Psalms 49: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The psalmist calls everyone in the world, rich and poor alike, to hear a riddle he will explain with the harp. He says no amount of money can buy anyone out of death: wise and foolish alike die and leave their wealth behind, and a rich man carries nothing with him. He tells the listener not to be afraid when someone else grows rich, and says that God will redeem his own life from the grave and receive him.

Claim by Claim

1. 49:1
   • The speaker calls on all peoples to hear this.
   • The speaker calls on all inhabitants of the world to listen.
2. 49:2
   • The call is addressed to those of low birth and those of high birth alike.
   • The call is addressed to rich and poor together.
3. 49:3
   • The speaker's mouth will speak wisdom.
   • The meditation of the speaker's heart will be understanding.
4. 49:4
   • The speaker will incline his ear to a proverb.
   • The speaker will open his riddle, his obscure saying, with the harp.
5. 49:5
   • The speaker asks why he should fear in days of evil.
   • The speaker describes being surrounded by iniquity, either the iniquity at his heels or the iniquity of those who supplant him; the phrase is ambiguous.
6. 49:6
   • Some people trust in their wealth.
   • Some people boast in the abundance of their riches.
7. 49:7
   • No man can by any means redeem his brother.
   • No man can give God a ransom for his brother.
8. 49:8
   • The redemption of their soul is costly.
   • That redemption ceases forever.
9. 49:9
   • The purpose of such a ransom would be that he should go on living forever.
   • The purpose of such a ransom would be that he should not see the pit, that is, decay.
10. 49:10
    • He sees that wise men die.
    • The fool and the brutish person likewise perish.
    • They leave their wealth to others.
11. 49:11
    • Their inward thought is that their houses will continue forever.
    • Their inward thought is that their dwelling places will last to all generations.
    • They call their lands by their own names.
12. 49:12
    • Man in honor does not abide.
    • Man is like the beasts that perish.
13. 49:13
    • This way of theirs is their folly.
    • Those who come after them approve their sayings.
    • Selah.
14. 49:14
    • They are appointed to Sheol like sheep.
    • Death will shepherd them.
    • The upright will rule over them in the morning.
    • Their form will be consumed by Sheol.
    • Their form will be consumed away from their dwelling.
15. 49:15
    • God will redeem the speaker's soul from the power of Sheol.
    • God will receive the speaker.
    • Selah.
16. 49:16
    • The hearer is told not to be afraid when a man is made rich.
    • The hearer is told not to be afraid when the glory of a man's house increases.
17. 49:17
    • When he dies he will carry nothing away.
    • His glory will not descend after him.
18. 49:18
    • During his life he blessed his own soul.
    • Men will praise you when you do well for yourself.
19. 49:19
    • He will go to the generation of his fathers.
    • They will never see light.
20. 49:20
    • A man who is in honor and does not understand is like the beasts that perish.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

49:1

The psalm opens by addressing not Israel but everyone alive, an opening more typical of the international wisdom teaching found in Proverbs and Job than of a temple song. The Hebrew word behind "world" here (heled) carries the sense of a span of time, a fleeting duration, so it means something like "all who live out their brief span on earth."

49:2

The Hebrew reads literally "sons of Adam and sons of man," using two different words for "man." The pairing was a standard way of saying commoners and men of rank, ordinary people and important ones. Together with "rich and poor" it means the whole of society, with nobody exempted from what follows.

49:3

In Hebrew the heart is not the seat of feelings as it is for us. It is where a person thinks, weighs things and decides. "The meditation of my heart" means considered thought, not emotion.

49:4

"Wise saying" and "riddle" translate two Hebrew terms belonging to the wisdom teacher's craft: mashal, a compressed saying that holds a truth by comparison, and chidah, a puzzle or hard question whose meaning is not obvious on the surface. A riddle here is not a game but a difficult truth that has to be worked out. Note that the speaker says he will listen to it before he speaks it: the teacher presents himself as receiving the saying, not inventing it. Wisdom was often taught to music, and the harp (a small hand-held lyre) was the ordinary instrument for it.

