Dennis Minott | Selah: A meaningless word that still commands us to pause

There is a curious little word scattered through the Psalms that has survived millennia of copying, translation, chanting, disputation, and devotion – yet stubbornly refuses to explain itself. Selah.

Most scholars agree on only one thing about it: no one knows exactly what it means.

It is not translatable in the usual sense. It does not function like a noun or verb. It carries no clear propositional content. Some suggest that it was a musical instruction. Others think it marked a pause, a change of key, or a cue for instrumental interlude. Still others concede, with refreshing honesty, that its original function has simply been lost.

And yet – despite its apparent meaninglessness – Selah has never been edited out.

This is not a trivial fact. Editors are ruthless creatures. They remove what they do not understand, what they cannot justify, what appears redundant or obscure. Yet generation after generation of scribes left Selah untouched. They copied it faithfully even when they could no longer explain it. That restraint deserves our attention.

Perhaps Selah survived precisely because it does not mean something in the usual way. Its function may not have been to inform but to interrupt.

In the Psalms, Selah often appears just after a troubling claim, a soaring declaration, or a moment of raw emotional exposure. It arrives unannounced, like a hand gently raised in mid-sentence. Not to contradict. Not to clarify. Simply to insist: stop here.

Pause.

Let this sink in before you rush on.

In a world that prizes fluency, speed, and relentless forward motion, Selah represents something we have largely unlearned: the discipline of deliberate stillness. It resists our modern obsession with productivity and immediate reaction. It offers no argument, no instruction, no policy proposal. It simply creates space.

That, perhaps, is why it unsettles us.

We live in a time when silence is treated as inefficiency, reflection as indulgence, and hesitation as weakness. Our public discourse moves at the pace of outrage. Opinions are formed before facts arrive. Judgments are issued before understanding has had a chance to breathe. There is little room for Selah in our national conversations.

And yet, Jamaica’s current challenges – educational decline, environmental vulnerability, economic precarity, social hardening – are not problems that yield to speed. They demand thoughtfulness, patience, and the humility to admit uncertainty. They require pauses long enough for wisdom to catch up with ambition. They groan for a place in Gordon House, Jamaica’s Parliament, and a place where Daryl is shell-shocked when Dayton pauses and gives him the side eye.

Selah may be meaningless in the dictionary sense, but it is not functionless. It regulates tempo. It guards against recklessness. It insists that some truths are too heavy to be rushed past.

There is a lesson here for leadership, for governance, and even for public commentary. Not every moment calls for an immediate statement. Not every criticism requires instant rebuttal. Sometimes the most responsible act is to pause – especially after saying something weighty or before doing something irreversible.

In music, silence is not the absence of sound. It is what gives sound its shape. In language, pauses are not emptiness. They are what allow meaning to settle. Selah reminds us that reflection is not a luxury of the contemplative – it is a necessity for the wise.

So perhaps Selah endures because it performs a task we still desperately need done. It slows us down when speed would betray us. It creates space where reaction would cheapen understanding. It forces us to sit, briefly, with what has just been said.

A meaningless word, then – if by meaning we require definition.

But profoundly functional, if what we require is ... well ... wisdom.

Selah.

Dennis A. Minott, PhD, is a physicist, green energy consultant, and long-time college counsellor. He is the CEO of A-QuEST. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.