Psalm 79

Psalms 79:1-4

The Hebrew title reads A Psalm of Asaph, placing this lament with the same collection as Psalm 78, one voice mourning the very unfaithfulness the other recites. O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance names a foreign army in possession of the land and the temple defiled, language the bench reads against the Babylonian destruction of 586 BC, though some hold an earlier Assyrian-era crisis the title alone cannot settle. Verse 3 is the psalm's plainest horror, blood shed like water round about Jerusalem with none to bury them, a detail Barnes reads as deliberate insult, denying the dead even that last mercy.

Psalms 79:5-7

How long, Lord, wilt thou be angry for ever, asks the question every lament in the Psalter eventually asks, three short questions that press for an end without setting a date. Verse 6 turns the prayer outward, pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, a prayer read across church history as vengeance handed to God rather than taken by the sufferer, never turned onto any people living now. Gill notes that the target is named by conduct, nations that have not called upon thy name, the same charge the prophets bring against Israel's own idolatry elsewhere.

Psalms 79:8-9

O remember not against us former iniquities turns the psalm from the enemy to the psalmist's own people, the disaster read as covenant discipline rather than accident, so the prayer for relief asks first for pardon. Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name grounds the appeal not in Israel's merit but in God's own reputation, the argument Moses made at Ex 32:12 and repeated here after the temple's fall. Henry reads the double request, deliver us and purge away our sins, as inseparable, rescue asked for only alongside repentance.

Psalms 79:10-11

Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is their God? presses the same divine-name argument into a public test, God's own honor at stake in whether his people are seen to be avenged. Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee widens the plea to captives taken in the disaster, appointed to die a phrase the bench reads as those condemned or marked for slaughter by the invading power. Spurgeon reads the shift from national reproach to individual prisoners as the psalm narrowing its compassion to the smallest sufferers left standing.

Psalms 79:12-13

And render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom is the psalm's hardest line, sevenfold answering what was done rather than exceeding it, a prayer handing retribution to God rather than to the sufferer's own hand, never license for any reader to wish it on people living now. So we thy people and sheep of thy pasture will give thee thanks for ever closes in the same shepherd language the collection uses at Ps 78:52 and 80:1, the flock's complaint ending in a vow of praise rather than in the curse itself.