Psalms 136:4–9

Psalms 136:4 — "to him who alone does great wonders" The Hebrew niplā'ôt gedolôt ("great wonders") is a technical term throughout the Psalter for deeds that exceed natural human power and comprehension — the same word used of the Exodus plagues and the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. Its placement here, before the specific acts of creation are enumerated, functions as a theological headline: everything that follows (heavens, earth, lights) is to be understood as belonging to the category of miracle. The word lebaddô ("alone") is emphatic and exclusive. No committee of gods, no emanation of divine powers, no rival cosmic force cooperated in creation. This is a pointed polemic against the polytheistic cosmogonies of Israel's neighbors — Babylonian, Canaanite, Egyptian — in which creation arose from the struggle between competing deities. Here, one God acts, and His action is pure gift.

Psalms 136:5 — "to him who by understanding made the heavens" Tebûnāh — "understanding" or "discernment" — is a wisdom term. The heavens were not fashioned arbitrarily or by raw force but by intelligence. This directly anticipates the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8:27–30, who was "beside him, like a master workman," when He established the heavens. The psalmist invites the reader to see structure, order, and rationality in the sky — its seasons, constellations, and movements — as the trace of a mind, not mere mechanism. St. Basil the Great (Hexaemeron, Homily 3) draws precisely this connection: the mathematical regularity of the firmament is a pedagogical device, teaching the human mind to ascend from visible order to its invisible Source.

Psalms 136:6 — "to him who spread out the earth above the waters" The Hebrew rāqa' ("spread out") conveys the image of hammering or rolling out a thin sheet of metal — a craftsman's word, full of deliberate skill. The phrase "above the waters" recalls the tehom (deep, abyss) of Genesis 1:2, the primal chaotic waters over which the Spirit of God hovered. The earth is portrayed not as self-subsisting but as upheld — suspended in its place by an ongoing act of divine will. The Fathers (notably St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram I.15) read this as an expression of the doctrine of creatio continua: creation is not a past event only, but God's continuous act of holding all things in being. Remove His creative will for an instant, and all returns to formlessness.

Psalms 136:7 — "to him who made the great lights" The term me'ôrîm gedolîm ("great lights") consciously echoes Genesis 1:14–16. Notably, neither sun nor moon is named there either — a rhetorical strategy widely recognized as a polemic against solar and lunar deity cults (Shamash and Sin in Mesopotamia, Ra and Thoth in Egypt). They are not gods; they are instruments — lamps hung in the vault by the one God. The Psalmist inherits and amplifies this demythologizing move, inserting these luminaries into the structure of praise to YHWH, not to themselves.

Verses 8–9 — "the sun to rule by day / the moon and stars to rule by night" The verb memsheleth ("to rule") is the same root used for human dominion in Genesis 1:28, creating a subtle parallel: as the lights govern time, so humanity governs creation — but both are delegated authorities under the sovereign of the refrain. The pairing of sun and moon across two verses mirrors the structure of Genesis 1's Day Four, while the addition of "stars" (absent from verse 7's "great lights") fills out the nocturnal canopy. Typologically, the Fathers saw in the greater and lesser lights a figure of the Old and New Covenants: the sun as Christ, the full light of revelation; the moon as the Law and the Prophets, which reflects and anticipates solar light but does not generate it on its own (Origen, Homilies on Genesis 1.5; St. Ambrose, Hexaemeron IV.3).

Catholic tradition reads these verses through the lens of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo — out of nothing — defined against Gnostic and Manichean dualisms at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and reaffirmed by Vatican I (Dei Filius, 1870). The "great wonders" of verse 4, performed by God "alone," are not the rearrangement of pre-existing matter but the absolute origination of all that is from sheer divine goodness. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§ 279–301) insists that creation is the foundation of all God's saving works — which is precisely the logic of Psalm 136: cosmological praise is placed before the historical recitation of the Exodus, because the God who saves Israel is first and always the God who made the world.

The presence of tebûnāh (wisdom) in verse 5 carries profound Trinitarian resonance for Catholic interpreters. The Logos Christology of John 1:3 — "through him all things were made" — is the New Testament fulfillment of this wisdom-creation nexus. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 45, a. 6) argues that creation is appropriated to the Son as the "Art" of the Father, the divine Idea through which the Father expresses all created reality. The Catechism (§ 292) makes this explicit: "God creates by his Word... and by his Spirit." Every act of creation enumerated in Psalm 136:4–9 is therefore implicitly Trinitarian.

The "steadfast love" (hesed) of the refrain that frames each creative act teaches that creation is not a neutral or indifferent act; it is a work of covenant love. Pope Benedict XVI (Verbum Domini, 2010, §9) emphasized that in Biblical thought, creation and covenant are not two separate realities but a single divine movement of self-communication. Verse 6's image of the earth upheld above the waters speaks to what the Catechism calls God's "conserving and governing" providence (§ 301) — the ongoing love that keeps contingent beings in existence at every moment.

Contemporary Catholics live in an age of pervasive cosmological anxiety — climate collapse, the sense of a universe indifferent to human meaning, the reduction of nature to raw material for exploitation. Psalm 136:4–9 cuts through this with a counter-claim: the sun, moon, earth, and sky are not autonomous or impersonal forces; they are works of a personal, wise, and loving God, and their very existence is a continuous act of His hesed. This should reshape how Catholics engage with creation care — not as a secular environmentalism adopted by the Church under social pressure, but as a response to a theological fact: what God lovingly upholds, we are not free to carelessly destroy. Pope Francis (Laudato Si', §§ 76–83) draws precisely this line from the Genesis/Psalm tradition to ecological responsibility.

On the personal level, these verses invite the practice of what the tradition calls contemplatio in natura — pausing before sunlight on a window, the phase of the moon, or a starlit sky and consciously naming it as the work of a God whose love for you endures forever. The refrain of Psalm 136 is not decoration; it trains the heart to see each feature of the natural world as a fresh act of love addressed personally to the worshipper.