Ps. 44.5-7 (a change in emphasis but not perspective)

“With you / we push back / our enemies; - in your name / we trample / our foes. – For / I will not / trust in / my bow – and my sword / will not give me / victory. – But / you have given us / victory over / our enemies – and put to shame / those who hate us.” We have already observed how the previous verse functioned as a type of transition, moving God’s action/responsibility into the present. Here, we begin to see how the past story of God’s deliverance is enacted with the current ‘children’ of the ‘fathers’. Importantly, the tone that is struck is different. Whereas before the action resided, utterly, in God’s initiative and man was essentially negated, here, there emerges something more relational. We can catch this by the observing in the first line how, now, it is “With you, we push back our enemies.” This is an important shift—before it was God’s “right hand and arm” and “their arm did not bring them victory”. Here, though, they are “with God” and battle “in your name”. The absolute nature of the previous verses is, here, softened.  There is, I believe, an important insight in this: the telling of the previous story was to ‘wake God up’, to inspire in him a covenantal continuity between what he did for “their fathers” and what he should be doing for “the sons”. The past, then, is not being retold simply to report; it is being retold to petition, to inspire and to re-ignite God’s concern. However, as the petition moves into the present, the emphasis changes. Now, the king (and “we”) alludes to the fact that God has enlivened them to ‘push back their enemies’. The purpose is the same but, because the psalm has now moved into the present, the emphasis is different. Now, the king is attempting to ignite God by appealing to the fact that they have been “with God” and have fought “in his name”. It is an experiential reference that attempts for forge a continuity between what has occurred in their own lives and what should occur now and in the future. That said, the central concern of the first section of the psalm is immediately regained: “I will not trust in my bow”; “my sword will not give me victory”. This is not only central in this psalm but is something that resonates, very clearly, throughout Israel’s military consciousness. This ‘negation’ of man’s ability to win victory for himself serves the point of emphasizing that any victory that is obtained is only achieved by way of God’s enlivening presence in their midst. In a way, the point is not so much as man’s inability as it serves to appeal to God to once again infuse his presence/power into their campaign(s). Again, this must be understood in the context of it being a rhetorical (and liturgical) way of imploring God to act. In other words, this is not as much a theological statement as it is a prayer and petition. One final observation: these words of man’s inability when placed in the context of being said after a massive defeat bring with them an almost haunting feel. It is as if the king were looking back at his defeat and realizing that God was simply not present with them; that the only thing fighting was his “sword and bow”. It is clearly not the case that the other gods were stronger, but, rather, that God’s presence and name had refused the engagement. There is almost a stinging sense of betrayal. And for a (real) last point: these lines formally work in the same manner as the previous in that God’s action bookends the verses with man’s inaction between. Such formal arraignment points, substantively, to the theme of the psalm—that the present seems to be a reverse (that man’s action is the only thing ‘fighting) and God seems absent. By arraigning it in this way the psalmist is attempting re-instate this understanding.