Psalm 46:10 — “Be still”, and the rest of the sentence

The four words, and the rest of the sentence

Psalm 46:10 is three clauses. Here it is whole:

“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted amongst the nations. I will be exalted in the earth.”Psalms 46:10 · World English Bible

Be still, and know that I am God is the first third. The other two thirds are I will be exalted amongst the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. Two of the three clauses are about nations, and those are the two that get left off.

That is worth noticing before anything else about the verse, because it is not an interpretation. It is a count. The sentence has a subject, the subject is stated twice, and the quotation stops before it arrives.

What is immediately before it

Come, see the LORD’s works, what desolations he has made in the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow, and shatters the spear. He burns the chariots in the fire.Psalms 46:8-9 · World English Bible

No break, no change of scene: verse 10 follows straight on from this. Whatever be still is asking for, it is asked in a psalm where God is described stopping wars by destroying the equipment. The bow, the spear and the chariot are the three things an ancient army was made of, and all three are named as broken.

So the setting of the most-quoted stillness verse in English is a battlefield being cleared. That does not make the calm reading wrong. It does mean the calm is being described in the middle of something loud, which is a different claim from the one on the candle.

It is plural

The Hebrew imperative is harpū — masculine plural. English has no way to show that, so be still reads in our language as something you could say to one person on their own. In the Hebrew it cannot be. It is nearer to all of you, be still.

Who exactly is being addressed — the congregation the psalm is sung by, or the raging nations of verse 6 — is a reading, and this site does not settle it. What the plural rules out is the one thing the verse is most often used for: it is not, on its own terms, a private instruction to an individual in a quiet room. It may well be usable that way. It is not written that way.

The verb is not about noise

The word behind be still is raphah, and the lexicons define it as a primitive root meaning to slacken — Brown-Driver-Briggs gives “sink, relax”, with a gloss range running through abate, cease, fail, forsake, leave, let alone and be slack. It is a word about loosening a grip. It is not a word about silence.

This is a matter of semantic range, not of manuscripts. Nobody disputes what the Hebrew says here, and the two translations on this page agree word for word. The gap is between what raphah covers and what the English phrase be still suggests to a modern reader, which is the same kind of gap our page on hope describes for the Greek elpis — not the manuscript kind of difference we describe on Romans 8:28.

Put the plural, the verb and the two verses before it together and the sentence reads less like go quiet and more like stop. We are not going to insist on that; a psalm is allowed to be usable in more than one room. But a reader who has only ever met the four words has met about a third of the verse.

The refrain, and one word that has drifted

The LORD of Armies is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.Psalms 46:11 · World English Bible

This closes the psalm, and it closed the first half too at verse 7. It is the line the psalm chooses to end on, and it is a military title. Our two translations render it differently: the King James has the LORD of hosts, the World English Bible has the LORD of Armies. The Hebrew is the same; hosts is simply an English word that has drifted, and in 1611 it still plainly meant armies. You can see both on this page and judge which one a modern reader hears.

A refrain that may have gone missing

Count the psalm’s markers in either translation and something does not line up. Selah comes three times, after verses 3, 7 and 11. The refrain, The LORD of Armies is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge, comes twice, after verses 7 and 11 — counted in both our translations. The first stanza ends on the roaring sea and a Selah, and nothing else.

Several commentators think the refrain once stood there too (commentaries on Psalm 46:3). The Cambridge Bible says the psalm’s symmetrical structure “makes it probable that the refrain … has been lost”. Ellicott says a change of construction in verse 3 “seems to confirm the suspicion that the refrain has dropped away”. Keil and Delitzsch cite Hupfeld and Ewald for the view that it “has accidentally fallen out here” (their verse numbers run one higher than ours, because the Hebrew counts the psalm’s title as verse 1). It is a conjecture from the psalm’s shape: the text as it stands, and both our translations, end verse 3 with Selah alone. We do not settle it. If they are right, the first stanza ended the way the other two do — the earth shaking, the sea roaring, and then the LORD of Armies is with us.

What it does not say

• It does not promise quiet. The psalm opens with mountains falling into the sea and closes with a battlefield cleared. Nothing in it is calm except the person speaking.
• It does not say the trouble will not happen. Verse 2 says we won’t be afraid, though the earth changes — though, not so.
• It is not a technique. There is no instruction here about breathing, posture or duration, and reading one in is reading it in.
• It is not addressed to one person. The imperative is plural, whatever else is true about it.

If you came here because your head will not stop, our verses for anxiety page is built for that, and verses about fear covers the difference between fear with an object and fear without one.

Using it

Both texts above are public domain — the King James by age, the modern rendering by the translators’ choice. Print either on a card, a retreat handout, an order of service or a wall with no permission and no fee. Most modern translations are licensed, which is why so many sites show you one verse and a copyright notice.

Where you've heard it

Two things worth knowing, and the second is a piece of trivia we can check rather than repeat.

• “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Martin Luther's Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott is a paraphrase of this psalm — Heinrich Heine called it the Marseillaise of the Reformation. Note which half Luther heard: a fortress, not a hush.
• The Shakespeare puzzle, which turns out to depend on a decision nobody mentions. See below.

Counting Psalm 46

The claim circulates every few years: in the King James Version, the 46th word of Psalm 46 is shake and the 46th word from the end is spear — and Shakespeare turned 46 around the time the translation was finished.

We can test this rather than repeat it, because the King James text is printed on this page. Counted from the start, the 46th word is shake. That part holds.

Counted from the end, the 46th word is spear only if you decline to count the three occurrences of “Selah”, which are printed in the psalm and which we print above. Count them and the 46th word from the end is in. So the puzzle works on one convention and fails on another, and the convention that makes it work is the one that discards words the text actually contains. That is not usually mentioned by people passing it on.

As for the attribution, scholars regard Shakespeare's involvement as unlikely, on the straightforward ground that the King James translations were settled by committee. A good puzzle, an honest arithmetic, and no evidence for the story attached to it — which is roughly our position on most things that arrive already framed as remarkable.