Psalm 85

Psalms 85:1-3

The Hebrew title, not carried on this page, reads To the chief Musician, A Psalm for the sons of Korah, another of the eleven psalms the family of temple gatekeepers left behind. The opening looks backward to an accomplished mercy, favour shown to the land, captivity actually brought back, iniquity forgiven and sin covered, wrath taken away and turned from its fierceness. The commentators are divided on which return the psalm remembers, the return from Babylon, so the plain historical reading, or an earlier deliverance recalled to found a present plea, and the positions are named without a verdict since the psalm itself gives no date.

Psalms 85:4-7

The mood shifts from remembered mercy to present distress: if the land was once forgiven, why does displeasure still weigh on it now, and the two questions of verse 5 press the point without accusing God of forgetting his own character. Revive us again asks for the nation's life to be quickened afresh, not a fresh start from nothing but a return to what forgiveness had already secured, and that thy people may rejoice in thee makes joy in God the goal rather than mere relief. The stanza ends in a plain request, shew us thy mercy, O Lord, and grant us thy salvation, asking again for what verses 1 through 3 already testified God had given.

Psalms 85:8-9

Having prayed, the psalmist stops to listen, I will hear what God the Lord will speak, the single most important turn a petitioner can make, from asking to attending. The promised word is peace, but a peace guarded by a warning in the same breath, let them not turn again to folly, so that the mercy just pleaded for is not read as license. Glory dwelling in the land in verse 9 uses the same word for God's manifest presence that filled the tabernacle and the temple, so the salvation in view is not distant relief but God himself returning to live among his people.

Psalms 85:10-11

Verses 10 and 11 personify God's own attributes as if they were people who had been at odds: mercy and truth, which can pull against each other since mercy inclines to spare and truth holds to the fact of sin, are pictured meeting; righteousness and peace, which can pull the same way since righteousness judges and peace forgives, are pictured kissing. Truth springing from earth answered by righteousness looking down from heaven adds a second picture, ground and sky reaching toward each other. Augustine and later writers in his line read the whole stanza as a portrait of the incarnation, where the four are reconciled in one person without either attribute being diminished, a reading named as theirs and not required by the Hebrew poetry on its own terms.

Psalms 85:12-13

The stanza descends from the picture of reconciled attributes to the ordinary good of a harvest, the Lord shall give that which is good, and our land shall yield her increase, mercy and truth cashed out in bread. Righteousness going before him in the final verse pictures God's own character as a herald walking ahead of him, and the way it sets is one the people are then placed in, and shall set us in the way of his steps, so that the nation's path follows the same righteousness just described as kissing peace. The psalm ends without a formal close, the herald still walking, which several commentators read as the poem leaving its hearers still on the road rather than arrived.