Praise YHWH All You Nations: Psalm 117

This is the third in a series of essays on the Hallel, recited at various Jewish festivals. See my previous essays at “A Women’s Voice in the Psalter: A New Understanding of Psalm 113,” TheTorah (2019); “Encouraging Babylonian Jews to Return, Psalm 114 Tells a Unique Exodus Story,” TheTorah (2020). I hope to return to Psalms 115 and 116 at a later point. I would like to thank Jonathan Homrighausen and the editors of TheTorah.com for their help with this essay.

This term was introduced into biblical studies by Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), considered the founder of biblical form-criticism.

This is clear from Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 8:

^{מלכים א ח:מא} וְגַם֙ אֶל־הַנָּכְרִ֔י אֲשֶׁ֛ר לֹא־מֵעַמְּךָ֥ יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל ה֑וּא וּבָ֛א מֵאֶ֥רֶץ רְחוֹקָ֖ה לְמַ֥עַן שְׁמֶֽךָ׃ ^ח:מב כִּ֤י יִשְׁמְעוּן֙ אֶת־שִׁמְךָ֣ הַגָּד֔וֹל וְאֶת־יָֽדְךָ֙ הַֽחֲזָקָ֔ה וּֽזְרֹעֲךָ֖ הַנְּטוּיָ֑ה וּבָ֥א וְהִתְפַּלֵּ֖ל אֶל־הַבַּ֥יִת הַזֶּֽה׃

^{1 Kgs 8:41} Or if a foreigner who is not of Your people Israel comes from a distant land for the sake of Your name—^8:42 for they shall hear about Your great name and Your mighty hand and Your outstretched arm—when he comes to pray toward this House,

This text is especially pertinent since it is likely from approximately the same time-period of the psalm; see Marc Z. Brettler, “Interpretation and Prayer: Notes on the Composition of 1 Kings 8.15-53,” in Minhah le-Nahum: Biblical and Other Studies Presented to Nahum M. Sarna in Honour of his 70th Birthday, ed. Marc Z. Brettler and Michael Fishbane, JSOT Supplement Series 154 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 17–35.

Quoted in, Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 3: A Commentary on Psalms 101-150, trans. Linda M. Maloney, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 224.

See also Pss 98:4–6 (and note the use of כָּל־הָאָ֑רֶץ “all the earth” in v. 4, which appears also in Ps 100) and 99:1.

The connection to Psalm 100 is also emphasized in Amos Hakham, Psalms with the Jerusalem Commentary, trans. Israel V. Berman (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 2003), 188; Hossfeld and Zenger, Psalms 3, 225.

YHWH as a righteous judge is a theme of the surrounding psalms that extol God as king as well.

The German scholar Berhard Duhm (1847–1928) was the first to point out this connection. Scholars debate if Psalms influenced Deutero-Isaiah or vice versa; I believe that the latter position is correct.

See also Isa 42:10; 49:1.

See Katharine D. Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry, Harvard Semitic Monographs 13 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978; reprinted in, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002); Elinoar Bareket, “Chesed a Reciprocal Covenant,” TheTorah (2017), and most recently Carlsten Ziegert, “What is חֶסֶד? A Frame-Semantic Approach,” JSOT (2020), who defines chesed as “an action performed by one person for the benefit of another to avert some danger or critical impairment from the beneficiary,” and notes that the English word “kindness” comes closest to expressing its meaning.

The term “verset” is used in Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 8, for a part of a verse in parallelistic relationship with another part. On the breakup of words in hendiadys, see Ezra Zion Melamed, “Breakup of Stereotype Phrases as an Artistic Device in Biblical Poetry,” in Studies in the Bible, ed. Chaim Rabin, Scripta Hierosolymitana 8 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1961), 115–153

They appear in the same verse over thirty times, sometimes in poetic parallel (see e.g. Isa 16:5; Mic 7:20; Ps 26:3), and elsewhere joined together with “and” (e.g. Gen 24:27; 2 Sam 2:6; Ps 25:10). See Hans-Jürgen Zobel, “חֶסֶד,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament 5.45-65; see esp. 47 on חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת. More specifically on Ps 117, Ethan Jones, “Zeit, Raum and Völker: חסד ואמת in Ps 117,” Biblische Notizen 178 (2019): 103–109.

If the Psalms are reflecting Deutero-Isaiah, and since they have no obvious cultic setting, perhaps we should abandon an attempt to find the cultic Sitz im Leben of Psalm 117—it may be more prophetic than cultic.

Avi Hurvitz established the method for linguistic dating of Psalms in, Avi Hurvitz, בין לשון ללשון: לתולדות לשון המקרא בימי בית שני [The Transition Period in Biblical Hebrew: A Study in Post-Exilic Hebrew and its Implications for the Dating of the Psalms] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1972), 88–91.

Hurvitz, The Transition Period in Biblical Hebrew, 170.

