Psalms 98:4–6

Psalms 98:4 — "Make a joyful noise to Yahweh, all the earth!"

The Hebrew verb hārîʿû (הָרִיעוּ) is a strong, visceral imperative. It does not describe polite applause; it denotes a battle shout, a blast of exultation — the kind of sound a crowd makes when a king enters in triumph. The same root appears at the fall of Jericho (Josh 6:5) and at the acclamation of a new king (1 Kgs 1:39). By commanding this shout toward Yahweh, the psalmist transfers the vocabulary of royal acclamation entirely to the Lord. Crucially, the addressee is kol hāʾāreṣ — "all the earth," not merely Israel. This universality is not an afterthought; it is the theological engine of the entire psalm, which opens by celebrating Yahweh's salvation "before the eyes of the nations" (v. 2). Joy in God is not a tribal possession; it is the birthright of every creature made by the one Creator. St. Augustine, commenting on this psalm in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, hears in "all the earth" an address to the whole Body of Christ spread across the nations, noting that the Church is the only community that can literally fulfill this global imperative.

Psalms 98:5 — "Sing praises to Yahweh with the harp"

The imperative zammerû (זַמְּרוּ), from the root for making music on a stringed instrument, adds refinement and beauty to the raw exultation of v. 4. Where v. 4 commands volume and abandon, v. 5 commands artistry — the kinnôr, the lyre or harp associated throughout the Psalter with David himself (1 Sam 16:23; Ps 33:2). The inclusion of the harp signals that praise worthy of God must engage not merely the emotions but the whole crafted intelligence of the human person: skill, preparation, beauty. The Fathers frequently understood the harp as an image of the human body held in tension by the strings of virtue and discipline; Origen and St. Hilary of Poitiers both read the psalmic instruments as figures of the interior dispositions required for authentic worship — the harp representing the body rightly ordered under the soul's direction.

Psalms 98:6 — "With trumpets and sound of the ram's horn"

Now two more instruments are added: ḥăṣōṣrôt (silver trumpets, the priestly instruments of Num 10:1–10, used to signal assembly, feast days, and war) and the šôpār (ram's horn, the instrument of covenant, theophany, and jubilee). This combination is liturgically precise. In Numbers 10, Moses is commanded to make silver trumpets specifically "for summoning the congregation" and for being "blown over your burnt offerings." The šôpār carries even denser symbolism: it was sounded at Sinai when God descended (Ex 19:16), at the Year of Jubilee to announce liberation (Lev 25:9), and it will sound at the eschaton to gather the elect (Mt 24:31; 1 Cor 15:52). The pairing of these two instruments in a single verse thus compresses within it the whole economy of salvation — priestly assembly, theophanic encounter, and final liberation. The Church Fathers saw in the šôpār particularly a figure of the apostolic preaching that gathers humanity into the new covenant assembly. St. Jerome writes that the trumpets of the priests signify the two Testaments sounding together in the one praise of Christ.

Catholic tradition interprets these three verses as a prophetic anticipation of the Church's universal, sacramental, and eschatological liturgy. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "in the liturgy of the Church, God the Father is blessed and adored as the source of all the blessings of creation and salvation" (CCC §1083), and Psalm 98:4–6 provides the scriptural heartbeat of exactly that vision: an all-encompassing, instrument-rich, cosmos-wide act of adoration.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the Psalms, notes that the multiplication of instruments is not redundant but necessary — because no single created medium can adequately express the fullness of divine praise, many are enlisted together. This insight directly informs Catholic liturgical theology: the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium §112) affirms that sacred music is "a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy," and the organ holds "pride of place" precisely because it can approximate the orchestral fullness these verses demand. Pope Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, argues that instrumental music in worship is not decoration but theology — it expresses what words alone cannot contain.

The šôpār's association with Jubilee (Lev 25:9) opens a profound typological vista: Catholic tradition reads the Year of Jubilee as a type of the redemption accomplished in Christ, who in Luke 4:18–19 explicitly applies the Jubilee text to himself. The "joyful noise" commanded in v. 4 is therefore not merely aesthetic but soteriological — it is the proper human response to liberation from sin and death. The universality of "all the earth" finds its ecclesiological fulfillment in the Church, which the Second Vatican Council describes as "a sign and instrument… of the unity of the whole human race" (Lumen Gentium §1).

For contemporary Catholics, these verses issue a direct challenge to the domestication of worship. In an age when Sunday Mass can feel routine, Psalm 98:4–6 insists that the appropriate human response to God's salvation is not decorum for its own sake but uninhibited, full-bodied, musically serious joy. Practically, this means several things. First, Catholics are called to mean what they sing — the Gloria, the Sanctus, the responsorial psalm are not warm-ups but the very shout of hārîʿû. Second, the diversity of instruments in these verses invites parishes to take their music programs seriously as acts of theology, not entertainment. Third, the universality of "all the earth" should press every Catholic to think missionally: the joy they experience at Mass is not a private possession but a proclamation meant for every human being. An individual Catholic might also take v. 5 as a personal invitation to cultivate interiority — to tune the "instrument" of one's own soul through prayer, fasting, and sacramental life, so that one's entire person becomes an offering of praise.