1For the lead player, for the Korahites, a psalm.
2All peoples, clap hands,
shout out to God with a sound of glad song.
3For the LORD is most high and fearsome,
a great king over all the earth.
4He crushes peoples beneath us
and nations beneath our feet.
5He chooses for us our estate,
pride of Jacob whom He loves.
selah
6God has gone up with a trumpet blast,
the LORD with a ram’s horn sound.
7Hymn to God, hymn,
hymn to our king, O hymn.
8For king of all earth is God,
9God reigns over the nations,
and sits on His holy throne.
10The princes of peoples have gathered,
the people of Abraham’s God.
For God’s are the land’s defenders.
PSALM 47 NOTES
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3. For the LORD is most high and fearsome, / a great king over all the earth. The Hebrew ʿelyon is adjectival here and so is translated as “most high” rather than represented as a name for God. This is one of several psalms that take for their subject the celebration of God’s kingship. In the first half of the poem, up to the selah that marks the end of verse 5, God’s kingship is seen manifested in His granting triumph to Israel over its enemies, a common theme in Psalms. In the second half of the poem, ceremonial flourishes of acclaim for the divine king are explicitly invoked, and God is imagined seated on a throne. Since Sigmund Mowinckel in the early twentieth century, many scholars have contended that this psalm is the text of a New Year ritual (on the model of an annual Babylonian rite of coronation for the god Mardukh) in which God was crowned. It must be said that the existence of an actual ritual of this sort is mere conjecture, and the psalm could simply be a symbolic celebration through song of the idea that God reigns supreme over all. This is precisely how this psalm came to be used in subsequent Jewish tradition in the New Year liturgy.
6. God has gone up. God’s loftiness or ascent is a theme that sounds through the poem from beginning to end. The psalmist may well be inviting us to imagine God ascending to take His seat on the celestial throne.
trumpet blast, / . . . ram’s horn. The fanfare of these instruments marked the coronation of human kings.
8. joyous song. The Hebrew term here is maskil, the word that appears in several of the superscriptions to individual psalms. The inference that it refers in particular to joyous song is drawn from the way it may be used in Amos 5:13.
10. For God’s are the land’s defenders. This sentence in all likelihood should be linked with “He crushes peoples beneath us / and nations beneath our feet (verse 4).” That is, God has manifested His own regal power by enabling His people to triumph over its enemies, and the warriors who have successfully defended the “estate” of the Land of Israel are victorious through God, or are in effect God’s soldiers.
Much exalted is He. The Hebrew here uses a passive verb naʿalah (literally, “has gone up”) in an adjectival sense. The verb exhibits the same root ʿ-l-h detectible in the adjective ʿelyon, “most high,” in verse 3.