Chapter Eight

The inscription in the Slavic Bible indicates either the manner of musical performance of the psalm on an instrument with openings like those in a winepress, or the time of the psalm’s use during the pressing of grapes, work which was ordinarily accompanied by songs (Judg 9:27; Jer 48:33). From the Hebrew: “on the gittith instrument” (gittith), that is, on an instrument borrowed by the Hebrews from the Philistine city of Gath, which might have resembled a winepress. The entire inscription can be understood as indicating that the aforementioned psalm is performed on the gittith instrument during the grape harvest as a folk song. The specified uses of the psalm correspond to the whole of its content, which presents a hymn of praise to God for His blessings granted to man in a rationally and beautifully ordered universe.

Since the main subject of the psalm’s content is the depiction of God’s greatness in nature, which presupposes in the psalm writer—David—prolonged observation and contemplation of it, and to this latter David could give himself only before his entry into public service, when first persecutions from Saul and then wars and the affairs of governing the state turned his attention in another direction, the composition of the aforementioned psalm should be attributed to the time of David’s life in his father’s house, after his first anointing by Samuel. Then he was still tending flocks and was among nature and could devote himself to its contemplation.

Psalm 8:2. O Lord, our God! How majestic is Your name throughout all the earth! Your glory is spread above the heavens! “Earth” and “heavens” can be understood in two ways. By earth is understood everything created on the terrestrial sphere, which by the diversity and beauty of its objects, by their rational arrangement, clearly speaks of the greatness of their Creator. The heavens speak the same—the heavenly lights and all atmospheric and astronomical phenomena. In patristic literature, by earth is understood mankind, by the heavens—the world of angels. Both praise God. The first understanding is more in accord with the subsequent content of the psalm.

Psalm 8:3. From the mouth of infants and nursing babes You have established praise, for the sake of Your enemies, to silence the enemy and the avenger. This Divine greatness is so powerfully diffused throughout the world and manifested so clearly that it is felt even by nursing infants, who “render praise to God.” By this ability to feel and perceive God in the phenomena of the world, they unintentionally and unconsciously, and therefore all the more powerfully, expose and reject the judgments of those who intentionally do not perceive this greatness, thus becoming enemies of God, and by their one-sided and erroneous judgments about the arrangement of the universe as it were avenging themselves on Him for their spiritual blindness. By infants here is understood nursing children. In the book (Wis 10:21) it is said that after the passage of the Hebrews through the Red Sea even the mouths of “the mute and the tongue of infants became clear.” This points not only to the fact that the Hebrews, previously silent and oppressed slaves in Egypt, now boldly speak and sing to God, but also to the fact that nursing children took part in the general joy, immediately and instinctively feeling the extraordinary and miraculous nature of this event. By infants can be understood not only nursing children, but also adults with uncorrupted and pure moral feeling, bringing them near to children. The fact mentioned by the book of Wisdom brings this passage close to (Matt 21:15-16), where it speaks of Hebrew children singing in the person of Christ, the son of David, that is, the promised Offspring, the Son of God, whom the Pharisees did not want to recognize as such. Thus, the fact that “Wisdom opened the mouths of infants” at the passage of the Hebrews through the Red Sea indicates to the fathers of these children that Wisdom, the power of God, is revealed to children as well, and not always does practical life experience and a person’s age serve as indicators of the accuracy of his judgments and actions, which was revealed in the history of the life of Christ, sung by children as the Son of God, while the fathers of these children, denying His divine dignity, at that time were making plans for His destruction. Thus, the aforementioned fact is a type, where in a historical event are indicated the features of a future event from the life of the Messiah, for which reason the given verse of the psalm, as a prediction, is cited in the Gospel of Matthew.

Psalm 8:4. When I look upon Your heavens—the work of Your fingers, at the moon and stars, which You have set, Psalm 8:5. then what is man, that You remember him, and the son of man, that You visit him? The writer of the psalm, struck by the greatness of God when contemplating His creations, stands in awe before Him. This awe is further intensified by the awareness that man is established by God as the head of the world, in which is seen an extraordinary benevolence of God.

Psalm 8:6. You have made him only a little lower than the angels: You have crowned him with glory and honor; Psalm 8:7. You have set him as ruler over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet: Psalm 8:8. all sheep and cattle, and also the wild beasts of the field, Psalm 8:9. the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, all that pass through the paths of the sea. Psalm 8:10. O Lord, our God! How majestic is Your name throughout all the earth! The exaltation of man by God is manifested both in the peculiarities of his spiritual nature and in his royal position in the world. In the first case, God “made him only a little lower than the angels,” that is, man by his spiritual nature stands only a little below the angels and, like them, is capable of infinite spiritual and moral development, which lower animals lack. In this capacity, bringing man near to the highest world of bodiless spirits and to God, lies his “glory and honor” before all the rest of the world. The expression “a little” in patristic literature is understood also in the sense of indicating the temporal state of fallen man in sin before his restoration through the sufferings of the Messiah, when man, directly taking Christ into himself in the mystery of the Eucharist, becomes through this even higher than the angels, since the latter do not partake of the Eucharist. According to this latter understanding, the expression “a little” is equivalent to “for a time,” that is, from the fall of Adam until the sufferings and resurrection of the Savior, man stood below the angels, but from the time of Christ he has come close to the latter. The royal position of man in the world is manifested in his dominion over all other kinds of the vegetable and animal kingdoms: both domestic and wild animals submit to him, as do predatory birds and fish in the seas. By his reason, discoveries, and inventions, man has not only made himself secure from all predatory animals but has also subjected them to himself, becoming himself the object of fear for them. Examples of such dominion of man are before everyone’s eyes. Verse 3, which contains a prophecy about the times of the Messiah contained in the very historical fact, shows that the aforementioned psalm is typologically messianic.