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In his Anchor Bible commentary, the scholar Mitchell Dahood describes what he calls the “tripartite structure” of Psalm 148, treating verse 7 all by itself as the second of three sections, and translating its word ha’arets as “the nether world” rather than as “the land” or “the earth.” The psalm itself disagrees. It patently pairs verse 7’s “Laud the Lord | from the land” with verse 1’s “Laud the Lord | from the skies,” marking out two twelve-line sections (1-6, 7-12). These two main sections are pulled together by a six-line conclusion that begins “Let them laud | the Lord’s name” (13a=5a). But while Dahood’s reading seems almost willfully mistaken, it nevertheless recognizes a strangeness in verse 7, which immediately follows its turn from the skies to the land by invoking “sea beasts | and all deeps / fire and hail | snow and smog / breath of storm | making his word” (7b-8). Why should a psalm that calls for praise from the orders of sky and of earth begin its terrestrial section with mythic depths and swirling atmospheric heights? The “nether world” goes in exactly the wrong direction, but Dahood’s attention to the chaos is helpful, allowing the insight that several overlapping logics govern the meticulous order of Psalm 148.

The first organizing principle is along the vertical axis of what would come to be called, in its Neoplatonic form, “the great chain of being,” evident from the psalm’s division into “skies” (1-6) and “land” (7-12), but visible within these divisions as well. The sky section moves from “messengers” and “forces” (2) to “sun and moon” and “all stars of light” (3) to “skies of the skies” and “waters above the skies” (4) in an order that becomes more remote from earth, less concrete. The earth section moves from meteorological phenomena (8) down to mountains and trees (9) to animals (10) to human social phenomena, from kings to princes to judges (11), men to women, old to young (12). Thus, the overall architecture of the psalm builds from the limit of the skies upward, and then from that same limit downward, with three effects. The psalm’s middle emphasizes the limit itself, “a limit | that shall not pass” (6b). This limit protects the created world against the chaos depicted by the verses immediately surrounding the limit, chaos which the limit splits, dividing “the waters above” (4b) from the sea beasts and all deeps below (7b). And finally, by building up from the limit then down, each section culminates at a vertical extreme, high divine then low human, which are brought together by the repetition of the name of the Lord (5a, 13a, 13b) and by the final verse, in which God “lifted a horn | for his people / a psalm | for all his caring / for the children of Israel | people close to him” (14). Poles meet.

A second organizing principle in Psalm 148 is temporal, following a timeline roughly similar to that of the creation narrative in Genesis 1. Again the psalm’s two main sections move in opposite directions, from the “lights in the vault of the skies” of the fourth day (Gen 1:14-19) chronologically backwards to the second day, with the creation of the vault itself, which split “the waters which are under the vault from the waters that are above the vault” (Gen 1:7). That the author of Psalm 148 knows and responds to the Genesis narrative is clear from its inclusion in verse 4 of the prosaic ’asher me`al, “that are above” from Genesis 1:7, which is cumbersome and grammatically unnecessary to the poem, but an integral marker of the rhythmic style of Genesis 1. The psalm’s second main section moves from the third day, combining geographical and botanical features (9, cf. Gen 1:9-13), to the fifth and six days, lumping together avian and terrestrial animals (10, cf. Gen 1:20-25). (The author of Psalm 148 may not have noticed that Genesis 1 presents birds as created first in keeping with its [that is, Genesis’s] strategy of populating, on Days 4, 5 and 6, the celestial, watery, and land-based spheres created, in turn, on Days 1, 2,3. More likely, the psalmist didn’t care, having strategies of her own.) In both Genesis 1 and Psalm 148, the cosmic timeline ends with humans, male and female (Ps 148: 11-12, Gen 1:26ff). Arguably in both texts, but certainly in the psalm, the human position emphasizes cosmic lowness and lateness, how earthbound we are, how young. Like the vertical scheme, the temporal arrangement carefully contrasts earth’s creatures with those creations and manifestations above, which were stood “for on and ever / he gave a limit | that shall not pass” (6).

While Genesis describes the creation of a vault, a firmament to separate above and below, Psalm 148 deliberately replaces the raqi`a with the word chaq, a word of both legal and ritual significance that shows up all over the Torah. In the plural it refers to the statutes of the law (Exod 18:20; Lev 26:46; Num 30:16; seven times in Deut 4) but also, as here, in connection with the word `olam, “ever,” it indicates the priestly allotment (Exod 29:28, 30:21; Lev 6:22, 7:34; Num 18:8, 18:11). A third organizational principle of Psalm 148, then, is to present a vision of cosmic order in which both the law and the priests who govern its celebration are there at the center, structurally equivalent to the vault of creation that holds back chaos.

If the five Hallelujah psalms that conclude the Psalter are patterned after the five books ascribed to Moses, Psalm 148 is their centerpiece just as the book of Leviticus is the centerpiece of the Torah. At its center—somewhere between verse 6’s “gave a limit” and verse 8’s “making his word”—the psalm folds together language from Genesis and Deuteronomy, creation and the law, mapping time and space, locating the human and the divine, emphasizing the cosmic propriety of praise.