Psalms 74: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This is a community lament sung after enemies broke into the sanctuary, burned it, smashed its carved work, and destroyed every place in the land where people met with God. The singer asks God how long the rejection and the enemy's taunting will last, and notes that there are no signs left and no prophet who can say how long. The middle of the psalm recalls God's old acts of power, splitting the sea, crushing the sea monsters, opening springs, drying up rivers, setting day and night, the boundaries of the earth, and the seasons. It closes by asking God to remember the covenant, to defend his own cause, and not to ignore the enemies' growing uproar.

Claim by Claim

1. 74:1
   • The psalm is a maskil, a contemplative or instructive composition.
   • The psalm is attributed to Asaph.
   • The speaker asks God why he has rejected them forever.
   • The speaker asks why God's anger smokes against the sheep of his pasture.
   • The people are called the sheep of God's pasture.
2. 74:2
   • The speaker asks God to remember his congregation.
   • God acquired that congregation long ago.
   • God redeemed the tribe of his inheritance.
   • Mount Zion is named as the place where God has dwelt.
3. 74:3
   • The speaker asks God to lift up his steps toward the perpetual ruins.
   • The enemy has done damage to everything in the sanctuary.
4. 74:4
   • God's adversaries roared in the midst of his meeting place.
   • The adversaries set up their own emblems as signs.
5. 74:5
   • The scene is like men swinging axes upward in a thicket of trees.
   • The King James reads it as a man being renowned according as he lifted axes upon the thick trees.
   • The wording of the verse is obscure.
6. 74:6
   • Now they smash the carved work of the sanctuary all together.
   • They strike it down with hatchet and hammers.
7. 74:7
   • They set God's sanctuary on fire.
   • They defiled the dwelling place of God's name to the ground.
8. 74:8
   • They said in their hearts that they would destroy them all together.
   • They burned all the meeting places of God in the land.
9. 74:9
   • We do not see our signs.
   • There is no longer any prophet.
   • There is no one among us who knows how long this will last.
10. 74:10
    • The speaker asks God how long the adversary will taunt.
    • The speaker asks whether the enemy will revile God's name forever.
11. 74:11
    • The speaker asks why God withdraws his hand, even his right hand.
    • The speaker asks God to bring his hand out from his bosom and make an end.
12. 74:12
    • God is the speaker's king from of old.
    • God works acts of salvation in the midst of the earth.
13. 74:13
    • God divided the sea by his strength.
    • God broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters.
14. 74:14
    • God crushed the heads of Leviathan.
    • God gave Leviathan as food.
    • The recipients of that food are either a people of the desert or the creatures of the desert.
15. 74:15
    • God split open spring and torrent.
    • God dried up ever-flowing rivers.
16. 74:16
    • The day belongs to God.
    • The night also belongs to God.
    • God established the luminary and the sun.
17. 74:17
    • God set all the boundaries of the earth.
    • God formed summer and winter.
18. 74:18
    • The speaker asks God to remember this.
    • The enemy has reproached the LORD.
    • A foolish people has reviled God's name.
19. 74:19
    • The speaker asks God not to hand over the life of his dove to the wild beast.
    • The speaker asks God not to forget the life of his afflicted ones forever.
20. 74:20
    • The speaker asks God to have regard for the covenant.
    • The dark places of the land are full of dwellings of violence.
21. 74:21
    • The speaker asks that the crushed not turn back humiliated.
    • The speaker asks that the poor and needy praise God's name.
22. 74:22
    • The speaker calls God to arise.
    • The speaker calls God to plead his own case.
    • The speaker asks God to remember the reproach the fool brings against him all day long.
23. 74:23
    • The speaker asks God not to forget the voice of his adversaries.
    • The uproar of those who rise against God ascends continually.

Words Worth Explaining

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

74:1

"Your anger burns" translates a Hebrew image of anger smoking, smoke rising from a fire that has been left to smolder. The picture is of God's nose or face steaming with rage. "Sheep of your pasture" is standard ancient language for a people and their ruler: a king was a shepherd, and his subjects were the flock he was supposed to guard and feed.

74:2

Three legal or commercial words pile up here. "Bought" and "set free" (KJV "purchased" and "redeemed") both come from the world of buying back property or paying to release a slave or a relative from debt; used of God and Israel they point back to the escape from Egypt. "Inheritance" is the language of land handed down in a family, so calling a people God's inheritance means they are his permanent, non-transferable property. Where the KJV has "the rod of thine inheritance," the Hebrew word means both a measuring rod and a tribe, the two senses run together, because tribes were defined by the land measured out to them. Mount Zion is the ridge in Jerusalem on which the temple stood.

74:3

"The holy place" (KJV "sanctuary") is the temple in Jerusalem, the walled complex containing the building where God was understood to be present, along with its courts and altar. The psalm never names the attacking army; readers have most often connected the scene to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587/586 BC, but the psalm itself leaves the enemy unidentified.

74:4

The KJV's "ensigns" are military standards, poles carrying an army's emblem, often the image or symbol of the god it fought under. Planting them in a captured shrine was the normal way an ancient army announced that the place and its god now belonged to the victor. The bitter point is that these signs are standing where the signs of Israel's own worship should be (see verse 9).

