Alleluia! Let Praises Ring — LSB 822 — The Confessional Lutheran

Written by Martin Rinckart in 1642, better known as the author of “Now Thank We All Our God,” this hymn began life as two much larger poems built on the Song of Solomon, one of twenty-eight stanzas and another of twenty-one, meditating on the spiritual marriage between Christ and His Bride, the Church. In 1655 an anonymous editor expanded the shorter poem still further, to thirty-one stanzas, recasting it as a memorial for a government official named Johan Scheffer and shifting its imagery toward the apocalyptic visions of Revelation 21. Not until 1698, when the Pietist hymnal Geistreiches Gesang-Buch pared the sprawling memorial text down to four stanzas, did the hymn take the form we sing today, a compact meditation on the Trinity that strips away nearly all of its original end-times language. The English translation comes from the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal, which opened each stanza with the Hebrew “Hallelujah”; modern hymnals changed this to the New Testament “Alleluia,” a revision that, without anyone realizing it at the time, actually restored Rinckart’s own original 1642 wording.

This hymn took more than half a century and three authors to reach the four stanzas we sing. It begins in 1642 with Martin Rinckart, the pastor who gave us “Now Thank We All Our God,” and two long wedding poems he wrote on the Song of Solomon, twenty-eight and twenty-one stanzas, celebrating the marriage of Christ and His Church. In 1655 an anonymous writer expanded the second into thirty-one stanzas in memory of a government official named Johan Scheffer, and rebuilt it on Revelation 21, the new Jerusalem coming down as a bride adorned for her husband, which is this morning’s Epistle. In 1698 a Pietist hymnal printed at Darmstadt cut the whole thing to four stanzas and made it a hymn to the Holy Trinity in turn: the Father who made and keeps us, the Lamb who redeemed His Bride, the Spirit who works faith, and the Triune God praised with the angels. Lutheran Worship changed the opening “Hallelujah” to “Alleluia” in 1982, which is what Rinckart himself wrote. It rides on Philipp Nicolai’s tune of 1599, “How Lovely Shines the Morning Star.”