This Psalm presents, as has often been remarked, a picture of the entire Universe, which for completeness, for breadth, and for grandeur, is unequaled in any other literature. Where else, in human language, shall we find the whole Universe, the heavens and the earth, and the ongoings of man in the midst of them, sketched, as here, in a “few bold strokes”?—
“The Lord covereth himself with light as with a garment. He hath stretched the heavens like a canopy. He laid the foundation of the round world that it should not be removed forever. The waters springing in the mountains descend into the valleys, unto the places which the Lord hath appointed for them, that they may never pass the bounds which He hath set them. He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills, to give drink to every beast of the field, for the wild asses to quench their thirst.... Beside them the birds of the air sing among the branches.” The fruits of the field, too, are there; grass and green herb; the labors of man, wine and oil of olive; all the creatures, the conies, the wild goats, the lions roaring after their prey, and seeking their meat from God. There, too, is the great and wide sea, and the wondrous creatures it contains, and the heavenly bodies are rounding in the whole. And then that touching contrast between the moving life of the elements and the quiet yet laborious life of man, encompassed by these vast movements,—“Man goeth forth unto his work and his labor until the evening.” And all this picture of the Universe contained within thirty-five short verses! Besides this, the special Psalm of the visible creation, there is the 65th Psalm, and many another passage in the Psalms, which describe so touchingly the way in which God deals with the earth through natural processes.
Again, I need hardly refer to the Book of Job, especially from the 37th to the 41st chapters, where both single appearances of the world and the arrangement of the whole are depicted in language which has graven itself on the heart of all nations: “The Lord walks on the heights of the sea, on the ridges of the towering waves heaped up by the storm.” Or again: “The morning dawn illumines the border of the earth, and moulds variously the canopy of clouds as the hand of man moulds the ductile clay.”
Or turn again to the great poet-prophet Isaiah. Here you find no detailed descriptions, but all Nature fused and molten before the intense fire, now of his indignation, now of his adoring awe, now of his spiritual joy; one moment lifting his eyes to the midnight heavens as the proof and witness of the Divine Omnipotence; another, in his soul’s exultation over God’s redemptive mercy, calling aloud to the heavens to sing, and the lower parts of the earth to shout for joy, “Break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest and every tree therein.”
But this transport comes from no mere love of Nature. It has a deeper origin. It is for that Jehovah hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted. This is the solemn spiritual joy in which he calls on the heavens and the earth to sympathize.
The following seem to be some of the chief notes of Hebrew poetry in its dealing with Nature:—
1. Nature, as we have seen, is never represented as an independent power or as resplendent with her own beauty, but as the direct creation, one might almost say, the garment of the great Jehovah. In fact it is remarkable that the word Nature, in the sense we now use it in, never occurs in the Bible. Neither the word nor the thing, as a separate entity, seems ever to have been present to the Hebrew mind. In everything they saw or heard God himself as immediately present, ready as it were to rend the veil and manifest himself.
2. The sober, truthful estimate of all things in the external world. They are spoken of exactly as they are. There is no temptation to make too much of them; for He who is behind them and who made them is so much greater, so much more present to thought, that reverence for Him precludes exaggeration. The accuracy of the Bible descriptions of these things is quite unexampled in other literature.[13] This faithfulness to fact, this veneration for natural truth, this feeling that things are too sacred to be exaggerated or distorted, or in any way trifled with, comes directly from the habit of regarding all visible Nature as created and continually upheld by One Omnipresent God. Habitual reverence for Him from whom they come sobers the writers and makes them truthful.
3. Connected with this is the absence of all tendency to theorize or frame hypotheses about Nature’s ongoings. This of course comes from the pervading habit of referring all effects directly to the Divine will; and yet there is no want of philosophic wonder, for, as Humboldt remarks, the Book of Job proposes many questions about natural things “which modern science enables us to propound more formally, and to clothe in more scientific language, but not to solve satisfactorily.” Lastly, there is a deep-hearted pathos, “a yearning pensiveness,” as it has been called, in the Hebrew poetry, over man’s mortal condition, as when in images straight from Nature it describes his life here as “a wind that passeth away and cometh not again,” or “as a flower of the field so he flourisheth, for the wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Simple images, yet how true for all generations!