Psalm 83

Ten peoples are listed, and on a map they form a ring: Edom and the Ishmaelites and Moab and the Hagarites to the south and east, Gebal, Ammon, Amalek, the Philistines on the coastal plain to the west, Tyre to the north, and Assyria behind them all lending strength to the children of Lot. This is not a general complaint about enemies. It is a named coalition.

The psalm answers it with two old battles. Midian at the hill of Moreh, where Gideon's three hundred broke a camp at night with torches and horns. And Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon, where the seasonal stream flooded the Jezreel plain and bogged down an army built around chariots. Both were victories where the equipment on the other side stopped mattering.

Make them like a wheel, as the stubble before the wind, uses two familiar sights. The wheel is the region's rolling thistle — a dried plant that snaps off at the root and tumbles for miles. And after harvest the leftover stubble was burned off the field.

The threshing floor sits behind the imagery. Floors were sited on hilltops to catch the afternoon wind, the grain was tossed up with a fork, and the chaff blew away while the heavy kernels fell straight down. The prayer is that this alliance blows away like the light stuff.

The occasion is not stated. The nearest match in the histories is the alliance of Moab, Ammon, and others that came against Jehoshaphat, and the psalm's Asaph heading fits a temple singer of that era; other readers place it elsewhere.