PSALM 8
1For the lead player, on the gittith, a David psalm.
2LORD, our Master,
how majestic Your name in all the earth!
Whose splendor was told over the heavens.
3From the mouth of babes and sucklings
You founded strength
on account of Your foes
to put an end to enemy and avenger.
4When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars You fixed firm,
5“What is man that You should note him,
and the human creature, that You pay him heed,
6and You make him little less than the gods,
with glory and grandeur You crown him?
7You make him rule over the work of Your hands.
All things You set under his feet.
8Sheep and oxen all together,
and also the beasts of the field,
9birds of the heavens and fish of the sea,
what moves on the paths of the seas.”
10LORD, our Master,
how majestic Your name in all the earth!
PSALM 8 NOTES
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1. the gittith. This is another musical instrument that has eluded persuasive identification.
2. Master / . . . majestic. The alliteration seeks to mirror the strong alliterative effect between the two Hebrew words ʾadonenu and ʾadir.
was told. The Masoretic Text has tenah, which appears to be an imperative of the verb “to give,” and does not make much sense in context. I have revocalized it as tunah, yielding “was told.” The beauty of the night sky, which the psalmist contemplates in verse 4, speaks out God’s glory wordlessly.
3. From the mouth of babes and sucklings. The meaning of this phrase, however proverbial it has become, has not been satisfactorily explained. One distant possibility: God draws strength from consciously aware humankind, made in His image, even from its weakest and youngest members, against the inhuman forces of chaos. Perhaps the innocence of infants is imagined as a source of strength.
to put an end to enemy and avenger. Because this is a psalm celebrating creation, there is plausibility in the identification proposed by some scholars between this implacable foe and the primordial sea monster, who, in Canaanite myth, must be subdued by the god of order so that the world can come into stable being. Imagery taken from that cosmogonic battle between gods is borrowed by a good many psalms.
4. the work of Your fingers. The “work of Your hands,” as in verse 7, is a common idiom, but this variation of it is unique, probably meant to suggest the delicate tracery of the starry skies.
5. What is man. At the exact center of the poem, we find a poetic parallelism not based on any semantic development or focusing from verset to verset (as, for example, in the immediately preceding line) but rather on balanced synonymity, producing a stately emphasis through the equivalence between the two halves of the line.
6. the gods. The ambiguous Hebrew ʾelohim, which could refer to gods or celestial beings but probably not in this context to the single deity, sets humankind in a hierarchical ladder: God at the very top, the gods or celestial beings below Him, then man, and below man the whole kingdom of other living creatures.
with glory and grandeur You crown him. All these terms appropriate to royalty establish the image of man ruling over nature, with all things “under his feet,” a common ancient Near Eastern image of subjugation.
8–9. Sheep and oxen / . . . birds of the heavens and fish of the sea. The language of this compact but embracing catalogue is a deliberate recasting in somewhat different words of the first Creation story (even “fish of the sea” is a slight variation on degat hayam in Genesis 1, the phrase used here being degey hayam), but the audience of the poem is surely meant to hear in all this a beautiful poetic reprise of Genesis 1. The eye moves downward vertically in the poem from the heavens to the divine beings who are God’s entourage to man’s feet and, below those, to the beasts of the field and then to what swims through the sea (which no longer harbors a primordial sea beast). The last term in the catalogue is a neat poetic kenning for sea creatures, “what moves on the paths of the seas.”
10. LORD, our Master, / how majestic Your name in all the earth. Although biblical literature, in poetry and prose, exhibits considerable fondness for envelope structures, in which the end somehow echoes the beginning, this verbatim repetition of the first line as the last, common in other poetic traditions, is unusual. It closes a perfect circle that celebrates the harmony of God’s creation. The “all” component of “all the earth,” which at first might have seemed like part of a formulaic phrase, takes on cumulative force at the very end of the poem. God’s majesty is manifest in all things, and the creature fashioned in His image has been given dominion over all things. The integrated harmony of the created world as the poet perceives it and the integrated harmony of the poem make a perfect match.