Psalm 104

The psalm walks through creation in roughly the order of Genesis 1 — light, sky and waters, dry land and plants, sun and moon, sea creatures and land animals, and finally man going out to work. It is Genesis 1 set to music by someone who had spent his life outdoors.

The details are those of a farmer and a shepherd. Wild goats keep to the high crags and the rock badgers hide in the boulders. Lions hunt in the dark and go back to their dens at sunrise, which is exactly when a man picks up his tools and goes out. The three staples of the land appear together: grain that strengthens, wine that gladdens, and olive oil rubbed on the skin to make a face shine.

The moon is said to mark the seasons, and it did. Israel's calendar ran on new moons; the feasts were fixed by them, and a watchman's sighting of the new crescent set the month going. Ships and the sea creature called leviathan belong to the same survey — the deep, which Israel's neighbors treated as a monster to be feared, is here a playground God made.

A hymn to the sun-disc written in Egypt around 1350 BC, in the days of Akhenaten, praises its god in lines that sound similar; some read that as borrowing. The simpler answer is that people who watched the same lions, the same dawn, and the same harvest reached for the same images — and that this psalm's God is not the sun at all, but the one who wraps himself in light as a garment and hung the sun in the sky.