Psalm 80: Israel has fallen

Books 1 and 2 of the Psalms focused on the reign of David and his sons (Psalms 1–72). Seeing the kingdom fall in Book 3 is heart-rending:

Psalm 79:1 O God, the nations have invaded your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple, they have reduced Jerusalem to rubble.

The disintegration began when Solomon died and the kingdom split (1 Kings 12). Only Judah (the southern kingdom) retained the Davidic kingship and worshipped in Jerusalem. The northern tribes made Samaria their capital, crowning their own kings, setting up their own worship centres. Eventually, both kingdoms fell.

Psalm 80 responds to the fall of Israel to Assyria in 722 BC. Psalm 89 responds to the fall of Judah to Babylon in 586 BC. We’ll keep Psalm 89 for next time.

Psalm 80:title-3 (ESV)
To the choirmaster: according to Lilies. A Testimony. Of Asaph, a Psalm.
¹ Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock. You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth.
² Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, stir up your might and come to save us!
³ Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved!

Ephraim and Manasseh dominated the northern kingdom. They were Joseph’s sons who became tribes in their own right because Jacob gave Joseph the family’s inheritance rights (Genesis 48). Joseph’s brothers had tried to bring him down, but God had raised him up. Joseph saved his family and many others (Genesis 50:20). Jacob entrusted the leadership of his family to Joseph, because God had done so:

Genesis 49:24, 26 (NIV)
²⁴ “His [Joseph’s] bow remained steady, his strong arms stayed limber, because of the hand of the Mighty One of Jacob, because of the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel …
²⁶ “Let all these [blessings] rest on the head of Joseph, on the brow of the prince among his brothers.”

Shepherd was the word Jacob chose to describe how God had led him all the days of his life (Genesis 48:15). Jacob’s Shepherd made Joseph the prince among his brothers.

The family was meant to be under God’s reign. That’s what the Sinai covenant established. They provided a house for their heavenly sovereign, with a throne where the Lord could sit enthroned between the cherubim (symbolic guards of the presence) (verse 1).

But the guiding light of God’s presence was gone as Jacob’s favourite tribes now sat under the shadow of Assyria. (Jospeh and Benjamin were Rachel’s sons.)

Yet, Psalm 80 is more than a lament for the loss of the kingdom. It’s an invitation for God to return and reign over them. They approach the heavenly throne, asking God to rescue them from Assyria and restore them to his reign (verse 3).

Psalm 80:4-7 (ESV)
⁴ O Lord God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers?
⁵ You have fed them with the bread of tears and given them tears to drink in full measure.
⁶ You make us an object of contention for our neighbours, and our enemies laugh among themselves.
⁷ Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved!

We’re using the English Standard Version for this psalm because it translates the phrase YHWH Elohim Sebaot correctly as “Lord God of hosts” (verses 4, 7, 14, 19):

• YHWH is the name of God revealed in the Sinai covenant.
• Elohim means God (or gods).
• Sebaot comes from saba meaning multitudes, a vast array.

Unfortunately, some translations interpret rather than translate. The New Living Translation (NLT) gets completely lost, rendering it, “God of Heaven’s Armies.”

Saba was often used of military forces. You don’t tell the enemy how many troops you have; it’s better to say you have hosts—more than they can cope with. That’s why the NLT interprets hosts as “armies” instead of translating it. Then they add another word that’s not there in Hebrew, making it heaven’s armies. Over-interpretative translations don’t help; they muddy the meaning.

The truth is that God reigns over both realms: the hosts of angelic beings in the heavens, and the hosts of people on earth. The phrase YHWH of Hosts (or God of hosts) occurs more than 280 times in Scripture, mostly in the Prophets. In several cases, it has to do with God’s authority over the nations (e.g. Zechariah 8).

The point is not that God has some heavenly armies to whip the Assyrians. The point is that God reigns over all the hosts in heaven and on earth — including the Assyrians.

God’s sovereign authority over everyone is crucial. God’s people don’t say, “Assyria was too strong for us.” They say, “We angered God with our disobedience, so he handed us over to our enemies.” God will restore them when he is ready. But when? Life is painful under foreign control. They approach their sovereign to ask, “How long?”

The pain is not just their enslavement by Assyria. It’s the shame of being thrown aside by God (verse 6).

That brings us back to the unanswered prayer, the song’s refrain (verses 3, 7, 19).

