Joyful invitation to faith
The Jews who returned from exile were marginalized and despised in their own land, much like Christians in the West today. This psalm reminds them of who their God is and, wonderfully, does so with playfulness, not anger.
1 Praise YHWH!
When Israel came out of Egypt—
when Jacob’s family escaped
from a people babbling in a strange tongue—
2 Judah became his sanctuary
and Israel his domain.
3 The sea saw it and bolted
the Jordan River turned tail and ran.
4 The mountains jumped like rams
and the hills skipped like lambs.
5 What was wrong with you, sea
that you bolted?
And you, Jordan
that you ran away?
6 Why, mountains
did you jump like rams
and you hills, skip like lambs?
7 Tremble, Earth
before YHWH!
Tremble before the God of Jacob!
8 He turned solid rock
into a pool of water
hard stone into a gushing spring.
My paraphrase moves Psalm 113’s final “Praise YHWH” to the start of this psalm for three reasons. First, without this correction, the pronoun “his” in 114:2 has no antecedent, which Hebrew grammar demands. With “YHWH” restored to the beginning of verse 1, we fix a grammatical error the psalmist wasn’t likely to have made. Second, the scribal error behind my correction was very easy to make. Third, the fact that the Psalms compiler placed this psalm among the book’s Hallel, or Praise, Psalms suggests that it originally included an explicit call to praise. Uncorrected, it’s the only Hallel psalm without one.
Returning from exile, the Jews were suppressed by their pagan overlords. This made praising YHWH an act of defiance. This psalm uses the Exodus, Israel’s signature story, to exalt YHWH. And it does so with playful pugnacity, by ridiculing the river, sea, and mountains and then calling the whole earth to submit to the omnipotent God who cares for his people.
Instead of saying what terrified the waters and made the mountains quake, the psalmist taunts the natural formations, leaving them mute before her taunts.* She also brings us on stage as we join her taunting and relish the resultant silence. Only when the earth is commanded to tremble do we see what overwhelmed it in the Exodus. But since these were Israel’s best-known stories, the psalmist’s audience knew the secret all along, the dramatic irony making her jibes livelier and more fun.
The psalm’s images of YHWH’s controlling water evoke the region’s creation myths, in which Baal subdued creation’s chaos to permit his ordering of it. The psalm’s images of mountains evoke the region’s pagan shrines, its “high places.” These images make the psalm’s demand that Earth submit absolute. The psalm ends with God’s tender care for his people, telling us he’s on Jacob’s side, is as compassionate as he is powerful, and is fully deserving of our praise.
Prayer:
Lord, you defeated all the powers of darkness degrading and dehumanizing your people in Egypt. And Jesus, you defeated evil itself in your death-and-resurrection Exodus. When I feel powerless, against the evil around me, help me believe you have absolute agency and you live in me. Amen.
In your free moments today, meditate on these words:
Tremble, Earth, before YHWH!
Tremble before the God of Jacob!
* I imagine the psalmist here as a woman of faith, like Miriam, Deborah, Hanna, or the Virgin Mary (see further, my answer to the question: Who wrote the psalms?).
