Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 66

Make a joyful noise. —Better, sing aloud, or shout.

All ye lands. —The margin is better.

Sing forth. —Literally, play on the harp.

Make his praise glorious. —So the Septuagint, but the construction is dubious. Literally, put glory his praise, meaning perhaps, in parallelism with the first clause, “make the Divine glory the subject of your praise.” But the opening words of the next verse, Say unto God, how, etc., are so bald that a suspicion arises as to the arrangement of the text. Perhaps by bringing back the initial words of Psalms 66:3 we get the true sense, “ascribe glory (and) speak praise to God.”

Flood. — Hebrew, nâhar, which generally stands for the Euphrates, but here, as in Psalms 74:15, for either the Jordan or the Red Sea.

There did we rejoice. — The verb is properly optative — there (i.e., in those works) let us rejoice, and thus rendered is more in keeping with the first verses of the psalm. The Septuagint and Vulgate have the future, There we will rejoice in him.

His eyes behold. —Better, his eyes keep watch on the nations. God is, as it were, Israel’s outpost, ever on the alert to warn and defend them against surrounding nations.

Let not ... —Literally, the rebellious, let them not exalt for themselves, where we may supply “horn” as in Psalm 75:4-5, or “head” as in Psalm 3:3; Psalms 110:7. For the rebellious, compare Psalm 68:6.

Which holdeth ... —The Septuagint literally, which puts our soul into life, that is, keeps us alive, as the parallelism shows.