Psalms 104:24–26

Psalms 104:24 — "Yahweh, how many are your works!"

The Hebrew exclamation mah-rabbu ma'aseykha YHWH ("How manifold/how many are your works, O LORD!") is not merely a count of creatures but an eruption of doxological wonder. The word rabbu (from rav, "many," "great," "abundant") carries the double sense of numerical vastness and qualitative richness — the works are not merely numerous but overwhelming in their variety and excellence. Critically, the psalmist immediately follows with kullam be-ḥokhmah 'asita — "In wisdom you have made them all." This is the theological linchpin: creation's variety is not chaos but the overflow of divine wisdom (ḥokhmah). Every creature reflects a specific facet of God's inexhaustible knowing and willing. The Septuagint renders ḥokhmah as sophia, linking this verse to the entire Wisdom tradition of Israel (cf. Proverbs 8; Sirach 42–43). The Catholic tradition will hear in this Sophia an anticipation of the Logos through whom "all things were made" (John 1:3).

Psalms 104:25 — "There is the sea, great and wide"

The psalmist's gaze shifts dramatically from the catalogued creatures of the land (vv. 10–23) to the sea — yam gadol u-reḥav yadayim, literally "the sea, great and broad of hands/sides," an evocative image of its seemingly limitless lateral expanse. In the ancient Near Eastern imagination, the sea was ambiguous: simultaneously the domain of death and chaos (tehom, the "deep" of Genesis 1:2) and a testament to God's sovereign ordering power. Here, however, the sea is not threatening — it has been domesticated into praise. It is teeming (sherem) with creatures "beyond number," both small and great. The sea, once the emblem of primordial disorder in Canaanite myth (Yamm, Baal's adversary), is here simply God's well-stocked aquarium. This is a profoundly anti-mythological claim: there is no divine struggle with the sea; the sea simply is, because God made it and filled it.

Psalms 104:26 — "There the ships go"

Uniquely, the psalmist inserts human beings into the sea — not as masters, but as small figures crossing a vast divine canvas. The ships (oniyyot) are mentioned almost incidentally, even humbly. They are a mark of human ingenuity and commerce, yet they appear dwarfed by the ocean's immensity. The verse continues: "and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it." Leviathan — the great sea-dragon of Canaanite mythology, the symbol of chaos itself in Job 41 — is here presented as God's plaything (lesaheq-bo), a creature God fashioned for his own delight. This is an astonishing theological move: the very emblem of primordial terror is revealed as God's toy, created for divine sport and joy. It strips Leviathan of all independent menace and subordinates it entirely to the Creator's sovereign playfulness.

Typological and Spiritual Senses

The Fathers saw in these verses a multi-layered meaning. The sea, broad and deep, was read as a figure of the world, of the Church, and of Sacred Scripture itself — vast, teeming with meaning, impossible to exhaust. The ships that cross it were read as the souls of the faithful navigating temporal life, or even as the Church (the navis Ecclesiae, the "ship of the Church") sailing through history toward the eternal harbor. Leviathan, meanwhile, was consistently read by the Fathers as a figure of the Devil — but crucially already defeated, already reduced to God's creature, already tamed by the Cross. St. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 103) saw in the ships the preaching of the Gospel crossing the sea of the world, and in Leviathan the enemy whose power Christ has definitively broken.

Catholic tradition brings singular depth to these verses through the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the theology of divine Wisdom. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity, and order" and that creation is a work of the Trinity — the Father creates through the Son (the eternal Logos-Wisdom) in the Holy Spirit (CCC 290–292). Psalm 104:24's invocation of ḥokhmah as the principle of creation thus anticipates Trinitarian theology: the wisdom by which all things were made is not an abstraction but a Person, the eternal Son (cf. 1 Cor 1:24; CCC 241).

St. Basil the Great, in his Hexaemeron, meditates extensively on the sea as a lesson in providential governance: even the abyss obeys boundaries set by God's word, and every creature within it manifests divine artistry. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 47) argues that the multitude and diversity of creatures is itself necessary to the perfection of the universe — no single creature could adequately represent the fullness of divine goodness, so God multiplied creatures to distribute across the whole cosmos a participation in his own infinite richness.

Pope John Paul II, in Laudato Si''s predecessor reflection and later echoed by Pope Francis in Laudato Si' (LS 85–86), teaches that each creature has its own intrinsic value and reflects God's glory. The teeming sea of verse 25 is thus not a resource to be exploited but a theophany to be reverenced. Leviathan playing in the sea is a reminder that creation includes dimensions of sheer divine delight that exceed human utility — God made creatures not only for human use but for himself, for his own pleasure and glory.

For a contemporary Catholic, these three verses carry an urgent ecological and spiritual charge. In an age of oceanic pollution, species extinction, and the industrial instrumentalization of nature, verse 24's "In wisdom you have made them all" is a summons to a specifically theological environmentalism — one grounded not in sentimentality but in the recognition that creation is the work of divine Wisdom and therefore sacred. To deface the sea is to deface a canvas on which God has written his glory.

But the passage also addresses the interior life. The sea of verses 25–26 invites the soul to stop at the edge of what it cannot fully comprehend — God's works, God's wisdom, God's ways — and to respond not with anxiety but with wonder. St. John Paul II wrote that wonder (admiratio) is the beginning of the contemplative life. These verses prescribe it as a spiritual discipline: stand before vastness, let it dwarf you, and let that dwarfing become praise. For Catholics drowning in the noise of modern life, the antidote may be as simple and demanding as the psalmist's exclamation — How many are your works, O LORD! — prayed slowly, with eyes open to the world.