Yes, to Him will bow down /
all the netherworld’s sleepers / . . . all who go down to the dust. The
received text seems to say, “They ate and bowed down,” ʾakhlu wehistaḥawu,
which does not make much sense. The translation adopts a commonly proposed
emendation that involves merely a respacing of the consonants and one change in
a vowel, ʾakh lo hishtaḥawu. This inclusion of the dead among God’s
worshipful subjects is unusual because a reiterated theme in Psalms is that the
dead, mute forever, cannot praise God. Perhaps the poet, having imagined God’s
dominion extending to the far ends of the earth, also wants to extend it
downward—against common usage—into the very underworld. The Masoretic Text
continues to be incoherent here, reading kol-dishney-ʾarets, “all the
fats [?] of the earth.” The translation assumes a widely accepted emendation, kol-yesheiney-ʾarets
(the last word, ʾarets, means both “earth” and “netherworld”). (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 3:69)
