Psalms For Life
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Yahveh Elohim hear our prayers

Psalm 8

Such wisdom, power, and love!

Cynics sneer at God’s having made humans the center of so fantastic a universe. But however reasonable such cynicism seems, the biblical writers have always insisted on a counter-intuitive story.

 For the music director, on the gittith. A David psalm.

1 YHWH, our Lord
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Your glory outshines suns
and stars beyond counting!
2 By the mouths of little children—
mere babes at the breast—
you’ve founded a stronghold
to bring your vengeful foes to a dead stop.
3 When I look up at the glittering night sky
it’s your handiwork I see—
the moon and stars you made.
4 So, what on earth are we
that you care for us?
Why give us mortals a second thought? 

5 Yet you made us
the pinnacle of your creation
with only you above
and crowned us with glory and honor—
6 lords of the earth—
putting everything under our feet:
7 sheep and cattle on the hillside
lions and wolves in the wild
8 every bird that flies the skies above
every fish that swims the seven seas. 

9 YHWH, our Lord
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

David praises YHWH, whose majesty surpasses that of the starry skies he created. God’s building a stronghold may seem odd here, but regional creation myths had the god follow his victory over the forces of chaos with building a stronghold to keep those forces at bay. YHWH does the same, but his stronghold is built of mere words uttered by little kids. This connects with a theme running right through scripture and central to this psalm: God chooses the weak to defeat the strong.

The poem’s main point—humankind’s glorious partnership with God in ruling the earth—is made unmistakably clear through the poem’s structure.[1] In verse 4, David asks two questions virtually synonymous in the Hebrew, bringing the poem to a dramatic standstill against the movement on either side of them. We thus pivot from seeing humans as insignificant amidst the glory of the cosmos, to seeing them as breathtakingly glorious, positioned just below God in authority, representing him on earth (Gen. 1).

The psalm’s unspoken question is: Why would so wise and so powerful a God share responsibility for ruling his creation with the likes of Adam and Eve—with the likes of us? What would keep him from washing his hands of us when we turned our stewardship into twisted self-seeking, as he knew we would? Only one thing: his unrelenting love, a radical idea in the ancient world, where fickle gods cared nothing for their puny mortal subjects.

Thus, besides pointing back to creation, the psalmist implicitly points forward to redemption. Colossians 1:15-19 says all God’s purposes in creation are ultimately realized in Jesus, the perfect human, as he fully revealed God’s love and decisively restored the hope of glory to our race. Recognizing both God’s infinite greatness and his inexhaustible grace, David ends as he began, praising God for his incomparable majesty, so evident in his wise ordering of creation.

Prayer:

Your wisdom, power, and love are amazing, Lord. You have mere kids silence your foes! Give me simple, childlike faith to believe your love is unstoppable. Fill me with that love, and fit me to rule as your faithful servant over whatever part of your world you put under my care. Amen.

In your free moments today, pray these words:

YHWH, our Lord
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

 

[1] The psalm’s chiastic structure is as follows: A: YHWH’s magnificence in creation (v. 1), B: God’s cosmic glory and strength (vv. 2-3), C: WHAT ARE MERE HUMANS THAT YOU NOTICE THEM? (v. 4), B: Humanity’s earthly glory (vv. 5-8); A: YHWH’s magnificence in creation (v. 9).

Why YHWH?

Every translator of the Psalms must decide how to handle God’s personal name, YHWH or YHVH, which occurs repeatedly in its Hebrew text. Translators of the King James Version usually translated it “LORD” (all caps) and sometimes transliterated it (badly) as “Jehovah.” Likewise, all modern translations either translate or transliterate it. Some other options for translating it are “the Eternal,” “the Almighty,” or “the Sovereign Lord.”

While translating it aims to make it more accessible to readers, transliterating it seems to me more faithful to the text since it’s not a word at all, but rather God’s uniquely personal name. This roots it more firmly in the biblical story as the name God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. Meaning “the self-existent One who answers to no one,” the name YHWH set Israel’s God apart from all the gods of Israel’s neighbors.

Personal names are, well, very personal. Even the sound of a name can evoke strong emotion. I’ve chosen to transliterate only YHWH’s consonants since the earliest Hebrew manuscripts contain only consonants, the vowels being added much later. My aim in doing so is to honor God’s name and set it apart, as unique.

One problem with YHWH is that we aren’t sure how it was pronounced since Jews long ago stopped saying it out of reverence. (They read Adonai instead whenever they come to YHWH in the text.) I take the advice of my esteemed Hebrew professor, Raymond Dillard, who advocated pronouncing it as Yahveh (Yah·vay). He favored that over the standard Yahweh since the modern Hebrew pronunciation of its third consonant makes the name sound more robustly Jewish. It also makes it sound more robust, period.

Finding strength in the ancient psalms
May these psalms be a light to you in dark times. You can read more of Mark Anderson's writings on Christianity, culture, and inter-faith dialogue at Understanding Christianity Today.