A Psalm

Here is a Psalm I recently wrote while dwelling on God's majesty and His glorious works. Ultimately, I would like to translate it into Hebrew and perhaps set it to music. To distinguish couplets and parallels, I've marked the first word of each verse with italics, though despite the parallelism, it is meant to build upon itself...so it's not like each poetic expression is seperate from the whole, just a combined idea which informs the whole. Though hopefully that should be somewhat intuitive.

My God is beyond compare

Yahweh is His name.

Out of the whirlwind He speaks,

From the mountaintop He shows His ḥesed*,

His people sing His praise every day,

All the nations declare “Holy is Yahweh!”

At His feet are glory and power,

The sons of God bow in worship,

They sing praise around His throne,

His courts ring with their song.

When Yahweh descends,

The Sea turns back in fear,

And the mountains become shale,

Even the ground trembles at His might,

For Yahweh comes to judge.

He bears justice as a shield

Righteousness like a flaming sword,

All the earth shall fear Him;

The mighty men shall fall prostrate

At the coming of Yahweh.

When Yahweh speaks, lightning covers the sky,

When he thunders, the earth trembles.

Who is like Yahweh?

I will shout aloud His praise,

From heights of the mountains I will exalt Him,

For my God is Yahweh.

*"ḥesed" (חסד) is a word that is particularly hard to translate (thus why I didn't translate it here). Some Bibles translate it as "lovingkindness," but this is about as inadequate a translation as you could possibly have. "ḥesed" encompasses so much more than that. It is God's covenant love and faithfulness, it is His compassion (as in the instance of Ruth and Naomi), it is His mercy in dealing with us as sinners, His grace, etc. It is how God describes Himself. Michael Card has an interesting definition which I sort of like, which is, "it is when the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing, gives me everything," though this definition still cannot cover the entire breadth of this wonderful word.