1 Great is Jehovah, and much to be praised, In the city of our God, His holy mountain. 2 Lovely in loftiness, a joy of all the earth, Is Mount Zion, the recesses of the north, the city of the great King.
3 God in her palaces Has made Himself known as a high tower. 4 For, lo, the kings assembled themselves, They marched onwards together. 5 They saw, then they were amazed; They were terror-struck, they fled. 6 Trembling seized them there; Pain, as [of] a woman in travail. 7 With an east wind Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish. 8 According as we have heard, so have we seen In the city of Jehovah of hosts, in the city of our God: God will establish her for ever. Selah.
9 We have thought, O God, of Thy loving-kindness In the midst of Thy Temple. 10 According to Thy name, O God, So is Thy praise to the ends of the earth: Thy right hand is full of righteousness. 11 Let Mount Zion rejoice, Let the daughters of Judah exult, Because of Thy judgments. 12 Compass Zion, and walk round her: Reckon her towers. 13 Give heed to her bulwark, Pass through her palaces; That ye may tell it to the generation after. 14 That such is God, our God: For ever and aye He will guide us. Al-Muth.
The situation seems the same as in Psalm xlvi., with which this psalm has many points of contact. In both we have the same triumph, the same proud affection for the holy city and sanctuary, the same confidence in God's dwelling there, the same vivid picturing of the mustering of enemies and their rapid dispersion, the same swift movement of style in describing that overthrow, the same thought of the diffusion of God's praise in the world as its consequence, the same closing summons to look upon the tokens of deliverance, with the difference that, in the former psalm, these are the shattered weapons of the defeated foe, and in this the unharmed battlements and palaces of the delivered city. The emphatic word of the refrain in Psalm xlvi. also reappears here in ver. 3. The psalm falls into three parts, of which the first (vv. 1, 2) is introductory, celebrating the glory of Zion as the city of God; the second (vv. 3-8) recounts in glowing words the deliverance of Zion; and the third tells of the consequent praise and trust of the inhabitants of Zion (vv. 9-14).
The general sense of the first part is plain, but ver. 2 is difficult. "Mount Zion" is obviously subject, and "lovely in loftiness" and "joy of all the earth" predicates; but the grammatical connection of the two last clauses is obscure. Further, the meaning of "the sides of the north" has not been satisfactorily ascertained. The supposition that there is an allusion in the phrase to the mythological mountain of the gods, with which Zion is compared, is surely most unnatural. Would a Hebrew psalmist be likely to introduce such a parallel, even in order to assert the superiority of Zion? Nor is the grammatical objection to the supposition less serious. It requires a good deal of stretching and inserting to twist the two words "the sides of the north" into a comparison. It is more probable that the clause is topographical, describing some part of the city, but what part is far from clear. The accents make all the verse after "earth" the subject of the two preceding predicates, and place a minor division at "north," implying that "the sides of the north" is more closely connected with "Mount Zion" than with the "city of the great King," or than that last clause is.
Following these indications, Stier renders "Mount Zion [and] the northern side (_i.e._, the lower city, on the north of Zion), which together make the city," etc. Others see here "the Holy City regarded from three points of view"--viz., "the Mount Zion" (the city of David), "the sides of the north" (Mount Moriah and the Temple), "the city of the great King" (Jerusalem proper). So Perowne and others. Delitzsch takes Zion to be the Temple hill, and "the sides of the north" to be in apposition. "The Temple hill or Zion, in the narrower sense, actually formed the north-eastern corner of ancient Jerusalem," says he, and thus regards the subject of the whole sentence as really twofold, not threefold, as appears at first--Zion on the north, which is the palace-temple, and Jerusalem at its feet, which is "the city of the great King." But it must be admitted that no interpretation runs quite smoothly, though the summary ejection of the troublesome words "the sides of the north" from the text is too violent a remedy.