Psalm 80

Psalms 80:1-3

The Hebrew title reads To the chief Musician upon Shoshannim-Eduth, A Psalm of Asaph, Shoshannim-Eduth meaning lilies, a testimony, a tune name the commentators do not claim to recover further. Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel opens the psalm with the same flock language the Asaph collection carries from Ps 78:52, God pictured enthroned between the cherubims over the ark, the throne from which the psalmist asks him to shine forth. Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh in verse 2 are the sons of Rachel, the three tribes the wilderness camp set together on the west side of the tabernacle by Num 2:18-24, named here perhaps because their territory bore the crisis the psalm laments.

Psalms 80:4-7

O Lord God of hosts, how long wilt thou be angry against the prayer of thy people repeats the lament formula the collection returns to often, anger measured here against prayer itself, as though the complaint is not only suffering but an apparently unheard cry. Thou feedest them with the bread of tears reverses the manna of Ps 78:24, tears now the diet in place of the corn of heaven, and thou makest us a strife unto our neighbours turns the shame outward into public mockery. Verse 7 repeats the refrain of verse 3 with God of hosts added to the divine name, an intensification the commentators note as the psalm's own structure, the plea growing more urgent with each repetition.

Psalms 80:8-11

Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt begins the psalm's central figure, the exodus and conquest told as a vine transplanted and tended, the heathen cast out to clear room for it exactly as Canaan's nations were driven out before Israel. The vine's growth in verses 9 through 11 reads like the kingdom at its widest, boughs reaching to the sea and branches to the river, the river most naturally the Euphrates of the promise at Gen 15:18. Delitzsch reads the vine's flourishing as deliberately drawn to its fullest extent before the psalm turns to its ruin, the height of the description measuring the depth of the loss that follows.

Psalms 80:12-13

Why hast thou then broken down her hedges turns the vine song to complaint, the hedge a farmer's protection against animals now removed so that every passerby plucks the fruit. The boar out of the wood and the wild beast of the field are named without further identification, the text itself silent on which invading power the figures stand for, and commentators who assign a specific nation to the image do so from history outside the psalm rather than from its own words. Barnes reads the switch from garden imagery to predatory animals as marking the difference between neglect and active destruction.

Psalms 80:14-16

Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts turns the complaint back into petition, look down from heaven and behold, and visit this vine asking for the same attention that once planted it. The vineyard which thy right hand hath planted and the branch that thou madest strong for thyself in verse 15 use vineyard and branch as parallel names for the one nation, branch a word the prophets later use of a shoot from Jesse's line. It is burned with fire, it is cut down states the present ruin plainly, the vine's flourishing of the previous unit already undone by the time this prayer is prayed.

Psalms 80:17-19

Let thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand, upon the son of man whom thou madest strong for thyself picks up the branch language of verse 15 and gives it a figure, most of the bench reading man and son of man here as the nation Israel itself, addressed as an individual the way a vine or a branch can stand for a people. Some later Christian readers have heard a further, messianic note in son of man given the title's later use, a position named without the psalm's own words settling it either way. Quicken us, and we will call upon thy name promises the response revival would bring, and the psalm closes with its refrain a third time, Lord God of hosts now completing the divine name the first two refrains built in stages.