Psalm 73

This opens the third of the songbook's five sections, and the name at the top is Asaph. He was one of the chief singers David appointed before the ark, and his descendants stayed in that job for centuries — well over a hundred sons of Asaph came back from Babylon and went straight to the music. So a psalm of Asaph may be his own or may come from the guild that kept his name and his style.

Their eyes stand out with fatness is a wealth marker. In a subsistence economy nearly everyone was lean; visible fat meant a man ate meat regularly and did no field work. And they are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued — famine and epidemic sorted the poor first, so the rich really did seem to live under different rules.

The turn in the psalm happens at a place, not a moment: until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. The temple was where the whole story was told — in the altar, the offerings, the annual feasts that rehearsed Israel's past and future. Walking in relocated the question.

The hope at the end is unusually clear for the Old Testament: thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. The word for receive is the same word used of Enoch, who was taken and did not die. Whatever the singer meant by it, he is looking past the grave for the settling of accounts.