74:5

The Hebrew of verses 5 and 6 is damaged or garbled, and no translation of verse 5 is certain; ancient and modern versions differ widely. The general sense that most translators reconstruct is a comparison: the soldiers hacking at the temple's woodwork look like woodcutters swinging axes in a forest.

74:6

The temple's interior was lined with cedar and olive wood carved with palm trees, flowers and winged figures, and overlaid with gold (described in 1 Kings 6). Stripping and smashing this panelling would both destroy the building and strip out the gold.

74:7

"The place where your name lives" is a fixed Hebrew way of speaking about the temple. To put your name on a place was to claim ownership of it and to be present there in person through your reputation; the phrase avoids saying that God was confined to the building. "Left it unclean" (KJV "defiled") is ritual language: the site was rendered unfit for worship, a state that could only be undone by specific ceremonies, not by cleaning.

74:8

The KJV's "synagogues" is an anachronism, synagogues as buildings did not yet exist. The Hebrew says "the meeting places of God" in the land; what these were is disputed. They may have been local shrines or assembly sites outside Jerusalem, or the phrase may be a plural of grandeur for the temple itself.

74:9

"Signs" here means visible evidence that God is still acting, a miracle, an answered request, a message through a prophet. The word deliberately echoes the enemy's "signs" in verse 4: the invaders' battle flags are on display, and God's are not. "No one knows how long" is the complaint that no prophet is left who can put a limit on the disaster.

74:10

"Reproach" means to taunt or shame someone publicly, and "blaspheme" here means to insult or revile, not the narrower modern sense of religious swearing. The logic of the taunt is that a god whose temple has been burned has been proved weak, so the insult lands on God and not only on the defeated people.

74:11

The right hand stands for a person's power in action, since most people fight and work with it. Ancient robes had a deep fold across the chest used as a pocket, and a hand tucked into it is a hand deliberately kept out of use. The image is of God sitting with his arms folded while his people are attacked.

74:12

"In the middle of the earth" is literal, and the point is publicity, not geography: the rescues being remembered were done out in the open where everyone could see them, not in private.

74:13

The Hebrew word behind the KJV's "dragons" is tanninim, large sea creatures or sea monsters. Verses 13 and 14 use imagery shared across the ancient Near East, in which the world began with a god defeating a monster of the sea and its many heads. The Hebrew poets used the same picture, and it also runs alongside the memory of the sea splitting at the escape from Egypt, the two are hard to separate, and the psalm does not separate them.

74:14

Leviathan is a many-headed sea monster known outside the Bible from Canaanite poetry found at Ugarit, where a similar creature with seven heads is defeated by a god. The second line is obscure in Hebrew: the phrase translated "the creatures that live in the desert" could refer to desert animals, to sea creatures, or to a group of people, and translators disagree on all three.

74:15

"You broke open springs and streams" recalls water struck from a rock in the desert; "you dried up rivers that had never stopped flowing" recalls the sea and the Jordan being pushed back so the people could cross. The same power that opens water can also shut it off.

74:16

The KJV's "the light and the sun" is a fair rendering of the Hebrew, which pairs an ordinary word for light-giver with the word for sun. Because day and night have just been named together, many translators take the first word to mean the moon; others keep the more general "light." Both readings are defensible.

74:17

"Boundaries of the earth" refers to the fixed limits of the created world, the lines separating sea from dry land and the edges of the inhabited world, and the summer-and-winter pairing likewise stands for the fixed order of the seasons. The point of these verses is that the God being addressed is the one who set the whole system running.

74:18

"Foolish" here does not mean unintelligent. The Hebrew word describes someone morally worthless, coarse, godless, contemptuous of what others hold sacred. It is a judgment on character, not on intelligence.

74:19

The KJV's "turtledove" is a small wild dove, a stock image for something defenseless with no way to fight back. The line has a second uncertainty: the Hebrew word rendered "wild beasts" can also mean "multitude" or "living creature," which is why the KJV has "the multitude of the wicked" and other versions have "beasts." The two halves of the verse are also built on the same pattern, so "the life of your dove" and "the lives of your suffering people" refer to the same thing.

74:20

The covenant is the formal agreement between God and Israel, drawn up in the style of ancient treaties between a great king and a lesser one, with sworn commitments on both sides. Asking God to "pay attention to" it is asking him to honor his own side of a contract. "Dark corners of the land" may mean unlit hiding places where violent men operate, or the whole land now sunk into darkness, the Hebrew supports both.

74:21

To "return ashamed" is to come away from asking for help with nothing, publicly humiliated. In this culture shame was not a private feeling but a loss of standing in front of everyone, so being sent away empty was itself a kind of injury.

74:22

"Plead thine own cause" is courtroom language: it means argue your own case as a party to a lawsuit. The poet's move is to stop asking for a favor and instead tell God that his own reputation is what is on trial here.

74:23

"Tumult" is the roar of a hostile crowd, and "increaseth continually" pictures the noise rising without a break. The psalm ends on that unresolved sound rather than on an answer.