Psalm 74

The damage is described by a man who has seen it. Enemies roaring inside the assembly rooms, axes taken to the carved work, the panelling broken down with hammers and hatchets, and fire set to the sanctuary itself. The temple's interior was cedar panelling carved with palms and open flowers and overlaid with gold. Stripping it meant prying the gold sheets loose and smashing the wood behind them, which is exactly what the psalm describes.

The title says Asaph, and the plain description fits the burning of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar's army in 586 BC — four centuries after David's singer. The natural reading is that a later member of the Asaph guild wrote in the founder's name and style, since the guild's psalms were all kept under it. Some readers instead place the psalm at an earlier desecration. The description is not in doubt; the date is, and the psalm itself does not say.

We see not our signs, there is no more any prophet. The signs were most likely the festival emblems and the ordered worship that marked the year. With the building gone, the calendar went too — and the silence of prophecy is named as part of the wound, not just as background.

The middle of the psalm reaches back past the temple to creation: God divided the sea by his strength, broke the heads of the monsters in the waters, and crushed leviathan. Israel's neighbours told stories of a god fighting a sea dragon for control of the world. This psalm takes that shared picture and fills it with history — the sea he split was the Red Sea, and the monster whose heads he broke was Egypt.