word for a young woman. Since 1 Chronicles 15:20 has Levites playing harps “on alamoth”, it is a musical term, perhaps for high voices or high-pitched instruments.
- Higgaion, which stands beside Selah in Psalm 9:17, comes from a verb for murmuring. The record takes it as probably a musical direction and keeps it at every level.
- Shigionoth, in the title of Habakkuk’s prayer, is the plural of the term in the heading of Psalm 7. Some link it to a verb for wandering or reeling, others to a word for lament.
Then there are phrases that are probably the names of tunes. Psalm 22 is “on Ayyeleth-hashshahar”, which means “the doe of the dawn”. Psalm 57 is headed אַל־תַּ֭שְׁחֵת, “Do not destroy”, which also heads Psalms 58, 59 and 75. Psalm 56 has words that mean something like “a silent dove of far-off places”. These look like the names of melodies the psalms were sung to, much as a hymn book prints a tune name above a hymn. The tunes themselves are long gone.
How the levels handle them
Here the three levels part ways, and the reason is the purpose of each level.
Literal and Balanced keep the Hebrew terms as names where their sense is unknown: “A miktam”, “On alamoth”, “On Ayyeleth-hashshahar”. They translate what is clear and keep what is not. Psalm 57 is a slight exception, since “Do not destroy” is plain Hebrew; every level translates it, and Balanced adds “To the tune”, taking it as a tune name.
Readable gives the likeliest sense, and its rendering decisions are marked uncertain where the guess is a guess. Here is Psalm 22’s heading at that level:
For the leader of the music. Set to the tune “The Doe of the Dawn”. A song of David.
Psalm 56 becomes “To the tune ‘A Silent Dove Far Away’”, and Psalm 46’s “on alamoth” becomes “For high voices”. Where even a likely sense is out of reach, Readable says only what is certain: for “miktam”, the rendering decision is simply “A song”, because its meaning is unknown, and Readable says only that it is a song.
This is the way Open Word Bible separates meaning from wording. The meaning decision says what is known and what is not, and marks it uncertain. The rendering decision chooses wording for each level that fits that state of knowledge. Readable can be bolder in its wording because the meaning decision beside it says plainly how much of it is a guess. (See Three levels, one meaning.)
Are the headings part of Scripture?
Readers sometimes ask whether the headings are original. The honest answer is that we do not know who wrote them or when. Most scholars think they were added by the people who collected and arranged the psalms for use in worship, sometimes long after the psalms themselves were written. But they are very old. The Greek translation has them, often with additions of its own, and the psalm scrolls from Qumran have them too. In the Hebrew text they are part of the psalm, and in some cases the New Testament seems to rely on them: Peter and Paul both argue from Psalm 16 as a psalm of David, the authorship its heading gives (Acts 2:25; 13:35–36).
Some scholars have also asked whether a few notes belong to the psalm before rather than the one after. In 1904 James W. Thirtle argued that the musical notes such as “for the director” originally stood at the end of the preceding psalm. Habakkuk 3 gives some support: its prayer ends, in verse 19, with exactly this kind of note, “For the music director. With stringed instruments”, standing after the psalm. Our record for that verse treats it as the closing note it is. The theory has not won general agreement for the Psalms, and our records keep the headings where the Hebrew text puts them.
Saying “we do not know”
It would be easy for a translation to cover these gaps. It could print a confident guess for every term, or quietly leave out the words no one understands. Many readers would never notice.
Open Word Bible takes the other path. Where the meaning of a word has been lost, the record says so, gives the evidence and the main proposals, and lets the wording follow from that. Selah stays Selah. “Miktam” stays “miktam” at Literal and Balanced, and becomes simply “a song” at Readable. The reader loses nothing that anyone actually knows, and is not given anything that no one knows. Like all our drafts, these records are AI-assisted and await review by named human reviewers.
There is something fitting in it. The psalms were sung for centuries by people who knew exactly what Selah meant, and they have gone on being sung by people who do not. The words still work.
Open Psalm 3, Psalm 46, Psalm 57 or Habakkuk 3 and tap a verse to see the full records.