Psalm 65 Bible study: Praise waits for you

The title is "For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David. A song" (65:1), and these notes say no more about it than it says. Then: "Praise waits for you, God, in Zion" (65:1) (tap waits, Praise). In Hebrew the line begins lekha dumiyyah tehillah: to you, then the word the WEB gives as waits, then praise. Brown-Driver-Briggs gives dumiyyah as "silence, still waiting, repose". Now look at how the psalm ends: "They shout for joy! They also sing" (65:13) (tap shout for joy). The title calls the psalm a song, shir, and the psalm's last word in Hebrew is yashiru, they sing, the verb with the same letters. In the WEB, that They comes right after the pastures and the valleys: "The pastures are covered with flocks. The valleys also are clothed with grain" (65:13). On the way, the psalm says to God, "You call the morning’s dawn and the evening with songs of joy" (65:8), where call … with songs of joy is the verb ranan, which Brown-Driver-Briggs gives in this form as "cause to ring out for joy".

Psalms 65:10→leads toMatthew 6:30

Teaching his disciples on the mountain (Matthew 5:1-2), Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow" (Matthew 6:28), and "But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won’t he much more clothe you, you of little faith?" (Matthew 6:30). The psalm says to God, "You visit the earth, and water it" (Psalm 65:9), "You drench its furrows. You level its ridges. You soften it with showers" (Psalm 65:10), and "You crown the year with your bounty" (Psalm 65:11). Matthew doesn't name Psalm 65, so setting the two together is a reading. It rests on a shared subject: God is the one who tends what grows in the fields. It doesn't rest on the word clothed: the WEB has the psalm's hills and valleys clothed too (Psalm 65:12-13), but in Hebrew those are two different verbs, and neither is said of God. One reading hears Jesus speaking of the same care the psalm praises, and taking it one step further, to the people listening: "won’t he much more clothe you" (Matthew 6:30). Another keeps each to its own setting: the psalm is praise for a harvest, spoken to God (Psalm 65:9-13), while Jesus's words answer worry, "Therefore I tell you, don’t be anxious for your life" (Matthew 6:25), and in his saying the grass "tomorrow is thrown into the oven" (Matthew 6:30), which the psalm doesn't say. These notes don't choose between them. This line doesn't say the psalm speaks of Jesus, and it doesn't set you of little faith against the psalm, which is praise, not worry.

דּוּמִיָּהdumiyyahsay doo-mi-YAH

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "silence, still waiting, repose". Strong's: "stillness; adverbially, silently". "Praise waits for you, God, in Zion" (65:1): in Hebrew the line opens lekha dumiyyah tehillah, to you, then this word, then praise (tap Praise). In the line it comes right after to you, and the psalm's last word is they sing (65:13). The chapter on Psalm 39 traces the word's four uses in the Hebrew Bible, all in the Psalms.