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For a poem whose main image is sitting still, a psalm with only two conjugated verbs, Psalm 113 swiftly maps the whole world, encompassing time and space. A balanced yet varied structure, the psalm features three stanzas, each its own syntactical unit. The first stanza embeds a jussive wish, “let the name the Lord be | adored” (2a), between three non-finite verbs for praise: “Laud… laud… be lauded” (1a, 1b, 3b; two imperatives and a participle). The second stanza relies on an implied copula between the interrogative “who” and “like the Lord | our God” (5), a question surrounded by a passive participle and two causative participle-plus-infinitive phrases: “lofted… making soaring | to sit in/ making sinking | to look around” (4a, 5b, 6a). The final stanza nests its clause, “he lofts the poor” (7b) within a third participle-plus-infinitive construction, “lifting from dust… to seat him” (7a, 8a), followed by a final participle, “seating” (9). With only a single declarative verb, “he lofts,” swirled around by non-finite forms, the psalm achieves stillness within motion, simplicity within complexity.

Most of the rest of the work of the psalm takes place in prepositions, which locate the lofting in time as well as on the vertical and horizontal axes of space. The first stanza features a pair of “from… until” phrases, the prepositions m- + `ad: the temporal merismus “from now | on till ever” (2b), followed by the map “from the rising of the sun | on till its setting” (3), which marks the length of the day, the height of the sky, and the width of the world, all of which are appropriate for the praise of the name of the Lord. The second stanzas begins at the zenith of the vertical axis, with a pair of `al prepositions: “over all the others | the Lord/ over the skies | his glow” (4). The effect extends the height of the possible, above “the others”— itself a term that maps other cultures on the horizontal”— then above that above, above even the skies. That second stanza ends with a pair of b- prepositions that spread the stretched vertical axis horizontally: “through the skies | and through the earth” (6b). The final stanza returns to the prepositional m- prefix— “from dust… from the ash pile” (7), a vertical pair, pointing upward from the nadir— and adds a pair of ’im phrases: “with nobles / with the nobles | of his people” (8).

These dimensions, the scope of time and space, are sketched out, too, by the psalm’s most compelling lines. The three hif`il participle + infinitive phrases—“doing x in order to y”—all articulate the psalm’s theme of rising: “making soaring | to sit in / making sinking | to look around” (5b-6a), and “lifting from dust | the low / from the ash pile | he lofts the poor / to seat him with nobles” (7-8a). Like the rising and setting of the sun near the end of the first stanza, these phrases combine up and down motion with horizontal spread. The sun rises and sets even as it crosses horizons. The Lord makes rising, ironically, to have a place to sit and dwell. The Lord makes sinking, why? To have a look around. And the Lord raises the weak and lowly to seat them among the nobles, whose plural spreads them all around.

Most compelling of all is the poem’s final verse, “seating a woman infertile | in a home / a mother of children | glad” (9). The Lord’s seated in the skies, the impoverished person is seated among the nobles, and now is seated a woman who is `aqeret, a word that conveys infertility but more literally means “uprooted.” If the poor are uplifted, those adrift are homed. A psalm that spends so long up above with sun and skies ends down in the middens and in the situating of a woman in a home, where she is surrounded horizontally and moved forward in time, with “children | glad.”

It would be easy to note all these dimensions in the psalm and then, for those of us who’ve read Eliade or even just the Zion psalms, to imagine this one woman’s seating as a kind of axis mundi, a sacred center of the world, an omphalos. It also calls to mind Hannah and 1 Samuel 2, a song this psalm seems to know. New Testament readers will recognize Psalm 113 as an ancestor of the Magnificat. There is a reason this psalm initiates Hallel. Something so cosmic culminates in such domesticity, which seems anywhere and everywhere, this nucleus of some woman’s pregnancy, someone low being lofted from dust, encircled by such electrical orbits of soaring and sinking and by imperatives to praise.