49:5

The Hebrew of this line is obscure and has been read in several ways. "The iniquity of my heels" could mean the wrongdoing of those at my heels, that is, pursuers or supplanters closing in behind me (the same image lies behind the name Jacob, "heel-grabber"); or the guilt that follows at my own heels and catches up with me; or, by a slight change of reading, "the evil of my oppressors surrounds me." The rendering keeps the pursuers reading, but the ambiguity is in the original.

49:7

"Redeem" and "ransom" are legal and commercial words, not religious abstractions. To redeem was to pay a price to get something back out of another's hands, to buy a relative out of debt-slavery, or to buy back family land that had been sold. The duty fell on the nearest male relative, which is why the psalm says "his brother." A ransom was the sum accepted in place of a life that was forfeit; Israelite law allowed such a payment in some cases but expressly forbade it for murder. The point of the verse is that no such payment exists for death itself.

49:8

"Precious" here does not mean dearly loved. In 1611 it meant costly, worth far more than anyone could pay.

49:9

To "see corruption" meant for a dead body to rot away in the grave.

49:10

"Stupid people" translates a Hebrew word (ba'ar) built on the idea of cattle or brute beasts, a person without the sense that distinguishes a human from an animal. The word plants the comparison that the psalm's refrain in verses 12 and 20 then makes explicit.

49:11

The Hebrew here is uncertain. The consonants can be read as "their inward part" (hence the King James "their inward thought is" and this rendering's "deep down they think") or, with the same letters differently vowelled, as "their grave," giving "their graves are their eternal homes," which is how the ancient Greek and Syriac translators took it. On that second reading the verse is bitterly ironic: the only permanent house a rich man gets is his tomb. Naming estates after yourself was a real practice and a recognized bid to keep your name alive after death, when there was no other way to be remembered.

49:12

The Hebrew verb translated "does not last" means literally "does not stay the night", a man in his glory is a guest who does not even remain until morning. This line returns as the psalm's closing refrain in verse 20, but with one Hebrew letter changed: here he "does not remain," there he "does not understand." Whether verse 12 originally matched verse 20 is disputed among translators.

49:13

Selah appears seventy-one times in the Psalms and its meaning was already lost by the time of the earliest translations. It is generally taken as a direction for performance (a pause, a lifting of the voices, or an instrumental interlude between sections), rather than a word to be read aloud.

49:14

"The grave" translates Sheol, the Hebrew name for the underworld where all the dead go, good and bad alike. It is not a place of punishment as later usage of "hell" implies; it is simply the realm of the dead, pictured as a dim place below the earth from which no one returns. The image in this verse is savage wordplay: these men are livestock, and death is the herdsman who pastures them, the Hebrew verb can mean both "shepherd them" and "graze on them." "In the morning" carries the sense of a sudden reversal at daybreak, the hour when a verdict was given or a night of trouble ended.

49:15

"Take me" translates a plain Hebrew verb meaning to fetch or receive someone, the same verb used of Enoch, whom God "took." What exactly is claimed here is disputed: it may mean rescue from dying now, or being received by God out of death itself. The Hebrew does not settle it.

49:16

The Hebrew word is the ordinary one for being afraid. Applied to another man's growing wealth it means something closer to being overawed or unsettled by it, the reaction of someone who assumes the rich man's position is secure and his own is not.

49:17

"Glory" again means visible wealth and status, and "descend after him" is literal: it pictures the possessions failing to follow their owner down into the grave. Burying valuables with the dead was common practice across the ancient world, which sharpens the line.

49:18

"He blessed his soul" means he congratulated himself, pronounced his own life a success. The second half of the verse switches abruptly to "you" and appears to quote a common saying of the day: look after your own interests and people will speak well of you. The psalm cites the proverb in order to set it against what follows in verse 19.

49:19

To "join the generation of his ancestors" was the standard Hebrew way of saying a person died, tied to the practice of burying family members together in one tomb, so that the dead were literally gathered to their kin. "Light" here means the daylight of the living world; the dead were thought of as in darkness, cut off from it.

49:20

The closing line repeats verse 12 with a single Hebrew letter changed, so that "does not remain" becomes "does not understand." It is the psalm's summary: what makes a man more than an animal is not what he owns but whether he grasps his own mortality.