1The LORD reigns, in triumph clothed,
clothed is the LORD, in strength He is girded.
Yes, the world stands firm, not to be shaken.
2Your throne stands firm from of old,
from forever You are.
3The streams lifted up, O LORD,
the streams lifted up their voice,
the streams lift up their roaring.
4More than the sound of many waters,
the sea’s majestic breakers,
majestic on high is the LORD.
5Your statutes are very faithful.
Holiness suits Your house.
PSALM 93 NOTES
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1. The LORD reigns. This brief, powerful psalm begins without superscription. It is clearly one of a group of psalms that celebrate God’s kingship. The once popular notion, put forth by Sigmund Mowinckel in the early twentieth century, that it is the liturgy for an annual festival in which YHWH was enthroned, has come more and more to seem like a scholarly exercise in historical fiction because there is no evidence for the existence of such a rite in ancient Israel. God’s grandeur as king of all the world would have been a perfectly appropriate theme for a Hebrew poet without a cultic apparatus.
triumph. The Hebrew geiʾut covers a range from splendor, grandeur, and greatness to the image of surging high (as it is used in the Song of the Sea, playing against the sense of the term as “tide,” as is evidently the case in this poem as well).
3. The streams lifted up. The rising waters of the sea—it is not until the end of the second verset that the verb receives an object, “their voice” (or “their sound”), which turns it into an idiom used for human speech—are an antithesis to the firmly founded world and divine throne of the two previous verses. Although this poem may glance back, as many scholars have proposed, to Canaanite cosmogonic myths of the conquest of a primordial sea monster, the mythology is no more than a distant memory here. Indeed, the idea that God is “forever,” before all national entities, is an implicit argument against a primordial battle of the gods. This notion of creation as assuring the safety and firmness of the land against the sea is one that makes special sense for a culture flourishing along the edge of the Mediterranean (in biblical idiom, “the Great Sea”). The waves pounding against the shore are a reminder of the precarious existence of the land dwellers, but God’s majestic power, far greater even than the power of the sea, is a reassuring guarantee of the stability of civilized life. The forceful use of incremental repetition in this line—“the streams lifted up. . . / the streams lifted up their voice, / the streams lift up their roaring”—may be deliberately deployed to suggest a wavelike movement in the formal pattern of the verse.
4. More than the sound of many waters, / . . . majestic on high is the LORD. The middle verset in this triadic line (“the sea’s majestic breakers”) stands in apposition to the first verset. The entire line is a wonderful use of a periodic sentence: at first we are not sure what or who is “more” than the sound of the majestic breakers, and at the end—YHWH is the last word of the line—we learn that it is God. The qualifier “on high” is strategic: the breakers of the sea may rise up terrifically high, inspiring awe or even fear in the observer, but YHWH is high above them.
5. Your statutes. The mention of law at the end of the poem is something of a surprise, but perhaps not for the Israelite believer. God’s supreme power over nature is followed by His giving to Israel a set of laws that can endow their lives with stable order and moral coherence. He also grants them a Temple (“Your house”), standing firm like God’s celestial throne, where Israel can repeatedly affirm a bond with Him.
for all time. The Hebrew leʾorekh yamim means literally “for length of days.” (It is the same idiom as the one used at the end of Psalm 23, translated differently there because of the context.) Though the temporal frame of reference of the phrase is more human than divine, it may be employed here as a synonymous variation of “forever,” which has already been used in verse 2.