Psalm 145 is the only psalm the superscription explicitly calls a tehillah — a praise — and it gives the whole book its Hebrew name, Tehillim. It is an acrostic, attributed to David, walking the alphabet from aleph to taw as if to say: every letter we have, we owe to him. Verse 8 is a deliberate quotation of Exodus 34:6, the self-disclosure God gave Moses on Sinai after the golden calf. Israel sang this psalm knowing that the line came from the day God forgave them when he had every right not to.

From the writers we read together

Carmen Joy Imes

Old Testament scholar, author of Bearing God's Name and Being God's Image

Imes argues that we have badly misread Sinai if we think of it primarily as the giving of rules. Sinai is, first, a covenant ceremony in which God binds his name to a people who will fail him within forty days. When Israel does fail — the calf, the panic, the pagan dance — God's response in Exodus 34:6 is not to revoke the covenant but to recite his own character. Psalm 145:8 is Israel learning that recitation by heart and singing it back. The psalmist is not flattering God; he is reminding the congregation what kind of God they are bound to.

This matters because most of us secretly suspect God is short-tempered with us in particular. We assume that our latest failure has finally exhausted him. Imes' reading of the Sinai narrative cuts that suspicion at its root. The God who chose to stay with the calf-makers is the same God whose name you bear today. His patience is not a mood; it is a disclosed attribute. Slow to anger is not how he feels this morning — it is who he is, and therefore how he is toward you.