What Does Psalm 148:7 Mean?
Praise the LORD from the earth, you great serpents, and all the deeps.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Praise the LORD from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:THE KEY
The command places even the earth’s wild, hidden regions inside the LORD’s praise.
THE MEANING
The LORD is praised from the earth by what is wild and by what lies beyond sight. Dragons and deeps are addressed as participants, so no remote corner of the reader’s world stands outside the summons. The verse holds the monstrous and immeasurable within the same field of praise.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that praise belongs only to human voices or orderly, visible life: the wild and the deep are already summoned into it.
THE ROOT
הַלְלוּ
halelu
GROWS FROM
הלל
H-L-L
Praise; celebrate
The plural command הַלְלוּ (halelu, “praise”) directly addresses the dragons and deeps that follow. Its root connects this summons to a wider vocabulary of praise, reaching beyond human speech into the earth’s untamed and hidden realms.
ALSO GROWS
tehillah: Praise; song of praise
תְּהִלָּה
The same root names praise as both the act summoned here and the song that carries it.
hallelu-Yah: Praise Yah
הַלְלוּיָהּ
This familiar compound preserves the root in a direct summons to praise the LORD.
THE PATTERN
Praise is a creation-wide response that reaches the wild, the hidden, and every creaturely realm.
The beasts of the field will give me weight, the jackals and the ostriches, for I have set waters in the wilderness and rivers in the parched land, to water my people, my chosen.The mountains saw you, and they writhed. The downpour of the waters crossed over. The deep gave its voice and raised its hands on high.And every created thing in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and in the sea, and all that is in them, I hear them saying, Blessing, and honor, and weight, and power, be to the one who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb, into the ages of the ages.THE THREAD
Let every thing that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.Psalm 150:6 uses the same root, הלל (halal, “praise”). Psalm 148 summons dragons and deeps; Psalm 150 opens the call to every breathing creature.
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