It occurs seventy-one times in the Psalms and three times in Habakkuk. It is found in the poetical books of the Old Testament. Due to the confusion around the meaning of Selah, Bible translators have translated it in different ways. You could also follow the model laid out by translators of the Septuagint who translated it as an intermission. Use Selah to take a pause to think about what the Scripture says - to reflect on the meaning of the verse before continuing to read the rest of the passage.
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, Jason Soroski, How do we sing and pray the selah of the Psalms? Here are some ways to pray selah distilled from the most probable interpretations above:.
We are in no hurry, but can sit us down and wait while earth dissolves, and mountains rock, and oceans roar. Ours is not the headlong rashness which passes for courage, we can calmly confront the danger, and meditate upon terror, dwelling on its separate items and united forces. The pause is not an exclamation of dismay, but merely a rest in music; we do not suspend our song in alarm, but tune our harps again with deliberation amidst the tumult of the storm.
It were well if all of us could say, Selah, under tempestuous trials, but alas! Selah invites us to rest and reflect, to receive and rejoice in the goodness, beauty, and truth of the God of the Psalms. See also:. How to Pray the Psalms. How I Learn the Psalms by Heart.
However, there are a handful of words in the Bible that are not, or cannot, be translated. When this happens, what we read is not a translation, but a transliteration.
A translation is when a Hebrew word is translated into an English word that means the same thing. For example, the Hebrew word erets is translated to earth , because they have the same meaning, so we English speakers just read 'earth'.
A transliteration is when a Hebrew word is simply sounded out to English so we can read and pronounce it. An example is Hallelujah. Instead of being translated as "Praise God," this word has been left for us to sound out as it would be in the original Hebrew and continues to be a powerful expression of praise.
Like Hallelujah, the fact that Selah is transliterated and not translated doesn't diminish its importance. Instead, it signifies that when we read Selah, we are pronouncing the word generally the same way it would have been pronounced thousands of years ago by those who originally wrote and read it. The Bible is truly the words of God given to us, and every one of those words matters, even the words we don't fully understand and can't properly translate.
After all, we can't understand all there is to know about God, so it stands to reason that there would be words in Scripture that are beyond our full comprehension. This doesn't diminish words like Selah, but in some ways can make them a little more meaningful. Another transliterated word in the Bible that we don't fully understand is the word shigionoth and its singular form, shiggaion. Each of these words appears in the Bible only once.
The important thing for us here is that these two words appear in chapters that are written as music and, you guessed it, also include the word Selah. Shiggaion is found in the title of Psalm 7 , " A shiggaion of David, which he sang to the Lord". Like the word Selah, no one knows the exact meaning of these words, but many scholars feel that shigionoth and shiggaion are clearly related to music. Some believe that it has to do with strong emotion, and the lyrical content of the songs where it is used would certainly support this idea.
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