Psalm 97

Clouds and darkness round about him, fire going before him, lightning lighting up the world, the earth seeing and trembling — this is the language of Sinai, where the mountain smoked and shook and the people begged Moses to speak instead of God. The psalm takes the vocabulary of that one morning and uses it for God's arrival to judge.

The hills melting like wax is a household image. Wax was the ordinary sealing material for documents and jars, and a lump left near a lamp lost its shape in minutes. Everyone had ruined a seal that way.

Idol worship was public business. A city's god was carried out in procession on festival days, and when a city fell its statue was often carted off by the winners — which everyone read as one god defeating another. The psalm tells the image-worshippers they will be ashamed and tells all gods to bow, which was a direct strike at how the whole region understood power.

Zion heard and was glad, and the daughters of Judah rejoiced. Daughters here are the villages around a town — the standard Hebrew way of naming the small settlements that depended on a walled city. The good news reaches the countryside, not just the capital.