1When Israel came out of Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a barbarous-tongued folk,
2Judah became His sanctuary,
Israel His dominion.
3The sea saw and fled,
Jordan turned back.
4The mountains danced like rams,
hills like lambs of the flock.
5What is wrong with you, sea, that you flee,
Jordan, that you turn back,
6mountains, that you dance like rams,
hills like lambs of the flock?
7Before the Master, whirl, O earth,
before the God of Jacob,
8Who turns the rock to a pond of water,
flint to a spring of water.
PSALM 114 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. When Israel came out of Egypt. It is unusual for a biblical poem to begin in this way with a subordinate clause (doubled, with the verb elided, in the second verset), given the strong predominance of parallel independent clauses (parataxis) in this body of literature. It is a strategy for sweeping us up from the beginning of the poem in a narrative momentum that invokes but also goes beyond the story of the Exodus. In a famous letter to Can Grande once attributed to Dante, this psalm is used to illustrate the fourfold levels of interpreting a sacred text (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or mystic). James Joyce picked up, in a vein of serious parody, the purportedly Dantean view of this psalm, quoting Psalm 114 in Latin in Ulysses. The original intention of the psalmist, however, seems clearly literal—which is to say, historical—a celebration of God’s spectacular intervention in history on behalf of the people of Israel.
a barbarous-tongued folk. The Hebrew loʿez corresponds exactly to the Greek term from which “barbarous” and “barbaric” are derived. Both indicate the utterance of unintelligible sounds instead of the articulate speech of a civilized people. This notion that the anguish of oppression is sharpened by the fact that the oppressor speaks an unintelligible language appears in a number of biblical texts, from Deuteronomy to the Prophets.
2. Judah became His sanctuary. The Hebrew term represented as “sanctuary,” qodesh, also has the more general meaning of “holiness.” When Judah becomes God’s covenanted people, it is henceforth the vehicle or the place of abode of God’s holiness.
3. The sea saw and fled, / Jordan turned back. This compact line is a powerful telescoping of two different events linked typologically in biblical narrative but separated by forty years. The first is the parting of the Sea of Reeds, in this poetic version a consequence of the sea’s terror before the fearsome presence of God and not as a result of Moses’s stretching out his staff over the sea. The second event is the dividing of the Jordan, recounted in Joshua, so that the Israelites could cross over. If there is some recollection here of the mythic conquest of the primordial sea monster (also called yam, “sea”), it is no more than a distant allusion in this historical context.
5. What is wrong with you. The poetic strategy here is unusual—a repetition of the two previous lines, merely recast as rhetorical questions that register the extraordinary disruption of the order of nature in God’s miraculous intervention.
7. Before the Master, whirl, O earth. One proposed emendation eliminates the verb and reads “before the Master of all the earth.” That emendation, motivated by the formulaic smoothness of the “corrected” version, seems unnecessary. The imperative verb here picks up the imagery of dancing and fleeing from the previous lines. The Hebrew verb ḥul could mean “tremble” or “dance,” and the choice of “whirl” in this translation is an attempt to convey both these senses.
8. rock to a pond of water, / flint to a spring of water. The obvious reference is to Moses’s drawing water from the rock in Exodus 17. In keeping with a common pattern of biblical poetry, we move from the general term “rock” in the first verset to a heightened equivalent, the extreme hardness of “flint,” in the second verset. The concluding line focuses an underlying development in this psalm: first water fled, then the hills and mountains danced, and now hard rock, through the metamorphic power of God’s overwhelming presence, turns into water. At least two contemporary interpreters have detected—in the Hebrew of the last line—sound-play on the beginning of the poem: from mitsrayim, “Egypt,” to tsur/mayim, “rock/water.”