PSALM 33

    ¹Sing gladly, O righteous, of the LORD,

          for the upright, praise is befitting.

    ²Acclaim the LORD with the lyre,

          with the ten-stringed lute hymn to Him.

    ³Sing Him a new song,

          play deftly with joyous shout.

    ⁴For the word of the LORD is upright,

          and all His doings in good faith.

    ⁵He loves the right and the just.

          The LORD’s kindness fills the earth.

    ⁶By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,

          and by the breath of His mouth all their array.

    ⁷He gathers like a mound the sea’s waters,

          puts in treasure houses the deeps.

    ⁸All the earth fears the LORD,

          all the world’s dwellers dread Him.

    ⁹For He did speak and it came to be,

          He commanded, and it stood.

    ¹⁰The LORD thwarted the counsel of nations,

          overturned the devisings of peoples.

    ¹¹The LORD’s counsel will stand forever,

          His heart’s devisings for all generations.

    ¹²Happy the nation whose god is the LORD,

          the people He chose as estate for Him.

    ¹³From the heavens the LORD looked down,

          saw all the human creatures.

    ¹⁴From His firm throne He surveyed

          all who dwell on the earth.

    ¹⁵He fashions their heart one and all.

          He understands all their doings.

    ¹⁶The king is not rescued through surfeit of might,

          the warrior not saved through surfeit of power.

    ¹⁷The horse is a lie for rescue,

          and in his surfeit of might he helps none escape.

    ¹⁸Look, the LORD’s eye is on those who fear Him,

          on those who yearn for His kindness

    ¹⁹to save their lives from death

          and in famine to keep them alive.

    ²⁰We urgently wait for the LORD.

          Our help and our shield is He.

    ²¹For in Him our heart rejoices,

          for in His holy name do we trust.

    ²²May Your kindness, O LORD, be upon us,

          as we have yearned for You.

PSALM 33 NOTES

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1. Sing, gladly, O righteous. Hermann Gunkel long ago plausibly identified this psalm as a hymn. The setting is choral; the form of address is collective; and the perspective, in contrast to the individual thanksgiving psalm, is both global and national. The emphasis on music through the first three verses suggests a public performance of the psalm with orchestra and chorus.

3. Sing Him a new song. This phrase is, in a sense, the composer’s self-advertisement: God is to be celebrated not with a stock item from the psalmodic repertoire but with a freshly composed piece.

play deftly. This stipulation is surely an indication that the new song must be presented in a technically skilled performance.

6. By the word of the LORD the heavens were made. The poet, developing a cue he has introduced at the end of the previous line—“The LORD’S kindness fills the earth”—takes us back to the Creation story in Genesis 1, for which he offers a kind of poetic interpretation. “Earth” and “heaven” are terms often paired in parallel versets of poetry as well as key terms in the Creation story. God’s word as the agent of creation is, of course, a recasting of the narrative in Genesis 1, in which God speaks the world into existence.

by the breath of His mouth. Ostensibly a synonym for “the word of the LORD,” this phrase also catches up the image in Genesis of God’s breath hovering over the primordial waters.

all their array. The “heavens and all their array,” referring to the stars, is still another phrase borrowed from the first Creation story.

7. He gathers like a mound the sea’s waters. This is a punning double allusion: it recalls God’s dividing dry land from water in the Creation story and at the same time picks up an image from the dividing of the waters in the Song of the Sea—”streams stood up like a mound” (Exodus 15:8). Both this text and the one in Exodus use the relatively rare noun ned for “mound.”

puts in treasure houses the deeps. This psalm shares with Job the mythological image of God’s stocking the elemental forces of nature in cosmic caches or storehouses (ʾotsarot).

9. For He did speak and it came to be, / He commanded, and it stood. This entire line again picks up the notion from Genesis 1 that God created the world through a series of speech-acts. This was an idea particularly favored by the Priestly writers, the literary circle that at some midpoint in the First Temple period produced the Creation story of Genesis 1, a variety of passages that occur later in Genesis, and most of Leviticus.

11. The LORD’s counsel will stand forever. This line makes an obvious but effective antithesis to the previous line, in which the LORD thwarts the counsel of nations.

13. From the heavens the LORD looked down, / saw all the human creatures. The viewpoint of this poem manages to be at once national (“the people He chose as estate for Him”) and universalist: the God of creation surveys the deeds of men and women throughout the world.

15. one and all. This is the idiomatic force of yaḥad, which elsewhere, and invariably in postbiblical Hebrew, means “together.”

16. surfeit of might, / . . . surfeit of power. The impotence of any material power a human being can command stands in vivid contrast to God’s overwhelming power, expressed in the preceding lines, over all the earth. It is noteworthy, moreover, that God is seen in this poem creating the world not through sheer force but through speech—not with a big bang but in a series of carefully measured words.

20. We urgently wait. The adverb “urgently” is added to suggest the force of emphasis achieved in the Hebrew through the use of nafsheinu—”our life-breath,” “our very selves”—as an intensive form of the first-person plural pronoun.