Ps. 93.1 (king's clothing)

Yhwh reigns! / He has robed himself / with majesty
Yhwh has robed himself / belted himself / with strength.
The world is firmly established / immovable. 

These opening lines have a complexity (or, depth) to them that is not immediately apparent. In order to delve into it, I want to divide up these reflections into a couple areas, rather than looking at it in the order it is presented. The first thing to note is that this ‘dressing of the king’ is one that does not happen to him; it is one that he himself performs. Yhwh ‘robes himself’ and ‘belts himself’. That said, what we are supposed to envision is Yhwh ‘taking to himself’ ‘majesty’ and ‘strength’, as if they were external to him. There is a movement, a drama, that is pictured here. And yet, it is a drama that has Yhwh completely and utterly in control. There is no attendant that dresses him. “Majesty” and “power” are fully under Yhwh’s authority. What this very simple image accomplishes is rather profound: it preserves the ‘dramatic’ nature of Yhwh’s kingship and its establishment while, at the same time, showing that drama to be one enacted only by Yhwh. Yhwh’s kingship is both present (“Yhwh reigns!”) and eternal. He is, in a way, the writer, the director and the actor on the stage. But, it is so, because Yhwh’s kingship is not one ‘conferred upon him’ but one that he, in a sense, eternally and perpetually confers upon himself. This reflection points toward a second one—the ‘public’ nature of the clothing. It is fascinating that the psalm, after this initial exclamation, then turns to the ‘clothing of the king’. This is Yhwh ‘dawning’ his regal power and authority, and in such a way that it is publicly acknowledged and visible. This ‘clothing’ does not cover, as in hide, Yhwh; it is meant to be expressive, to assert Yhwh’s authority, to impress itself upon the world around. We might call this something like a ‘second skin’. Yhwh ‘exudes’ these. They form the ‘atmosphere of his presence’. If the “Yhwh reigns!” is the people’s acclamation, then this ‘clothing’ is Yhwh’s acclamation of himself. This is something we need to probably re-emphasize—the psalms live in the public sphere. They live in the realm of expression, of communal recognition, of display. The realm of the ‘private’, on the other hand, is often the realm of the wicked. They operate in private, in secret, and away from the visible. Which is why, when judgment falls upon them, they are ‘reversed’ into the public, into shame (not ‘guilt’). More positively stated, as in this psalm, when Yhwh is perceived, he is perceived ‘in his glory’, in ‘his majesty’ and ‘in strength’. There is no ‘remainder’ to him, in the sense that he ‘floods’ the world. In Yhwh, this external realm can be trusted. Clothing can be a revealing. 

The world. This line seems strange (at least to me on my first reading). What connection does Yhwh’s clothing have to do with the establishment of the world? I think the answer is that we have moved from the king to the kingdom. And the kingdom (the world) partakes of the authority of Yhwh; it is ‘firmly established’. The king’s kingdom reflects the king as much as his ‘clothing’. When it falls into chaos or injustice, the king’s authority is questioned; when it reflects righteousness and order, the king’s authority is visible, public, on display and enacted. One concluding observation that we will return to. In many other psalms the world is established “on the waters”, which reflects a creation of ‘order from (the chaos) waters’. Here, the world is ‘firmly established’ but the psalm does not depict what it is established on or from. As we will see the ‘waters’ play an important role in verse 3. Further, the waters are, by their nature, movable, changeable and impermanent. Here, the ‘world’ reflects solidity and immobility. As such they reflect Yhwh’s dominance over the forces of chaos.