Psalm 19

Psalm 19 is the 19th psalm in the Book of Psalms, beginning in English in the King James Version: "The heavens declare the almighty of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." In the slightly different numbering system used in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate translations of the Bible, this psalm is Psalm 18. The Latin version begins "Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei". The psalm is attributed to David.

The psalm considers the glory of God in creation, and moves to reflect on the character and use of "the law of the LORD". Psalm 1, this psalm and Psalm 119 have been referred to as "the psalms of the Law". It forms a regular part of Jewish, Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox Church and Protestant liturgies. It has often been set to music, notably by Heinrich Schütz, by Johann Sebastian Bach who began a cantata with its beginning, by Joseph Haydn, who based a movement from Die Schöpfung on the psalm, and by Beethoven, who set a paraphrase by Gellert in "Die Himmel rühmen des Ewigen Ehre". Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville wrote a grand motet Caeli enarrant in 1750 and François Giroust in 1791.

The classical Jewish commentators all point to the connection the psalmist makes between the Sun and the Torah. These connections include:

According to the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, this psalm compares and contrasts "the study of God's two great books—nature and Scripture". Explaining the emphasis on the heavens, Spurgeon explains, "The book of nature has three leaves, heaven, earth, and sea, of which heaven is the first and the most glorious…” Beginning in verse 7 (KJV), the psalmist then extols the perfection of the law of Moses and "the doctrine of God, the whole run and rule of sacred Writ".

John Mason Good theorizes that this psalm was composed either in the morning or around noon, when the bright sun eclipses the other heavenly bodies; he contrasts this with Psalm 8, in which the psalmist contemplates the starry sky in the evening. Praising the poetry of this psalm, 20th-century British writer C. S. Lewis is quoted as saying: "I take this to be the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world".

On the matter of unity, Artur Weiser states that the first part (verses 1 to 7) are a completely distinct song from the second (verses 8 to 15). He upholds that not only the subjects, but also the metrics, the language and the tone are distinct and the two parts could not have been composed by the same author. Lewis, on the other hand, indicates nature as "an index, a symbol, a manifestation, of the Divine" and he points that here "the searching and cleansing sun becomes an image of the searching and cleansing Law", on which he suppresses the idea of these two subjects not being correlated. Rav Elchanan Samet identifies the same problems that Weiser did: "These two halves are strikingly different from one another in their content as well as in their style, to the point that it is difficult to point to verbal, stylistic, or conceptual connections between them." Nonetheless, he points that these two parts have been in unity since the Septuagint and agrees with it, "the inclination to adopt this [critical] solution is liable to stem from intellectual laziness."

Concerning Psalm 19's place in the architectural arrangement of the Psalms, Psalm 18 precedes Psalm 19, wherein David's adversaries are vanquished. Following this triumph and following Psalm 19, a succession of five royal Psalms, Psalms 20 through 24, according to O. Palmer Robertson, seemingly accentuating the unequivocal establishment of the Davidic kingdom

The centrality of Psalm 19 within a literary chiasm extending from Psalm 15 to Psalm 24 has been also expounded upon in Carissa Quinn's doctoral thesis.