Ps. 79.6 (wrath and counterpoint)

Pour out you wrath / on the nations
those who do not / know you 
Pour out your wrath / on kingdoms
who have not / called on your name. 

Counterpoint. It has almost become something of a mantra: when God enacts his judgment it directly and precisely mimics the sin that it responds to. It has flowed through every psalm of judgment we have seen. When God acts he does not act in an arbitrary act of power and destruction. Rather, it gathers together the sin perpetrated and hurls it back on their heads. Here, the same act is called for. The command is repeated twice: “Pour out (your wrath)…”. This act of ‘pouring out’ has already occurred: when the nations “poured out their blood like water around Jerusalem.” The holy blood that poured into the Land is now going to be answered by a heavenly ‘pouring out’ of wrath. They drenched the Land in sacrilege; they will now be drenched in God’s wrath. Further, in this we see a close connection between ‘blood and wrath’. The blood of God’s servants becomes a mode of God’s wrath—in mimicking the nation’s actions, God reveals his intense devotion to the blood of his own. It is as if the two coincide in some fashion—that the ‘pouring out’ of their blood is separated chronologically but not essentially from God’s wrath. It is a ‘call and response’ that is certain to occur. 

Knowing and calling. The blood that was poured out is specific. It was the blood of God’s servants and ‘devoted ones’. These were special objects of affection to Yhwh. They were, although not stated, those who “knew” and “called upon” his Name. They were, in this way, the antithesis of the nations. Their blood was, for this reason, holy blood. They were sacred(sacra-mental perhaps). In the ‘call-and-response’ mentioned above must be inserted vs. 5 where the Name is directly ‘called upon’. In this way the Name operates like a pivot or hinge for the judgment. It is what ‘presence-es’ God. Lastly, this ‘calling out’ on God’s name must be perceived as an act of ‘knowing’, an intimate form of personal face-to-face, loving perception of God. What we see here is that these two concepts must be held together—knowing and calling—although not identified. 

Nations and kingdoms. The objects of wrath are the negative mirrors of God’s holy servants. They stand not only in conceptual distance from God but are alienated from him. There is the sense here not that they are simply aloof of Yhwh, but stand in rebellion to him. This is clear from the fact that these nations and kingdoms are the ones who have engaged in deliberate acts of shaming Yhwh and his people, by and through their intentional defiling of his Temple, the destruction of his city and their refusal to bury the bodies of his holy ones. Their “knowing and calling out” cannot be separated from their actions. Their lack of ‘knowing and calling out’ is, itself, the ‘vocal’ counterpoint to their sacrilege.