A moderate number of LBH may signal exilic Hebrew: Mark F. Rooker, Biblical Hebrew in Transition: The Language of the Book of Ezekiel, JSOT Supplement Series 90 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990). The cut-off between the number of signs needed to indicate post-exilic rather than exilic Hebrew is uncertain. For other indications that the psalms may be exilic, see Fannie Snyman, “Reading Psalm 117 against an Exilic Context,” Vetus Testamentum 61 (2011): 109–118.

Malka Simkovich, The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 80.

Though biblical poetry does not seem to operate with the kind of consistent meter of ancient Greek and Latin poems, it does display a more flexible idea of balance within and between verses. It is unclear if biblical poetry had a system of true meter—a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, though the word and/or syllable length of many biblical lines in many biblical poems match. Some of our uncertainty derives from the fact the current Tiberian vocalization does not reflect the syllable and stress systems of the time these poems were composed.

This treatise, originally Lowth’s lectures at Oxford, were translated into English in 1787 and are easily available online; his translation and notes on Isaiah also deal with parallelism. A small number of medieval Jewish commentaries had some basic understanding of parallelism; see Adele Berlin, Biblical Poetry Through Medieval Jewish Eyes, Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Robert A. Harris, Discerning Parallelism: A Study in Northern French Medieval Jewish Biblical Exegesis, Brown Judaic Studies 341 (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004).

3:2 meter characterizes biblical dirges, and is thus called qinah (dirge) meter, but it is often used for material other than dirges (see, e.g. Gen 1:1). Some scan the meter as 3:3; see Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 60-150: A Commentary, Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989), 390.

Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 6.

NJPS renders “you nations”||“you peoples.” This translation is not quite accurate: the pronoun “you” is lacking in the Hebrew. “O nations” is better, though it sounds archaic. The NJPS also ignores the definite article “the” that appears only before the second term. Although the general sense of the NJPS translation is correct, it obscures the variation that is typical in parallelism, and makes the verse even more parallel than it is in the Hebrew. Such variation prevents biblical poetry from becoming stilted and thus boring.

These terms are often used together in poetry or even in prose idioms (e.g. “law and order” in English). Word-pairs are common in biblical poetry; see Wilfred G. E. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to Its Techniques, JSOT Supplement Series 26 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), 128–144. See, Psalms 147:12:

שַׁבְּחִ֣י יְ֭רוּשָׁלִַם אֶת־יְ־הוָ֑ה הַֽלְלִ֖י אֱלֹהַ֣יִךְ צִיּֽוֹן׃

O Jerusalem, extol (NJPS: glorify) YHWH; praise your God, O Zion!

In the latter case, the direct object marker אֶת and a proper name, YHWH, are replaced with a short pronoun הוּ “him” attached directly to the imperative. This type of variation typifies synonymous parallelism, where it is rare that each part of the verse matches up exactly both semantically and syntactically.

This pairing is also attested in Psalms 44:15 and 149:7.

The repetition of כָּל “all” in each verset represents the most basic type of word-pair in synonymous parallelism: instead of using a synonym, the exact word itself is repeated.

Lowth would have most likely categorized this verse as having synthetic parallelism, a catch-all category he created for verses that do not fit the two most common types of parallelism: synonymous and antithetical. Since the publication four decades ago of James Kugel’s groundbreaking The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), the category of synthetic parallelism has been largely abandoned by biblical scholars. Indeed, Kugel and others have suggested that the categories of synonymous and antithetical parallelism are also problematic, but many scholars, including me, continue to find them useful, if imperfect, categories.

The psalm can make sense as a self-standing unit. In that case, in structure and vocabulary it would be very similar to Ps 100 (noted above): they both demand that the entire world praise Israel’s God who takes care of them, and conclude with references to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.

See the photograph at https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/explore-the-archive/image/B-496376.

Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011), 49.

This is unique in the biblical corpus. Chapter divisions for other books are often problematic, and are best ignored by the interpreter.

I will touch on this in my forthcoming essay on Psalm 115.

This is certain for Psalms 9–10, which are a single acrostic (alphabetic) composition, which accidentally became divided into two.

Psalm manuscripts show many diverse options for how many individual compositions comprise the Hallel (Pss 113–118), and where the dividing points between individual compositions lie. See Eric J. Harvey, “Sing to the Lord a New(-ish) Song: The Psalms of the Egyptian Hallel across Two Thousand Years” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2020), http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/37373.

See the introductory comments of Menahem Me’iri to this psalm in his commentary on the Psalms, available at https://www.mgketer.org/.

See the evidence collected in Lloyd M. Barré, “Halelû yāh: A Broken Inclusion,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 45 (1983): 195–200; I disagree with his specific conclusion concerning broken inclusions.

118:5 transitions from the plural to the individual, and is thematically different from what precedes. Several scholars, e.g., Hakham, Psalms, 188–189, see Ps 117 as the introduction to all of Ps 118.

Alternately, the כי can go untranslated, functioning to introduce a quotation (so NJPS): “His steadfast love is eternal.” This is true for all four instances of this phrase.

In this counting, כִּ֖י does not have its own beat, even though it is a separate word.

This is here a technical term for a specific group of Jews. It refers neither to anyone who is religious and thus fears God nor to a non-Jewish group sometimes called “God-fearers” by some scholars of Second Temple literature.