Joy to the World

Lyrics

Joy to the world! The Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
let every heart prepare him room,
and heaven and nature sing,
and heaven and nature sing,
and heaven, and heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the earth! The Saviour reigns!
Your sweetest songs employ
while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
repeat the sounding joy,
repeat the sounding joy,
repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
and makes the nations prove
the glories of his righteousness,
and wonders of his love,
and wonders of his love,
and wonders, wonders, of his love.

History

"Joy to the World" is by Isaac Watts, who was born in Southampton in 1674 and died in 1748. It was first published in 1719 in his The Psalms of David Imitated, where it formed the second part of his versification of Psalm 98 under the heading "The Messiah's Coming and Kingdom". Watts presented the psalm in Christian terms, and one stanza is his own interpretative addition drawing on Genesis 3 rather than psalm text. It was therefore written as a hymn on Christ's coming and reign, not specifically as a carol for Christmas. The original is in common metre (8.6.8.6).

The text was altered by later editors. There is a substantially revised version by Cotterill (1810, in the authorised edition of 1820) that repeated the first stanza at the end, and a five-stanza form in Bickersteth's 1833 collection. Some hymnals still omit the third stanza.

The tune usually sung is ANTIOCH. It is an arrangement by the American musician Lowell Mason, published in The National Psalmist in 1848; Mason had already printed the tune in 1836, its first publication with these words, and he attributed it to Handel. That attribution is doubtful. Resemblances to passages in Handel's Messiah have been dismissed by Handel scholars as chance, and similar tunes were in print in the early 1830s, including one called COMFORT in 1832. The opening also resembles the chorale "Vom Himmel hoch", which may explain the tune's seasonal association. Sources differ on whether Mason merely adapted an existing tune, changing only a few notes, or arranged it more freely.

Since the twentieth century the hymn has been the most-published Christmas hymn in North America, based on a count of 1,387 hymnals as of December 2009.

Performance

The video is titled "Joy to the World by Isaac Watts. Arranged and sung by Katie Ritson". It runs about 3 minutes 12 seconds and was published to the church channel on 5 December 2023.

Sources: hymnary.org · en.wikipedia.org · Words book