Psalm 100:1-5 vs. “Psalm 100”

Poor Bishop Hooper · checked 2026-08-21

What we checked

PassagePsalm 100:1-5 chapter ↗

Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)

Presents itself asparaphrase

Categoryadditions / omissions

AlbumPsalm 100 (EveryPsalm single) · 2021

Words addressed tonot addressed to God (sung about Him)

Teaching or experiencescripture set to music

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria this song presents words as scripture, so these apply

✓Text-faithful

✗Translation named

✓Context kept

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

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

Every clause of all five verses is present, and no line in the song comes from outside Psalm 100
The psalm's hard-to-sing parts are not smoothed: the gates and courts of verse 4 stay in, and the flock image of verse 3 is kept rather than modernised away
The refrain is the psalm's own summons to know who the LORD is, so the most repeated idea is one the text repeats first
The official upload gives the psalm's heading, its book within the Psalter, and the fact that its author is unknown, which is more provenance than most releases offer
The whole project is free to stream and download, and it worked through the Psalter in order from Psalm 1 to Psalm 150, so nothing was skipped for being unappealing

⚠ Cautions

No translation is named anywhere on the release, the project pages, or the upload, so the wording cannot be checked against a source the listener is pointed to
The wording follows the NIV at the points where versions differ, including verse 1's shout, verse 2's worship, and verse 5's enduring love, and a listener comparing it against a KJV or BSB in their hand will find mismatches that are the version's doing rather than the song's
Verse 5's "for" is the psalm's closing ground, and singing it in the middle leaves the argument resting on a clause the psalm places earlier
The song's most repeated line rests on verse 3's disputed reading. Toggle the passage above to KJV and the phrase the song sings most is not in that version's verse 3 at all
The closing section is roughly half the sung lines and all of it comes from one half of one verse, so the psalm's proportions are not the song's

Verse Proof

Psalm 100:1-5

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth. Serve the LORD with gladness; come into His presence with joyful songs. Know that the LORD is God. It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture. Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and bless His name. For the LORD is good, and His loving devotion endures forever; His faithfulness continues to all generations.”

Psalm 100 is five verses long and carries its own heading, which the older English versions render as a psalm of praise and the newer ones as a psalm for giving thanks. It is built as an argument. Verses 1 and 2 command the whole earth to make noise and to serve gladly. Verse 3 gives the first ground: know who the LORD is, because He made us and we belong to Him as His people and His flock. Verse 4 returns to commands, this time at the temple gates. Verse 5 gives the closing ground, opening with a "for" and resting the whole thing on God's goodness, His enduring love, and His faithfulness to every generation. The commands come first and the reasons carry them.

What the song says, described not quoted

The song is short and holds every clause of the psalm. It opens with verse 1's call to the earth and verse 2's gladness and singing, then lands on the opening clause of verse 3, the summons to know that the LORD is God. That clause becomes the refrain. The second section takes verse 4 whole, the gates, the courts, the thanks and the blessing of the name, and closes on the same refrain again. The third section is verse 5 entire: God's goodness, His love that does not end, His faithfulness reaching every generation. Then the song stops moving forward and goes back. Its closing section is the second half of verse 3, God's making of us and our belonging to Him as His flock and His people, and in the recording that section runs nine lines out of nineteen, with two of its lines sung three times each. Nothing outside Psalm 100 appears anywhere in the song.

Two things are worth stating plainly, because they point in opposite directions. First, nothing is missing and nothing is invented. Every clause of all five verses is present, and every line of the song traces back to Psalm 100. On this site that is rare. The site's usual finding on a free setting is what got added or left out, and here the honest answer to both is nothing. Second, the psalm's sequence is rebuilt. Verse 3 is split at its colon and the two halves are given separate jobs: the first clause becomes the recurring refrain, and the rest becomes the whole closing section. Verse 5, which the psalm places last and opens with a "for" so that it grounds everything before it, is sung in the middle instead. The result is that the psalm ends on who God is and the song ends on whose we are. Both sentences are in the passage. Only one of them is where the passage leaves you. The wording has an unnamed ancestry. Where the older English tradition and the BSB have a joyful noise, serving, and loving devotion, the song has shouting for joy, worship, and love that endures, which is the NIV's line at each point, and its verse 5 tracks the NIV almost clause for clause. Verse 3 also sits on a known textual crux. The KJV reads that He made us and not we ourselves; the NIV, ESV and BSB read that He made us and we are His. The song takes the second reading and repeats it more than any other line it sings. No translation is named on the release, on the project's pages, or in the official upload.

