‘Your paths overflow with plenty.’ (11)
Australians don’t observe Thanksgiving as a holiday. However, often a harvest festival of some sort is held in the autumnal season, the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, rejoicing in the rich produce of the land.
Enter Psalm 65 with something for all seasons, full of a sense of happiness at the creation and its bounty. After a prayer for forgiveness, the song goes on to remark upon the wonders of our world – mountains, roaring seas, amazing dawns.
Then, delight at what is going on within that scene, where the river of God is full of water. Flocks thrive, grains grow, the year is crowned with bounty, paths (or, rather quaintly in some versions ‘your wagon-tracks’) overflow with plenty. David concludes: ‘Let them shout for joy and sing.’ (13)
Several of our song sources pick up this theme.
- PFAS likes those paths that overflow with plenty.
- NCH chooses verse 5, (“God is the hope of all the ends of the earth”) for its refrain.
- An easy but tuneful little antiphon from The Emergent Psalter by Isaac Everett uses the final verse: “The fields are clothed with grain; the hills are bursting with song.”
Psalms in the South 