Ps. 99.3 (Zion-izing the peoples)

Let them / praise your name / O great and Awesome One
Holy is it
and the might of the king / who loves justice. 

From Yhwh-in-Zion who is ‘exalted over all peoples’, the psalmist now turns his attention to these people directing (asking) them to praise Yhwh. This movement is important—Yhwh as ‘exalted over all people’ leads to an absolute unification of all people in praise to him. Importantly, though, what is implied is that this praise will be one focused on Zion, because that is ‘where Yhwh is’. It is, at this point, that I think it deserves pointing out that the Name, Yhwh, is mentioned precisely seven times in the psalm. Standing alone, this may indicate simply the perfect number or expression of Yhwh. However, there may be more going on here when we think of Genesis (with the ‘seven-fold’ Temple-Creation); Exodus (with the seven-fold commands of Moses to construct the tabernacle); and Chronicles (when the Temple is dedicated in the ‘seven of seven’ in time). What these point to is that the inhabiting of the Name within a dwelling/Temple (or Zion) is intimately associated with the number seven. ‘All the peoples’ “praise of the Name (that is expressed seven times and, here, is ‘in Zion’)”, then, is a Zion-praise. To draw this in our previous reflections on the nature of Israel—what we see here is the ‘Zion-izing’ of “all the peoples”. They are being brought within the realm of Israel, as Israel had been brought within the realm of Yhwh. The fact that this psalm, in particular, falls at the conclusion of the ‘King’ psalms 96-99 is, also, not coincidental. 

A shift. The concluding line of the psalm shifts perspective (or, perhaps better, ‘deepens it’). Up to this point Yhwh has been portrayed as inhabiting, or exhibiting, the awesome force of the divine realm; the ‘terror of the holy’. Here, however, we move into the realm of ‘goodness’, of Yhwh’s “will for justice” and his love of it. It seems, in other words, that we are being provided a glimpse of the, so to speak, ‘subjectivity’ of Yhwh, of his ‘inner life’. And the first glimpse is of him as the ‘good king’, the ‘king who loves justice’. The psalm, will, from this point forward, largely ‘flesh out’ this inner life and how he instantiates it in Israel (and, hence, in ‘all the peoples’).