Psalms 148 - Introduction

CXLVIII.

This glorious anthem, as it has been the model of countless hymns of praise, is best appreciated and understood by comparison with some of these. The “song of the three children,” found in the LXX. Version of Daniel, is no doubt an imitation, but in its elaboration and its artificial style loses much of the lyric fire of the original. And of the rest, Isaac Taylor truly says: “It is but feebly and as afar off, that the ancient liturgies — except so far as they merely copied their originals — came up to the majesty and wide compass of the Hebrew worship, such as it is indicated in the 148th Psalm. Neither Andrews, nor Gregory, nor the Greeks, have reached or approached this level. And in tempering the boldness of their originals by admixtures of what is more Christian and spiritual, the added elements sustain an injury which is not compensated by what they bring forward of a purer or less earthly kind: feeble, indeed, is the tone of these anthems of the ancient church; sophisticated or artificial is their style.”
The motive of the psalm, too, is quite different from that sympathetic feeling for nature which enters so largely and powerfully into modern poetry. Not that this feeling was entirely unknown to the Hebrew mind. It makes itself felt elsewhere; but here it is not because the poet wants nature to join him in praise that he summons the universe to his choir, but that he may, in the last verse, enhance the glory and privilege of Israel. All nature has reason to praise the Creator who called it into being, and gave it its order so fair and so established, and poetically the universe may be imagined full of adoring creatures, but in reality, praise as a privilege belongs only to Israel. It is not here a contrast between inanimate and animate, rational and irrational creation. Still less does there show itself the feeling that motives Keble’s

“All true, all faultless, all in tune.”

On the contrary, it is the covenant people that alone possess the privilege. Expression is piled on expression to establish this fact. “His people,” “His saints,” “a people near unto Him.”
The immediate occasion of the psalm may very probably have been some victory, but conjecture cannot recover it.