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The first fourteen lines of Psalm 95 are changed entirely by the last ten. Through the first two-thirds of verse 7, the psalm calls for collective praise. It is a celebration of the Lord’s face (2, 6) and hand (4, 5, 7), suffused with Davidic imagery (“the crag of our rescue,” 1; “the people/ of his pasturing | sheep of his hand,” 7), centered on the kingship of the Lord (3), and grounded in the vertical and horizontal axes of creation (4-5; “the Lord who made us,” 6). The three cohortative first-person plural verbs of verses 1 and 2, “let’s shout… let’s roar… let’s greet his face”—four if we count both instances of “let’s roar” (nari`ah and nari`a)—are matched by the three verbs in verses 6 and 7, “let’s bow | let’s bend / let’s kneel at his face.” The pairing is so tidy that the psalm could confidently end in verse 7.

But everything changes with the phrase “Today when you hear | his voice” (7c). The line leads to verses in that voice, God’s voice in the first-person, which is neither grateful nor gracious with blessings in response to the praise of the psalm’s first part. The voice is severe and monitory. There are no patterned connections between these last lines and the first more-than-half of the psalm. Instead of recalling creation, the psalm links in cultural memory three low points from the Exodus narrative: the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, the people’s stubbornness in the wilderness (Exod 17), and Moses’s ban from entering the Promised Land, the land of rest (Deut 12:7).

In doing so, Psalm 95 recalls Psalm 81, which also begins with shouts of praise (“Ring out | for God our strength” 81:1) but similarly turns to stories of rebellion in the wilderness: “and so I sent them off | with their obstinate heart / to walk | with their own devices” (81:12). Psalm 81’s transitions are milder, longer, and its retelling of the Exodus includes excerpts from the Law (81:9-10) as well as the Lord’s desire to feed the people in the wilderness: “He made him eat | sweet bits of wheat / and honey from the cliff | I want to satisfy you” (81:16). Psalm 95, by contrast, is all weariness, annoyance, and prohibition: “Forty years | I bemoaned that age / I said they’re a people | of straying heart” (10). And even if this straying from paths suggests wayward sheep, obliquely pairing verse 10 with the sheep in verse 17, the resonance only highlights the differences between pasturage and wandering.  

None of this means that the psalm is necessarily two different poems spliced together, though of course it might have been. If anything, Psalm 95 is three psalms: verses 1-7b on their own; 7c-11 on their own; and the interruptive entire psalm. Like prophetic calls to rend hearts not garments, the psalm as a whole interrupts its own liturgical momentum to warn against insincerity and recalcitrance. In doing so, it makes that admonition itself liturgical.

The passage most clearly alluded to here is Deuteronomy 12, which is set up to foretell the temple:

But the place that the Lord your God selects out of all your tribes, a place to place his name to live, you must seek and go there, that you might carry there your offerings and sacrifices, your tenths and the raisings of your hand, your votives and voluntaries, and the firsts of your cattle and sheep, that you might eat there before the face of the Lord your God, that you might be glad of all the occupations of your hand, you and your families with which the Lord your God has blessed you.

You must not do anything like what we are doing here today, each all that’s right in his eyes, for you have not yet come to the rest and bequest which it’s the Lord your God who gives you, so that you might cross the Jordan and live in the land which it’s the Lord your God who bequeaths you, so that he might let you rest from all your foes around, so that you might settle safely, that it may become the place that the Lord your God selects, a place to place his name to live.

Like Psalm 95, this passage connects a concern with appropriate praise, not to mention the face of the Lord, with the temporal and spatial location of that praise, both “what we are doing here today” and “the rest,” the “place to place his name to live.” What Psalm 95 does uniquely is not just to update the time and place of the Deuteronomic regulations for worship, but to balance seven “let’s” verbs of outward praise (1-2, 6) against the psalm’s one instruction, powerful and inward, “don’t harden your hearts” (8).