Catholic Commentary
Harvest Blessing and Eschatological Hope
6The earth has yielded its increase. God, even our own God, will bless us.7God will bless us. All the ends of the earth shall fear him.
Psalms 67:6–7 celebrates God's provision through a harvest that testifies to divine blessing while looking toward future abundance. The passage declares that the earth's yielded produce demonstrates God's grace to Israel, yet this visible blessing merely foreshadows the greater eschatological blessing promised to all nations.
The earth's harvest is not a supply chain—it is God's confession written in grain and fruit, binding the blessing given to us to the salvation promised to all peoples.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses
The fourfold sense of Scripture, as taught by the Catechism (CCC 115–119) and rooted in patristic exegesis, opens these verses into deeper registers:
Allegorical/Christological: The "increase" of the earth points to Christ, the seed fallen into the ground (John 12:24), whose death and resurrection produce an eternal harvest. The Fathers of the Church read yəḇûl as a figure of the spiritual fruit born from the Incarnation. Cassiodorus, in his Expositio Psalmorum, identifies the earth's increase with the spiritual fruitfulness of the Church spread among the nations.
Moral/Tropological: The yielded harvest calls the Christian to a disposition of generosity: nothing we possess is ours by right but is gift, and gift is ordered toward sharing. Pope Benedict XVI (Caritas in Veritate, §48) explicitly links the theology of gift and creation's fruitfulness to the obligation of justice and solidarity.
Anagogical: The future blessing anticipated in verse 7 points toward the eschatological banquet of the Kingdom, the "marriage supper of the Lamb" (Revelation 19:9), where every nation gathers and creation's long groaning (Romans 8:22) is resolved in final abundance.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates these verses through at least three converging lenses.
1. Creation as Sacramental Sign. The Catechism teaches that "God speaks to man through the visible creation" (CCC 1147) and that material realities can "become means by which he expresses and sanctifies nature." The earth yielding its increase in verse 6 is not merely a meteorological event; it is a sacramental sign — a visible, tangible reality that makes present and communicates an invisible grace. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the Psalms, notes that God's providential blessing of the soil is itself a form of ongoing creation, a participation of the creature in the divine generosity (Summa Theologiae I, q. 104).
2. Universal Missionary Vision. The universal scope of verse 7 ("all the ends of the earth") is central to the Catholic understanding of salvation history. The Second Vatican Council, in Ad Gentes (§9), grounds the Church's missionary mandate precisely in this dynamic: the blessing given to Israel was never meant to be contained but to radiate outward. The Psalm thus anticipates the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20) and provides its Old Testament theological foundation.
3. Eucharistic Theology. Patristic and liturgical tradition, especially visible in the Roman Rite's Offertory prayers ("fruit of the earth and work of human hands"), reads the harvest blessing of Psalm 67 as a prototype of Eucharistic oblation. What the earth yields is taken up, blessed, and transformed. Pope John Paul II, in Ecclesia de Eucharistia (§8), wrote that the Eucharist "contains the universe" — the harvest of creation brought into the very offering of Christ. Verse 6 thus finds its ultimate fulfilment at every Catholic altar.
Contemporary Catholics live in a culture simultaneously anxious about food security, ecological crisis, and global inequality — precisely the real-world referents of these two verses. Psalm 67:6–7 invites a concrete threefold response.
First, gratitude as a discipline: when you eat a meal, pause to acknowledge that the earth's yield is not a default condition but a gift. The grace before meals, so easily rushed, is a liturgical echo of this verse — and it counters the consumerist assumption that abundance is simply owed.
Second, justice as a consequence of blessing: if God blesses "us" in order that "all the ends of the earth" may fear him, then hoarding the earth's increase is a theological contradiction. Catholic Social Teaching, from Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si', consistently insists that the goods of the earth have a "universal destination" (CCC 2402–2403). The harvest you enjoy obligates you toward those who have not yet received theirs.
Third, missionary hope: the forward-looking "God will bless us" is an antidote to spiritual discouragement. Whatever is diminished, barren, or unfinished in your life or in the Church, this verse holds open the future. The harvest is not yet complete.
Commentary
Psalms 67:6 — "The earth has yielded its increase."
The Hebrew nāṯenāh ʾarṣāh yəḇûlāh ("the earth has given its produce") employs the perfect tense with the force of a confident declaration: the harvest has come, and it testifies. The noun yəḇûl (increase, produce, yield) appears throughout the Hebrew Bible in contexts of covenant blessing, most significantly in Leviticus 26:4, where God promises that obedience to the covenant will cause the land to yield its fruit. Here in Psalm 67:6, the earth's yielding is not merely agricultural; it is confessional. The land becomes a living sermon, proclaiming that the God addressed in verse 1 ("May God be gracious to us and bless us") has heard and answered.
The verb is placed emphatically at the head of the clause. Creation does not produce autonomously — it yields, surrendering its fruit in response to the blessing of the Creator. This grammatical emphasis counters any Canaanite or Baalist interpretation of agricultural fertility as something owed to lesser gods of storm or soil. The psalmist is pointedly monotheistic: it is Elohim — the God of Israel, the God of all nations — who causes the earth to yield.
Read in its liturgical setting — almost certainly an Israelite harvest festival, likely Sukkoth (Tabernacles) — this verse would have accompanied the presentation of first-fruits before God. The harvest is not possessed but offered back. Catholics will recognise in this the structure of all authentic Eucharistic worship: what the earth yields is received as gift, elevated, and returned to God as praise.
Psalms 67:7 — "God will bless us; let all the ends of the earth fear him."
The shift from past perfective ("has yielded") to future imperfective ("will bless") is theologically charged. The harvest already received is not the terminus of the divine economy but its foretaste. The psalmist's confident "God will bless us" (yəḇāreḵēnû ʾĕlōhîm) looks beyond the present season to an inexhaustible future. This is not merely optimism about next year's crops; it is eschatological hope grounded in the character of God.
The verse then pivots universally — "let all the ends of the earth fear him" (wəyîrəʾû ʾōṯô kol-ʾapəsê-ʾāreṣ). The blessing given to Israel is ordered toward the blessing of the whole earth. This is the great Abrahamic trajectory (Genesis 12:3: "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed"), now expressed in hymnic form. The "fear" (yārēʾ) in question is not craven terror but reverential awe — the posture of a creature who recognises the sovereign goodness of the Creator and responds in adoration.