Psalm 47

Psalms 47:1-2

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads To the Overseer, by the sons of Korah, A Psalm, one of eleven psalms this Levitical family of temple singers contributed to the Psalter. The call goes out to all ye people, not to Israel alone, to clap the hands and shout to God with the voice of triumph, an enthronement psalm's opening fanfare. The reason given is immediate: the Lord most high is terrible, a great King over all the earth, a claim that reaches past any one nation from the first line.

Psalms 47:3-4

The universal King acts for his own people first: he shall subdue the people under us, and the nations under our feet, the language of conquest turned into worship. What is chosen is called an inheritance, the excellency of Jacob whom he loved, tying the nation's land back to the choosing love named at the patriarchs. Selah closes the stanza, the honest pause the Psalter uses without explaining, before the shout of the second half begins.

Psalms 47:5-6

God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet, language read two ways among the older writers: some hear the ark carried up to Zion in procession, the ritual reenacted at the festival that gave the psalm its use, and others, from the church fathers onward, hear it as an anticipation of Christ's ascension, a reading named as tradition since this verse is not among the psalms the New Testament itself quotes of him. The command that follows repeats itself four times in one breath, sing praises to God, sing praises, sing praises unto our King, sing praises, the repetition itself doing the work of emphasis that no single word could carry alone.

Psalms 47:7-9

For God is the King of all the earth is the psalm's own summary, repeated in the next verse as God reigneth over the heathen, God sitteth upon the throne of his holiness, kingship extended from Israel to every nation without qualification. The princes of the people gather themselves not as conquered subjects but as the people of the God of Abraham, joined to Israel's own ancestor rather than merely subdued by Israel's God. Shields of the earth belong unto God closes the psalm, the rulers' own instruments of power reckoned as already his, and the last word is that he is greatly exalted.