113:1 Praise the Lord!
Praise, you servants of the Lord,
praise the name of the Lord!
113:2 May the Lord’s name be praised
now and forevermore!
113:3 From east to west 2
the Lord’s name is deserving of praise.
113:4 The Lord is exalted over all the nations;
his splendor reaches beyond the sky. 3
113:5 Who can compare to the Lord our God,
who sits on a high throne? 4
113:6 He bends down to look 5
at the sky and the earth.
113:7 He raises the poor from the dirt,
and lifts up the needy from the garbage pile, 6
113:8 that he might seat him with princes,
with the princes of his people.
113:9 He makes the barren woman of the family 7
a happy mother of children. 8
Praise the Lord!
114:1 When Israel left Egypt,
when the family of Jacob left a foreign nation behind, 10
114:2 Judah became his sanctuary,
Israel his kingdom.
114:3 The sea looked and fled; 11
the Jordan River 12 turned back. 13
114:4 The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs. 14
114:5 Why do you flee, O sea?
Why do you turn back, O Jordan River?
114:6 Why do you skip like rams, O mountains,
like lambs, O hills?
114:7 Tremble, O earth, before the Lord –
before the God of Jacob,
114:8 who turned a rock into a pool of water,
a hard rock into springs of water! 15
1 sn Psalm 113. The psalmist praises God as the sovereign king of the world who reaches down to help the needy.
2 tn Heb “from the rising of the sun to its setting.” The extent is not temporal (“from sunrise to sunset”) but spatial (“from the place where the sun rises [the east] to the place where it sets [the west].” In the phenomenological language of OT cosmology, the sun was described as rising in the east and setting in the west.
3 tn Heb “above the sky [is] his splendor.”
4 tn Heb “the one who makes high to sit.”
5 tn Heb “the one who makes low to see.”
6 sn The language of v. 7 is almost identical to that of 1 Sam 2:8.
7 tn Heb “of the house.”
8 tn Heb “sons.”
8 sn Psalm 114. The psalmist recalls the events of the exodus and conquest and celebrates God’s kingship over his covenant people.
9 tn Heb “the house of Jacob from a nation speaking a foreign language.” The Hebrew verb לָעַז (la’at, “to speak a foreign language”) occurs only here in the OT.
9 sn The psalmist recalls the crossing of the Red Sea (Exod 14:21).
10 tn Heb “the Jordan” (also in v. 5). The word “River” is not in the Hebrew text, but has been supplied in the translation for clarity.
11 sn The psalmist recalls the crossing of the Jordan River (Josh 3:13, 16).
10 sn The mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs. This may recall the theophany at Sinai when the mountain shook before God’s presence (Exod 19:18).
11 sn In v. 8 the psalmist recalls the event(s) recorded in Exod 17:6 and/or Num 20:11 (see also Deut 8:15 and Ps 78:15-16, 20).