Ps. 80.12-13 (the collapse)

Why have you / broken its wall
so that vagrants / may pluck its fruit?
Wild boars / root it up
and field animals / feed on it.

The tempting. In the immediately preceding verse the Vine had grown to the limits of the Land. It had become the promise of Deuteronomy to Israel to inhabit the land from the south to the north and the east to the west. It is important to see how, in that verse, the Vine had reached a type of conclusion, a zenith or goal. There was no remainder for it. It had become fully self-possessed. Yet, as everyone around them would have recognized, it was no mere vine, but one that was growing under the impetus of the divine. Heaven was infusing it with power. It radiated and shimmered with divine favor. Because of this, though, it simultaneously became the object of desire. The more evident its divine backing became, the more it ascended into glory, the more it also attracted the attention of envy. It is impossible to achieve this beauty without the consequent danger. This reality is deepened by the observation that Israel is portrayed as a plant, not a kingdom. And like any plant, it does not contain in itself an ability to defend itself against devouring animals. In order for it to truly thrive, it would require a gardener. To make the image even more acute: Israel is a vine, not a luxuriant and strong tree. In other words, Israel’s ability to become what God promised it would become (a vine covering the Land) would necessitate God’s divine concern and protection, like any prized plant. This necessity of protection is referred to in this verse as a “wall” that has been constructed around Israel.

The garden. Up to this point in the psalm the boundary of the vine has been the boundary of the promise outlined in Deuteronomy; it is the Land. Here, however, for the first time we have a ‘wall’ that has been constructed around the vine. What is clear from these verses is that the purpose of the wall is not simply to protect the Vine but to prevent the influx of chaos. And here we come to a point in the psalm that has hitherto remained hidden—the Land is in fact a Garden. The ‘boundary’ of the Land—the boundary established by the promise—is the demarcation of God’s holy Garden, within which he has cultivated this divinely empowered Vine. As today, so in the ancient world, it was not uncommon for king’s to construct gardens around which they established a wall. The point is profound: the Land is the establishment of God’s holy Garden, a place of cultivated concern, and in which he has planted Israel to be his prized possession. As it grows, it grows under the influence and power of this new Eden.

The enclosure. