1A psalm.
For wonders He has done.
His right hand gave Him victory,
and His holy arm.
2The LORD made known His victory,
before the nations’ eyes He revealed His bounty.
3He recalled His kindness and His faithfulness
to the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the victory of our God.
4Shout out to the LORD, all the earth.
Burst forth in glad song and hymn.
5Hymn to the LORD on the lyre,
on the lyre with the sound of hymning.
6With trumpets and the sound of ram’s horn,
sound loud before the king, the LORD.
7Let the sea and its fullness thunder,
the world and those dwelling in it.
8Let the rivers clap hands,
let the mountains together sing gladly
9before the LORD, for He comes
to judge the earth.
10He judges the world in justice
and peoples righteously.
PSALM 98 NOTES
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1. A psalm. This is a zero-degree superscription. The Septuagint adds “David.”
Sing to the LORD a new song. The comment on this same clause at the beginning of Psalm 96 is also relevant to this poem.
gave Him victory. Although the verbal root y-sh-ʿ generally means “rescue,” in military contexts the meaning shades into “victory,” and the invocation of God’s right hand clearly suggests the role of divine warrior. The poem does not specify the enemy, but, given its cosmic sweep and the background of similar psalms, the most likely candidate would be the primordial forces of chaos.
2. bounty. Though in a good many contexts tsedaqah means “righteousness,” it also often has the sense in poetry of “bounty” or “beneficent act,” and the interlinear parallelism with verse 3 indicates that meaning here.
3. All the ends of the earth have seen. As in the other psalms celebrating God’s kingship, the perspective is global, for His reign extends over all the earth. But here, in contradistinction to Psalm 97, the poet also invokes God’s relationship with his covenanted people (“His kindness and His faithfulness / to the house of Israel”).
7. Let the sea and its fullness thunder. There is a concordance between the human orchestra—in all likelihood, an actual orchestra accompanying the singing of this psalm—with its lutes and rams’ horns, and the orchestra of nature, both groups providing a grand fanfare for God the king. The thundering of the sea is a percussion section, joined by the clapping hands of the rivers, then the chorus of the mountains. This simple, compact poem, drawing extensively on the formulas of the kingship psalms, is resonantly expressive: the Israelites chanting the poem’s words of exaltation, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, are invited to imagine their musical rite as part of a cosmic performance.