104 Bless the Lord, O my soul!
O Lord my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty,
2 covering yourself with light as with a garment,
stretching out the heavens like a tent.
3 He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters;
he makes the clouds his chariot;
he rides on the wings of the wind;
4 he makes his messengers winds,
his ministers a flaming fire.
5 He set the earth on its foundations,
so that it should never be moved.
6 You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
7 At your rebuke they fled;
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.
8 The mountains rose, the valleys sank down
to the place that you appointed for them.
9 You set a boundary that they may not pass,
so that they might not again cover the earth.
10 You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills;
11 they give drink to every beast of the field;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
12 Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;
they sing among the branches.
13 From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
14 You cause the grass to grow for the livestock
and plants for man to cultivate,
that he may bring forth food from the earth
15 and wine to gladden the heart of man,
oil to make his face shine
and bread to strengthen man’s heart.
16 The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
17 In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has her home in the fir trees.
18 The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.
19 He made the moon to mark the seasons;1
the sun knows its time for setting.
20 You make darkness, and it is night,
when all the beasts of the forest creep about.
21 The young lions roar for their prey,
seeking their food from God.
22 When the sun rises, they steal away
and lie down in their dens.
23 Man goes out to his work
and to his labor until the evening.
24 O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom have you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
25 Here is the sea, great and wide,
which teems with creatures innumerable,
living things both small and great.
26 There go the ships,
and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it.2
27 These all look to you,
to give them their food in due season.
28 When you give it to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
30 When you send forth your Spirit,3 they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.
31 May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in his works,
32 who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke!
33 I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
34 May my meditation be pleasing to him,
for I rejoice in the Lord.
35 Let sinners be consumed from the earth,
and let the wicked be no more!
Bless the Lord, O my soul!
Praise the Lord!
Section Overview
The phrase “Bless the Lord, O my soul” that opens and closes Psalm 104 (cf. 103:1, 22) shows that the psalm is about reasons for speaking well about God. This hymn of praise celebrates the way in which the created order reveals God’s glory by providing so abundantly for all living things.
A number of special issues come up in studying this psalm, and the discussion here will take up each of them in turn. For example, there seem to be striking similarities between this psalm and an Egyptian hymn, raising questions as to whether literary or theological dependence is evident (one way or the other). Theologically, the psalm lays a heavy stress on God’s causation of ordinary events, which raises questions about how the Bible authors desire us to understand his action in the world. Further, the psalm’s celebration of the created world has been enlisted in support of environmental ethics as a modern application.
The final special issue regards whether the psalm is primarily a reflection of the creation account of Genesis 1–2 or, as some suggest, includes a reference (Ps. 104:6–9) to the flood account of Genesis 6–9. The comments will add more detail, but the overall context in the psalm, the present functioning of the creation, makes a flood reference very unlikely.
Although Psalm 104 does not use many specific words from Genesis 1:1–2:3, most scholars agree that the creation account’s ideas lie behind the psalm.639 Some have even suggested that the psalm follows the six workdays of God (cf. table 1.4).640
TABLE 1.4: Six Workdays of Creation and Psalm 104
|
Creation |
Psalm 104 |
|
Day 1 |
v. 2a: light |
|
Day 2 |
vv. 2b–4: the “expanse” divides the waters |
|
Day 3 |
vv. 5–13: land and water distinct |
|
vv. 14–18: vegetation and trees |
|
|
Day 4 |
vv. 19–24: light-bearers as time-keepers |
|
Day 5 |
vv. 25–26: sea creatures |
|
Day 6 |
vv. 21–24: land animals and man |
|
vv. 27–30: food for all creatures |
This structure should not be pressed, however, since the land animals and man (vv. 21–24) here precede the sea creatures (vv. 25–26), while the Genesis account has them in the opposite order. Even more, Psalm 104 is not a straight retelling of the Genesis account as an event: rather, it celebrates the way in which the creation order still continues in human experience.641 The psalm acknowledges the existence of human sin, but in only one verse (104:35; “sinners” and “wicked”).
Genesis 1:1–2:3 uses the term “God” for the deity, stressing his role as the transcendent Creator. The psalm primarily uses “the Lord,” the personal name of the deity, following the biblical claim that the covenant God of Israel is the same being as the majestic Creator (as the shift in divine name in Gen. 2:4 also implies; cf. Ps. 8:1).642
This psalm joins Psalm 8 as a reflection on God’s continuing commitment to, and care for, his creation (cf. 136:5–9).
The psalm moves smoothly across the landscape of creation, and thus a rigid outline would probably be artificial. The outline followed here is indicated more by shifts in subject matter than by clear textual features.643
Section Outline
I. The Lord Is Clothed with Splendor and Majesty (104:1–4)
II. The Lord Set Bounds for the Land and the Sea (104:5–9)
III. The Lord Provides Water for the Creatures on Land (104:10–13)
IV. The Lord Provides Food and Homes for the Land Creatures (104:14–18)
V. The Lord Governs the Rhythm of Day and Night (104:19–24)
VI. The Lord Delights in the Sea Creatures Too (104:25–26)
VII. All Creatures Everywhere Depend on the Lord’s Provision (104:27–30)
VIII. May I Ever Rejoice in the Lord’s Works Like He Does (104:31–35)
The first words of the psalm (“Bless the Lord, O my soul”; v. 1) are echoed in its ending (v. 35). This has led some to follow the LXX, which makes the very last words (“Praise the Lord!”) the opening of Psalm 105 (which would then match its ending in 105:45). This would result in Psalms 103–106 each having a literary envelope, with the closing phrase echoing the opening. There is, however, no evidence for this in the Hebrew manuscripts.
