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. As reasonable as such cynicism seems, the psalmists have always insisted on a counterintuitive 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 Out of the mouths of toddlers
and babes at the breast
you’ve founded a stronghold
against your enemies
to silence the foe and avenger.
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 human beings
that you care for them?
Why give the son of Adam a second thought? 

5 Yet you made him
the pinnacle of your creation
with only you above
and crowned him with glory and honor—
6 lord of the earth—
putting everything under his 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 heavens. YHWH’s building a stronghold seems strange here. But in ancient myths, the god defeated the forces of chaos in creation and then built a temple-stronghold to keep his enemies at bay. David uses that imagery even though Satan fought YHWH in the fall, not creation.

God promised Adam and Eve a child who would crush the serpent’s head. That baby—one of the many offspring God later promised Abraham and the son Nathan promised David—is himself God’s defense against Satan’s vengeful attacks. Here as elsewhere, God has human weakness complement his strength. He counters Satan’s raucous victory cry with a chorus of babies.

In verse 4, David brings the psalm to a dramatic standstill with two questions virtually synonymous in the Hebrew. To begin, David is asking about himself—why me?—just as he did when God gave him not the building permit he sought, but the promise of a child whose house and throne would never fail (2 Sam. 7). As the perfect man, Jesus would fully reveal God’s love and restore the hope of glory to our race.

David is also asking the bigger question: Why us? Why would so wise and powerful a God share responsibility for ruling his creation with the likes of Adam? What would keep him from washing his hands of our race when we turned our stewardship into self-seeking, as he knew we would? Only the unrelenting love embodied in the promised child, a love utterly radical in a world where fickle gods cared nothing for their subjects.

Verse 5 pivots from presenting humans as small amidst creation’s glory, to seeing them as breathtakingly exalted, just below God in authority, representing him gloriously on earth (Gen. 1:26-28). The poem’s structure thus makes its main point unmistakably clear: God remains graciously committed to partnering with us in ruling the earth.[1]  Thus glimpsing God’s infinite greatness and grace, David ends as he began, praising God for the majesty revealed in his wise ordering of creation.

Prayer:

Your wisdom, power, and love are astounding, Lord! You have little 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 entrust to me. 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 chiasm is as follows: A: YHWH’s magnificence in creation (v. 1), B: Human weakness in creation (vv. 2-3), C: WHAT ARE HUMANS THAT YOU BOTHER WITH THEM? (v. 4), B: Human authority over creation (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.