Psalm 100
Words: William
Kethe, from The Scottish Psalter of 1635
| Music: |
Old 100th, Geneva, 1551, composed or adapted by Louis Bourgeois (See Note
below) |
1 All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the LORD with cheerful voice;
2 Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell,
come ye before him and rejoice.
3 The LORD ye know is God indeed,
Without our aid he did us make;
We are his flock, he doth us feed,
And for his sheep he doth us take.
4 O enter then his gates with praise,
Approach with joy his courts unto
Praise, laud and bless his Name always
for it is seemly so to do.
5 For why? the Lord our God is good,
His mercy is for ever sure;
His truth at all times firmly stood,
And shall from age to age endure.
Note: This was the tune for Psalm 134 in the Genevan Psalter of 1551. The first
Anglo-Geneval psalter, published in 1556, did not have a version of Psalm 100. When the
version we have here first appeared in the 1561 Anglo-Genevan and English psalters
it was
set to this tune, and has been associated with it ever since.
The form used here is its original form. The rhythm is slightly
different on the second and third notes of the forth stanza.
There has also been some dispute over whether or not William Kethe was indeed the
author of these words. When this version first appeared in the Anglo-Genevan psalter of
1561 the words were attributed to Thomas Sternhold, but Sternhold had died in 1549. Daye's
Psalter of 1561 gives no attribution to these words. A little known Psalter
published by Brittwell in 1561 attributes the words to Kethe, as does the Scottish Psalter
of 1564.
Julian (Dictionary of Hymnology) decides in favor of
Kethe based on the metre (LM), since Sternhold did not write in Long Metre, but Kethe did
leave us other LM examples. MacMeeken (Scottish Metrical Psalms, Glasgow,
1872) points
out that in the 1561 editions, all other new Psalms were furnished by Kethe, and also that
the rhyming of the first and third lines is not found in any of the known Sternhold
Psalms, but it is found in other known Kethe psalms.
We think that the evidence conclusively favors Kethe.
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