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Japanese Nobody knows for certain what selah means. The word comes 74 times in Scripture, in 39 psalms and in Habakkuk’s prayer, and it puzzled even its first translators. It may mark a pause in the music, a moment to lift up the voice, or a word meaning “forever”.
What we can do is watch where it falls, and again and again it falls where a prayer turns. We meet it first in Psalm 3, a song David made “when he fled from Absalom his son.” Scripture remembers that day: “David went up by the ascent of mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had his head covered, and he went barefoot” (2 Samuel 15:30). A king on foot, weeping, running from his own son. Early in the song he tells God what people were saying about him: “Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. Selah” (Psalm 3:2).
Then the prayer turns. “I cried unto the LORD with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah” (3:4). The very next line is “I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me” (3:5). A man with “ten thousands of people” set against him (3:6) lies down and sleeps. And the psalm ends with all of God’s people: “Salvation belongeth unto the LORD: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah” (3:8). After the taunt, after the answer, after the blessing. Each time the song reaches a turn, selah is there to hold it.
Where does selah appear in the Bible?
We counted it ourselves in the King James Bible: 71 times in 39 psalms and three times in the third chapter of Habakkuk, 74 in all. If you search your own Bible you will find one more, and it is a trap. In 2 Kings 14:7 King Amaziah “took Selah by war”. That Selah is a place in Edom, and its name is a Hebrew word for “rock”, spelled differently from the selah of the songs. One is a city taken in war. The other belongs to Israel’s singing.
The plainest clue to what the word is for is written over the psalms themselves. Fifty-five psalms are headed “To the chief Musician”, and 28 of them have selah. Of the other 95, only 11 do. More than half of the songs handed to the chief Musician, then, and only a few of the rest. Habakkuk’s prayer, the one place outside the Psalms where the word appears, closes with the same kind of note: “To the chief singer on my stringed instruments” (Habakkuk 3:19). Selah goes where the music goes.
So the word was written for singing to the Lord, for the singers, the players and the people who worshipped with them. Most of us meet it reading alone, in silence. David’s people met it singing.
Usually it closes a verse, and four psalms end on it. But four times it breaks into the middle of one, and Habakkuk gives us the most striking. He sees the Lord coming to save his people: “God came from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran. Selah. His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise” (Habakkuk 3:3). Read it aloud. The word falls between the coming of God and his glory filling the heavens, right where any of us would need to catch our breath.
What might selah mean?
| Selah may mean | Why some think so |
|---|---|
| A pause or interlude in the music | The first Greek translation wrote diapsalma, which early readers took for a break in the singing |
| “Lift up” the voice, the music or the blessing | It seems to come from a Hebrew verb meaning “lift up” |
| “Forever” | The rabbis of the Talmud took it so, and in several psalms it follows “for ever” |
| “So be it”, like an amen | Some early readers heard it this way |
Two or three of these may belong to a single moment. A pause in the singing may have been the time when the people lifted up a blessing, and Israel’s blessings of God reach for eternity: “blessed be his glorious name for ever” (Psalm 72:19). Pause, lift up, forever: one moment of worship could hold all three. Scholars have long agreed on just one thing, that selah is not part of the sentence it follows. That is why it sits so oddly when we read it. It tells the singers how to sing the line, and the line goes on without it.
Jewish tradition has long heard “forever” in it. The Talmud puts it among the words of eternity: “Wherever it states netzaḥ, Selah, or va’ed, the matter will never cease.” Its proof is a psalm about the city of God, “God will establish it for ever. Selah” (Psalm 48:8). Hear the end of David’s psalm that way, and the blessing on God’s people has no end.
Augustine, reading the Psalms in Latin with the Greek beside him, was no surer about diapsalma, and he said so. He weighed the guesses of his day and settled for what he could see: “whether I say it be the former, or the latter, or something else, this at least is probable, that the sense cannot rightly be continued and joined, where the Diapsalma intervenes.” The song turns at selah, he meant, and we should not run the two halves together. Psalm 3 shows it plainly. On one side of the first selah is “There is no help for him in God.” On the other is “But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me” (3:3).
Does selah mean “pause and reflect”?
You will often hear selah explained as a call to stop and think about what has just been sung. It is a good way to pray the Psalms, a kind of meditation on God’s word, and the first translators’ word for a break in the singing gives it some ground. But none of the oldest readers says the word itself means to reflect. If you stop at each selah and let the line before it settle in you, you are praying well. Hold it as a way of praying rather than as a translation.
Nor does selah mean “be still”. Psalm 46 shows the difference. Selah comes three times: after the waters roar and the mountains shake (46:3), and after each of the two refrains, “The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah” (46:7 and 46:11). Between those refrains comes “Be still, and know that I am God” (46:10). Its Hebrew verb is unrelated to selah, and means to let go and leave off. No selah follows it. The stillness is in the words themselves. The selah comes after the promise that God is with us, as if the musicians were told to stay on that line a little longer. It is the line in that psalm we most need to hear, and the psalm gives it to us twice.
Why most Bibles leave selah untranslated
Because no one can translate it with confidence, most English Bibles print “Selah” just as it is in the Hebrew, some with a footnote saying its meaning is uncertain. Others move the word into a footnote or leave it out. The New Living Translation prints “Interlude” instead, wherever the word appears. So if your Bible has a note at the foot of the page, or prints “Interlude”, or seems to have lost the word, nothing has gone wrong.
And if you have come to Psalm 3 on a night when you could pray its first line yourself, “LORD, how are they increased that trouble me!” (3:1), stay with David to the end. Whatever the singers did at selah, whether they rested, raised their voices or answered “forever”, the last line of his psalm holds in every case: “Salvation belongeth unto the LORD: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah.”
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