1An Asaph psalm.
God takes His stand in the divine assembly,
in the midst of the gods He renders judgment.
2“How long will you judge dishonestly,
and show favor to the wicked?
selah
3Do justice to the poor and the orphan.
Vindicate the lowly and the wretched.
4Free the poor and the needy,
from the hand of the wicked save them.
5They do not know and do not grasp,
All the earth’s foundations totter.
6As for Me, I had thought: you were gods,
and the sons of the Most High were you all.
7Yet indeed like humans you shall die,
and like one of the princes, fall.”
8Arise, O God, judge the earth,
for You hold in estate all the nations.
PSALM 82 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. God takes His stand in the divine assembly. Like the psalms of supplication, this poem is concerned with the infuriating preponderance of injustice in the world. It differs from them, however, not only because God is the principal speaker (from verse 2 through verse 7) but also because the psalm is frankly mythological in character. Alternatively, one could describe it as a poem about the transition from mythology to a monotheistic frame of reference because in the end the gods are rudely demoted from their divine status.
in the midst of the gods. The efforts of traditional commentators to understand ʾelohim here as “judges” are unconvincing. God speaks out in the assembly of lesser gods and rebukes them for doing a wretched job in the administration of justice on earth.
2. How long will you judge dishonestly. The plot of the poem that begins to unfold is a mythological account of the existential problem that would vex the Job poet: Why is it that the just often seem to suffer, whereas the wicked prosper? The answer given here is that the gods, administrators of the old polytheistic order, impose a crooked scheme of justice on humanity, showing favoritism to the wicked and ignoring the pleas of the helpless.
5. in darkness they walk about. Ibn Ezra, the past master among exegetes in seeing intra-biblical connections, brilliantly links this image of judges stumbling through darkness with Exodus 23:8—”No bribe shall you take, for a bribe blinds the sighted and perverts the words of the innocent.”
All the earth’s foundations totter. This is not, as may first appear, a non sequitur. The order of creation itself, in the view of biblical monotheism, is founded on justice. When the lesser gods allow injustice to become rampant, the very foundations of earth are shaken—the perversion of justice is the first step toward the apocalypse.
6. As for Me, I had thought. God confesses to have been taken in by the polytheistic illusion. He imagined that these sundry gods entrusted with the administration of justice on earth would prove or justify their divine status by doing the job properly. In the event, He was sadly disappointed.
7. like humans you shall die, / and like one of the princes, fall. Because the gods have failed in their crucial role as executors of justice, they are henceforth compelled to relinquish their supposedly divine status and suffer the same fate of mortality as human beings. The parallel term to ʾadam (“humans,” or “man,” though the Hebrew does not imply gender), “one of the princes,” reflects a kind of hierarchical logic. One does not readily imagine the ex-gods turning into peasants, but all people know that even the most elevated of human beings—princes and potentates—are fated to die.
8. Arise, O God, judge the earth. The psalm concludes, after God’s address to the unjust gods, with a speaker who exhorts the one authentic divine being to impose upon earth the reign of true justice to which He alone is committed.
for You hold in estate all the nations. Why does the speaker need to say this at the very end? In the ancient world, the multiplicity of nations is associated with a multiplicity of gods: each nation has its patron god (see, for example, Jephthah’s words to the Amorite king about YHWH and the Amorite deity Chemosh in Judges 11:24) as well as a variety of gods and goddesses presiding over the various realms of nature. But that order has now proven to be judicially and morally bankrupt, and it is the God of Israel alone Who holds in estate (the verb could also be construed as a future, “will hold in estate”) all the nations of earth.