1LORD, You are my God,
I shall exalt You, acclaim Your name.
For You have performed wondrous counsel,
steadfast faithfulness from times long past.
2For You turned a town into rubble,
a fortified city to ruins,
the arrogants’ citadel, from a town,
it will never be built again.
3Therefore a fierce people does You honor,
a city of cruel nations reveres You.
4For Your people a stronghold for the poor one,
a stronghold for the needy when in straits,
a shelter from the downpour, a shade from the heat.
For the spirit of the cruel is like a downpour on walls,
like heat in the desert.
5The arrogants’ uproar You subdued,
the heat, with the shade of a cloud.
The chant of the cruel ones He answered.
6And the LORD shall prepare a banquet for all the peoples on this mountain, a banquet of rich food, a banquet of well-aged wines, rich food with marrow, well-aged wines fine strained. 7And He shall swallow up on this mountain the veil that covers all the peoples and the mantle cast over all the nations. 8He shall swallow up death forever, and the Master LORD shall wipe the tears from every face, and His people’s disgrace He shall take off from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. 9And it shall be said on that day:
Look, this is our God
in Whom we hoped, and He rescued us,
This is our own God in Whom we hoped,
Let us exult and rejoice in His rescue.
10For the LORD’s hand shall rest on this mountain,
and Moab shall be threshed beneath Him
as straw is threshed in a cesspool.
11And he shall spread his arms within it
as the swimmer spreads his arms to swim
and his pride shall be brought low
12The towering fortress of their walls He shall bring down,
bring it low, level it with the ground.
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
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1. I shall exalt You, acclaim Your name. This is the formulaic language of a thanksgiving psalm. In keeping with the biblical literary practice, this may well have been editorially inserted here from another source. The psalm continues through verse 5.
from times long past. This Hebrew word would ordinarily mean “from afar,” but the context invites construing it in a temporal, not spatial, sense.
2. the arrogants’. This translation reads, with two Hebrew manuscripts and the Septuagint, zedim for the Masoretic zarim, “strangers.” The same correction is made in verse 5.
the arrogants’ citadel, from a town. This translation follows the Hebrew. Either a phrase has dropped out, or “turned into rubble” from the previous line is meant to do double duty for this clause.
5. The chant of the cruel ones He answered. The received text is enigmatic here. Attempts to render the concluding verb as “has silenced” are questionable: yaʿaneh as it stands means “answer,” and a revocalization as yeʿaneh doesn’t work because that verb means “afflict,” not “silence,” and also requires a human object. Perhaps the “chant” is a battle chant, or a triumphal song.
6. And the LORD shall prepare a banquet for all the people on this mountain. Here begins a new, evidently eschatological section, first in prose. The mountain is probably Mount Zion, and, as several commentators have observed, the banquet may recall the sacred feast on the slopes of Mount Sinai with Moses and the seventy elders, which is marked by an epiphany.
a banquet of rich food. This passage is probably the ultimate source for the Midrashic idea of a grand banquet at the end of days in which the righteous will feast on the flesh of the Leviathan and drink wine preserved from the time of creation.
8. He shall swallow up death forever. It is hard to determine the status as literal belief of these ringing words. Standard biblical notions see death as inevitable and final. Prophetic discourse is given to extravagant hyperbole (the mountains dripping wine, the sower overtaking the reaper, and so forth), but then hyperbole may lead to new beliefs. Many generations of Jews and Christians have taken these words literally, and the exquisite tenderness of the clause that follows—“and the Master LORD shall wipe the tears from every face”—remains deeply moving.
9. And it shall be said. The Hebrew appears to say “and he shall say,” but the third-person singular verb (like the on construction in French) is often used as the equivalent of a passive.
10. as straw is threshed in a cesspool. Straw was soaked in animal excrement, and the soggy mixture was then trampled so that it could be used for fertilization. This is a deliberately repellent and humiliating image to depict the fate of Israel’s traditional enemy Moab.
11. And he shall spread his arms within it. Even though the Hebrew word for “cesspool” is feminine and “within it” has a masculine ending, the reference seems to be to the cesspool. This yields a rather nasty image of the flailing Moab trying to swim in a cesspool.
churn. The Hebrew ʾorbot (what appears to be a noun attached to “arms”) appears nowhere else, and links to purported cognates in other Semitic languages are not convincing. This is another instance in which one is compelled to surmise the sense from the context.