Beatus vir — Psalm 1

Last tended: 30 June 2026

The first psalm is a doorway: before the Psalter sings, prays, or laments, it draws a line between two ways and asks the reader which he will walk. The Coverdale text I sing at chapel keeps the old shape of that line.

Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners: and hath not sat in the seat of the scornful.Coverdale’s three verbs — walked, stood, sat — descend by degrees into settledness, a rhetorical figure already present in the Hebrew.

But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and the tree planted by the waterside answers the chaff driven away by the wind: the one rooted, the other rootless. The whole psalm turns on that contrast, and the Psalter will return to it again and again.

notes

1 counsel Coverdale renders Heb. ʿēṣâ; the LXX has βουλή. The sequence counsel → way → seat descends from a passing thought to settled company.
4 chaff Heb. mōṣ, the husk the wind lifts from the threshing-floor. Cf. Ps 35:5; Hos 13:3.

glossary

ʾašrê: Hebrew, how blessed — an exclamation in the intensive plural; the psalm opens on a cry, not a proposition.
Beatus vir: the Latin incipit (Vulgate), by which the psalm is named in the liturgy.

Changelog

30 June 2026 — first notes: the three verbs of verse 1, the tree and the chaff.