Psalms 44: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The psalm opens by recalling what God did for earlier generations: he drove out the nations and settled Israel in the land, and this was not won by their own swords. It then turns to the present, where the people are defeated in battle, scattered, plundered, and mocked by their neighbors, and it says plainly that God has done this to them. The speakers state that they have not forgotten God or turned to a foreign god, and they end by calling on God to wake up, stop hiding his face, and rescue them.

Claim by Claim

1. 44:1
   • The speakers say they have heard with their own ears.
   • The speakers address God.
   • The speakers' fathers told them what God did.
   • God performed a work in the fathers' days, in days long past.
2. 44:2
   • God drove out nations with his own hand.
   • God planted the fathers in the land in their place.
   • God brought harm upon peoples.
   • God sent them out; it is unclear whether those sent out are the peoples driven away or the fathers spread abroad in the land.
3. 44:3
   • The fathers did not take possession of the land by their own sword.
   • Their own arm did not bring them victory.
   • It was God's right hand, God's arm, and the light of his face that gave them the land.
   • God acted for them because he was favorably disposed toward them.
4. 44:4
   • The speaker declares that God is his King.
   • The speaker asks God to command victories for Jacob.
5. 44:5
   • By God the speakers push down their foes.
   • By God's name the speakers trample those who rise up against them.
6. 44:6
   • The speaker does not trust in his bow.
   • The speaker's sword will not save him.
7. 44:7
   • God has saved the speakers from their enemies.
   • God has put to shame those who hate the speakers.
8. 44:8
   • The speakers boast in God all day long.
   • The speakers will praise God's name forever.
   • The verse ends with the notation Selah.
9. 44:9
   • God has rejected the speakers.
   • God has brought them to disgrace.
   • God no longer goes out with their armies.
10. 44:10
    • God makes the speakers retreat before the enemy.
    • Those who hate the speakers plunder them for themselves.
11. 44:11
    • God has handed the speakers over like sheep meant to be eaten.
    • God has scattered the speakers among the nations.
12. 44:12
    • God sells his people for no price.
    • God gained no profit from their sale.
13. 44:13
    • God makes the speakers an object of reproach to their neighbors.
    • God makes the speakers an object of mockery and derision to those around them.
14. 44:14
    • God makes the speakers a byword among the nations.
    • God makes the peoples shake their heads at the speakers.
15. 44:15
    • The speaker's disgrace is before him continually.
    • The shame of the speaker's face has covered him.
16. 44:16
    • This is because of the voice of the one who reproaches and reviles.
    • This is because of the enemy and the avenger.
17. 44:17
    • All of this has come upon the speakers.
    • The speakers have not forgotten God.
    • The speakers have not been false to God's covenant.
18. 44:18
    • The speakers' heart has not turned back.
    • The speakers' steps have not swerved from God's path.
19. 44:19
    • God has crushed the speakers in the place of jackals.
    • God has covered the speakers with deep darkness.
20. 44:20
    • The speakers pose the condition of having forgotten the name of their God.
    • The speakers pose the condition of having spread out their hands to a foreign god.
21. 44:21
    • The speakers ask whether God would not search this out.
    • God knows the secrets of the heart.
22. 44:22
    • For God's sake the speakers are killed all day long.
    • The speakers are reckoned as sheep for slaughter.
23. 44:23
    • The speakers call on the Lord to awake.
    • The speakers ask why the Lord sleeps.
    • The speakers call on the Lord to arise.
    • The speakers ask that God not reject them forever.
24. 44:24
    • The speakers ask why God hides his face.
    • The speakers ask why God forgets their affliction and their oppression.
25. 44:25
    • The speakers' soul is sunk down to the dust.
    • The speakers' belly clings to the earth.
26. 44:26
    • The speakers call on God to rise up as their help.
    • The speakers ask God to redeem them for the sake of his steadfast love.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

44:1

The psalm begins the way Israelite worship often did, by rehearsing the national story out loud. "Our fathers have told us" points to history handed down by word of mouth from parents to children rather than read from a book. The events being recalled are the conquest of Canaan, when Israel took possession of the land.

