Catholic Commentary
God's Saving Mercy Toward the Lowly
7He raises up the poor out of the dust, and lifts up the needy from the ash heap,8that he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people.9He settles the barren woman in her home as a joyful mother of children. Praise Yah!
Psalms 113:7–9 describes God's act of raising the poor from dust to seat them with princes, and settling the barren woman as a joyful mother of children. These three images represent God's purposeful reversal of human desolation and restoration of the marginalized to generative, functional roles within covenant community.
God's power is measured not by what he builds but by whom he raises—the person reduced to dust, the woman written off as barren, the one everyone else has forgotten.
Psalms 113:7 — "He raises up the poor out of the dust"
The Hebrew word for "poor" here is dal, denoting one stripped of resources, dignity, and social standing — not merely materially poor but existentially reduced, as low as the ground itself. "Dust" ('afar) is the earth of humiliation; it is the same dust to which Adam was condemned (Gen 3:19), the dust in which Job sat (Job 2:8), the dust that enemies lick before a conqueror (Ps 72:9). To be raised from the dust is to be drawn back from near-nothingness into creaturely dignity. The verse is not a general moral maxim; it is a confession of historical experience — Israel has seen this happen. The language deliberately echoes the Song of Hannah (1 Sam 2:8), which this psalm amplifies and which Mary will herself later echo in the Magnificat. The divine subject is emphatic: it is He — the God who made heaven and earth (Ps 113:4–6) — who performs this act. The cosmic Lord and the rescuer of the destitute are one and the same.
Psalms 113:8 — "That he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people"
The movement is not merely from low to somewhat-better; it is from the ash heap to the company of rulers (nedibim, nobles, freely willing ones). This is a maximal reversal. The grammar marks a purposive clause: God's raising of the poor is teleological — he raises in order to seat with the great. This is not social accident or human philanthropy; it is divine intention embedded in the act of rescue. The phrase "princes of his people" situates the reversal within covenantal community: to be elevated is to be restored to full belonging within Israel, the people God has chosen. For the Church Fathers, this typologically anticipates baptismal elevation — the neophyte who was nothing in the world is made, by grace, a co-heir with Christ (Rom 8:17), seated in principle with him at the right hand of the Father (Eph 2:6).
Psalms 113:9 — "He settles the barren woman in her home as a joyful mother of children"
The third image moves to the most intimate register of human desolation in the ancient world: barrenness ('aqarah). In the patriarchal culture of the Old Testament, a woman unable to bear children suffered not only personal grief but social dishonor, often interpreted as divine disfavor. "Settling" her "in her home" (bayit, household) restores her to the center of social life — she who was marginal is made the generative heart of the family. "Joyful mother of children" ('em habanim śemeḥah) is a cry of exultation, echoing Sarah (Gen 21:6), Rachel (Gen 30:23), and Hannah (1 Sam 1–2). The barren matriarchs of Israel become a sustained biblical type: God's covenant promises advance precisely through the wombs that human calculation had written off.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the fourfold sense of Scripture — championed by Origen and systematized by St. John Cassian and later by St. Thomas Aquinas — these verses carry a rich anagogical and allegorical freight. Allegorically, the "barren woman" who becomes a joyful mother images the Church herself: once a Gentile world that had borne no children for God, now — through the grace of Christ — the mother of millions of the faithful (cf. Gal 4:26–27, citing Is 54:1). The "poor" raised from the dust allegorically figures fallen humanity, created from dust and redeemed from its consequences. At the tropological (moral) level, the soul that acknowledges its own poverty and barrenness before God is the soul prepared for grace. The psalm does not reward the self-sufficient; it glorifies the God who intervenes where human capacity has run out.
Catholic tradition reads these verses through at least three intertwining theological lenses.
The Magnificat and Marian Typology. The most immediate and authoritative Catholic reading connects Psalm 113:7–9 directly to the Magnificat (Lk 1:46–55). Mary's song is not a composition ex nihilo; it is a Spirit-breathed meditation saturated in Hannah's canticle (1 Sam 2:1–10) and in this very Hallel psalm. When Mary sings "he has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly" (Lk 1:52), she is performing a living exegesis of Psalm 113. The Church has always read Mary herself as the fulfillment of the "barren woman" type in its deepest sense: not biologically barren, but humanly impossible — a virgin who conceives. Lumen Gentium §55 calls Mary the "exalted Daughter of Zion" in whom the Old Testament promises find their summit. St. Louis de Montfort (True Devotion, §14) saw in the lowly handmaid the paradigm of how God works: emptying what is full of self, filling what is empty of self.
The Preferential Option for the Poor. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2448) grounds the Church's "preferential love for the poor" in Scripture, and passages like Psalm 113:7–8 are its deep root. Pope St. John Paul II (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, §42) and Pope Francis (Evangelii Gaudium, §198) both invoke this scriptural pattern: God's power is characteristically displayed through reversal, not reinforcement of existing hierarchies. This is not a political program grafted onto Scripture; it is exegetically native to Israel's covenant theology.
Grace and Human Poverty Before God. St. Augustine (Confessions I.1) opens with the paradox that the human heart is made for God and therefore restless until it rests in him — a restlessness that is its own form of spiritual poverty. The raising from the dust is, for Augustine, the movement of grace meeting the confession of creatureliness. St. Thomas Aquinas (ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1) links humility — the truthful acknowledgment of one's lowliness — as the necessary precondition for divine exaltation, drawing precisely on the logic of this psalm.
For a contemporary Catholic, these verses cut against the ambient cultural pressure to project strength, fertility, and success. The psalm insists that God's attention is most intensely directed at precisely the places where human ability has collapsed: the person who has lost a career, a marriage, a pregnancy, a sense of identity. The "dust" and the "barren" are not metaphors to be sentimentalized — they are specific, embodied states of desolation.
A practical response: sit with the specific form of "dust" in your own life — a relationship that will not bear fruit, a vocation that seems blocked, a failure you have not been able to redeem — and bring it explicitly before this God who "settles the barren woman in her home." The psalm is not promising that the outcome will look exactly as you envision; it is promising that God's purposive love is aimed at that very point of poverty. The Hallel context (sung at Passover, and by Jesus at the Last Supper) reminds us that this reversal has already been accomplished definitively in the Paschal Mystery. To pray this psalm is to place your particular poverty inside that already-accomplished rescue.
Commentary