Open Psalm 6 and before the first line of the poem there’s an instruction — a note to the music director. Part of it is a single Hebrew word that has defeated translators for two thousand years: sheminith (שְׁמִינִית).

Look across English Bibles and you can watch them give up in different ways. Some leave it out entirely and drop a footnote. Some simply transliterate it — according to the sheminith — which is a polite way of admitting they don’t know. Some translate it literally as “the eighth,” which is what the word plainly means, and leaves the reader exactly as puzzled. Others guess “an eight-stringed instrument.” The ancient translators were already unsure: the Greek and Latin just wrote “upon the eighth.”

Here is where it gets interesting. The clue comes from the book of Chronicles, where sheminith appears opposite another term that seems to mean “maidens” — soprano voices (1 Chr 15:20-21). If one word means high voices, its partner most likely means the low ones. Sheminith, “the eighth,” would then be pointing at what a musician today would call an octave: the instruments, or the voices, pitched an octave down. Low. Grave.

For a long time scholars doubted ancient Israel even thought in octaves. Then the twentieth century turned up the evidence — an Akkadian “tuning text” laying out how to tune a lyre across a seven-note scale, and a 3,400-year-old Hurrian hymn from Ugarit specifying one of those very tunings. The scale was there. The octave was possible.

Which means the word in the title may be a stage direction for grief: play it low. Fitting, for the psalm of a man soaking his bed with tears.

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org → The Meaning of הַשְּׁמִינִית in Psalm 6:1