Catholic Commentary
Zion as the Holy City of God
1A Psalm by the sons of Korah; a Song. His foundation is in the holy mountains.2Yahweh loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.3Glorious things are spoken about you, city of God. Selah.
Psalms 87:1–3 affirms that God, not human effort, established Zion on holy mountains and loves its gates with particular divine affection above all Israel's dwellings. The passage declares that glorious things are spoken about Zion as God's city, emphasizing its unique status as the locus of divine presence and covenant significance.
God doesn't merely dwell in the Church — he chose its foundation and loves its gates more than all other places on earth.
Psalms 87:1 — "His foundation is in the holy mountains."
The psalm opens abruptly and without introduction, with a declaration that carries immense theological weight: the city's foundation is God's own act. The Hebrew yesodatoh (his founding, his establishment) places the subject — God himself — as the architect and sustainer of Zion. This is not a city that rose through human ambition or geopolitical fortune; it was founded by God, on "holy mountains" (plural: har'rê qodesh). The plural likely alludes to the range of peaks surrounding Jerusalem — Moriah, Ophel, Zion proper — all of which carried profound salvific history: it was on Moriah that Abraham bound Isaac (Gen 22), and it was on this same mountain that Solomon's Temple was built (2 Chr 3:1). The holiness is not intrinsic to the geography but entirely derivative: these mountains are holy because God chose them, acted there, and dwells there. This verse silently refutes any theology of self-made sanctity; holiness flows from divine election and indwelling.
Psalms 87:2 — "Yahweh loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob."
The contrast here is precise and surprising. "All the dwellings of Jacob" (mishkenot Ya'akov) encompasses the entire covenant people — their tents, their towns, the sanctuaries scattered across the land. Yahweh's love extends to all of these; he is the God of the whole house of Israel. Yet Zion is singular in his affection. The "gates of Zion" is a synecdoche for the whole city, but gates in the ancient world were especially freighted: they were the place of judgment, of commerce, of formal civic life — the living center of a community's identity. That God loves the gates (Hebrew 'ohev, an active, passionate verb of divine preference) is striking. Divine love here is not diffuse sentiment but directed, particular, and even discriminating. This is the theological move that runs throughout Israel's covenant history: God chooses one — a person, a family, a city — not to exclude others, but to draw all through the particular. The gates of Zion become the locus of encounter between heaven and earth.
Psalms 87:3 — "Glorious things are spoken about you, city of God. Selah."
Nikhbadot — "glorious things," literally "weighty, honored, magnificent things" — are the subject of speech about Zion. The passive construction suggests a heavenly discourse: it is not merely poets or historians who celebrate this city, but a proclamation that transcends human authorship. The title "city of God" ('ir ha'Elohim) appears here for the first time in this psalm and gives the city its ultimate identity: not a capital of a human dynasty, but the habitation of the living God. The Selah — a liturgical pause or crescendo — invites the worshipper to stop, breathe, and absorb the weight of what has just been declared before the psalm continues to unfold the cosmic significance of Zion.
Typological and Spiritual Senses:
From the earliest patristic period, Christian readers recognized that Zion's praise in this psalm could not be exhausted by the historical city of Jerusalem, which was destroyed in 70 AD. Origen, Augustine, and later the medieval commentators read the psalm as prophetically describing the Church. The "holy mountains" on which God's foundation rests are the apostles and prophets (cf. Eph 2:20); the "gates" are the entry-points of faith and sacrament; and the "city of God" is the title Augustine gave to his magisterial theological vision of Christian history and eschatology. The Selah becomes an invitation to contemplative reception of the mystery of the Church as God's own dwelling among his people.
Catholic tradition brings several layers of meaning to these three verses that other interpretive frameworks do not fully develop.
The Church as the New Zion. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium (§6) identifies the Church using precisely this Zion typology, describing it as "the holy city, the new Jerusalem" (cf. Rev 21:2). The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§756) teaches that the Church is prefigured in the Old Covenant by the gathering of Israel, and that Zion — the city God founded and loves — is a type of the Church, which God founded not on human achievement but on the apostolic foundation of Peter and the Twelve (CCC §857). St. Augustine's City of God (De Civitate Dei), perhaps the most influential theological work of Christian antiquity, takes its organizing metaphor directly from the "city of God" of this very psalm. For Augustine, all of human history is the drama of two cities — the earthly and the heavenly — and Psalm 87 declares, already in Israel's liturgy, that the heavenly city is the true object of our longing.
Divine Election and Particular Love. Verse 2's declaration that God loves Zion more than other dwellings touches the Catholic theology of divine election. The particularity of God's love — choosing one mountain, one city, one people — is not a scandal but a pedagogy. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I-II, q.110) notes that grace is always particular before it is universal: God saves the world through chosen vessels. The Church, as Zion, is the beloved city through which God's universal salvific will reaches all peoples.
Mary as Daughter Zion. The Catechism (§2676) and papal documents including Redemptoris Mater identify Mary as the supreme realization of "Daughter Zion." The Church Fathers — especially St. Ambrose and St. Ephrem — saw in Zion a figure of the Theotokos, the holy mountain who bore God incarnate. The "glorious things spoken" of the city of God thus find their most perfect personal expression in Mary, of whom Gabriel said, "The Lord is with you."
For the contemporary Catholic, Psalm 87:1–3 issues a counter-cultural summons: to re-anchor one's identity in the Church as the city God built, not merely an institution one chooses to affiliate with. In an era of "spiritual but not religious" sentiment and growing disaffiliation, the psalmist's declaration that God loves the gates of Zion — its visible structures of entry, its formal thresholds of belonging — challenges the reduction of faith to purely interior experience. The gates, the walls, the foundations matter because God made them and loves them.
Practically, this passage invites Catholics to renew their sense of the parish church as a local embodiment of Zion: a place God has founded, not merely a community center we maintain. When a Catholic crosses the threshold of a church — passing through its gates — they enact what Psalm 87 describes. Glorious things are spoken here: in the liturgy, in the Creed, in Scripture proclaimed. The Selah is a spiritual practice: the deliberate pause before the Blessed Sacrament, in Adoration, or in silent prayer before Mass, in which we let the weight of being the city of God land in our souls rather than pass through us unreceived.
Commentary