1Praise the LORD, all nations;
extol Him, all peoples.
2For His kindness overwhelms us,
and the LORD’s steadfast truth is forever.
Hallelujah.
PSALM 117 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. Praise the LORD. This succinct poem amounts to a kind of zerodegree psalm of thanksgiving. Just two verses long, it is not only the shortest psalm in the collection but also the shortest chapter in the Bible. No specific details of God’s beneficence are offered, only the great measure of His kindness and steadfast truth.
all nations / . . . all peoples. The one element of difference in this thanksgiving psalm is that not Israel but all nations are enjoined to praise the God of Israel. The occasion for gratitude, then, is collective rather than individual: God has overwhelmed Israel by keeping faith with His commitment to His people. One could easily imagine that such a concise psalm of thanksgiving might have been composed to celebrate the restoration of the cult in the rebuilt Temple, but the evidence is far too scanty to make any confident identification of this sort.