Ps. 79.5 (cleaving the present)

How long / O Yhwh?
Will you be angry forever?
Will your jealousy / burn like fire forever? 

The past. One aspect of the psalm that we have completely overlooked is why the psalmist is recounting the past in the first place and, more specifically, why has he recounted it in the way he has. The answer to this is not difficult to fathom when we look back to previous psalms of lament. The psalmist is attempting to awaken in Yhwh the same sense of revulsion and horror that he himself experiences when recounting these events. They have been artfully and rhetorically crafted in order to create this ‘descending sense of defilement’. In verse 4 the action ‘hit the bottom’. Here, it begins to turn around. 

The present. We have noted how the previous section dealt with an action in the past. That said, the final verse began the transition to the present by detailing how the destruction has caused the ongoing “contempt, scorn and derision”. Now, in this verse, we find out that the temporal movement has turned into a type of stasis, a non-time. In other words, it is as if time itself has now become subject to the ‘defilement’ that has consumed the Temple, Jerusalem, the holy ones, the Land and their reputation. Things have ceased moving forward and are, instead, slipping into decay and chaos. The name. It is key that from within this non-time the psalmist cries out not just to God (“El”) but to Yhwh. As we will see, by ‘calling upon the name’ the psalmist places himself in direct opposition to those that have been the cause of the defilement. They are specifically designated as “those who have not called on your name”. (vs. 6). It is key. The psalmist is attempting to ignite the present, to get time moving forward again. He does this by placing the divine name directly into the midst of the defilement and, by doing so, placing the source of the sacred into the midst of defilement and thereby cleanse it. We might say, by calling on the Name he is attempting to “presence Yhwh” into their time-situation. 

Anger and jealousy. The source of defilement is not the weakness of Yhwh and his inability to defend his Temple and his people (as the nations will later taunt the speaker; vs. 10). It is, rather, Yhwh’s anger with his people. There is an internal cause to Yhwh’s distance, not an external force working against Yhwh. This shift in tone is instructive. The psalm’s opening feels as if the defilement is one of overwhelming absence, an almost supreme indifference to the nation’s defilement. Here, however, a different note is struck. The entire drama has actually been encompassed within the will of Yhwh’s anger and jealousy. There is something in this we need to speculate about—anger makes one ‘double’; one is never unified when one is angry (this is not the case with love, as that is the experience of inner unity). Anger and jealousy, by definition, create a split within the person enacting it—it is the response to injustice. For that reason, when the psalmist describes God as ‘angry and jealous’ there is no problem meshing the two sections of the psalm. A person in anger can be ‘actively indifferent’; they can be ‘actively forgetful’. The point is that the duality itself is an expression of the anger. And this, I think, is what we see contained in this question posed to Yhwh. The ‘gap’ created in the present—the distance between sacrilege and holiness—is the gap of Yhwh’s anger, his duality. But this anger is one that is, importantly, rooted in his anger with Israel. They have created the gap; they are responsible for cleaving the present in two. This is an important thing to note as it is the first instance of a theme that will continue.