Selah in the Psalms

Rick Brannan, who brightens my day every time I visit his blog with his Ella pictures, wants to know more about Selah in the Psalms. So would I, truth be told.

Chris Heard takes a stab at the question. His essay is a jewel of methodological rigor in the sense that he surveys the primary data with care rather than discuss previous solutions to the problem. Explanations of Selah in the literature are a dime a dozen, but none of them (the interpretations of the Targum and Jerome, Briggs, Mowinckel, and Eerdmans come to mind), so far as I can see, are convincing.

It’s nice to see someone conclude instead that the significance of Selah is a mystery. I refer the interested reader to Chris’s survey, and among the comments, the note that Selah also occurs in psalms and liturgical texts attested at Qumran which did not end up in the biblical Psalter transmitted by later Judaism.

It is also worth noting that Selah occurs twice in the Eighteen Benedictions, and is represented in the LXX Psalter in more instances than in the MT Psalter. The additional examples, interestingly enough, fit into the typology of occurrences known from MT delineated in Chris's essay.

Selah is probably a musical rubric of some kind. This is implied by the oldest interpretation of the word on record, that of the LXX (Habakkuk and Psalms), which translates διάψαλμα. But διάψαλμα is a neologism in Greek. It refers to something musical, to what more precisely is not obvious. It is not known to me on what basis Al Pietersma takes διάψαλμα to mean an “interlude on strings” (NETS translation). It’s as good a guess as any, but I’m not sure it’s more than that. 

If Selah is a musical rubric of some kind - a flourish, a da capo, or what have you  – that explains why it occurs at spaced intervals once, twice, or three times in a given psalm, and always in psalms that have superscripts plus or minus subscripts containing other musical information. It would also explain why Selah coincides with but does not indicate logical breaks of various kinds (I believe that it is a fair summary of the results of Chris’s research). If Selah were a discourse marker per se, we would expect to find it distributed in non-superscripted Psalms as well.

Comments

[Rick Selah]

I was always told our name originated from Mt. Selah in old Israel, where scholars went to meditate. The literal biblical translation of "Selah" is 'pause and reflect...'