Psalm 150: Let Everything That Has Breath Praise the Lord

Psalm 150 is praise with nothing else in it: no request, no complaint, no story. Its six verses answer four questions, and then stop.

• Where? “Praise God in his sanctuary!” and in the heavens: from the Temple to the edge of creation (verse 1).
• Why? For his mighty acts and his excellent greatness: for what he has done, and for who he is (verse 2).
• How? With every instrument Israel had, and with dancing (verses 3–5).
• Who? Everything that has breath (verse 6).

In Hebrew it opens and closes with the same word, Hallelujah, “Praise the LORD,” as Psalms 146 to 149 do. Those five together are the Psalter’s final chorus. The book as a whole is named for this: the Catechism notes that the prayer of the psalms “is always sustained by praise; that is why the title of this collection as handed down to us is so fitting: ‘The Praises.’” (CCC 2589).

What praise is, the Catechism says in one line: “Praise is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God. It lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite beyond what he does, but simply because HE IS” (CCC 2639). Psalm 150 does exactly that, and it is the only psalm that does nothing else.

Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!

Psalm 150:6

The last verse of the Psalter widens the choir to its limit. Breath, in the Bible, is life given by God: in the second creation story God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” and the man became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). To have breath is to have received it from him, and the psalm asks for it back in the only form that can be returned: praise.

It is the same choir the Book of Revelation hears at the end of history: “I heard every created thing which is in heaven, on the earth, under the earth, on the sea, and everything in them” giving blessing and honor to God and to the Lamb (Revelation 5:13). The Psalter ends where the Bible ends.

Notice who is not excluded. Not only the righteous man of Psalm 1, or the grateful, or those who feel like praising. Everything that breathes. St. Augustine, who knew the Latin text as “let every spirit praise the Lord,” told his congregation that the instruments of the psalm are the people themselves: “You are trumpet, psaltery, harp, timbrel, choir, strings, and organ, cymbals of jubilation sounding well, because sounding in harmony. All these are you.”

Verses 3 to 5 name almost the whole orchestra of ancient Israel, in the words of the World English Bible:

• Trumpet: in Jewish tradition the shofar, the ram’s horn (verse 3).
• Harp and lyre: two plucked stringed instruments (verse 3).
• Tambourine and dancing: a hand-drum, and the body itself (verse 4).
• Stringed instruments and flute (verse 4).
• Loud cymbals and resounding cymbals, two kinds, to finish (verse 5).

The list is loud, mixed and physical, wind, string, percussion and feet. Augustine noticed that it covers every way of making a sound, “voice in the choir, breath in the trumpet, striking in the harp, representing mind, spirit, body.” And on the cymbals, which only sound when they touch each other, he preached that God is praised “when each is honoured by his neighbour, not by himself.”

The psalm does not settle arguments about which instruments belong in church. It says that everything that can make a sound is capable of praise. For the saints musicians pray to, see the patron saint of music.

Psalm 150 has no heading and no named author. It was placed where it is by the people who edited the Psalter, as the doxology that closes the whole book.

The Psalter was not written by one person. The Catechism describes it as a collection that grew “from the time of David to the coming of the Messiah,” with the psalms “gradually collected into the five books of the Psalter (or ‘Praises’), the masterwork of prayer in the Old Testament” (CCC 2585). Many headings name David; others name “A Psalm by Asaph.” (Psalm 73), “A Prayer by Moses, the man of God.” (Psalm 90), Solomon (Psalm 127), or the sons of Korah, the Temple singers of Psalm 42. Many, like this one, name no one.

The five books each end with a short doxology, a blessing of God. The first four close with a verse or two; the fifth closes with an entire psalm. Psalm 150 is the doxology of the fifth book and of all five.

