Psalm 76

Psalms 76:1-3

The Hebrew title, not shown on this page, reads To the chief Musician on Neginoth, stringed instruments, A Psalm or Song of Asaph, a worship setting for a psalm of victory. Salem in verse 2 is Jerusalem under its older name, the same city called Salem when Melchizedek was its king and priest (Genesis 14:18), a connection the commentators draw though this psalm makes no argument from it itself. The weapons named there, the bow, the shield, the sword and battle itself, are broken, God's dwelling place the place where warfare ends rather than begins.

Psalms 76:4-6

The mountains of prey are strongholds robbers held for plunder, and God's own glory is set above even that entrenched strength. The stouthearted, men of might who trusted their own hands, are spoiled and sleep their last sleep, unable to find their hands when the moment came. At God's rebuke both chariot and horse, the ancient world's whole military technology, are cast into that same dead sleep, an army stopped without the psalm naming a battle at all.

Psalms 76:7-9

Judgment heard from heaven and an earth that feared and was still describe an intervention the psalm never explains by ordinary means, which is why many older readers, Calvin and Henry among them, have set this psalm beside the destruction of Sennacherib's army in the night (2 Kings 19:35), a reading tied to history rather than to the psalm's own words. Whatever the occasion, the purpose stated is plain: God arose to judgment, to save all the meek of the earth, judgment and rescue named in the same act. Selah closes the movement, the second pause in the psalm.

Psalms 76:10-12

Even human wrath is made to serve God's own praise, and what wrath is left over he restrains himself, so that no rage against him outruns his own control of it. The call to vow and pay follows naturally, worship owed to the God whose reach the psalm has just displayed, presents brought to him that ought to be feared. The last line returns to the princes and kings first named among the powers of the earth, their spirit cut off, the psalm's closing claim that no earthly power stands outside this reckoning.