Psalm 8:3-4 vs. “How Great Thou Art”

Carrie Underwood · checked 2026-08-01

What we checked

PassagePsalm 8:3-4 chapter ↗

Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)

Presents itself asinspired-by

Categorynot a quote

AlbumMy Savior · 2021

Words addressed toGod, person unspecified

Teaching or experiencemixed

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria not graded: this song never presents its words as scripture

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

Never says it is quoting, anywhere. No verse cited, no scripture framing, nothing presented as the Bible's words
The refrain and every stanza are about God: His works, His Son, His return. The singer is present as the one looking, not as the subject
The opening keeps the psalm's actual starting move, standing under a sky God arranged and answering it out loud
Nothing it says about God is contradicted by Psalm 8 or by the texts behind its later stanzas
Its authorship is documented in unusual detail and credited to Boberg and Hine both, so the whole chain can be traced by anyone who wants to

⚠ Cautions

Hymnal indexes list it under Psalm 8, but the hymn never cites the psalm. The link is a resemblance someone else noticed, not something the hymn says
Psalm 8:4 asks what man is that God is mindful of him. The hymn moves from the sky straight to praise, so singing it does not teach the psalm's turn
The psalm answers its own question in verses 5 and 6, with the honour God gave to man. The hymn answers with the cross instead. That is true, and it is not what Psalm 8 says
The English words are a paraphrase made from a Russian version, and two of the four stanzas are Hine's own writing. Treating the hymn as Boberg's poem in English is a few steps off
A literal English translation of Boberg does exist, E. Gustav Johnson's "O Mighty God" of 1925, and it is not the one anybody sings

Verse Proof

Psalm 8:3-4

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place— what is man that You are mindful of him, or the son of man that You care for him?”

Psalm 8 is a psalm of David, addressed to God from the first line to the last, and it opens and closes with the same sentence about the majesty of God's name in all the earth. Verses 3 and 4 are the hinge. The psalmist looks up at a night sky God arranged and then asks why God should give any attention to something as small as a man. The question does not stay open. Verses 5 and 6 answer it: God made man a little lower than the heavenly beings, crowned him with glory and honour, and put the works of God's hands under his feet. So the passage runs sky, then smallness, then the dignity God gave anyway.

What the song says, described not quoted

The stanza that echoes this passage has the singer standing in wonder at the worlds God made, at the stars, at thunder, at power on display across the universe. The refrain answers with the singer's soul praising God and saying how great God is. A later stanza turns from creation to the cross and the Son God sent to bear sin. The last one looks ahead to Christ's return and the singer being taken home. No verse is quoted anywhere in the hymn, and no reference is given.

Nothing shifted at the level of wording, because no wording is presented as scripture. What is missing is the second half of the psalm's move. Psalm 8:3-4 looks at the sky and then asks about man. The hymn looks at the sky and then sings about God. Both are true responses to the same view, and only one of them is Psalm 8's. There is a second thing worth attributing, which is the words themselves. Carl Boberg wrote a Swedish poem of nine stanzas in 1885. Manfred von Glehn made a German version. Ivan S. Prokhanoff made a Russian one. Stuart K. Hine, working from the Russian rather than the Swedish, made the English paraphrase in 1949 and wrote two of its four stanzas himself. Not one step in that chain was a translation of the Bible.

· Not a quote: The hymn cites no verse and presents no words as scripture. So the word-for-word standard does not apply. Its opening stanza echoes the sky of Psalm 8:3. It does not carry the question the psalm asks in verse 4.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

The hymn everyone knows is a paraphrase of a translation of a translation, with two stanzas nobody translated at all.

Why it matters

This is one of the most sung hymns in English, and it is routinely indexed under Psalm 8 in hymnals. That index entry is somebody's description of a resemblance. It is not a citation the hymn makes about itself, and the difference is easy to miss when the two are printed on the same page.

The distinction matters because of how the words got here. The English text people sing reached them through three other people and two intermediate languages, and half its stanzas were never Boberg's at all. None of that is dishonest and none of it is hidden. It is simply worth knowing before treating a hymn as though it were the psalm in singable form.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song fixes your attention on God.

The most repeated part of this hymn is the refrain, and the refrain is addressed to God about God. That is what looping it plants: the reflex of looking up at something large and then speaking to the One who made it, rather than about yourself. The stanzas keep widening the same view, from stars to the cross to Christ's return, so the picture of God that repetition builds here is a big one and it stays big.

What repetition will not plant is Psalm 8's question. The psalm makes you stand under the sky and feel small before it tells you what God did about that. The hymn skips from the sky to praise, which is a fair thing for a hymn to do and leaves a gap worth filling on purpose. If you sing this often, read the psalm through to verse 6 sometimes, so the awe you have rehearsed lands where David put it.

Helpful comparison

The chain is the checkable part, and the arithmetic is worth laying out. Boberg's Swedish poem had nine stanzas, published on the front page of Mönsterås Tidningen on 13 March 1886. Von Glehn's German version carried six of them. Prokhanoff's Russian version ran to eight and reordered two. Hine's English has four, and by the accounts of his own booklet the third and fourth are his composition rather than anyone's translation. Sources disagree about the years of the German and Russian versions, which is itself a small lesson in how much of this history is reconstructed.

Two details sharpen the point. First, the Hymnology Archive describes Hine's text as inspired by the Russian rather than translated from it, and Hymnary's notes say much of Boberg's original was lost along the way. Second, the one scriptural quotation anywhere in the chain sits at the head of the Russian version, and it is Psalm 19:1, numbered 18:2 in the Russian Bible. The closest thing to a citation in the hymn's whole history points at a different psalm from the one the English text now gets filed under. The hymnologist Carl P. Daw Jr. calls the English text "a post-Romantic Christianizing of Psalm 8," which is a description of what Hine made, and a good reason not to read it as what David wrote.

Sources

Carrie Underwood — How Great Thou Art (Official Performance Video) · (the recording checked for this proof; carrieunderwoodVEVO, from My Savior: Live from the Ryman)
Wikipedia — My Savior (album) · (album, release date of 26 March 2021, Capitol Nashville, "How Great Thou Art" as a solo track credited to Boberg and Hine)
Wikipedia — How Great Thou Art · (Boberg 1885, von Glehn's German, Prokhanoff's Russian, Hine's 1949 loose translation from the Russian, third and fourth stanzas Hine's own, E. Gustav Johnson's 1925 "O Mighty God")
Hymnology Archive — How Great Thou Art · (nine Swedish stanzas published 13 March 1886; six in German, eight in Russian with two reordered; Hine inspired by rather than translating the Russian; his 1958 booklet; the Psalm 19:1 quotation at the head of the Russian version; Carl P. Daw Jr.'s assessment)
Hymnary.org — How Great Thou Art · (credits, the Psalm 8 scripture reference hymnals attach to the text, and the note that much of Boberg's original was lost through the successive translations)

Corrections

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