• The Liturgy of the Hours. Morning Prayer on the Sundays of Weeks II and IV, as the last of the three psalms, after Psalm 118 and the song of the three young men from Daniel. For centuries before that, the office of Lauds, the Church’s dawn praise, traditionally ended with the three Laudate psalms, 148, 149 and 150.
• At Mass. The responsorial psalm on Thursday of the twenty-third week in Ordinary Time (Year I) and Wednesday of the thirty-third week (Year II). It is not sung on any Sunday, and it is not among the psalms of the funeral Mass.
• In Judaism. Psalms 146 to 150 form the heart of the daily morning service, and the last verse of Psalm 150 is said twice to close them.
• In the Coptic Church. It is chanted during the distribution of Communion.

The Psalms, the Catechism says, “remain essential to the prayer of the Church” (CCC 2586). This one is prayed on Sunday mornings, on the day of the Resurrection, the mightiest of the mighty acts it tells us to praise.

The best-known hymn is Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, by the German hymn-writer Joachim Neander, which paraphrases Psalm 103 and Psalm 150, sung in English in Catherine Winkworth’s translation.

Composers have set the psalm more often than almost any other:

• Anton Bruckner, Psalm 150 (1892).
• César Franck, Psaume 150.
• Felix Mendelssohn, in Lobgesang, his “Hymn of Praise.”
• Louis Lewandowski, Halleluyah.
• Igor Stravinsky, the third movement of the Symphony of Psalms.
• Benjamin Britten, Psalm 150 (1962), written for children’s voices.
• Charles Ives, Psalm 150.

Marc Chagall designed a window on it for Chichester Cathedral. It has been called the musicians’ psalm.

Psalm 150 asks for nothing and complains of nothing, so it can be prayed on any day, including the ones when you have no words.

1. Say it aloud, in the morning. It is Morning Prayer’s psalm, and it is short enough to learn by heart in a week.
2. Make it concrete. For each “praise him,” name one thing: a mighty act you have seen, one thing about God you are grateful for simply because it is true.
3. Sing it, or play it. Paul tells the Ephesians to go on “speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” The psalm assumes music.
4. Pray it when you feel nothing. Praise does not depend on how you feel; that is the point of it. And when words fail altogether, “But the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which can’t be uttered” (Romans 8:26).
5. End the Psalter with it. If you are praying through the psalms, do not stop at 149. And if you want the whole arc in two pages, read Psalm 1 and then this one.

Psalm 150 is the last word of the Psalter, and it is six verses long.

After a hundred and forty-nine psalms containing complaint, terror, guilt, revenge, exhaustion and grief, the book ends with nothing but praise. That ordering is deliberate and it is the strongest argument the Psalter makes. It does not arrive at praise by avoiding the other material; it arrives there having gone through all of it.

The psalm answers four questions in turn and answers them very quickly. Where: in his sanctuary and in his heavens, which is to say everywhere from the local building to the far edge of creation. Why: for his mighty acts and his excellent greatness. How: with trumpet, harp, lyre, tambourine, dancing, strings, flute and cymbals, a list that is loud and physical and includes the body.

And who. The final line is the widest sentence in the book: let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Not everyone who is worthy, or has understood, or has recovered. Everything that is breathing.

The Psalter's first psalm sets out a choice between two ways. Its last one issues an invitation with no conditions attached at all. That is the shape of the whole book in two bookends, and it is why Psalm 150 is short. There is nothing left to argue.

In the Liturgy of the Hours Psalm 150 is prayed at Morning Prayer on the Sundays of Weeks II and IV, after Psalm 118 and the canticle from Daniel, just as the older office of Lauds traditionally ended with Psalms 148, 149 and 150. At Mass it is the responsorial psalm on two weekdays in Ordinary Time and on no Sunday; it is not one of the psalms of the funeral liturgy.

Use it when you have no words of your own, because it asks for none. It is short enough to say from memory within a week and it is one of the few psalms that works when you feel nothing, since it is not about your state at all. If you pray the Psalter through, ending on it is the point; do not stop at 149.