Ps. 74.23 (petition and sign)

Do not forget / the clamor / of your foes
the din / of those who rebel against you / which goes up continually. 

The noise of the wicked is “clamor” and “din”; it is, in other words, simply noise as opposed to praise/music. This ‘liturgy’ embodies their action: rebellion. To the psalmist it has no form, no meaning, no shape or structure. It has no coherence. In other portions of the psalm it is referred to as: “roaring” (vs. 4); and “taunting” and “scorn” (vs. 18; 22). This is always the noise of the wicked in the psalms. It is ‘liturgical’ in that it “goes up continually” like incense and praise. It is, willfully, aimed at heaven in the same way that their “signs” were meant to shame the Temple (which is heaven on earth). The wicked hope that God notices their racket. It is a mock-liturgy. The psalmist, too, hopes that God notices it but for opposite reasons—there is an aspect about the present situation that makes the psalmist revert to this image of absence, of God’s ‘forgetting’. So fully convinced is the psalmist that God’s power cannot be limited, and that God controls time—the present represents not a weakened God but an aloof or absent one. As we have argued throughout, this is the purpose of the psalm—to bring the present tragedy to God’s awareness. And it is the specific focus of this third portion—the calls to God are, almost without fail, calls for God to be ‘aware’, to have it ‘brought to his attention’ and ‘memory’. Once this reality is ‘made present’ to God, the psalmist is sure, redemption will occur, the clamor and din will cease, and the poor will “praise your name” (vs. 21). One final, exploratory, point: we noted in verse 9 how the absence of prophets and signs has left the psalmist and his community in a quandary as to whether God will redeem his name and them. I think we could say this in light of the repeated call to God to “remember”: that the psalmist invokes the things of remembrance so that they will be ‘signs’ to God. Those consist of the entire dynamic of righteous to wicked: “remember your congregation…your tribe…Mount Zion” (vs. 2); “the total ruin” of the Temple (vs. 3); desecration and embarrassment of the Temple; his own power of foes and time (vs. 13-17); the enemy taunt (vs. 18); his ‘dove’ (vs. 19); the covenant (vs. 20); humiliation of the oppressed (vs. 21). The entire panoply of the present situation is “signed” to God. Indeed, the petition itself is the attempt to place the ‘sign’ square in front of him so as to compel him to move.