Psalms in Book 5 affirm that God does answer prayer, God’s promises are valid and they include a long love song for God’s laws. The Great Hallel is a name given to Psalm 136, but sometimes extended to include Psalms 135 and 137. These three songs link the songs of ascents (songs to be sung on pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple) to a section of songs attributed to David.

Hallel means praise.

So here it is, a song of praise so important that it is given the title The Great Hallel, or The Great Praise, yet unlike the Egyptian Hallel (Psalms 113-118) it does not have Hallelujah either at the beginning or end of the song, or both. You would have thought that the rabbis who gave this title would have noticed that their Great Hallel does not contain any form of the word Hallel. Well, they have. Rabbi Johanan says in the Talmud, “Because the Holy One, blessed be he, is enthroned on high in the universe and yet gives food to all creatures.”

Psalm 136 is a song of praise despite the absence of the word “praise”. It is a song of the community, written by a very skillful poet. It has a hidden meaning and a twist at the end.

The books of Psalms are roughly themed like this:

Book 1: Psalms 1 – 41: God is beside us.
Book 2: Psalms 42 – 72: God goes before us
Book 3: Psalms 73 – 89: God is all around us.
Book 4: Psalms 90 – 106: God is above us.
Book 5: Psalms 107 – 150: God is among us.

136 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever.
² Give thanks to the God of gods,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever.
³ Give thanks to the Lord of lords,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
⁴ to him who alone does great wonders,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
⁵ to him who by understanding made the heavens,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
⁶ to him who spread out the earth above the waters,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
⁷ to him who made the great lights,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
⁸ the sun to rule over the day,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
⁹ the moon and stars to rule over the night,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹⁰ to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹¹ and brought Israel out from among them,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹² with a strong hand and an outstretched arm,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹³ to him who divided the Red Sea in two,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹⁴ and made Israel pass through the midst of it,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹⁵ but overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹⁶ to him who led his people through the wilderness,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹⁷ to him who struck down great kings,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹⁸ and killed mighty kings,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
¹⁹ Sihon, king of the Amorites,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
²⁰ and Og, king of Bashan,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
²¹ and gave their land as a heritage,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
²² a heritage to Israel his servant,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever.
²³ It is he who remembered us in our low estate,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
²⁴ and rescued us from our foes,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever;
²⁵ he who gives food to all flesh,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever.
²⁶ Give thanks to the God of heaven,
    for his steadfast love endures for ever.

Psalm 136 ESVUK

God’s love never fails.

“God’s love never fails,” is just another way of interpreting the repeated line in every verse of this song (in this case from the CEV), which in the ESV and ESVUK is “for his steadfast love endures forever.” When you compare different English translations of this verse, you will find things put very differently, especially in the way the Hebrew hesed is translated. Here’s a list of a few of them:

Steadfast love. (ESV)
Love (NIV)
Mercy (King James Version)
Faithfulness (NASB)
Lovingkindness (NASB 1977)
Loyal love (NET Bible)

Yes hesed is very difficult to translate into English. Now compare this to another translation of hesed:

Wicked thing, disgrace. (Leviticus 20: 17 in the KJV and ESV, respectively).

How can the same word mean such very different things?

If a man takes his sister, a daughter of his father or a daughter of his mother, and sees her nakedness, and she sees his nakedness, it is a disgrace [hesed], and they shall be cut off in the sight of the children of their people. He has uncovered his sister’s nakedness, and he shall bear his iniquity.

Leviticus 20:17 ESV

Hesed is about the nature of the person. If a person’s nature is to be insestuous it is disgraceful, says Leviticus. I like the use of disgraceful in Leviticus as it means being without grace and contrasts nicely with grace inplied the first list of what hesed means.

In Psalm hesed is about what God does or has, I can’t deny that, but God has mercy and love because that is what God is, merciful and loving. What this Psalm does not say is that God is masculine, the word “his” does not exist in relation to God in Psalm 136, but the nature of the English language demands a pronoun where Hebrew has none.

A community song with a twist

Psalm 136 Psalm 136 is a community song like the one before it. That psalm, 135, is mostly verses taken from Psalm 115 and a development of them using Israel’s past. That development is in my previous blog post. Psalm 136 is taken almost directly from the new part of 135, only saying “give thanks to God” instead of “praise God.”

It starts with a threefold salutation to give thanks to God, who is good, is the God of gods, and is the Lord of lords.

Verses 4-7 are about the God of creation. Psalm 135 was about the God who continues to create. You would be forgiven if you thought that Psalm 136 is about creation being about something God has done, and that’s it, but verses 4-7 used the participle forms of the verbs so verse 7 can be read as this:

To God who continues to make the great lights.

God is still creating now!

Verses 10 to 22 are nearly identical to Psalm 135, but again the verbs are participles, meaning it is not a one-off event but part of God working continually on behalf of Israel. Even the “divided” of “who divided the Red Sea in two” is part of God’s ongoing work of love rather than a one-off. Verses 23 to 25 are a threefold salutation to God who remembers, rescues, and gives.

Verses 4 to 25, 22 verses, follow the 22-verse pattern of Jewish acrostic poetry found in some of the Psalms and all five of the Lamentations, only without the initial letters. The 22-verse psalms, including the acrostics, are all written in the style called Wisdom, an early form of philosophy. In Wisdom writings, 22 has the significance of being the number of revelations. (The number is symbolic, not literal, but the Book of Revelation in the New Testament has been divided into 22 short chapters for this very reason.) The number 22 stands for the Wisdom of God.

The twist at the end? I’ve teased you enough. Verse 26. We would expect a psalm like this to end by repeating the first verse at the end. Verse 26 has similarities with verse 1, but is also different. Let’s compare them:

¹ Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
²⁶ Give thanks to the God of heaven,

The change, in a community song, is that giving thanks to God is for all people because God is the God of heavens, of all and for all. It was shadowed in the previous verse, that God gives food to all flesh, but here serves as a sting in the tail. Especially as the context of the psalm is during the New Exodus, the return from exile in Babylon.

Chapters 8 to 10 of Ezra tell of the ethnic cleansing of the returned exiles. Some have taken wives from the people of the land and had children. They are told that to remain part of the country they must put away those wives and children. Psalm 136:26 seems to contradict this. God is for all it says, as do other verses in Psalms in this part of the collection.

How do we reconcile this?

One answer is we don’t. I’m happy for the histories to contradict the prophecy of God. The histories in the Bible say what happened; they often do not say whether those actions were good or bad. But both Ezra chapters 8-19 and Psalm 136 have the same aim: Worship is for God alone. Ezra’s problem was that the returned exiles had taken wives from the local people and started worshipping their gods. Whether Ezra was right or wrong to tackle the issue by ethnic cleansing rather than welcoming the wives and children who worshipped God, the god of their husbands is left for the reader to decide.

If Ezra’s strict rules had been followed back before the exile, Moses, who had two Midianite wives, would have been excluded from the people. So would King David, great-grandson of Ruth, an Edomite. I have made my decision, and I ask you to make your own. If you disagree with me, I’m OK with that.

The twist in the end of Psalm 136 means, as I understand it, that everybody is called to be one of the people of God and as Christians we should accept all who have professed to have come to Jesus, even if we disagree with them.

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*While Ps 135 does not employ participles in its historical recounting, Ps 136 does. This further confirms the close connection between God’s creative and sustaining work in the world. https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1010-99192019000200019#:~:text=He%20points%20out%20the%20incidence,%2C%20with%20thirty%2Dfour%20occurrences.