Ps. 96.11-12 (earth erupting)

Let the heavens / rejoice / and the earth / be jubilant

let the sea / and all within it / resound

let the fields / and everything in them / exult

let all the trees / of the forest / raise a shout

before Yhwh / for he is coming

he is coming / to judge the earth. 

There is no shadow in these verses. Instead, it is unadulterated, exuberant joy at Yhwh’s coming.  “Heaven and earth”, those twin realms that until now were not in unity (the earth was the realm of ‘idolatry’ while heaven was the realm of perfect praise) are contained within a single line, and in a single act of unified rejoicing at Yhwh’s coming. In a sense, what was divided and set apart (and against each other) after Adam and his sons, is here brought back together.  We should hear here an echo of the opening words of Genesis, where ‘heaven and earth’ are so close (literarily and literally). But first, we need to back-track and see why these verses appear here within the psalm. The previous verses ended with Yhwh establishing ‘equity’ among “the peoples”. Within the context of the psalm, as we saw, that includes the removal of idolatry such that Yhwh becomes the absolute center of the world’s liturgical attraction and desire. It necessitates, in other words, a judgment of sorts that contains within itself a proclamation of “guilty” (on idolatry and injustice). It is only in the wake of this that ‘heaven and earth’ can again be united. As Paul would say, creation ‘awaits the redemption of man’. It ‘groans for it’. Just as, in Genesis, the land is cursed following the curse on Adam, so too is the earth healed following the redemption of man. When this occurs, however, what follows is truly tremendous. Heaven and the earth itself enter into a profound and wild praise to Yhwh. Liturgy is not something restricted to man (the peoples and the nations), but something that ‘heaven and earth’ enact as well. We need to note that the most extravagant acts of praise in this psalm are not found in the human realm, but in ‘heaven and earth’, in ‘land and see’ and in ‘trees’. Again, we find here the psalmist pushing praise to the utter boundaries in a very shocking manner. As the psalm progresses, as the Yhwh’s reign gets closer, the cosmos begins to fall more and more under the sway of Yhwh’s reign. As it does this, the liturgical praise of Yhwh increases—from Israel, to the nations, and, now, to the earth. In Israel, there was ‘singing’ to Yhwh; but in the nations, they actually mirrored the heavenly liturgy; here, “heaven and earth” are “jubilant”, “resound”, “exult” and “raise a shout”. Something has been released, as it were, in creation; a barrier to its festival shout to Yhwh has been removed. Until this point, ‘heaven and earth’ have been contained. Yet, when it is freed, its expression is nothing short of an eruption.