The knotty old words of the priestly blessing in the book of Numbers, chapter 6, were to be pronounced for uncounted generations over ‘the sons of Israel’.
Yet there is in biblical Israel’s shalom a marked potential for good that flows far beyond that little people’s boundaries. The patriarchal narratives of Genesis tell us, a little enigmatically, that all the nations of the earth shall find their blessing in Father Abraham.
The sixty-seventh psalm discerns in these two resilient threads of biblical tradition—blessing for Israel, blessing for the nations—authorization to unite the venerable words of the priestly blessing to a fervent hope that the whole earth might go giddy before the righteous judgements of Israel’s God. Shalom, for this poet, is open-ended. No zero-sum game, it is capable of embracing all who will come. Love need not love its first object less in order to expand the circle to seconds, thirds, and more.
A self-referential note persists throughout the psalm—Israel is the we and the us of it—but it is sounded with a soft touch and a generous spirit.
Old boundaries may not be erased, but they are certainly blurred by the overflowing goodness of the one who called Abraham and blessed Israel.
The writer of Psalm 67 gives us a statement of YHWH’s overflowing goodness that is very much his own. There may be nothing quite like it in the rest of the Bible. With extraordinary precision and a taste for literal phrasing he has taken Israel’s primary blessing and extended it in Abrahamic fashion to those nations who—it was promised us so very long ago—would find their blessing in Abraham.
Yet even if the precise construction he puts on things is unique, the psalmist’s laughing nations and his delighted Israel manifest a cast of mind and heart that are to be glimpsed all through the Scripture. Jesus, Paul, and others will find their way both to insistence that salvation comes from and through the Jews and to their claim that salvation is the destiny of all their Father’s nations.
Israel is at its best when it delights to see the shalom it has so well known coursing its way through the life of the peoples.
We are at our best when a psalm like this shapes hearts and minds and animates hands and feet.
Canter Bridge 
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