Seder 1: Psalm 104---A Psalm of Creation

 Commentator Willem Van Gemeren calls Psalm 104 a "descriptive song of praise."  It presents beautiful pictures of Go's greatness as Creator of all.  

There are a number of connections between Psalm 104 and the book of Genesis.  Verses 6-9 are related to the third day of creation from Genesis 1.  Verse 9 refers to the covenant with Noah in Genesis 9:  "You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth."

Verse 19 refers back to Genesis 1:14 and the roles of the heavenly bodies in helping define a worship calendar and setting up an orderly structure for the activities of life: "He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting." 

Creation as pictured in Psalm 104 is not a one-time event, bur rather an ongoing process.  God sustains and renews life, and he may also choose to take it away.  

The psalm ends in verse 35 with a prayer that all creation would be submitted to God: "Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more!"  In the midrash on Psalm 104, the sages assert that this is a prayer for all to repent and cease from sin.  When that occurs, they say, everyone will praise God as at the close of verse 35.  

Much of Psalm 104 addresses God in second person.  There is some shifts, though, in vv 3-5 and verse 19 from second person to third person.  Some early Christian interpreters viewed these shifts as places where God the Father speaks about the Son.  We see this in Hebrews 1:7, where the author quotes Psalm 104:4 as an example of the Father speaking of Jesus' superiority over the angels. Psalm 104:4, according to Hebrews 1:7, has God saying that Jesus "makes his angels winds, and his ministers a flame of fire."

There are traditions about the creation of special "wind angels" and "fire angels," and about God changing angels to wind or fire according to his will.  Hebrews 1:7 implies that the Son has authority over the angels.  

 Early Christians identified several passages in the Tanakh in which members of the Godhead speak about or address each other.  This kind of interpretation is known as prosopological exegesis and has been the subject of some recent research, for example by Matthew Bates, Kyle Hughes, and Madison Pierce.