“Holiness of the Lord becometh thine house for ever”

Representation of the sacral texts by redirection of a quote from God to the Tsar was well known in eighteenth-century Russia. A special set of representations of the sacral texts is connected with the emperor Paul I. Among them - the edited quotation of the final half-verse of Psalm 92 (93), which was placed on the southern facade of St. Michael's Castle at St. Petersburg: “Holiness of the Lord becometh thine house for ever”. The editing of Church Slavonic text consisted here in replacing of the address “O Lord” by the appropriate possessive adjective. Thus the words, which are referred to God's house in the Psalm, were forwarded to Paul's new residence. The inscription on castle was reflected in Alexander Yastrebtzov's ode and an example of implicit polemic with this Paul's representation can be revealed in one speech of metropolitan Platon (Levshin). In the early 19th century German authors accompanied the exact publications of the inscription on St. Michael's Castle with the corresponding quotation from the Luther Bible. However, in Russian translations of these descriptions of the castle, which were published during the 1870s - 1880s, the references to Psalm 92 (93) were omitted. Apparently, in contrast to the German authors their later Russian translators understood the dissimilarity between the inscription on St. Michael's Castle and Ps. 92(93):5. However, the historian Pyotr Petrov not only ignored this difference, but also supposed that this inscription was originally made for St. Isaac's Cathedral.