Biblion Bible Commentary
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In Judah God Is Known
Psalms 76:1-12
1 For the Chief Musician. On stringed instruments. A Psalm by Asaph. A song. In Judah, God is known. His name is great in Israel. · WEB
An army goes to sleep on the field and does not wake up, and the psalm says the weapons were broken where God lives.
In Judah, God is known. His name is great in Israel. His tabernacle is also in Salem. His dwelling place in Zion Psalms 76:1–2.
Salem is the old name of Jerusalem, the city Melchizedek was king of Genesis 14:18, and it means peace. The psalm uses it deliberately, because what it describes next is a battle.
There he broke the flaming arrows of the bow, the shield, and the sword, and the weapons of war Psalms 76:3.
The weapons are broken there — in the place called peace, where God lives. The same reversal as the forty-sixth psalm, where the desolations turn out to be smashed equipment.
Valiant men lie plundered, they have slept their last sleep. None of the men of war can lift their hands Psalms 76:5.
The description is of a field the morning after, with no account of any fighting. Soldiers are asleep and their hands do not work.
At your rebuke, God of Jacob, both chariot and horse are cast into a dead sleep Psalms 76:6.
A rebuke — a word — and the cavalry is down. The details fit the night the Assyrian army outside Jerusalem was destroyed and Sennacherib went home 2 Kings 19:35, which is the occasion most often proposed for this psalm and for the change in the fifty-third.
You pronounced judgment from heaven. The earth feared, and was silent Psalms 76:8.
The silence is the psalm's most effective stroke. After a chapter of war vocabulary, nothing is making any noise.
When God arose to judgment, to save all the afflicted ones of the earth Psalms 76:9.
The purpose clause, and it is worth stopping on. The destruction of an army is described as a rescue of the afflicted — not of Judah specifically, but of all the afflicted ones of the earth. The psalm treats the breaking of a military machine as a benefit to everyone who would have been under it.
Surely the wrath of man praises you. The survivors of your wrath are restrained Psalms 76:10.
A dense and much-argued verse. The plain sense is that human fury ends up serving purposes it did not intend — that even the rage directed against God is, in the outcome, made to contribute. It is the same claim the account of Joseph makes in a sentence Genesis 50:20, applied to an invasion.
He will cut off the spirit of princes. He is feared by the kings of the earth Psalms 76:12.
The psalm ends with rulers rather than armies, and what is cut off is not their lives but their spirit — the confidence that made the campaign seem worth starting.
held with reason What this mark means