Psalms 8: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This psalm is a song of praise to the LORD, opening and closing with the same line about how majestic his name is over all the earth. The singer looks up at the moon and stars and asks why God pays any attention to human beings at all. The answer given is that God made humans a little lower than the angels, crowned them with glory and honor, and put the animals, birds, and fish under their rule.

Claim by Claim

1. 8:1
   • The speaker addresses the LORD as our Lord.
   • The speaker exclaims that the LORD's name is majestic in all the earth.
   • The speaker says that the LORD has set his glory above the heavens.
2. 8:2
   • Out of the mouth of babies and nursing infants the LORD has established strength.
   • The LORD did this because of his adversaries.
   • The purpose was to silence the enemy and the avenger.
3. 8:3
   • The speaker looks at the LORD's heavens.
   • The heavens are the work of the LORD's fingers.
   • The moon and the stars are included in what the speaker sees.
   • The LORD set the moon and the stars in place.
4. 8:4
   • The speaker asks what man is, that the LORD is mindful of him.
   • The speaker asks what the son of man is, that the LORD attends to him.
5. 8:5
   • The LORD made man a little lower than God, or than divine beings, the word being ambiguous and rendered 'angels'.
   • The LORD crowned man with glory and honor.
6. 8:6
   • The LORD gave man dominion over the works of the LORD's hands.
   • The LORD put all things under man's feet.
7. 8:7
   • All sheep and oxen are under man's feet.
   • The beasts of the field are also under man's feet.
8. 8:8
   • The birds of the sky are under man's feet.
   • The fish of the sea are under man's feet.
   • Whatever travels the paths of the seas is under man's feet.
9. 8:9
   • The speaker addresses the LORD as our Lord.
   • The speaker exclaims that the LORD's name is majestic in all the earth.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

8:1

Two different words for God sit side by side here. The first, printed LORD in capitals, stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew consonants (YHWH) that Jewish readers did not pronounce aloud; the second is 'adonai', an ordinary word for a master or owner, the term a servant would use of the man he worked for. So the line is roughly: 'YHWH, the one we serve.' The second half of the verse is difficult in Hebrew and the grammar is uncertain; 'you have set your glory above the heavens' is one reading among several.

8:2

The Hebrew word here is 'strength' or 'stronghold'. The ancient Greek translation of the Psalms read it as 'praise', and that is the form quoted in the New Testament, which is why some Bibles print 'praise' instead. Both readings are old. 'The one who wants revenge' translates a word for an avenger, in Israelite society, the relative whose duty it was to settle a score for a killed or wronged family member.

8:3

"Ordained" here means set in place or fixed, not commanded and not appointed to an office. The picture of God's "fingers" is deliberately small scale: the night sky that overwhelms the poet took only fingerwork to make.

8:4

'Son of man' is a Hebrew idiom, not a title here. 'Son of' can simply mean 'one of the class of', so 'son of man' means a human being, a mortal, and in Hebrew poetry the second line of a pair usually restates the first in different words. The verse is asking the same question twice.

8:5

The word translated 'angels' is 'elohim', which in Hebrew can mean God, gods, or heavenly beings generally; the ancient Greek translation chose 'angels' and the King James followed it, but 'God' is an equally possible reading of the Hebrew. The phrase rendered 'a little lower' can mean either 'slightly lower in rank' or 'lower for a short time'; the Hebrew does not decide between them.

8:6

Putting something under a person's feet is a standard ancient image for complete authority over it, drawn from the victor who set his foot on a defeated enemy. It says the rule is total, not that anything is being trampled.

8:7

"The beasts of the field" does not mean farm animals. In the King James it regularly means wild animals living out in open country, set deliberately against "sheep and oxen," which are the tame ones people keep. The list is working outward from what humans already control toward what they do not.

8:8

"The paths of the seas" pictures fish and sea creatures following routes through water that keeps no track of them. Israel was not a seafaring nation, and the open sea stood in its imagination for the least known and least manageable part of the world, so finishing the list there is a way of saying the rule reaches even the places no one has charted.

8:9

The psalm closes with exactly the words it opened with. This kind of repeated frame is a deliberate device in Hebrew poetry: it marks off the whole poem as a single unit and returns the reader to the starting point.