Ps. 48.10 (Zion turns to her God)

“Mount Zion / shall rejoice – the daughters of Judah / shall be jubilant – because / of your judgments / O Yhwh.” This is a crucial, if not central, verse. In a sense, the psalm is almost in dialogue with itself here. Zion was, in the opening section, the object of the world’s exultation. Here, it has become the subject of rejoicing. There are several important insights to this. Fist, Zion is set within the context of the “daughters of Judah”, which is a traditional designation for the towns and cities of Judah. By being listed first, however, one wonders if Zion is not, in a sense, the chorus leader of the praise being offered. If Judah is the ‘father’ of these cities, perhaps Zion is the daughter of God as it is the seat of God’s ‘son’ the king (Ps. 2). Second, the kings’ destruction/judgment was premised on their ‘seeing Zion’. It was, as we saw there, the bringing up of Zion into the realm of God that made it the icon of God’s (covenantal) power within the world (a type of sacramental presence of God). Here, however, we see a hiatus between Zion and God as Zion now turns to her ‘indweller’ and praises him for the power infused into her which produced the “judgment of Yhwh” on the kings. This is a very interesting development. Within Zion the relationship between Zion and God is very clear. To the kings, however, Zion itself was, purely, the demonstration of God’s power. They would not have been able to detect this ‘praise of Zion’. To them, any hiatus between Zion and God would have been a weakness; to the citizens of Zion, the hiatus is Zion’s greatest strength and the source of her joy. It is, indeed, as this verse makes clear, the source of her praise. That, is something only her citizens would ever be able to appreciate.