Ps. 74.19 (handing over the dove)

Give not / the life of your dove / to a wild beast
forget not completely / the life of your poor ones. 

These lines are reminiscent of the opening verses wherein the psalmist asks God why he is unrelenting in anger and, specifically, why his anger “smolders against the flock of your pasture” (vs. 1). There, the people of God are likened to animals as well—sheep against whom the anger of their shepherd burns. The image is clearly one of helplessness and, more importantly, the sense that the one who is duty-bound to protect them has, in fact, ignited a fire against them. Here, the sense is the same but the vulnerability is increased. Instead of being ‘a flock’, God’s people are now a single ‘dove’. And, instead of their destruction coming from the shepherd, it is their owner ‘giving them’ to a wild beast. The flame is replaced by a ‘wild beast’. Everything about these lines is intended to convey an extreme sense of tragedy. A dove is one of the weakest and most delicate of all birds. If it is in the possession of another—not a wild dove—then its existence is necessarily and utterly dependent on how that owner handles its life. It cannot protect itself. Here, that dove, owned by God, is ‘given’ to a ‘wild beast’. This being ‘given’ is really ‘being fed’, except for the fact that there is a latent indifference to what becomes of the dove. What was ‘acquired’ and ‘redeemed’ in verse 3, is now being transferred back, with the full knowledge that the transfer will result in death, a particularly violent one. Further, the psalmist has already recounted how God took the ‘wild beast’ of Leviathan and gave him as food to the desert animals (vs. 14). Here, the dove, the utter opposite of Leviathan, is being handed over to God’s enemies. The reversal of images is horrendous: Leviathan—the massive and wild beast-king of the seas; the dove—the small and delicate bird of air; Leviathan—the foe and ‘wild’ enemy of God; the dove—the domesticated creature owned by God; Leviathan—even in his strength is no match for God; the dove—in its utter vulnerability, is dependent upon its owner. The point is not merely that there is no justification for this transfer—the point is that the transfer is needlessly, and grotesquely, immoral. The transfer is one that should evoke horror. That is the first line. The second line partakes of the dynamic we have tracked throughout between God’s activity in this tragedy and his seeming passivity (the same dynamic between verses 1 and 2, the ‘anger’ and the ‘forgetting’). The second line focuses not on his ‘handing over’ but on his ‘forgetting’, his aloof passivity in the face of his ‘poor ones’’ destruction. Here, the point, as we saw yesterday, is that if God ‘forgets’, if his mastery is not enacted, “life” will be destroyed. And not just any life, but life that is owned by God: “the life of your poor ones”. Just as the dove is owned by God, so too are these poor ones. And, therefore, so too do they have the right to be protected by their owner. These, as in verse 2, were “acquired” and “redeemed” by God. God is their kinsman (their ‘redeemer’) who should act on their behalf due to the bonds created in his acquiring-redemption (i.e., his covenant).