Psalm 100: Make a Joyful Noise to the LORD

The superscription "mizmor letodah" ("a psalm for the thank offering") is one of only a handful in the Psalter. It ties this song to a specific kind of temple worship. The "todah" was the thanksgiving sacrifice prescribed in Leviticus 7:11-15, a meal-shared peace offering brought by a worshiper who had been delivered from sickness, danger or distress and wanted to give public thanks. The offering had to be eaten the same day, which meant the worshiper had to invite guests. Praise, in other words, was structurally communal. Psalm 100 is the song that accompanied that meal. When you sing it, you are joining a banquet that has been going on for three thousand years.

The summons "all the earth" (verse 1) refuses to keep this psalm parochial. In the second-temple period, this would have been startling. A small province under foreign rule was claiming to lead the worship of every nation. The verb translated "make a joyful noise" ("hari'u") is the same verb used for the war shout, the coronation cry and the fall of Jericho's walls. It is full-throated, even rowdy. Psalm 100 is not a quiet hymn. It is the loud welcome at the temple gates.

The central claim in verse 3, "It is he who has made us and we are his; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture," reaches back to the covenant language of Exodus 19 and forward to the shepherd imagery developed in Ezekiel 34 and John 10. The Hebrew here also contains a famous textual question: the consonants can be read either as "and not we ourselves" or as "and we are his." Both readings are theologically rich; both are old. Either way, the worshiper is confessing that he did not author his own existence and does not own his own life.

By the medieval period this psalm had become the most-sung praise text in Jewish worship outside of the morning Shema. In 1561 William Kethe set it in metrical English for the Geneva Psalter, sung to the tune Louis Bourgeois had composed. That pairing crossed the Atlantic with the Pilgrims and became the "Old 100th," still familiar to most Protestant congregations as the Doxology tune. When you sing "Praise God from whom all blessings flow," you are singing Bourgeois's tune to Kethe's frame for this psalm. Few texts in Scripture have woven themselves so deeply into the daily worship of both synagogue and church.