Jason, translation does involve more than a little interpretation and the “meaning” of the context can be informed by many things that were not necessarily in the mind of the original author. So I wonder if everlasting, in the sense of endless time or timeless eternity, is an intended meaning we can attribute to the various authors of the Tanakh.
To illustrate this:
Jewish Complete Bible
When he stands up, the earth shakes;
when he looks, the nations tremble,
the eternal mountains are smashed to pieces,
the ancient hills sink down;
the **ancient **paths are his.
NIV
He stood, and shook the earth;
he looked, and made the nations tremble.
The ancient mountains crumbled
and the age-old hills collapsed.
His ways are eternal.
21st Century KJV
He stood and measured the earth;
He beheld and drove asunder the nations;
and the everlasting mountains were scattered,
the perpetual hills did bow. His ways are everlasting.
Young’s Literal Tranlation
He hath stood, and He measureth earth,
He hath seen, and He shaketh off nations,
And scatter themselves do mountains of antiquity,
Bowed have the hills of old, The ways of** old** [are] His.
“Eternal” and “everlasting” convey a very different meaning from “ancient” and “old.” The Jewish version and Young’s are much close to the actual meaning of olam. There is nothing in the immediate context that compels the use of everlasting or eternal. What does however inform the choice of those words is a larger doctrinal agenda that those particular translators wish to support. Choosing to translate olam as everlasting is really redundant. That God has always existed and always will is a given and saying that he is everlasting is stating a redundancy. By doing that it is in fact obscuring a deeper more profound meaning about the nature of God, which the psalmist is trying to convey.
The Hebrew meaning of olam “being beyond the horizon” suggests that is more about a quality than a quantity. More specifically what issues or comes from God.
“Before the mountains were brought forth or ever You had formed and given birth to the earth and the world, even from olam (far beyond the horizon) to olam (far beyond the horizon)You are God.” Ps 90:2 Here the passage repeats olam to convey a superlative. Hebrew has no way to say something is “best” or “greatest” so it doubles a word to give it a superlative.
The extent of God’s agape and passion for His creation is beyond our perception and comprehension–we see through a glass darkly. The self-revelation of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ presents us with the best view of what is beyond the far horizon of God’s new creation, at least until the veil is pulled back and His full presence amongst us is seen by all.
But the parallel just occurred to me. The prophets indicate Israel, having returned to Jerusalem from being scattered, will devolve into the worst idolatry again as they had done before the Babylon dispersion, despite God’s grace, and will build idolatry temples on the nearby hills again. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of those was envisioned as being destroyed in the immediate vicinity of YHWH’s visible glorious rescue of faithless Jerusalem from her enemies.)