Biblion Bible Commentary
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God, Don't Keep Silent
Psalms 83:1-18
1 A song. A Psalm by Asaph. God, don’t keep silent. Don’t keep silent, and don’t be still, God. · WEB
Ten nations form an alliance to erase Israel, and the psalm's fiercest requests turn out to have a purpose stated at the end.
God, don't keep silent. Don't keep silent, and don't be still, God Psalms 83:1.
Three negatives in one verse, all asking for the same thing. As in the twenty-eighth psalm, what is dreaded is not opposition but quiet.
"Come," they say, "let's destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more" Psalms 83:4.
The enemy's stated aim is quoted, and it is not conquest. It is erasure — that the name should not be remembered, which in that world was the completest destruction imaginable.
The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites; Moab, and the Hagrites; Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek; Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre. Assyria also is joined with them Psalms 83:6–8.
Ten names, and the list is the psalm's evidence. It runs clockwise around Israel's borders, from EDOM in the south to Tyre on the northern coast — the whole neighborhood, plus a great power, and several of them relatives: Esau's line, Lot's two sons, and the Ishmaelites who descend from Abraham. The alliance is a family gathering.
They form an alliance against you Psalms 83:5. Against you — the psalm's whole framing is that the target is not really Israel.
Do to them as you did to Midian, as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the river Kishon Psalms 83:9.
The precedents cited are all from Judges, and all are cases where a vastly superior force was broken without Israel's strength being the reason Judges 7 Judges 4. The psalm is not asking for a victory; it is asking for a repeat of a particular kind of victory.
My God, make them like tumbleweed, like chaff before the wind Psalms 83:13.
The image is of the dried thistle head that rolls across open country in autumn — visible, fast-moving, and going nowhere.
Fill their faces with confusion, that they may seek your name, Yahweh Psalms 83:16.
The purpose clause changes the psalm. Everything asked for — the tempest, the fire, the confusion — is requested so that they will seek your name. This is one of the most severe prayers in the collection and it turns out to be, in its own stated intention, a prayer for the conversion of the ten nations.
Let them be disappointed and dismayed forever. Yes, let them be confounded and perish Psalms 83:17.
The alternative is stated immediately afterward, and the psalm holds both without resolving them, which is honest about what it is asking: let them seek you, and if not, let them fall.
That they may know that you alone, whose name is Yahweh, are the Most High over all the earth Psalms 83:18.
The last verse is the object of the whole psalm, and it is knowledge rather than destruction. What the ten nations are to end up with is the same thing Egypt was told the plagues were for.
held with reason What this mark means