Psalms 94: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The psalm calls on God, the judge of the earth who pays back wrong, to act against wicked people who crush his people and kill widows, foreigners, and orphans while saying God does not notice. It answers them by arguing that the God who made the ear and the eye does hear and see, and it says the person God corrects and teaches from his law is well off. The writer then says God's love held him up when he was slipping, asks whether corrupt rulers who make harm legal can be God's allies, and states that God will bring the wicked's own wrongdoing back on them.

Claim by Claim

1. 94:1
   • The LORD is a God of vengeance.
   • The psalmist addresses God as the one to whom vengeance belongs.
   • The psalmist calls on this God to shine forth and show himself.
2. 94:2
   • The psalmist calls on God to lift himself up.
   • God is the judge of the earth.
   • The psalmist asks God to render to the proud what they deserve.
3. 94:3
   • The psalmist asks the LORD how long the wicked will continue.
   • The psalmist asks how long the wicked will exult in triumph.
4. 94:4
   • The psalmist asks how long the wicked will pour out and speak arrogant, hard words.
   • All the workers of iniquity boast of themselves.
5. 94:5
   • They crush the LORD's people.
   • They afflict the LORD's heritage.
6. 94:6
   • They kill the widow and the resident foreigner.
   • They murder the fatherless.
7. 94:7
   • They say that the LORD does not see.
   • They say that the God of Jacob does not perceive it.
8. 94:8
   • The psalmist commands the brutish among the people to understand.
   • The psalmist asks the fools when they will become wise.
9. 94:9
   • God planted the ear.
   • The psalmist asks whether the one who planted the ear can fail to hear.
   • God formed the eye.
   • The psalmist asks whether the one who formed the eye can fail to see.
10. 94:10
    • God chastises the nations.
    • The psalmist asks whether the one who chastises the nations will not correct.
    • God teaches man knowledge.
    • The psalmist asks whether the one who teaches man knowledge does not himself know.
11. 94:11
    • The LORD knows the thoughts of man.
    • They are vanity, a mere breath.
    • It is not clear whether what is called vanity is man's thoughts or men themselves.
12. 94:12
    • Blessed is the man whom the LORD disciplines.
    • Blessed is the man whom the LORD teaches out of his law.
13. 94:13
    • God's discipline is meant to give that man rest from days of adversity.
    • A pit will be dug for the wicked.
14. 94:14
    • The LORD will not cast off his people.
    • The LORD will not forsake his inheritance.
15. 94:15
    • Judgment will return to righteousness.
    • All the upright in heart will follow after it.
16. 94:16
    • The psalmist asks who will rise up for him against the evildoers.
    • The psalmist asks who will stand up for him against the workers of iniquity.
17. 94:17
    • The LORD was the psalmist's help.
    • If the LORD had not been his help, his soul would almost have dwelt in silence.
18. 94:18
    • The psalmist said that his foot was slipping.
    • The LORD's covenant love held him up.
19. 94:19
    • The psalmist has a multitude of anxious thoughts within him.
    • God's comforts delight the psalmist's soul.
20. 94:20
    • The psalmist asks whether a throne of destruction can be allied with God.
    • That throne frames mischief by means of a decree.
21. 94:21
    • They band together against the life of the righteous.
    • They condemn innocent blood.
22. 94:22
    • The LORD has been the psalmist's stronghold.
    • The psalmist's God is the rock of his refuge.
23. 94:23
    • God will bring their own iniquity back upon them.
    • God will destroy them in their own wickedness.
    • The LORD our God will destroy them.

Words Worth Explaining

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

94:1

"Vengeance" translates a Hebrew word for legally owed payback, the redress a judge, or a wronged family's protector, is entitled to exact. It is a courtroom idea rather than private spite. "Shew thyself" renders a verb meaning to shine out or blaze forth, used of God appearing in light to rescue or to pass sentence. Note also that where the King James prints LORD in capital letters it is standing in for God's personal name in Hebrew, while plain "Lord" is the ordinary title meaning master.

94:2

"Render a reward" does not mean hand out a prize. In 1611 English a "reward" was simply what someone had coming to them, good or bad; here it is the payment due for wrongdoing.

94:3

"Triumph" in the King James means to gloat or crow over a victory, not to win one.

94:4

Iniquity is a King James word for wrongdoing, especially wrong that a person chooses on purpose. It appears again in verses 16 and 23.

94:5

"Heritage" here, and "inheritance" in v. 14, translate a Hebrew word for the plot of land permanently allotted to a family and handed down through it. Israel is spoken of as the portion allotted to God himself, property he holds rather than something he can trade away or lose.

94:6

Widows, fatherless children and resident foreigners were the three groups in Israelite society with no man of the household to speak for them in court or hold land on their behalf. Israel's laws single them out repeatedly for protection, which is why harming them stands here as the sharpest available example of lawlessness.

94:7

Jacob was the ancestor from whom the twelve tribes of Israel were reckoned to descend. "The God of Jacob" is a standard way of saying the God this particular nation worships.

94:8

"Brutish" in 1611 English meant animal-like, dull, unable to reason things through. It did not mean cruel or violent.

94:9

"Planted the ear" is a picture from gardening. God set the ear in the head the way a gardener sets a plant in the ground.

94:10

"The heathen" in the King James simply means the nations, the peoples other than Israel. It carries no suggestion of savagery or of having no religion.

94:11

"Vanity" in the King James does not mean conceit. It means emptiness: the Hebrew word pictures a breath or a puff of vapor, something with no substance that cannot be held onto.

94:12

"Blessed" here means fortunate, well off, in an enviable position, a comment on how the person stands, not a status conferred on them. "Chastenest" means disciplines or trains, as a parent trains a child, rather than punishes. "Thy law" translates torah, a word covering instruction and teaching as much as legislation.

94:13

A pit dug for the wicked is a hunting image: a covered trap dug in the ground for a large animal to fall into. The digging goes on out of sight while the quarry walks about unaware.

94:15

This line is compressed in the Hebrew and can be read more than one way: that legal verdicts will go back to being based on what is right, or that the right to judge will pass back to those who are upright. The rendering takes the first sense; the ambiguity is in the original.

94:17

"The land of silence" is the world of the dead, pictured in Hebrew poetry as a place underground where no one speaks and nothing is heard. To go and live there means simply to die.

94:18

"Mercy" translates hesed, the loyal and committed love that one party owes another inside a binding relationship. It is dependable follow-through rather than a warm feeling.

94:19

The Hebrew word behind "my thoughts" means specifically the churning, unsettling kind, worries and agitation, not ideas.

94:20

A "throne" stands for the person sitting on it and the power he holds; in Israel the king was also the highest court, so a corrupt throne is a crooked judge. "Frameth mischief by a law" means writing harm into the statutes, making injustice legal rather than merely committing it.

94:21

"Condemn the innocent blood" is a Hebrew legal idiom: to return a guilty verdict, and so a death sentence, against someone whose blood carries no bloodguilt. "Blood" here stands for a life taken.

94:22

"Defence" and "rock of my refuge" draw on the terrain of Judea, where a high outcrop of rock with caves and ledges was a literal hiding place from raiders or an army, hard to reach and impossible to shift.

94:23

"Cut them off" is a standard Hebrew expression for putting someone to death or wiping out their family line, not merely for shutting them out.