Response
Singing Psalm 104 shapes the worshipers’ hearts in two ways. First, it leads them to delight in the world God has made, recognizing it as a gift that continues to express his generosity (even after Genesis 3); they can learn to love the Giver even more. Second, it enables them to see that “sinners” and “the wicked”—those who dwell in their sin and refuse God’s grace—defile God’s world; the faithful will not want to be identified with such people.
This psalm is often said to be connected to the Great Hymn to Aten, which is generally attributed to the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten (r. 1352–1336 BC).656 This pharaoh attempted a drastic revision of Egyptian religion, aiming to focus worship on only one god—Aten, represented by the disk of the sun. Egyptologists continue to debate whether Akhenaten was a true monotheist (there is only one god) or a henotheist (worshiping only one god while allowing for the existence of others). The hymn to Aten celebrates the works of this deity, including his provision of water and food for man and beast; it distinguishes between creatures active during daylight and those active at night (even mentioning the lions).
Literary dependence is tricky to establish, especially when the sources are in different languages; the results vary in the level of probability we may legitimately attach to them. There are certainly similarities between this Egyptian hymn and Psalm 104, but, even if we think there is literary dependence, we would need to be careful about what we might mean in saying that the Egyptian hymn influenced the psalm.657 C. S. Lewis put it best (as he often did) when he observed about the possible relation of the Genesis creation to story to Near Eastern “parallels”: “We must of course be quite clear what ‘derived from’ means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice.” He observed that it is persons who do the retelling and revising of stories, for various ends:
Thus at every step in what is called—a little misleadingly—the “evolution” of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such re-tellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.658
Further, the psalm has its own inner coherence; as the comments show, the psalm reflects the covenantal and creational perspective of the Pentateuch. If there is any connection to the Egyptian hymn, it is that this psalm renders the right kind of praise to the universal Creator. (The fact that few Israelites would likely have known about the Egyptian hymn means they would not have been aware of specific literary “connections” between the two compositions; the thematic connections will be more important.) Kidner, like Lewis, helpfully puts the whole matter into a nutshell: “Theologically [the psalm] displays the incalculable difference between worshipping the sun and worshipping its Maker; indeed, the psalm’s apparent allusions to this famous hymn seem designed to call attention to this very point.”659 Hence the literary history of the psalm should not detract from its function in the canonical Psalter.
Psalm 104 lays a heavy emphasis on God’s causation in the world: it is he who makes the springs to gush, who waters the mountains, and who causes the grass to grow (vv. 10, 13, 14). This has led some to conclude that the biblical authors, or Israel as a whole, had no notion of the causal contribution of created things—all causation is actually God’s direct action. That this is a mistake appears from the very words of the psalm; after all, the water is the sort of thing that quenches the animals’ thirst, and the grass is that which feeds the livestock. Even more importantly, this mistake overlooks the purpose of the song to begin with. As John Rogerson noted,
These passages [that express pervasive divine activity] do not represent what the average Israelite felt; they are religious texts, containing a religious interpretation of the natural world, a religious interpretation that was certainly not ‘given’ along with ordinary perception of the world, and which was by no means self-evident to anyone who reflected on the processes of the natural world. . . . The attempt of the OT writers to claim the sovereignty of God over nature and its workings was not something easily attained with the help of thought processes or an ‘outlook’ that readily saw the divine in everything. It was rather a courageous act of faith, persisted in when there was often much in personal experience and competing religions and outlooks, that suggested that such a conviction was false.660
That is, texts like this one foster the perspective of faith.
Experience of the damaging effects of human shortsightedness and greed on the natural world has heightened our sense of responsibility as stewards of creation. Psalm 104 is not directly about that subject; nevertheless, in celebrating the world as a gift—including those parts of the world for which humans have no use—it does serve to foster a feeling of respect for the world as a coherent system, the balanced interactions of which display the Creator’s wisdom. That is, it can indeed serve to help believers honor their Maker by honoring the world he made and by drawing back from defiling that world. Lewis noted that the appreciation of creatures that goes beyond simple admiration of their utility or harm to human interests sets Psalm 104 (and creation faith in general) apart from what we find elsewhere in the ancient world:
The Psalmist’s clear objective view—noting the lions and whales side by side with men and men’s cattle—is unusual. And I think it is certainly reached through the idea of God as Creator and sustainer of all. . . . The thought which gives these creatures [lions and ravens] a place in the Psalmist’s gusto for Nature is surely obvious. They are our fellow-dependents; we all, lions, storks, ravens, whales—live, as our fathers said, “at God’s charges,” and the mention of all equally redounds to his praise.661
People who take this gusto to heart will of course own their responsibility to preserve and care for this variety of fellow dependents.
Christians will add to these things their affirmation that Christ is the One through whom the world was made. That is, Christians should see the world as the gift of their Savior; their faith should lead them to love God in the context of his world.
Psalm 104 lies behind Robert Grant’s well-known hymn, “O Worship the King, All Glorious Above” (1833).Psalm 104
Psalm 105