Psalm 19 Revisited

The heavens declare (mesaprim) the glory¹ (kvod) of God, firmament (rakiah) relates (magid) His handiwork. Day to day makes utterance, night to night speaks out. There is no utterance, there are no words, whose sound goes unheard. Their voice carries throughout the earth, their words to the end of the world. He placed in them a tent for the sun, who is like a groom coming forth from the chamber, like a hero, eager to run his course. His rising-place is at one end of heaven, and his circuit reaches the other; nothing escapes his heat. The teaching of the Lord is perfect, renewing life; the decrees of the Lord are enduring, making the simple wise; the precepts of the Lord are just, rejoicing the heart; the instruction of the Lord is lucid, making the eyes light up. The fear of the Lord is pure, abiding forever; the judgments of the Lord are true, righteous altogether (Psalm 19:2-10).

Psalm 19 is familiar to Jewish worshipers as the lead addition to the Shabbat morning service (p’sukei d’zimra) and for its moving closing prayer asking God to accept His “words” and “thoughts.”² Today it is customary for the officiant at public prayer to recite it quietly.

I wish to start by addressing what might be called a structural problem, which as the text stands mars our sense of the unity of the psalm as a single composition. As one can see, the first seven sentences deal with items pertaining to the lead subject of the psalm, “The heavens.” However, beginning with verse 8, without any connectives or bridge statements, the lead subject changes to the teaching of the Lord, the laws of the Torah, which are presented in a plain, non-metaphorical, staccato style. In order to understand this anomaly we must remind ourselves of the audacious Biblical worldview: both the material universe and the Torah of Moses, despite the vast distance between them in time and in kind,³ are ultimately the “works” of the same, One, indivisible God. Each one is a foundational and transformational event in the epic ongoing story which starts in Genesis, continues in Exodus, and whose redemptive end is envisioned by the prophets. The cosmos is so designed as to permit the emergence of creatures endowed with intelligence, a moral sense, and creative curiosity, while the Torah is given with an exegetical methodology enabling Israel to meet the challenges of changing times. Thus verse 8 does not introduce a different subject but rather one that enables the psalmist to complete his presentation of the works of God and why they are praiseworthy.

Even a casual reading of the psalm presents a challenge: if there are no words, no speech, and no sounds are heard, how are we to know what the heavens are declaring? A close read of the next two verses reveals that the text is not referring to the empty sky but to celestial bodies that are visible — the sun during the day and the moon and stars during the night. Therefore it is the benefits of those celestial bodies to man that evoke the praise of God.

An initial inspection of Psalm 19:2 shows it to be a perfectly formed couplet, echoing two units of four words each in the chiastic style A.B.B.A. That is to say that the second part of the verse repeats the theme in reverse order and usually in different words. However, in our case the use of different words, magid instead of mesaprim, gives us an added meaning. While the primary meaning of both verbs is “to tell” or “to relate,” lehagid can sometimes be read as “to inform,” i.e. to convey information that was not known before or whose significance was not realized, as in Exodus 19:3, Micah 8:6, and Esther 3:4. Thus, we may now read our text with emphasis on the second part of the verse as follows: Yes, the heavens (by virtue of the celestial bodies) indeed testify to the glory of God’s work, but if you wish to perceive His “handiwork” — which is always more expressive of the maker’s feelings — then you must hearken to the tale of the rakiah, which is the vital atmosphere that surrounds our planet.⁴ Just as the product of handiwork is cherished more than a machine-made product, so what we may learn from understanding the vital benefits of our planet’s atmosphere will give us a more meaningful understanding of God, not only as an omnipotent and omniscient Creator but as a God who is attentive to the needs of man.

I now wish to bring our psalm into dialogue with a verse from Isaiah: Raise upward⁵ your eyes and see who created these (Isaiah 40:27). Isaiah is suggesting here that the heavens are glorifying God by challenging us to perceive that the heavens and the vast celestial bodies⁶ that they contain indicate that they must have had an intelligent and powerful creator,⁷ and that behind it all exists a “who” (mi) rather than a “what” (ma). Part of this approach is to see in the heavens an intellectual challenge, focusing on the question of origin — how did we get here. Long after Isaiah, in the Middle Ages, there developed theological explanations and even so-called proofs for the existence of God based on the creation of these celestial bodies.⁸ However, a different line of thinking saw in the heavens not an intellectual challenge but an awe-inspiring sight that we might call an aesthetic experience — that is to say, one dealing only with surface qualities, those that appeal to our senses.

This was later noted by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his famous observation that “reflecting often and steadily on the starry heavens above and the celestial bodies fills the mind with new and increasing admiration and awe.”⁹ Pleasurable sensation (visual, auditory, or tactile), to which excessive exposure does not produce feelings of satiation (unlike physical pleasures), is a characteristic of aesthetic experience. So when Kant claims that “often and steady reflection on the heavens” produces “new and increased admiration,” he is talking aesthetics.

However, the term “awe” takes us to a new level of aesthetic perception, called “the sublime.”¹⁰ This is based on a concept that there are aspects of nature which, because of their magnitude and force, afford a unique, overwhelming experience that is beyond words. Kant explains it as follows: “The overwhelmed imagination, in its effort to widen itself, falls back on itself and realizes the dignity and value of its own subjectivity as a creator of consciousness which alone can be aware of and can appreciate nature’s grandeur.” In our time, as well, R. Joseph Ber Soloveitchik chose to interpret our text in aesthetic terms, only now what Kant saw as natural phenomena are seen as intimations that reflect the glory of their Creator God: “The heavens tell the glory of God” — in this enthusiastic explanation, David does not refer to the mathematical precision of the movement of the planets and the propagation of light but to the grandeur and splendor of the sky, to the innumerable natural phenomena whose charm and loneliness are beyond human imagination.¹¹

Thus we have two basic approaches as to what it is that “the heavens are declaring” and how they are “glorifying God.” The first is the traditional one,¹² which sees in the starry skies the “work” of a benevolent Creator. The other, going no further than its surface qualities, perceives within the heavens an instance of the “sublime,” now considered traces of God’s own attributes.¹³