Passage

Psalms 110.1

Book: Psalms · NASB95

Verse

"The LORD says to my Lord: 'Sit at My right hand Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.'" (Psalm 110:1, NASB95)

Immediate context (±2 verses)

NASB95 (NASB95)

"1. The LORD says to my Lord: 'Sit at My right hand Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.'"

"2. The LORD will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, 'Rule in the midst of Your enemies.' 3. Your people will volunteer freely in the day of Your power; In holy array, from the womb of the dawn, Your youth are to You as the dew." (Psalm 110:1-3, NASB95)

Setting

Speaker: David, traditionally, and explicitly (the superscription L'David Mizmor, "A Psalm of David"; Jesus affirms Davidic authorship in Matthew 22:43-45 / Mark 12:36-37). Within the verse, David quotes a divine speech.
Audience: the worshipping community of Israel, used liturgically and royally; later, taken up in Second Temple Jewish messianic expectation.
Location: likely Jerusalem, after David's establishment of the kingdom and bringing of the ark (c. 1000 BC).
Time period: c. 1000 BC (Davidic era). The psalm functions as a royal-coronation oracle later identified as messianic.

Theological reading

This single verse is the most-cited Old Testament verse in the New Testament, Habakkuk's "the just shall live by faith" comes second; Psalm 110:1 is first. It appears explicitly in Matthew 22:44 // Mark 12:36 // Luke 20:42-43; Acts 2:34-35; Hebrews 1:13; and is alluded to in Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 1:3; 8:1; 10:12-13; 12:2; 1 Peter 3:22, at least 25 NT citations and allusions in total. Why? Because the verse has explosive Christological implications:

The grammatical puzzle: in Hebrew, Ne'um YHWH la'Adoni, "An oracle of YHWH to my Adon (lord/master)." Two terms for "Lord":

YHWH, the Tetragrammaton; God's covenant name.
Adon / Adoni, my lord, my master (similar to "sir" but used for kings, David refers to Saul as "adoni" [1 Samuel 26:17-18]).

So David, the author, calls someone other than YHWH his adoni, his Lord. But David is the highest authority in Israel; David has no human adoni. So who is David's adoni?

Jesus's exegetical trap (Matthew 22:41-46):

Jesus poses this question to the Pharisees: "What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?" They answer: "the son of David." Jesus then asks: "Then how does David in the Spirit call Him 'Lord,' saying, 'The LORD said to my Lord…'? If David then calls Him Lord, how is He his son?"

The trap is binary: either (a) David's Messiah is greater than David (which contradicts the Messiah being David's son in any merely-genealogical sense, sons are not greater than fathers in Hebrew patriarchal logic), or (b) the Messiah is both son of David (humanly descended) and greater than David (David's adon), which requires the Messiah to be more than human. Jesus presses the second option implicitly. The Pharisees cannot answer.

The implication for Christ's deity: the Messiah is not merely the great-king-like-David; the Messiah is David's Lord, and not just human-lord but seated at YHWH's right hand. Two-Lord theology in the Hebrew Bible: YHWH speaks to a second figure, addressed as Adon, who is co-throned with YHWH. The verse is a foundational text for Trinitarian readings of OT theology.

At My right hand. The position of supreme honor and authority. Compare:

Daniel 7:13-14, the Son of Man approaches the Ancient of Days and receives "dominion, glory, and a kingdom"; this scene parallels Psalm 110:1's two-figure throne-room.
Acts 7:55-56, Stephen sees "the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."
Mark 14:62, Jesus before the Sanhedrin: "you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven", citing both Psalm 110:1 and Daniel 7:13. The high priest tears his clothes and charges blasphemy. The Sanhedrin understood the claim.

Patristic. Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho 32-33, c. AD 160), Tertullian (Against Praxeas 10-11), Athanasius (Discourses Against the Arians II.13ff), Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechetical Lectures 14.27ff), and Augustine (Tractates on John 21.5; City of God 17.17) all develop Psalm 110:1 as the OT charter for Christ's deity, ascension, and heavenly session at the Father's right hand.

The Council of Nicaea's affirmation that the Son sits at the right hand of the Father, a phrase preserved in the Apostles' Creed, is the credal absorption of Psalm 110:1.

Reformation. Calvin (Psalms commentary; Institutes II.15.5; II.16.15-16) develops the triplex munus Christi (Christ's threefold office) using Psalm 110: v. 1 = kingship, v. 4 ("a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek") = priesthood, the prophetic word implicit throughout. Psalm 110 is, with Isaiah 53, one of the two most exegetically productive OT chapters for messianic Christology.

Modern. Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the God of Israel, 2008) and Larry Hurtado (Lord Jesus Christ, 2003) develop the kyrios (Lord) Christology grounded in NT use of Psalm 110:1, early Christians applied YHWH-passages to Jesus by way of kyrios (Septuagint rendering of YHWH); Psalm 110:1 in LXX reads eipen ho kyrios tō kyriō mou, "the Lord said to my Lord", making the verse a perfect bridge from Hebrew two-Lord theology to NT kyrios Christology.

Apologetic significance

Apologists from Justin to today use Psalm 110:1 as a pre-Christian Hebrew text that:

Predates Christ by ~1000 years.
Was canonical Jewish Scripture.
Contains a two-Lord theology in the canonical text.
Was understood as messianic by Jesus (and not contested by His Pharisaic interlocutors on that point).
Was applied by all NT writers to Christ.
Cannot easily be read in non-trinitarian terms without grammatical violence.

This makes Psalm 110:1 one of the strongest single OT proof-texts for Trinitarian / divine-Messiah theology, a position pre-Christian Judaism was already half-pushing toward in Second Temple speculation about exalted intermediary figures (The Son of Man of Enoch's Similitudes; Metatron; the Memra, see Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 2012).

Key words

H3068 - YHWH, the first Lord (YHWH)
H113 - adon, adon (lord, master), the second Lord
H4899 - mashiach, mashiach (anointed), the broader messianic context
G2962 - kyrios, Greek/LXX rendering of both Hebrew terms; the bridge to NT Christology