Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Psalms · About this commentary
What Is Man?
Psalms 8:1-9
1 For the Chief Musician; on an instrument of Gath. A Psalm by David. Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens! · WEB
A man looks at the night sky, concludes that people are negligible, and is told the opposite.
Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens! Psalms 8:1.
The first psalm addressed to God from beginning to end with no enemy in it. It opens and closes with the same line, so that everything between is enclosed by the majesty of the name — and the psalm's argument runs from the largest thing visible to the smallest and back.
From the lips of babes and infants you have established strength, because of your adversaries Psalms 8:2.
The first surprise. Having named the heavens, the psalm turns to the noise small children make and calls it a fortification. Jesus quotes this verse in the temple, when the chief priests object to children shouting his praise Matthew 21:16, and the quotation is exact in its logic: what silences the adversary is not force.
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained, what is man, that you think of him? Psalms 8:3–4.
The question is asked by someone standing outside at night, and it is the honest one. Set against that scale a human being is nothing, and the psalm concedes the arithmetic completely. What it disputes is the conclusion.
Note also the work of your fingers. The heavens are fingerwork — the word for delicate craft rather than heavy labor — while the making of a human being in Genesis has God stooping in the dust and breathing. The psalm has already reversed the scale before it asks the question.
For you have made him a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor. You make him ruler over the works of your hands Psalms 8:5–6.
The answer is the commission of Genesis 1:28, restated as a coronation. Crowned, and given dominion — not ownership, since the works remain God's hands' work, but responsible rule. Everything in the list that follows is alive: sheep, cattle, wild animals, birds, fish. The dominion granted is over creatures, and it is the kind a shepherd exercises rather than the kind a conqueror does.
The letter to the Hebrews takes up the psalm and observes what any reader can see, that we do not yet observe all things subjected to man — and finds the fulfillment in one man who was made lower and is now crowned Hebrews 2:6–9. The psalm asks what man is; the answer it receives is larger than it expected, and larger still by the time the New Testament has finished with it.
settled What this mark means