1God of vengeance, O LORD,
God of vengeance, shine forth!
2Rise up, O judge of the earth,
bring down on the proud requital.
3How long the wicked, O LORD,
how long will the wicked exult?
4They utter arrogance, speak it,
all the wrongdoers bandy boasts.
5Your people, O LORD, they crush,
and Your estate they abuse.
6Widow and sojourner they kill,
and orphans they murder.
7And they say, “Jah will not see,
and the God of Jacob will not heed.”
8Take heed, you brutes in the people,
and you fools, when will you be wise?
9Who plants the ear, will He not hear?
Who fashions the eye, will He not look?
10The chastiser of nations, will He not punish,
Who teaches humankind knowledge?
11The LORD knows human designs,
that they are mere breath.
12Happy the man whom Jah chastises,
and whom from His teaching He instructs,
13to make him quiet in evil days
until a pit is dug for the wicked.
14For the LORD will not abandon His people,
and His estate He will not forsake.
15For justice will join with judgment,
and all the upright will follow it.
16Who will rise for me against evildoers,
who will take a stand for me against the wrongdoers?
17Were not the LORD a help to me,
I would have almost dwelled in the silent realm.
18When I thought my foot had stumbled,
Your kindness, LORD, sustained me.
19With my many cares within me,
Your consolations delighted me.
20Will the throne of disaster consort with You,
that fashions trouble against the law?
21They band together against the just man’s life,
22But the LORD became my fortress,
and my God, my sheltering rock.
23He will turn back against them their wickedness,
through their evil He will destroy them,
the LORD our God will destroy them.
PSALM 94 NOTES
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1. God of vengeance. This boldly aggressive characterization of God, ʾel neqamot, which occurs only here, is fudged by the modern translations that render it in mitigating language as “God of retribution.” As in many psalms of supplication, to which this poem is roughly allied, the speaker is filled with rage at the dominance of injustice in the world and exhorts God to manifest a spectacular appearance (“shine forth”) in order to exact grim vengeance against the perpetrators of evil.
3. how long will the wicked exult? In the typical psalm of supplication, this is the kind of question that a beleaguered speaker asks personally, on his own behalf. Here, however, though the speaker does stress the first-person singular toward the end of the poem (verses 16–22), most of the psalm expresses a generalized concern about the prevalence of injustice.
5. Your people, O LORD, they crush. Although some interpreters have taken this as a reference to a national disaster, such as conquest by an enemy, the subsequent reference to the murder of the disadvantaged—proverbially, in biblical usage, the sojourner, the widow, and the orphan—suggests that what the speaker has in view is a practice of criminal, social, and economic oppression within the nation. This reading is reinforced by the use of the phrase “You brutes in [or among] the people” (verse 8).
12. Happy the man whom Jah chastises, / and whom from His teaching He instructs. This is the turning point in the poem, the moment when a rationale is offered for the present suffering of the innocent. The man who is engulfed in suffering—that is, who is “chastised” by God—can take comfort in the lesson of God’s teaching, which is that punishment (the “pit” that is dug) awaits the evildoer. This certain knowledge has the power to give inner calm to the just man in the midst of his afflictions. This same idea is rephrased in verse 19: “With my many cares within me, / Your consolations delighted me.”
14. not abandon His people, / . . . His estate . . . not forsake. This is the one moment in the poem when individual oppression appears to be displaced by (or merge with) the oppression of the nation, especially because “estate,” naḥalah, is a common poetic epithet for the people or the land.
15. For justice will join with judgment. The Hebrew at this point sounds a little crabbed. A very literal rendering: “For unto justice will judgment come back.”
16. Who will rise for me against evildoers. Now we hear a voice in the first-person singular. The immediate answer to these rhetorical questions is that no one will come to the aid of the embattled speaker except God.
17. in the silent realm. The Hebrew dumah simply means “silence,” implying death. The Vulgate actually renders this as in inferno.
20. that fashions trouble against the law. Although the meaning of each word and of the clause as a whole is quite transparent, the verset sounds a little strange because one would expect the verb “fashions” (yotser, as in the second Creation story) to be attached to a conscious agent, not to a throne. Perhaps the poet is simply thinking of “throne” metonymically as an epithet for the king of evil who sits on it.
21. and innocent blood condemn. The paradigmatic crime of the wicked is the perversion of the judicial system, which again leads to the inference that what the speaker complains of is injustice within his own society, not a military assault on it by external powers.
23. He will turn back against them their wickedness. The idea is both that the wicked will finally be tripped up by their own vicious scheming and that they will be paid back measure for measure.
the LORD our God will destroy them. As often happens in biblical poetry, a triadic line—here, with incremental repetition of the second verset—is used to mark closure at the end of the poem.