Psalm 94
23 verses · BSBPsalms book hub →
Speaks with:Psalms 31×3Psalms 7×2Isaiah 10×2Psalms 37×2Psalms 59×2Isaiah 35×1
Summary
Chapter summary
'O Jehovah, thou God to whom vengeance belongeth, shine forth.' The wicked break in pieces thy people, slay the widow and the sojourner, and say, 'Jehovah will not see.' The answer of the maker: 'He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?' Jehovah knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity (1 Corinthians 3:20). 'Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest… In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul.' Jehovah has been my high tower; shall the throne of wickedness have fellowship with thee?
Context
Poetry · David, Asaph, Sons of Korah, others — Psalms overview
The world behind this chapter
Psalms 94The history
Vengeance in Israel was an office, not a mood. When a person was killed, a kinsman called the avenger of blood carried the legal duty to answer for it, and the cities of refuge existed to keep that duty from turning into an endless feud. This psalm takes that office and hands it upward: O LORD God, to whom vengeance belongeth.
The three victims named — the widow, the stranger, and the fatherless — are the law's protected class for one reason. None of them had a male kinsman to stand up at the gate and act. The avenger system, and the whole court at the gate, simply had no one to speak for them, which is why the Law names them again and again.
The wicked in this psalm say the LORD shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. The answer is a carpenter's argument: he that planted the ear, shall he not hear; he that formed the eye, shall he not see. The maker of the equipment is not blind to what the equipment was built to catch.
And the sharpest line is about legislation. Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frames mischief by a law — injustice written into the statute book, done in daylight with the paperwork in order.
What it meant to them
The Mishnah records this as the psalm the Levites sang on the fourth day of every week. Israel put a complaint about crooked courts into its ordinary midweek service and sang it in the temple.
Its comfort is not that the wait will be short. It is that the wait is not indifference — he shall bring upon them their own iniquity — and that the waiting man is held: in the multitude of my thoughts within me, thy comforts delight my soul.
Sources cited
- Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
- The Mishnah , tractate Tamid 7:4 (Danby translation)
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Psalms 94. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
Connections from this chapter
v. 19 · Written to them
In the multitude of my thoughts thy comforts delight
topics/anxiety→MannaFest topical index
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.