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COMMENTARY ON PSALM 79 A psalmfor Asaph. HE INSPIRED WORD PROPHESIES the frenzy of Antiochus, nicknamed Epiphanes, against the people of the Jews.I It expresses the oracle as a prayer offered by pious people at a time in the future when, though not yet defeated, they were still beset by calamities. (2) 0 God, the nations entered your inheritance, they defiled your holy Temple (v. 1). The grace of the Spirit wisely taught the people struggling with those difficult problems to fall to prayer: they narrated in the first place not their own suffering but the sacrilege committed against the divine Temple, the Temple having committed no fault against the divine Law. Nations given to a life of impiety and lawlessness, he is saying, gained power over your inheritance: they presumed to gain entry to the recesses ofyour Temple. (3) It was not only, however, that they polluted your holy places with demons' altars and sacrifices. They turned Jerusalem into a hut ofa garden-watcher: after totally ravaging the whole city, they made the famous Jerusalem no different from a hut of a garden-watcher. [1 505] They turned your servants' corpses into food for the birds of heaven, the flesh ofyour holy ones for the beasts of the earth (v. 2): they directed such ferocity and frenzy against your attendants as to expose their bodies as a meal for beasts and flesh-eating birds. They poured out their blood like water around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them (v. 3): possessed of a bloodthirsty mentality, they did away with those of pious life, I. Theodoret is aware of the association of this psalm with the Maccabean wars, while not adverting to quotation of it (v. 3 specifically, as 1 Macc 7.17) as a "word that was written" before the events described there and already enjoying canonical status. But, as usual, he sees the author (referred to obliquely in these Asaph psalms) composing with prophetic perspective before those events. 41 42 THEODORET OF CYRUS and made their blood flow in streams down onto the earth, not allowing the slaughtered to be given burial. (4) We have become a laughing stock to our neighbors, a mockery and taunt for those around us (v. 4). These things rendered us an object of reproach to our neighbors; on account of them we became a source of glee to our associates. He refers to the Philistines, Idumeans, Ammonites, Moabites, and the other nearby nations as neighbors, opposed and hostile as they always were. How long, 0 Lord? will you be angry forever? will yourjealousy burn like fire? (v. 5). In giving the Law God ordered [them] to serve him alone and to adore no one else as a god: "Because I am the Lord your God," he is saying, "a jealous God, a devouring fire. "2 As has often been said by us, however, no one hearing of one God should form the impression of a monarchy: he gives the name God to the being without limit and always in existence that we adore as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; but let no one of the more scholarly be in any doubt that God the Word, who isJesus Christ, our Savior, gives the law. The inspired word recalls this here, too: will your jealousy burn like a fire? Be angry with us no further, Lord, he is saying, nor inflame jealousy against us like fire on account of our failings. (5) Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on kingdoms that do not call on your name (v. 6): since you require penalty for sins from human beings, I beg that you transfer your rage against those who in no way wish to learn your name, and instead are in thrall to extreme impiety. Because they devouredJacob and laid waste his place (v. 7): this, too, was a clear sign of their impiety, putting us to death, ravaging the country, and devastating the cities without enduring any trouble from us. His place, on the other hand, Aquila rendered as "his appearance ," Symmachus, "his beauty" and Theodotion, "his charm," which are better indicators of the divine [1508] house.3 He was right to call the peopleJacob, prompting God to mercy with mention of the ancestor. 2. A conflation of Exod 34.14 and Deut 4.24. The longer form of the text is now prompted to insert a theological corrective in case any nitpicking...

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