I'm nobody's servant. Why does the first line call me one?
The Hebrew word is eved. It means servant, and in the Torah it also means slave. So the psalm opens: "Give praise, servants of Hashem." That can sound like an insult.
The Midrash Tehillim (a collection of the rabbis' teachings on Tehillim) hears it as the word of someone just freed. On the night of the Exodus, it says, we were slaves to Pharaoh, God redeemed us, and we became God's servants.
The Torah puts it the same way: "For to Me the children of Israel are servants. They are My servants, whom I took out of the land of Egypt" (Vayikra 25:55). The Retzeh prayer tells how the Gemara (the rabbis' discussions built on the Mishnah) reads that verse: God's servants, "and not servants of servants."
The Gemara ties that idea to this psalm. In Megillah 14a, Rava (a leading sage in Babylonia, 300s) explains why we do not say Hallel on Purim. After the Exodus we could say "servants of Hashem" and mean: no longer servants of Pharaoh. After Purim, he says, the Jews were still servants of Achashverosh, the Persian king, so the line did not fit yet. In these sources, being God's servant means that no one else owns you.
Not everyone reads it as slavery. Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, a Bible commentator in Provence, about 1200) says "servants of Hashem" means the wise people who fear God, because they know how to praise Him according to what they understand of Him. Meiri (Rabbi Menachem Meiri, Provence, about 1300) also says the wise. So there are two readings: freed slaves, or the wise. The psalm does not choose.
Midrash Tehillim 113:1,Vayikra 25:55,Bava Metzia 10a,Megillah 14a,Radak and Meiri on Tehillim 113:1Is it just luck who ends up poor, or childless, or rich?
The psalm credits God with two reversals. He lifts the poor from the dust, and He gives the childless woman children. That raises a question: are things like that decided by chance, or fixed in advance?
Malbim (Rabbi Meir Leibush Malbim, a Bible commentator in Eastern Europe, 1800s) hears the psalm answering people who said that wealth and poverty, children and childlessness, depend on mazal. Mazal here means the stars and planets, the idea that your fate is set by the sky. He says no: both depend on God's providence. Even if the "system" would keep someone at the bottom, God can raise him.
The Gemara has the same argument. In Shabbat 156a, Rabbi Chanina (a sage of the Land of Israel, 200s) says that mazal makes a person wise and rich, and that Israel has mazal too. Rabbi Yochanan (the leading sage of the Land of Israel in his day, 200s) says Israel has no mazal, and brings a verse from Yirmiyahu: "Do not be afraid of the signs of the sky, because the nations are afraid of them."
Rav (a founder of the great Torah academies of Babylonia, 200s) adds a story about Avraham, whose wife Sarah had no children (Bereishit 11:30). Avraham says he looked at his stars and saw that he was not fit to have a son. God answers: "Step out of your astrology, because there is no mazal for Israel." The Gemara reads this into the verse where God "brought him outside" to look at the stars.
Hannah (the mother of the prophet Shmuel) sang these same lines in her prayer, and she says it plainly: "Hashem makes poor and makes rich. He lowers, and He also raises" (Shmuel I 2:7). One thing stays open. None of these sources explains why some people stay poor, or stay childless. They say who holds the power. They do not say it will happen for everyone.
Malbim on Tehillim 113:7,Shabbat 156a,Yirmiyahu 10:2,Bereishit 11:30 and 15:5,Shmuel I 2:7Is this psalm about real people, or about the Jewish people?
The psalm lists a poor man in the dust, a needy man on the garbage heaps, and a childless woman at home. Each can be read as one person, or as a picture of a whole people.
Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, a Bible commentator in Provence, about 1200) says the psalm opens the way it does because the writer is about to speak of the Exodus. He starts with God's power to raise the low and bring down the high, "as He did to Israel and Egypt." Meiri (Rabbi Menachem Meiri, Provence, about 1300) says the psalm hints at the nation's rise at the Exodus, and at its rise still to come in the final redemption.
The Gemara reads the childless woman as the Jewish people. In Pesachim 118b, Reish Lakish (a sage of the Land of Israel, 200s) says the Congregation of Israel speaks to God: Master of the world, Your children have made me like the chuldah, a small animal that lives in the foundations of houses. Rashi (the classic commentator, France, died 1105) says that animal is the "childless woman of the house," and that "Your children" did this because of their many sins in exile.
Rashi on the psalm reads "the childless woman of the house" as Zion, which is like a barren woman. He points to Yeshayahu 66:8: Zion had labor pains and bore her children.
Others read it as a real woman. Metzudat David (a commentary from the 1700s) says a childless woman spends her time outdoors, to ease her pain. God opens her womb, and she sits at home with her children. Ibn Ezra (a Spanish Bible commentator, 1100s) compares the verse to the words of Hannah, the mother of the prophet Shmuel. Radak says God here reverses nature.
So the commentators do not agree. The psalm may be about the person next to you, or about a people that felt squeezed into the corners of its own house. The literal readers describe what God can do. None of the comments we read says every childless woman will have a child.
Radak and Meiri on Tehillim 113:1,Pesachim 118b,Rashi on Pesachim 118b and on Tehillim 113:9,Metzudat David, Ibn Ezra and Radak on Tehillim 113:9