What Does Selah Mean in the Psalms?

Nobody knows for certain what Selah means. The word appears 71 times in 39 psalms in the King James Version, and three more times in Habakkuk 3. Wikipedia's Selah article says its origin and exact meaning are unknown. The most common proposals are that it is a musical or reading mark, a cue to pause, or a place for the music to play on. In the Psalms it never names a person. It stands on its own, usually at the end of a line.

Psalm 89 has Selah 4 times, more than any other psalm. Psalms 3, 32, 46, 66, 68, 77 and 140 have it 3 times each. The table on this page lists every psalm that uses the word and how many times it appears.

The honest answer is that the meaning has been lost. Wikipedia's Selah article lists several proposals. It may be a musical or liturgical mark, or an instruction to the reader meaning stop and listen. It may mark a musical interlude, or tell the musicians to lift up the sound during a pause. It may work like underlining before the next section. In Jewish liturgy the word is taken to mean forever, and some ancient translators, Aquila, Jerome and the Targum, rendered it as always. None of these can be proved from the psalms themselves. This site keeps the word as it stands in the text and does not add a meaning to it.

Early translators already had to guess. According to Wikipedia, the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, and the Greek versions of Symmachus and Theodotion wrote diapsalma, glossed as apart from psalm. The King James Version and the World English Bible do not translate it at all. Both print Selah as it is, at the end of the line where it falls. Psalm 46:11 is a clear example: "The LORD of Armies is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah." A few times it falls in the middle of a verse instead, as in Psalm 55:19 and Psalm 57:3, where the sentence carries on after it.

All 71 uses in the King James Version fall in 39 psalms, and 37 of those psalms come between Psalm 3 and Psalm 89. After Psalm 89 the word appears only in Psalm 140 and Psalm 143. It can come in the middle of a psalm or at its very end. Psalm 3 uses it after verses 2, 4 and 8, so the last word of the psalm is Selah. Psalm 46 has it after verses 3, 7 and 11, again ending the psalm. In Psalm 9:16 it stands next to a second unexplained word, Higgaion in the King James Version, which the World English Bible renders Meditation.

As a word in a song, Selah appears in one other book. Habakkuk 3 is a prayer of the prophet, and its first verse says it is "set to victorious music", much like a psalm heading. Selah falls in Habakkuk 3:3, 3:9 and 3:13. The chapter ends with a note that also recalls the psalm headings: "For the music director, on my stringed instruments." Wikipedia gives the total for the whole Bible as 74, which is the 71 in the Psalms plus these three. The same spelling in 2 Kings 14:7 in the King James Version is something else: there Selah is a place that Amaziah took in war.