Psalm 8 begins with a burst of praise — “YHWH, our lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth” — and then immediately hits one of the most stubborn puzzles in the Psalter. The second half of the verse is only four words in Hebrew, but you can see interpreters struggling with it just by comparing two closely related English versions: the RSV reads “thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted,” while its own revision, the NRSV, reads “you have set your glory above the heavens.” One line, two completely different sentences.

The trouble is a single word: tenah (תְּנָה). Everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible this form is an imperative — “give!” or “put!” — which would yield “…who, put your glory on the heavens!” But it can’t mean that here: an imperative can’t sit inside a relative clause the way this word does, and a command to put glory on the heavens makes no sense in a psalm that assumes God’s glory is already there. The word looks like an imperative but cannot be one.

The reading adopted here takes tenah (תְּנָה) instead as an infinitive construct from the root “to give” — “you whose glory is bestowed on the heavens.” It has a real analogy elsewhere (the similarly shortened form in Genesis 46:3), and there may even be a reason the poet reached for such an odd form: it echoes the sound of mah (“how”; מָה) earlier in the line, and it may hint at something ongoing — God continually bestowing splendor on the heavens rather than in a single finished act.

A third option lies behind several major translations (RSV, NEB, GNT), which revocalize the word to tunnah (תֻּנָּה), “is praised.” It smooths out the grammar, but it stumbles on two facts: it requires a division of the verse that contradicts the oldest witnesses (the Masoretic accents and the Septuagint), and the plain expression “to put glory upon” someone is well attested elsewhere in exactly this construction. Since that idiom is real and recurring, it’s the more probable meaning.

And that is what turns a grammatical headache into a rich image. “To bestow glory upon” someone, elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, means to confer royal authority — the way one king invests another with the right to rule (Moses to Joshua, or God to a king). So when the psalm says God has bestowed his glory on the heavens, in a poem steeped in the creation story of Genesis 1, it may be picturing God granting the sun, moon, and stars a kind of delegated dominion — appointing the heavenly lights “to rule” the day and the night, just as Genesis 1 describes. The strange, almost impossible word opens onto the psalm’s central theme: a King whose majesty fills the heavens, and who shares his glory with what he has made.