In their crushing anguish and loss of identity, they look back to see who God called them to be. Struggling with the consequences of their unfaithfulness, God’s covenant faithfulness is the one reality they rely on:

Psalm 80:8-13 (ESV)
⁸ You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it.
⁹ You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land.
¹⁰ The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches.
¹¹ It sent out its branches to the sea and its shoots to the River.
¹² Why then have you broken down its walls, so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit?
¹³ The boar from the forest ravages it, and all that move in the field feed on it.

Can you make sense of that poetic description of Israel’s history? What elements do you see here? The exodus? The kingdom? The fall of the kingdom?

Once again, this is not just a lament for what went wrong. It’s a prayer, a plea for God to rescue them:

Psalm 80:14-19 (ESV)
¹⁴ Turn again, O God of hosts! Look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine,
¹⁵ the stock that your right hand planted, and for the son whom you made strong for yourself.
¹⁶ They have burned it with fire; they have cut it down; may they perish at the rebuke of your face!
¹⁷ But let your hand be on the man of your right hand, the son of man whom you have made strong for yourself!
¹⁸ Then we shall not turn back from you; give us life, and we will call upon your name!
¹⁹ Restore us, O Lord God of hosts! Let your face shine, that we may be saved!

People (Assyrians) destroyed God’s garden, the vineyard God planted (verses 14-16).

The solution will be for God to raise up his right-hand man (verse 17). Who is this? Who is the human descendant (son of man) to whom God restores the authority he gave humans in the beginning, i.e. heaven’s dominion on earth? (Compare Psalm 8:4 ESV)

It sounds like they’re praying for the restoration of the Davidic king. Is that their hope? Hadn’t these northern tribes walked away from David’s reign and Jerusalem worship centuries earlier? These “sins of Jeroboam” were repeated in every generation.

Israel may have walked away from the Lord and got themselves enslaved, but their heavenly sovereign had not walked away from them. Hosea and Amos — both prophets to the northern kingdom — held out to Israel the hope of returning to David’s reign (Hosea 3:5; Amos 9:11). So did Ezekiel (37:15-28). Even in New Testament times, some were hoping to see God restoring the twelve tribes (Acts 26:7).

Given that Asaph was a temple worship leader in Jerusalem, we probably should hear Psalm 80 as a combined prayer from Jerusalem and the fallen Samaritan kingdom for God’s face to shine on them and restore their broken nation.

For us

When did God’s face shine on the region of Samaria where the ancient capital of Israel used to be? When did God answer the prayers of Psalm 80, and rescue the northern tribes from foreign rule?

The king of Assyria had resettled Samaria with people from all over (2 Kings 17:24), so there was considerable animosity between Jews and Samaritans. In the fifth century BC, the Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim (the place of blessing named in Deuteronomy 11:29). In 111 BC, the Jews knocked it down. You could say, “Jews do not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9).

So, it was totally counter-cultural when Jesus decided he had to go through Samaria (John 4:4). A Jewish man talking to a Samaritan woman crossed so many boundaries (4:27). She raised the issue of which mountain was God’s chosen place of worship (4:20). She’d heard that God’s anointed ruler would come one day and resolve the misunderstandings between Jews and Samaritans (4:25). So, it was to a Samaritan that Jesus first revealed his identity as the Messiah (4:26).

When the Samaritans realized God’s anointed ruler had come to them, they recognized Jesus not as the Saviour of the Jews, nor as the Saviour of the Samaritans, but as the Saviour of the world (4:42).

The prayers of Psalm 80:19 had been answered. The Lord God of hosts — the eternal God whose sovereign authority extends not only to the Jews but to all the peoples of the earth — had shown them this kindness (his face shining on them) to save them from oppression and restore them to his reign. They recognized God’s Christ: “This man really is the Saviour of the world.” (John 4:42)

What the Samaritans understood informs the way we pray for the world to be restored into the reign of God who is Lord of all: Restore us, O Lord God of hosts! Let your face shine, that we may be saved! (Psalm 80:19)

Is this what you pray for? What do you think the Samaritans meant by calling the Messiah “the world’s Saviour”? (John 4:42) What did the temple worshippers mean when they asked God “that we may be saved”? (Psalm 89:3, 7, 19)? How does this background shape the way you understand salvation?

Adapted from “Formed in God’s Story: Psalms.” Full notes and podcasts here.

Related posts

• The story of the Psalms: a survey of the five books
• Psalm 22: David’s “defeat”