Ps. 113 (Glory above the heavens)

Exalted is Yhwh / above all nations

                His glory / above the heavens

Who is like Yhwh / our God

                Enthroned so high –

                Looking down so low –

In heaven / or on earth?

In the second stanza, the psalmist moves from the arena of time, to that of the nations. From his exaltation by his servants, Yhwh is now perceived as exalted above all nations and above all heavens. The shift from time to the nations and the heavens is important on many levels. Time is all encompassing. In the first stanza, Yhwh is brought into time. The nations and the heavens are similar in some ways. They control and form the life of the cosmos. They organize it. And yet, unlike time, Yhwh is here portrayed as the Sovereign over both. He is not “brought into” them so much as displayed as the one who rules them, who is exalted above them. While Yhwh’s presence can be “stitched into time”, it cannot really be stitched into the nations and heavens. That would be idolatry. The overriding point of the second stanza is to highlight the incredible and staggering difference between Yhwh and the powerful (be they the gods of the nations or the heavens). They are incommensurate. We are here to perceive the darkness, the incredible distance between Yhwh’s sovereign authority and that of the nations and the heavens. Yhwh’s glory and power does not stand along the spectrum of the powerful in “heaven or earth”. His enthronement puts him outside the spectrum. There is no comparison. There is nothing “like” him. The more one perceives how exalted Yhwh is, above every power, the more one is enlightened by a ray of darkness, of greater dissimilarity.

And yet—crucially—this ever greater dissimilarity does not result is silence. Just as Yhwh was to inhabit Time through praise, so too now is his authority above the nations and the heavens, seen as ‘exaltation’ and ‘glory’. It is because he is incomparably brighter than every brightness; incomparably more glorious than any glory. Although Yhwh’s glory is not along the spectrum of earthly or heavenly glory, that is because it infinitely surpasses it, not because it is alien to it. If Yhwh’s glory was alien to the glory of the nations and the heavens, then he could not “look down so low”. The psalmist is making a very important point here—Yhwh’s authority above the heavens is what enables him to look down to the lowest point as well. It is because his so infinitely superior to every form of national and heavenly power that he can be so infinitely intimate to the cosmos. It is because he is not part of the spectrum that he can be intimately associated with every part of it. It does not challenge him (because he is not a part of it).

This insight is important to grasp because it is what provides the basis for the closing stanza—where Yhwh “raises the needy from the dust and exults the poor from the rubbish heap.”