1Come, let us sing gladly to the LORD,
let us shout out to the Rock of our rescue.
2Let us greet Him in acclaim,
in songs let us shout out to Him.
3For a great god is the LORD
and great king over all the gods.
4In Whose hand are the depths of the earth,
and the peaks of the mountains are His.
5His is the sea and He made it,
and the dry land His hands did fashion.
6Come, let us bow and kneel,
bend the knee before the LORD our maker.
7For He is our God
and we are the people He tends
If you would only heed His voice!
8“Do not harden your heart as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9when your forefathers tested Me,
tried Me, though they had seen My acts.
10Forty years I loathed a generation,
and I said, ‘They are a people of wayward heart.
And they did not know My ways.’
11Against them I swore in My wrath,
‘They shall not come to My resting place.’”
PSALM 95 NOTES
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1. Come, let us sing. Without superscription, like the rest of the sequence of psalms from Psalm 93 to Psalm 99 (with the marginal exception of Psalm 98), the first-person plural exhortation to sing suggests that this is a public celebration of God. NOTES
2. acclaim. The Hebrew todah, as elsewhere in Psalms, straddles “acclaim” and “thanksgiving.” Some interpreters think it refers here to the thanksgiving sacrifice because the idiom used for “greet,” qadem ʾet peney, is sometimes linked with sacrifice. However, the strong poetic parallelism with “songs,” woven in a tight chiastic pattern—greet (a), in acclaim (b), in songs (b'), shout out (a')—argues against this understanding.
3. For a great god is the LORD, / and great king over all the gods. The language here harks back to a period when YHWH was thought of not as the one exclusive deity but as the most powerful of the gods, though it is unclear whether the formulation in this psalm reflects active belief or merely a linguistic survival. In any case, the next two verses proceed to proclaim that YHWH alone is the master of depths and heights, the maker of sea and earth, an idea that would seem to preclude the notion of sundry gods having jurisdiction over the various realms of nature. Scholars attached to the hypothesis of an annual ritual of the coronation of YHWH of course have seized on this psalm as a liturgical text for the rite, but its existence remains conjectural. Later Jewish tradition made this the first in a sequence of psalms chanted as a prelude to the Friday-evening prayer for welcoming the sabbath, evidently because the sabbath was seen as a celebration of creation.
4. the depths of the earth. The Hebrew for “depths” is not the ordinary tehomot but the more unusual meḥqerey, which by etymology means “the utmost reaches that can be searched out.”
7. the flock of His hand. This unusual phrase may be employed here to pick up the references to God’s hand in verses 4 and 5.
If you would only heed His voice. Although this sentence appears at the end of the verse according to the conventional verse breaks, it is actually the initial verset of a new triadic line that continues in verse 8. It marks an abrupt pivot in the poem, as the psalm of acclaim turns into a psalm of prophetic rebuke.
8. Meribah, / . . . Massah. These place names, meaning Dispute and Testing, appear in Exodus 17:7 in the story of the Israelites’ resentful plea for water in the wilderness. One of the earliest of the episodes of “murmuring,” it is invoked here typologically as an image of Israel’s wayward, rebellious behavior through all the generations. Perhaps the implicit connection with the acclaiming of God’s kingship in the first part of the poem is that Israel can authentically recognize God as king only by obedience to His commands.
10. Forty years I loathed a generation. The obvious reference is to God’s decree, after the incident of the ten fainthearted spies (Numbers 14), that the people would have to wander in the wilderness forty years, until the whole refractory generation had died out.
11. They shall not come to My resting place. The “resting place” is the promised land. The psalm thus ends on a rather stern note of admonition, one that its listeners are expected to take to heart.