44:2

The KJV's "heathen" translates a Hebrew word that means simply "nations" or "peoples", here the peoples already living in Canaan before Israel settled there. In 1611 the word carried no suggestion of savagery. "Plantedst them" is a farming image: one crop pulled up by the roots and another set in the same soil.

44:3

"The light of your face" is a fixed idiom. A face turned toward someone and lit up means favor, welcome, attention; a face hidden or turned away means rejection. The same image returns, reversed, in verse 24.

44:4

Jacob was the ancestor who was renamed Israel; "Jacob" is a standard poetic name for the whole nation descended from him, used in place of the people's own name.

44:5

The Hebrew verb behind "push down" is the action of an ox goring, driving an opponent backwards with its horns.

44:6

A bow shoots arrows. A bow and a sword were a soldier's main weapons.

44:8

Selah appears throughout the Psalms and is probably a direction for performance, a pause, a musical interlude, or a change of instruments. Its exact meaning was already lost by the time of the earliest translations, so it is normally left untranslated.

44:9

Israel's armies expected God to march out with them, and a defeat was therefore described not as bad tactics but as God declining to come along.

44:10

"Spoil" is a verb here: the winning side strips the defeated of their possessions. Plunder taken from a beaten army was the ordinary payment soldiers expected for a campaign.

44:11

In 1611 English "meat" meant food of any kind, not flesh in particular. "Sheep appointed for meat" are sheep set aside to be butchered and eaten.

44:12

The picture is of a trader who lets goods go so cheaply he makes nothing on the sale. The complaint is not that God sold them but that he got nothing whatever out of it.

44:13

Neighbors here means the nations living all around them, not people next door.

44:14

A "byword" is a nation whose name has become a proverb for disaster, the sort of name people use as a curse or a warning. Shaking the head at someone was a recognized gesture of mockery and contempt, not of sympathy or mild disapproval.

44:15

"Confusion" in the KJV means public disgrace and humiliation, not mental muddle. The word has narrowed since 1611.

44:16

The KJV's "blasphemeth" translates a Hebrew word meaning to revile, jeer at, or insult; it is aimed at the defeated people and at their God together, and is broader than the narrow religious sense the English word now has. The "avenger" is an enemy out to settle a score.

44:17

A covenant was a formal binding agreement of the kind made between a king and a people or between two rulers, setting out obligations on both sides. Israel's relationship with God was routinely described in these legal terms, which is why the speaker can insist on having kept his side of it.

44:19

The KJV's "dragons" renders a Hebrew word for jackals, scavenging wild dogs that haunt ruins and abandoned country. "The place of jackals" is desolate wasteland where nobody lives. "The shadow of death" translates a Hebrew word for the very deepest darkness; the ear can hear "death-shadow" in it, but the plain sense is pitch blackness.

44:20

Spreading the hands out, palms open, was the ordinary bodily posture of prayer, so to spread your hands towards a god is to worship it. The KJV's "strange god" means foreign, a god belonging to some other nation, not a peculiar one.

44:21

In Hebrew the heart is the seat of thought, planning and decision, closer to what we would call the mind than to the feelings.

44:22

"For thy sake" means on your account, because of you. The claim is that the suffering falls on them precisely because they are known as God's people, not as punishment for anything they did. Paul quotes this verse in the New Testament, at Romans 8:36.

44:23

Telling God to wake up is standard blunt language in the psalms of complaint, where sleep is a figure for not acting. Neighboring cultures used the same image of their own gods.

44:24

Hiding the face is the exact reverse of "the light of your face" in verse 3: turning away, withholding attention and favor.

44:25

Literally "our belly clings to the earth", the posture of someone defeated or in mourning, lying face down in the dirt.

44:26

"Redeem" comes from family and property law: to buy something back, or to pay the price that frees a relative from slavery or debt. "Mercies" translates the Hebrew word chesed, the loyal, committed kindness owed to someone inside a binding relationship.