PSALM 83

¹A song, an Asaph psalm.

    ²O God, no silence for You!

          Do not be mute and do not be quiet, God.

    ³For, look, Your enemies rage,

          and those who hate You lift their heads.

    ⁴Against Your people they devise cunning counsel

          and conspire against Your protected ones.

    ⁵They have said: “Come, let us obliterate them as a nation,

          and the name of Israel will no longer be recalled.”

    ⁶For they conspired with a single heart,

          against You they sealed a pact—

    ⁷the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,

          Moab and the Hagrites,

    ⁸Gebal and Ammon and Amalek,

          Philistia with the dwellers of Tyre.

    ⁹Assyria, too, has joined them,

          has become an arm for the sons of Lot.

selah

    ¹⁰Do unto them as to Midian, as to Sisera,

          as to Jabin at the Kishon Wadi.

    ¹¹They were destroyed at En-Dor,

          they turned into dung for the soil.

    ¹²Deal with their nobles as with Oreb

          and as with Zeeb and Zebah and Zalmunna, all their princes,

    ¹³who said, “We shall take hold for ourselves

          of all the meadows of God.”

    ¹⁴O God, make them like the thistledown,

          like straw before the wind.

    ¹⁵As fire burns down forests

          and as flame ignites the mountains,

    ¹⁶so shall You pursue them with Your storm

          and with Your tempest dismay them.

    ¹⁷Fill their faces with infamy

          that they may seek Your name, O LORD.

    ¹⁸May they be shamed and dismayed forever,

          may they be disgraced and may they perish.

    ¹⁹And may they know that You, Your name is the LORD.

          You alone are most high over all the earth.

PSALM 83 NOTES

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3. For, look, Your enemies rage. The situation of an alliance of surrounding nations plotting an all-out assault on Judah identifies this as a militant national supplication. Many interpreters have inferred that it was actually composed in a time of national emergency to be recited in public worship in an entreaty to God to intervene on behalf of His people. When that might have been remains a matter of scholarly debate, although the list of hostile peoples in verses 7 and 8 as well as the invocation of the Song of Deborah in verse 10 argues for an early date, close to or even within the period of the Judges (before 1000 B.C.E.). The mention of Assyria, on the other hand, could be an indication of a late-eighth-century date, unless, as has been proposed, “Assyria” in this text is not the great empire—after all, why would it ally itself with these small, mainly trans-Jordanian kingdoms?—but rather a modest-sized eastern nation antecedent to the empire.

7. the tents of Edom. Because these are seminomadic peoples, “tents” is an appropriate synecdoche for their concentrations of population.

8. Philistia. It is worth noting that the Philistines ceased to be a serious threat to the Israelites not long after the establishment of the Davidic dynasty at the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E.

10. as to Sisera, / as to Jabin. Jabin was the Canaanite king whose army, under the command of Sisera, was defeated by Barak, with Deborah behind him, as recorded in Judges 4–5.

12. Oreb / . . . Zeeb . . . Zebah . . . Zalmunna. These were the Midianite chieftains defeated by Gideon, as reported in Judges 8.

16. pursue them with Your storm. As in Canaanite mythology, the storm is the weapon of the sky god—in particular, the bolts of lightning, clearly implied in the fire imagery of the previous verse.

19. You alone are most high over all the earth. YHWH, the God of Israel, is not just a powerful national god but the deity that rules all the earth. This cosmic supremacy of the God of Israel, in the gesture of prayer that concludes the psalm, is a fact that the hostile nations will come to recognize through their own disastrous defeat, just before they perish.