BackgroundAn anonymous enthronement psalm of victory, echoing the "new song" call of Psalm 96 and celebrating salvation already accomplished by YHWH's "right hand and holy arm"; widely thought to date to the post-exilic period and remembered in Christian tradition as the seedbed of Isaac Watts's "Joy to the World."
Psalm 98: His Right Hand Has Won Salvation
A Psalm.
By Bea Zalel
Psalm 98
A Psalm.
- Sing to the LORD a new song, for He has done wonders; His right hand and holy arm have gained Him the victory.
- The LORD has proclaimed His salvation and revealed His righteousness to the nations.
- He has remembered His love and faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
- Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break forth—let your cry ring out, and sing praises!
- Sing praises to the LORD with the lyre, in melodious song with the harp.
- With trumpets and the blast of the ram’s horn shout for joy before the LORD, the King.
- Let the sea resound, and all that fills it, the world, and all who dwell in it.
- Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy
- before the LORD, for He comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity.
Theme
The phrase "his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him" is exodus language. In Exodus 15:6 Moses sings, "Your right hand, O LORD, glorious in power, your right hand, O LORD, shatters the enemy." The psalm is deliberately reaching back to the foundational deliverance and saying: that same arm has acted again. For a generation rebuilding Jerusalem under Persian permission, this was a way of claiming that the modest return from exile belonged in the same theological category as the parting of the sea. "Yeshuah" (salvation) here is not internal or private; it is publicly visible rescue.
Verses 4-6 specify the instrumentation: lyre and sound of melody, trumpets and the horn (the "shofar," the ram's horn). The shofar is not a concert instrument; it was used to announce the new year, the Day of Atonement and the coronation of kings. Pairing the shofar with the trumpets ("hatzotzrot," the silver priestly trumpets of Numbers 10) signals that this is full coronation liturgy, the temple equivalent of a royal inauguration. A post-exilic worshiper would have heard it and understood: YHWH is being publicly acknowledged as king.
The closing summons in verses 7-9 (sea roaring, rivers clapping hands, mountains singing) inspired Isaac Watts's 1719 paraphrase that became "Joy to the World." Watts was reading this psalm as a prophecy of Christ's reign and read "the LORD is coming to judge the earth" as good news, the arrival of the rightful King. Whether or not one follows Watts's full Christological reading, the psalm itself insists that the world's true response to a coming Judge is joy, not dread, because the Judge is righteous and his judgment puts the world right. That reframing is the gift Psalm 98 gives every generation that has only seen judgment as bad news.
Discussion questions
- How does the language of "right hand" and "holy arm" deliberately place this psalm in the same theological frame as the Exodus song of Moses in Exodus 15?
- What is the difference between the priestly silver trumpets and the shofar? Why does it matter that this psalm uses both?
- Why does the psalmist twice call for a "new song" (echoing Psalm 96)? What was inadequate about the old songs in the moment this psalm was sung?
- Isaac Watts based "Joy to the World" on this psalm. What in the psalm itself supports a Christmas-season reading? What would an original Hebrew worshiper have thought of that application?
- How does this psalm engage with Isaiah 52:10, "The LORD has bared his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations"?
- Why is the coming judgment of God treated as cause for the seas to roar and the rivers to clap, rather than as cause for fear?
- How does verse 3, that "all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God," both stretch and unsettle a community whose actual political reach was extremely small?
- What does it look like in your local congregation to make "a joyful noise" without performing or pretending?
- How can a season of personal hardship still produce a "new song" in the sense the psalmist means?
- If salvation is something publicly accomplished rather than only internally experienced, how should that shape Christian witness in the public square?
Read this psalm in another translation
The inline text above is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Open in a new tab to compare with a modern licensed translation: