Psalm 4:6 (7 in Hebrew) ends with a line every translation renders differently, and the disagreement comes down to a single Hebrew word: neseh (נְסֵה). Three consonants — and scholars disagree about what it means.

The most common English reading treats it as a slightly misspelled form of the verb “lift” (nesa נְשָׂא): lift up the light of your face upon us. It’s a beautiful line, and it echoes the famous priestly blessing of Numbers 6. But there’s a problem. To read neseh (נְסֵה) as “lift,” you have to accept three separate irregularities stacked in one short word — a stray letter at the front, one consonant swapped for another, and a third swapped at the end. Any one of these happens elsewhere in Hebrew. All three at once, in the same word, is hard to swallow.

A second reading vocalizes the same consonants as a different verb entirely: has fled. On this reading the line turns dark — the light of your face has fled from us — a complaint rather than a prayer. The New English Bible went this way. But the grammar resists it: the little preposition attached to the word means “upon” or “over,” not “away from.”

The third reading is the oldest and the strangest, and the Scriptura scholars judge it the best. It connects neseh (נְסֵה) to the noun nes (נֵס) — a “banner,” the standard an army lifts so its people can see where to rally. Read this way, the line asks God to raise the light of your face over us like a banner. Rashi, a renowned Jewish exegete from the Middle Ages, paraphrased it exactly so a thousand years ago.

It fits the whole psalm. Psalm 4 is about a people set apart, a light others are meant to see and move toward. A banner is precisely that: something lifted high so the scattered can find their way home. The obscure little word, it turns out, may hold the psalm’s whole picture.

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org → The Morphology of נסה in Psalm 4:7b