One final wordplay—in verse 13—demonstrates this. There we read: “But whoever takes refuge in me will possess the land, and will inherit my holy mountain.”

The Hebrew word for possess is ynh\l; it is a verbal form of the noun nah\ala, a word that means “possession, property, inheritance.” More specifically, it refers to the ancestral estate of every Israelite, the family homestead. It is, of course, the fertility of the nah\ala, the family homestead, that is so essential to the well-being of the dead. Surely, then, it is no coincidence that when we look back at verses 5–6, we find a word similar to nah\ala, nah\al, which means valley or wadi, and which is used to refer to the valley as the home of the perished, the dead. Indeed, W.H. Irwin has suggested that nah\al may even mean grave in this context. The poet through wordplay is attempting to demonstrate to us precisely the point we made above: the crucial stake that the dead in the valley graveyard (the nah\al) have in the fertility of the family inheritance (the nah\ala).