Ps. 74.13-15 (Temple, creation and mastery)

You put down / the Sea / with your great strength
you broke / the heads / of the Sea-Monsters / in the waters
You smashed / the heads / of Leviathan
giving him / as food / for the creatures / of the desert.
You cleft open / both spring and stream;
you dried up / flowing rivers. 

There are several points to make about these verses, many about what is stated and one about what is curiously absent. The absent first—in the first section of the psalm the main (indeed, almost entire) focus was on the destruction of the Temple (and the ‘meeting-places’). However, as we move into this section the Temple is curiously (and entirely) absent. What are we to make of this? Are these two poems that have been put together, one focusing on the Temple, the other on God’s redemptive act of creation? The answer to this, I think, lies in two places. First, as we saw in our reflection yesterday, there is a parallel in structure between the first half and the second. Further, that parallel shows us that the concern here is (although not entirely) primarily looking back to God’s establishment of his kingship when he ‘acquired’ and ‘redeemed’ Israel from the king Pharaoh. However, as verse 2 makes clear, the ‘goal’ of that redemptive acquiring was in the establishment of Zion (there is no mention of Sinai). Kingship (expressed in the militaristic dominance of the enemies of God and his people) and the establishment of the Temple are therefore intimately wed. Without going into great detail this is confirmed by a probable background to this portion of the psalm, when Baal battled the forces of Chaos in order to establish his ruling kingship. The ‘effect’ of a king’s conquering power is often the construction of a Temple. Pacification, then construction. The point is that within the psalm itself and the ‘ethos’ surrounding its possible source, there is a clear goal of the kingly violence and subjugation of Chaos as resulting in the construction of the (a) Temple. This occurs, without the necessary violent pacification, in the creation story of Genesis when God ‘separates’ the chaos waters and then separates water from land. There, the creation of the cosmos-Temple does not proceed by way of the kingly violence; creation, kingship and Temple coincide in a theological chronology. All of this leads us to see the violence in these verses as relating to God’s “acquiring” and “redeeming” of “his congregation” with the goal being the establishment of Zion (vs. 2). That, however, is only the first level. We have noted many times how the Exodus reveals creation, from the ‘parting of the sea’ to the seven commands of Moses in the construction of the Temple, to the ‘it is finished’. Creation is in the Exodus and Exodus is in the creation. The point is that there are clear depths and soundings to creation in these verses, just as in the exodus itself. Along these lines we must note something important about God’s acts in these verses: it is total, it is unequivocal and there is no hint of any real struggle on God’s part with these sea creatures. This is, not surprisingly, the same approach we see in the Exodus. It is difficult to call God’s redemption of Israel a ‘battle’ with Pharaoh in any really meaningful sense. God is utterly in control. In a way, he is just as much in control of him as he is of creation itself; it is in the end, effortless. All of these observations begin to point us toward what these verses are aiming at: for God to enact this ‘effortless, and creative mastery’ over the world. It is an appeal for a new creation. Furthermore, this brings to the surface two other elements of the psalm. First, the ‘effortlessness’ with which the foes attacked the Temple and destroyed it is now met by the effortless mastery of them (him) by God as he will “crush” its head (he will be the promised ‘seed’ that will crush the head of the serpent).  Further, this ‘crushing’ will be a ‘resurrection’/creative ‘raising from the dead’ of his ‘right hand’ (vs. 11). And here is the final, and perhaps most important point: that the psalmist conviction of God’s utter mastery over creation and his foes is both what engenders the confusion of the first half of the psalm and, more importantly, the conviction that God can re-create and redeem from the complete depths.