Psalm 85

The psalm starts in the past tense: thou hast been favourable to thy land, thou hast brought back the captivity of Jacob, thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people. Something good has already happened. Then it asks God to turn and stop being angry — so the good thing has not settled anything.

The natural fit is the generation that came home from Babylon under the Persian decree and found a ruined city, a modest temple, hostile neighbours, and poor crops — the exact conditions the prophets of that period describe, with people sowing much and bringing in little. Other readers take the captivity here more broadly of any reversal God had granted. The psalm does not say.

Mercy and truth meeting together, righteousness and peace kissing each other, is a scene from a road. Travellers who met embraced and kissed in greeting; the psalm has four things that had been apart arriving at the same place and greeting one another.

Then truth springs out of the earth, using the verb for a seed breaking through, and the next line says our land shall yield her increase. In Israel's law the fertility of the land was tied to the covenant, so a thin harvest was read as a message and not just as weather. Asking for righteousness to look down from heaven and truth to come up from the ground is asking for the whole system to work again.