Ps. 48.2 (Zion as participatory praise)

“Its elevation / is beautiful – the exultation / of the whole world – Mount Zion / the heights of Zaphon – is the city / of the Great King.”  It is interesting this section describes not the city as beautiful but its “elevation”. Clearly, we are not solely in the realm of literal description. We have seen throughout our reflections that for God to “rise up” is a sign of his mounting his throne, of his taking upon himself the authority of his glory over the earth. In other words, of his ‘becoming king’. Mountains in the ancient word, and Israel saw this too, were, likewise, seats and homes for the gods. They were where the gods dwelled, where heaven and earth met and gods and man conversed and communed. The gods’ authority flowed from these mountains. To therefore describe a mountains ‘elevation’ as a source of beauty and exultation is not to be simply referring to its height (the psalm never says that Zion is the highest mountain) but to the manifestation of the god’s sovereign power. In other words, the ‘elevation’ of a mountain is the presence of the god on that mountain. Here, the psalm began with, “Yhwh is great and most worthy of praise!” Yhwh is not merely an object of praise; by standing as that which is ‘most worthy’ of praise he is, it seems, categorically different than any other object that is praise-worthy. It is this “Yhwh” that has chosen Zion as his ‘resting place’, his ‘home’ and his ‘city’. Here is where Yhwh dwells. And here is where that which is the pinnacle of all praise has deigned to have built his home. We are to see a correspondence between this first verse regarding Yhwh’s ‘worthiness’ of praise and Zion’s “elevation” and “exultation”. Zion, in other words, as the “exultation of the whole earth” participates and displays to the world Yhwh’s worthiness of praise. It is an icon, an image, of Yhwh’s glory. Therefore, just as Yhwh is removed (or, elevated) categorically from all other praise-worthy objects, so too is Zion a participating within this distinction. Zion must participate within the same glorious mystery of Yhwh. There is one final point that needs to be contemplated in this regard, and it is something we mentioned in our previous post: Zion is a manifestation of God’s covenant with creation and with man; it is a mountain and a city (as Eden was a garden and a home). As we will see, its being an object of praise is rooted in its ‘unshakable’ nature which, in turn is a manifestation of the unbreakable oath Yhwh swears in covenant.