Psalm 113 - Up from the Dunghill

Hallelujah! We usually say it as an exclamation. Something goes well or pleases us and we shout “Hallelujah.” But the Hebrew word – or words – is actually a command. Hallelu Yah. Hallelu - You (plural) Praise - Yah - a shortened form of God's name- Yahweh.

Hallelujah – praise you servants of Yahweh.
Hallelujah – praise the name of Yahweh.
Hallelujah – may Yahweh’s name be praised from now until forever.

It’s a command for everyone everywhere to praise Yahweh. From the rising of the sun in the East to the place where it sets in the west. People in all nations everywhere and through all time should praise Yahweh. Everyone should praise him because he is exalted over all the nations. His glory is beyond anything we could no or describe. The Psalmist then asks a rhetorical question, “Who is like our God?” Who could compare?

It’s thought by many scholars that this particular psalm was written after the Israelites Babylonian exile. Before the exile the people of Israel were largely an agrarian society – farmers working on ancestral lands passed down from father to son to son. They carefully marked the boundaries of these lands and were loathe to divide them. They believed that these lands had been given to their families by God and took it as their responsibility to keep the lands in their families through the generations.

They also believed that the harvest was a direct reflection of God’s favor towards them. If they had a bountiful harvest it was because they had been blessed by God – and because God blessed the righteous and the good, it was evident to them that if someone had a bountiful harvest it was because he was good. The rich and prosperous farmer was, of course, an honest and upright man.

The converse of that was true also; if a farmer had a poor harvest year after year and was forced to sell off his ancestral lands to avoid going into debt it must have been because God was displeased. We see this illustrated in the book of Job. Job who was, we are told, an honest and upright man and was quite prosperous. He had fields and flocks and houses and children. He had it all. But because of that cosmic wager between God and the Satan, he lost everything. He lost his fields and flocks and houses and children. He had nothing. When his three friends came to comfort him, they were convinced that he must have sinned somehow and offended God. How else could one explain Job’s dramatic reversal of fortune?

Before the exile the Jewish people believed God blessed the righteous with wealth and cursed the wicked with poverty. But in 596 B.C. King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Israel, destroyed Jerusalem and took the people away into foreign captivity. Many of them died during this exile, far from their homeland. But when King Cyrus came into power he decreed that the Jewish people could return home and begin rebuilding their nation.

When they got there, however, those ancestral homelands were not returned to them. Instead, they were confiscated and given to foreign landlords who expected a payment of tribute from the Jewish tenant farmers. They had nothing. They struggled to farm the land and to pay the tribute to their landlords. They lived in poverty.

But instead of seeing this as a curse from God they had a change in their thinking. They began to recognize that poverty wasn’t a curse from God, and that God loved them even in their poverty and cared for them in spite or (or even, because of) their poverty.

They began to realize that the high king of heaven was not just a far away God who only saw them from a distance, but was a king who would get down off this throne in order to help them.

...but he gets off his high horse
gets dirt on his hands…

He stooped down from that high and lofty throne and got right down into the squalid poverty with his people.

In the fracas and filth
in the fire and flood
in the trash and the tumors
the rash, and the nub
-from God Went Bowling by The Swirling Eddies *1

Those who had lost their farms and lost their ability to work were often found living around the town dung heap, the place where everyone would throw their garbage and refuse. There wasn’t plumbing or flush toilets so everyone brought their waste to the town refuse heap. And there the poor would scavenge for whatever bit of scraps they could find. Maybe a piece of fabric they could use as a blanket, or bone with a tiny bit of meat left on it that they could eat. This is where they lived - on the trash heap, on the dunghill, scouring over the rest of the communities refuse for their sustenance.
And the high king of heaven, the God of heaven and earth whose glory was above all the nations came down off this throne and got down on his hands and his knees, got dirt under his fingernails and got shit on his clothes in order to rescue his people. This was not something one would expect of a king.

Large Man: Who's that then?
Dead Collector: I dunno. Must be a king.
Large Man: Why?
Dead Collector: He hasn't got shit all over him.
-from Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975)

Kings just don't do that sort of thing. They sit in their palace and they wear fine linen garments - clean clothes, and they are clean and washed. They don't get down into the filth with the people.

And what is more, in the city of Jerusalem the community dung heap was on the south side of the city in the valley of Gehenna. And when it got too full or too putrid, the valley would be set on fire to burn away the filth and garbage. Over time this burning smoldering place of filth became a figurative name for the place for the wicked dead, a site at the greatest possible distance from heaven. It was hell.

Imagine: the glorious king of heaven getting down off his throne to crawl down into this farthest place from heaven in order to lift up his people. And this is just what we have in the person of Jesus Christ, who did not consider equality with God something to be exploited but instead he put aside his glory and his divine power in order to get down into the filth and muck and mire with his people. He even allowed himself the humiliation of death on a cross and went down into the grave in order to lift up his people.

This is why we should praise him.
This is why his name should ring from the rising of the sun in the east to the place where it sets in the west.
This is why we should sing his praise both now and forever more.

Hallelujah.


*1 "God Went Bowling" by The Swirling Eddies on the Album Zoom Daddy, 1994 broken songs.