For a great god is the LORD, /
and great king over all the gods. The language here harks back to a period
when YHWH was thought of not as the one exclusive deity but as the most
powerful of the gods, though it is unclear whether the formulation in this
psalm reflects active belief or merely a linguistic survival. In any case, the
next two verses proceed to proclaim that YHWH alone is the master of depths and
heights, the maker of sea and earth, an idea that would seem to preclude the
notion of sundry gods having jurisdiction over the various realms of nature.
Scholars attached to the hypothesis of an annual ritual of the coronation of
YHWH of course have seized on this psalm as a liturgical text for the rite, but
its existence remains conjectural. Later Jewish tradition made this the first
in a sequence of psalms chanted as a prelude to the Friday-evening prayer for
welcoming the sabbath, evidently because the sabbath was seen as a celebration
of creation. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019], 3:227)
