1 Hallelujah!
Praise the name of Jehovah,
Praise, ye servants of Jehovah,
2 Who stand in the house of Jehovah,
In the courts of the house of our God.
3 Praise Jah, for Jehovah is good;
Harp to His name, for it is pleasant.
4 For Jah has chosen Jacob for Himself,
Israel for His own possession.
5 For I--I know that Jehovah is great,
And [that] our Lord is above all gods.
6 Whatsoever Jehovah wills He has done,
In the heaven and in the earth,
In the seas and all depths;
7 Who makes the vapours go up from the end of the earth,
He makes lightnings for the rain,
Who brings forth wind from His storehouses.
8 Who smote the first-born of Egypt,
Both of man and of cattle;
9 He sent signs and wonders into thy midst, O Egypt,
On Pharaoh and all his servants.
10 Who smote many nations,
And slew mighty kings;
11 Sihon, king of the Amorites,
And Og, king of Bashan;
12 And gave their land [as] an inheritance,
An inheritance to Israel His people.
13 Jehovah, Thy name [endures] for ever,
Jehovah, Thy memorial [endures] to generation after generation.
14 For Jehovah will right His people,
And will relent concerning His servants.
15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
The work of the hands of men.
16 A mouth is theirs--and they cannot speak;
Eyes are theirs--and they cannot see;
17 Ears are theirs--and they cannot give ear;
Yea, there is no breath at all in their mouths.
18 Like them shall those who make them be,
[Even] every one that trusts in them.
19 House of Israel, bless ye Jehovah;
House of Aaron, bless ye Jehovah;
20 House of Levi, bless ye Jehovah;
Ye who fear Jehovah, bless ye Jehovah.
21 Blessed be Jehovah from Zion,
Who dwells in Jerusalem!
Hallelujah!
Like Psalms xcvii. and xcviii., this is a cento, or piece of mosaic
work, apparently intended as a call to worship Jehovah in the Temple.
His greatness, as manifested in Nature, and especially in His
planting Israel in its inheritance, is set forth as the reason for
praise; and the contemptuous contrast of the nothingness of idols is
repeated from Psalm cxv., and followed, as there, by an exhortation
to Israel to cleave to Him. We have not here to do with a song which
gushed fresh from the singer's heart, but with echoes of many strains
which a devout and meditative soul had made its own. The flowers
are arranged in a new bouquet, because the poet had long delighted
in their fragrance. The ease with which he blends into a harmonious
whole fragments from such diverse sources tells how familiar he was
with these, and how well he loved them.
Vv. 1-4 are an invocation to praise Jehovah, and largely consist
of quotations or allusions. Thus Psalm cxxxiv. 1 underlies vv. 1,
2. But here the reference to nightly praises is omitted, and the
summons is addressed not only to those who stand in the house of
Jehovah, but to those who stand in its _courts_. That expansion may
mean that the call to worship is here directed to the people as well
as to the priests (so in ver. 19). Ver. 3 closely resembles Psalm
cxlvii. 1, but the question of priority may be left undecided. Since
the act of praise is said to be "pleasant" in Psalm cxlvii. 1, it is
best to refer the same word here to the same thing, and not, as some
would do, to the Name, or to take it as an epithet of Jehovah. To a
loving soul praise is a delight. The songs which are not winged by
the singer's joy in singing will not rise high. True worship pours
out its notes as birds do theirs--in order to express gladness which,
unuttered, loads the heart. Ver. 4 somewhat passes beyond the bounds
of the invocation proper, and anticipates the subsequent part of the
psalm. Israel's prerogative is so great to this singer that it forces
utterance at once, though "out of season," as correct critics would
say. But the throbs of a grateful heart are not always regular. It
is impossible to keep the reasons for praise out of the summons to
praise. Ver. 4 joyfully and humbly accepts the wonderful title given
in Deut. vii. 6.
In vv. 5-7 God's majesty as set forth in Nature is hymned. The
psalmist says emphatically in ver. 5 "I--I know," and implies the
privilege which he shared, in common with his fellow-Israelites
(who appear in the "our" of the next clause), of knowing what the
heathen did not know--how highly Jehovah was exalted above all their
gods. Ver. 6 is from Psalm cxv. 3, with the expansion of defining
the all-inclusive sphere of God's sovereignty. Heaven, earth, seas,
and depths cover all space. The enumeration of the provinces of His
dominion prepares for that of the phases of His power in Nature,
which is quoted with slight change from Jer. x. 13, li. 16. The
mysterious might which gathers from some unknown region the filmy
clouds which grow, no man knows how, in the clear blue; the power
which weds in strange companionship the fire of the lightning flash
and the torrents of rain; the controlling hand which urges forth the
invisible wind,--these call for praise.
But while the psalmist looks on physical phenomena with a devout poet's
eye, he turns from these to expatiate rather on what Jehovah has done
for Israel. Psalmists are never weary of drawing confidence and courage
for to-day from the deeds of the Exodus and the Conquest. Ver. 8 is
copied from Exod. xiii. 15, and the whole section is saturated with
phraseology drawn from Deuteronomy. Ver. 13 is from Exod. iii. 15, the
narrative of the theophany at the Bush. That Name, proclaimed then as
the basis of Moses' mission and Israel's hope, is now, after so many
centuries and sorrows, the same, and it will endure for ever. Ver. 14
is from Deut. xxxii. 36. Jehovah will right His people--_i.e._, deliver
them from oppressors--which is the same thing as "relent concerning His
servants," since His wrath was the reason of their subjection to their
foes. That judicial deliverance of Israel is at once the sign that
His Name, His revealed character, continues the same, unexhausted and
unchanged for ever, and the reason why the Name shall continue as the
object of perpetual adoration and trust.
Vv. 15-20 are taken bodily from Psalm cxv., to which the reader is
referred. Slight abbreviations and one notable difference occur. In
ver. 17_b_, "Yea, there is no breath at all in their mouths," takes the
place of "A nose is theirs--and they cannot smell." The variation has
arisen from the fact that the particle of strong affirmation (yea) is
spelt like the noun "nose," and that the word for "breath" resembles
the verb "smell." The psalmist plays upon his original, and by his
variation makes the expression of the idols' lifelessness stronger.
The final summons to praise, with which the end of the psalm returns
to its beginning, is also moulded on Psalm cxv. 9-11, with the
addition of "the house of Levi" to the three groups mentioned there,
and the substitution of a call to "bless" for the original invitation
to "trust." Ver. 21 looks back to the last verse of the preceding
psalm, and significantly modifies it. There, as in Psalm cxviii.,
Jehovah's blessing comes out of Zion to His people. Here the people's
blessing in return goes from Zion and rises to Jehovah. They gathered
there for worship, and dwelt with Him in His city and Temple. Swift
interchange of the God-given blessing, which consists in mercies
and gifts of gracious deliverance, and of the human blessing, which
consists in thanksgiving and praise, fills the hours of those who
dwell with Jehovah, as guests in His house, and walk the streets of
the city which He guards and Himself inhabits.