O Lord, O Judge of all the earth

The 1912 Psalter is again made use of for this longer Psalm, also titleless. If the previous one begins a sequence of songs praising God as king, this is the exception, focusing on him as judge. Weiser’s heading is ‘Justice will return to the righteous’. The 1st line of this text faithfully repeats v2, with the added ‘all’ which recalls Abraham’s prayer in Genesis 18:25. Stz 3 includes the succinct ‘proverb’ of v9: ‘He who planted the ear, shall he not hear? He who formed the eye, shall he not see?’ (NKJV). That is part of a fuller assertion of the Judge’s qualifications and authority. The Praise! editors have given stzs 4 and 6 a particularly contemporary ring. Donald MacDonald’s tune HALLADALE, harmonised by Isobel Gordon, is one of their joint contributions to the revised approach to Psalmody by the Free Church of Scotland in the 1990s, first published as Sing Psalms in 1997, full edn 2003. It is named from the birthplace of the composer’s parents, ‘a picturesque strath in the north of Sutherland … not far from my own native Strath of Kildonan’.

A notable landmark in the line of Scottish metrical Psalters beginning with the classic 1650 collection, which remained unchallenged for nearly a century until revisions began in 1745; the 1912 book was the last significant one of its kind before Sing Psalms qv. Nos.46A, 87, 93, 94, 111, 119C, 119F, 135, 140.