~ Faithful & Labeled: Every clause of Psalm 100 is present and nothing outside the psalm is added. But verse 3 is split into a refrain and a closing section. Verse 5 is moved out of its final position. No translation is named.

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

The psalm ends on who God is. The song ends on whose we are. Both sentences are in the text; only one is where the text leaves you.

Why it matters

Psalm 100 is an argument, not a list. Its commands sit on two grounds, one at verse 3 and one at verse 5, and the second is introduced by a word meaning "because." When a setting keeps every clause but moves the last ground into the middle, the reasoning still gets sung and yet the shape of it changes.

That matters because a congregation carries away the last thing it sang. Here the last thing is true, and it is the psalm's own sentence. It is simply not the psalm's own ending. Noticing that gap costs nothing and takes one reading, and it is the only edit this song makes.

Is it safe to dwell on?

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

What repetition plants here is the making and the belonging. Nine of nineteen lines say that God made us and that we are His flock and His people, and two of those lines come three times each. That is a true sentence out of the psalm, and a good one to have worn into memory, so this forms attention toward God rather than toward the singer. Every clause in the song has God as its subject or its object.

The thing to keep alongside it is verse 5. The psalm's own last word is not our belonging but God's character, His goodness, His love that does not stop, His faithfulness reaching generations nobody in the room will meet. The song sings all of that, just earlier. If this is on repeat, read the psalm through to its end now and then, so the ground the psalm finishes on stays underneath the line you finish on.

Helpful comparison

The count is the evidence, so here it is. Nineteen sung lines. Verse 1 gets one. Verse 2 gets two. Verse 3's opening clause gets two, spaced as a refrain. Verse 4 gets three. Verse 5 gets two. Verse 3's second half gets nine. That single half-verse is the song's largest block by a wide margin, and the psalm gives it one line out of its five verses.

Set that beside the two other EveryPsalm proofs on this site. The Psalm 46 setting leaves four of eleven verses unsung. The Psalm 23 setting keeps all six verses but drops two images and adds a line of its own. This one drops nothing and adds nothing, which narrows the whole finding down to a single variable. When a setting is complete and clean, order and proportion are the only edits left, and they are still edits.

Sources

Poor Bishop Hooper — Psalm 100 (EveryPsalm), official upload · (the recording checked for this proof, on the duo's own channel, published 24 November 2021; the description carries the psalm's heading, its place in Book 4, the note that the author is unknown, the credits, and the duo's own lyric sheet, and names no Bible translation)
Musixmatch — Psalm 100, Poor Bishop Hooper · (the second, independent transcription used to check the first; the two agree on every word and differ only in how many repeats the recording adds beyond the posted sheet)
Poor Bishop Hooper — EveryPsalm project page · (the project ran January 2020 to November 2022, one song a week from Psalm 1 to Psalm 150, written and recorded by Poor Bishop Hooper, mastered by Jim Barnes, art by Lauren Stevens; no translation named)
EveryPsalm — Resources · (the project's own published materials, a psalter book of the music and chord charts and a devotional for Psalms 120-134; the songs are described as scripture-based, and no translation is named)
Apple Music — Psalm 100, Poor Bishop Hooper · (released as a single on 24 November 2021, two minutes fourteen seconds long)
Bible Gateway — Psalm 100, NIV · (the renderings the song's wording follows at each point where the versions differ)

Corrections

No corrections to this proof yet.

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