1For the lead player, for the Korahites, a psalm.
2You favored, O LORD, Your land,
You restored the fortunes of Jacob.
3You forgave Your people’s crime,
You covered all their offense.
selah
4You laid aside all Your wrath,
You turned back from Your blazing fury.
5Turn back, pray, God of our rescue
and undo Your anger against us.
6Will You forever be incensed with us,
will You draw out Your fury through all generations?
7Why, You—will again give us life,
and Your people will rejoice in You.
8Show us, O LORD, Your kindness,
and Your rescue grant to us.
9Let me hear what the LORD God would speak
when He speaks peace to His people and to His faithful,
that they turn not back to folly.
10Yes, His rescue is near for those who fear Him,
that His glory dwell in our land.
11Kindness and truth have met,
justice and peace have kissed.
12Truth from the earth will spring up,
as justice from the heavens looks down.
13The LORD indeed will grant bounty
and our land will grant its yield.
14Justice before Him goes,
that He set His footsteps on the way.
PSALM 85 NOTES
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2. You favored, O LORD, Your land. There is scarcely a more striking example in the Bible of the temporal ambiguity or fluidity of Hebrew verbs. The verbs used through to the end of verse 4 are in the perfective or “suffix” form, which, lacking an initial waw that would convert them into a future, appear to indicate actions completed in the past. But what is reported here as completed action is precisely what the speaker prays for beginning in verse 5. Either he is remembering a time in the past when God forgave His people and favored the land as a precedent for the present plight, or he is imagining what he is about to pray for as though it were already an accomplished fact.
You restored the fortunes of Jacob. The Hebrew shevut (or in the variant used here, shevit), when it is coupled with the cognate verb shuv, means “previous condition.” (It is precisely the idiom used at the end of Job, 42:10, to indicate God’s restoration of all Job’s losses.) The appearance of the expression in this verse, joined with the idea of God’s favoring His land after it had fallen out of favor, suggests that the psalm may have been composed after the Babylonian exile in 586 B.C.E., though references to exile are not entirely explicit. “Turning back” becomes a key phrase of the poem. It is used five times, including verse 7, where the idiomatic sense in context leads this translation to render it adverbially as “again.”
5. Turn back. The Hebrew text says “Turn us back,” which doesn’t make much sense in this verse (and the verb in the qal conjugation does not take personal objects). The translation reads shuv naʾ, “turn back, pray,” instead of the Masoretic shuveinu.
9. that they turn not back to folly. The key verb expresses a kind of quid pro quo: God is implored to turn back from His wrath, and the people will accordingly not turn back to folly.
10. that His glory dwell in our land. This rather generalized clause could well refer to the restoration of Judah after exile. Because God’s rescue is near at hand, His glory will again be manifest in the land.
11. Kindness and truth. The two terms of the familiar hendiadys ḥesed weʾemet (“steadfast loyalty”) are separated and turned into figures, along with another pair, justice and peace, in a kind of allegory of the ideal moment when God’s favor is restored to the land.
justice and peace have kissed. This bold metaphor focuses the sense of an era of perfect loving harmony. Rashi imagines a landscape in which all Israelites will kiss one another.
14. that He set His footsteps on the way. Although some scholars have sought to emend this final clause, a vivid image is suggested by the text as we have it. Justice leads the way, and God, preparing to walk about the earth after having withdrawn from it in His wrath, follows the path marked out by justice.