Catholic Commentary
Universal Call to Praise
1Praise Yah! Praise, you servants of Yahweh, praise Yahweh’s name.2Blessed be Yahweh’s name, from this time forward and forever more.3From the rising of the sun to its going down, Yahweh’s name is to be praised.
Psalms 113:1–3 opens with a liturgical command to praise God's name and declares that this praise is worthy everywhere and at all times, from east to west and sunrise to sunset. The passage establishes that God's identity and character transcend national boundaries and deserve universal acknowledgment across all creation.
God's praise is not a private devotion but a public command that encompasses every person, place, and moment — from sunrise to sunset across the entire world.
Psalms 113:1 — "Praise Yah!" The Hebrew Hallelujah — rendered here as "Praise Yah!" — is one of the most recognizable words in all of Scripture, yet its force is easily dulled by familiarity. It is a second-person plural imperative: a command directed outward, not a private interior sentiment. The subject commanded to praise is unnamed at this point, which is itself significant. The call goes out into the open air before any audience is specified, suggesting its scope is unlimited. "Yah" is a contracted form of the divine name YHWH (Yahweh), appearing frequently in the Psalms and embedded in Hebrew names such as Elijah and Isaiah. It is not a diminutive but a poetic intensification — the divine name pressed into a single emphatic syllable. The Psalmist opens, therefore, not with a theological proposition but with a liturgical shout: act, praise, now.
Psalms 113:2 — "Blessed be Yahweh's name" The imperative of verse 1 is immediately grounded in a doxological declaration: the name of Yahweh is to be blessed — meaning extolled, hallowed, spoken of with reverence and wonder. In the ancient Semitic world, a name was not a mere label but the very identity and presence of the person. To "bless the name" of God is to acknowledge who God is — his character, his deeds, his self-disclosure. This connects directly to the Third Commandment and to the petition of the Lord's Prayer, Hallowed be thy name (Matthew 6:9). The Psalmist is not offering abstract theological praise; he is directing attention to the God who has revealed himself in history, to Israel and ultimately to all nations. The phrase also echoes God's promise to Abraham: "I will make your name great" (Genesis 12:2) — a promise now gloriously reversed in direction: it is God's name that must be made great throughout the earth.
Psalms 113:3 — "From the rising of the sun to its going down" This is a merism — a literary device in which two extremes are named to indicate the totality of everything between them. East to west means everywhere; sunrise to sunset means always. The verse declares that the praise of Yahweh's name is not the property of one sanctuary, one people, or one hour of the day. It belongs to all creation, across the entire arc of daylight. This is a remarkable theological claim: the God of a small nation in the ancient Near East is here declared worthy of universal adoration. The verse is explicitly quoted by the prophet Malachi (Malachi 1:11) in reference to a future pure offering that will be offered to God "in every place" — a text the Catholic tradition has consistently read as a prophecy of the Eucharist. The Didache (c. AD 100), and later the Council of Trent (Session 22), invoke Malachi 1:11 in this very context, and Psalm 113:3 provides the Psalmist's own anticipatory foundation for that vision.
Catholic tradition situates Psalm 113 within the Egyptian Hallel, which Jesus himself would have sung at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26). The Church Fathers understood this detail as profoundly significant: the Lord of the universe, on the night before his Passion, praised his Father using these very words. St. Augustine, in his Expositions of the Psalms, treats the entire Psalter as the voice of Christ speaking to the Father and of the Church speaking in Christ — making the Hallelujah of Psalm 113 simultaneously Christ's prayer and the prayer of his Body.
The phrase "from the rising of the sun to its going down" carries immense weight in the Catholic sacramental imagination. The Council of Trent (DS 1742) cites Malachi 1:11 — which is itself an echo of this verse — as a prophetic anticipation of the Mass, "the pure oblation" offered in every place and time. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1330) calls the Eucharist the actio gratiarum, the act of thanksgiving, fulfilling in an unbounded way what the Psalmist envisions. Where the psalm envisions universal praise across geography and time, the Mass enacts it: every celebration of the Eucharist, from the rising of the sun to its going down across all the world's time zones, is the Church's unceasing Hallelujah offered in and through Christ.
St. John Chrysostom saw in the universality of this verse the overthrow of Jewish particularism and the opening of praise to all nations — a point St. Paul makes in Romans 15:11, where he quotes another psalm to establish that Gentiles too are called to glorify God. The Catholic understanding of mission flows naturally from this verse: the Church goes to every nation precisely because God's name is worthy of praise everywhere.
For contemporary Catholics, these three verses issue a quiet but searching challenge. The Hallelujah is a command, not a suggestion — and it is plural. It calls communities, parishes, families, and nations to praise, not merely individuals in private moments. A Catholic today can ask: Is my participation in the Sunday Eucharist — the supreme act of communal praise — genuinely active and engaged, or habitual and passive? The vision of verse 3, praise spanning the entire day from sunrise to sunset, also invites recovery of the Liturgy of the Hours. The Divine Office is precisely the Church's institutional answer to this verse: Morning Prayer at sunrise, Evening Prayer at sunset, with the Hours in between, so that no segment of the day is left unpraised. Even for laypeople who cannot pray all the Hours, praying Morning and Evening Prayer transforms the entire day into an act of worship. These three verses are not liturgical poetry from the distant past — they are a daily commission.
Commentary