Entering the Gates: A Psalm of Movement

Psalm 100 is built around a physical journey into sacred space, moving the worshipper, in its own compressed poetic geography, from outside the Temple precinct to inside it across just five verses: "enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise," language that reads less like private devotional reflection than like an instruction given to a worshipper, or a group of worshippers, actually walking toward the altar with an offering. This processional quality, words meant to accompany movement and action rather than to be read in isolation, is characteristic of a number of psalms associated with Temple worship and helps explain why later Jewish liturgical tradition incorporated Psalm 100 into the daily morning service.

That liturgical tradition traditionally omits the psalm on the eve of Passover and the eve of Yom Kippur, the two days on which the todah offering itself could not be brought, since the offering required its bread to be eaten within a fixed short window that a fast day or a festival's own sacrificial demands would not accommodate. That restriction, keeping a joyful thanksgiving psalm out of the service specifically on the days its own named sacrifice could not be performed, is itself testimony to how closely later readers understood the psalm's content to be tied to the concrete ritual act named in its heading rather than to a general sentiment of gratitude detachable from any particular offering.