The One Who Numbers Stars Binds Broken Hearts

Three grounds are packed in: it is good, it is pleasant, it is comely. “Comely” is navah, fitting or becoming, as in 33:1, “praise is comely for the upright”. The Hebrew of the middle phrase can also be read “for he is pleasant”, a reading some modern translations prefer.

“Gathereth together the outcasts of Israel” is lifted almost exactly from Isaiah 56:8. A Jerusalem being rebuilt and exiles coming home fit the return from Babylon, and some copies of the Greek translation head this psalm with the names of Haggai and Zechariah, prophets of that rebuilding.

“Bindeth up” is chavash, to wrap a bandage, the verb of Isaiah 61:1, “to bind up the brokenhearted”, and of the shepherd in Ezekiel 34:16 who binds what was broken. “Wounds” is atsvot, a word for pains and griefs as much as cuts, so the bandage is laid on sorrow.

Abraham was told to count the stars “if thou be able to number them” (Genesis 15:5), and could not. God counts them and names them, as Isaiah 40:26 says of the host of heaven: “he calleth them all by names”. To name is to know one by one, not as a mass.

A pun runs across two verses. In verse 4 God tells the mispar, the number, of the stars; here “his understanding is infinite” is literally “of his understanding there is no mispar”. He counts what is past counting and cannot himself be counted. “Lord” in lower case is Adonenu, our master.

“Lifteth up” is the same verb as “relieveth” in 146:9, a word for setting someone back on their feet. “The meek” are anavim, the lowly and afflicted, people with no leverage of their own. “Casteth down to the ground” is literally “brings low as far as the earth”.

“Sing” is literally “answer”, anu, a word that suits singing in response, one group to another. The harp is the kinnor, a small wooden lyre carried in the hand, the instrument David played for Saul (1 Samuel 16:23). A second round of praise begins, with new grounds.

The grass grows on the mountains, the steep slopes no one irrigates, where only rain can reach it. The Greek translation adds a line from Psalm 104:14, “and herb for the service of man”, but the Hebrew stops at the grass, keeping attention on ground that nobody farms.

Job 38:41 asks, “Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God”, and the psalm answers the question. The raven was an unclean bird under Leviticus 11:15, yet it is the one named as fed. Jesus points to ravens in the same way in Luke 12:24.

The horse is the war horse, the chariot strength of the nations, and “legs of a man” is shoq, the leg or thigh of a runner or foot soldier. Cavalry and infantry, the two measures of an army, are both set aside, as in 33:17, “an horse is a vain thing for safety”.

The second half repeats Psalm 33:18 in the Hebrew almost word for word, “them that fear him … them that hope in his mercy”. “Hope” is yachal, to wait in expectation, a waiting that has not yet received what it waits for. “Mercy” is again chesed, loyal love.

At this verse the Greek and Latin Bibles begin a new psalm, which is why their numbering, out of step with the Hebrew for most of the Psalter, rejoins it at Psalm 148. The Latin opening, Lauda Jerusalem, became a vespers text set by Monteverdi. The verbs are feminine: the city is addressed as a woman.

Bars are the beams dropped across a city gate at night to hold it shut. Nehemiah’s record of the rebuilding repeats “the locks thereof, and the bars thereof” for gate after gate (Nehemiah 3:3, 3:6, 3:13–15), the kind of work this line gives thanks for.

“Maketh peace in thy borders” reads literally “sets thy border as peace”, the frontier itself turned into peace. “The finest of the wheat” is “the fat of wheat”, the phrase of Deuteronomy 32:14 and of Psalm 81:16, where God says he would have fed Israel with it, had they listened.

“Runneth very swiftly” pictures the word as a royal courier. The same root names the runners of 2 Chronicles 30:6 who carried Hezekiah’s letters through the land. “Commandment” is imrah, an utterance, something spoken aloud, and the next verses show what it sets in motion.

Snow falls on Jerusalem in some winters, and 2 Samuel 23:20 dates a deed of Benaiah by it, “in time of snow”. Wool gives it whiteness and softness; Isaiah 1:18 sets snow and wool side by side for whiteness. Hoarfrost is scattered “like ashes”, the grey dusting a fire leaves.

“Morsels” are pittim, crumbs or broken bits of bread, so the ice is hail flung down in pieces. “Who can stand before his cold?” is the only question in the psalm, and it gets no answer; the next verse simply ends the cold.

Job 37:10 says frost is given “by the breath of God”; here his wind does the opposite and brings the thaw. Ruach means wind and breath alike. “Flow” is nazal, to stream or trickle, the word behind the “streams” brought out of the rock in 78:16.

“Statutes” are chuqqim, from a root meaning to engrave, decrees fixed in place; “judgments” are mishpatim, rulings for particular cases. Jacob and Israel name the same man twice, the second time by the name God gave him at the Jabbok (Genesis 32:28).

The claim echoes Moses in Deuteronomy 4:8: “what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law”. The Greek translation reads the second half differently, “he has not made his judgments known to them”, putting the silence on God’s side rather than theirs.