Psalm 8

Psalms 8:1

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, sets the psalm to the Gittith, read by the commentators as either a Philistine instrument brought from Gath or a tune tied to the wine-press, gath being the Hebrew word for it, with no verdict reached between the two readings. The psalm opens where it will close, O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, addressing God twice by two different Hebrew names in a single breath, the covenant Lord and the sovereign Lord. Who hast set thy glory above the heavens states the frame before a single created thing is named, majesty belonging to God before the psalm counts what he made.

Psalms 8:2

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength names the weakest human voices as the place God chooses to found his defense against enemies and avengers, praise rather than force answering the opposition. Jesus quotes the verse of himself at Matt 21:16, when children cry Hosanna in the temple and the chief priests object, applying to his own reception the strength the psalm says God ordained in the mouths of the weak. The verse already carries the reversal in its own words before any citation makes it messianic, strength built from what looks like nothing.

Psalms 8:3-4

When the psalmist considers the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the scale of the question grows, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him. The dark counterpart stands at Job 7:17, where the same question of God's attention to man is asked in bitterness, what is man that thou shouldest magnify him, and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him, an inversion of this psalm's wonder into complaint. Both verses ask exactly the same thing of the same God, and the difference is entirely in the asking.

Psalms 8:5-6

a little lower than the angels: For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour is quoted at length in Hebrews 2:6-9, where the writer applies it first to man's intended dominion and then names Jesus by name as the one in whom it presently stands fulfilled, crowned with glory and honour for the suffering of death, tasting death for every man. Hebrews itself notes what experience shows, that we see not yet all things put under man, and reads Jesus as the one man in whom the psalm's claim already holds true. Verse 6 restates the dominion in the psalm's own terms, all things put under his feet, the same phrase Hebrews and 1 Corinthians 15 both carry forward for Christ.

Psalms 8:7-8

the beasts of the field: The dominion of verse 6 is spelled out by category, flocks and herds, the beasts of the field, then the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea and whatever moves through the paths of the seas, the same three domains named in the creation mandate of Genesis 1:26 and 28. The psalm does not add anything Genesis did not already grant, it sings what was already given as a plain fact of the created order. The catalogue read after verses 5 and 6 extends what is said of man in general to the same dominion the Genesis narrative assigns him at the start.

Psalms 8:9

The psalm closes exactly where it opened, O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, the refrain framing the whole meditation on man's smallness and glory inside the larger fact of God's own name. Everything the psalm has said, the heavens, the babes, the dominion over every living thing, is folded back into praise rather than left standing as an argument about man. The doubled address of the frame, the covenant name and the sovereign name together, is the last word as it was the first.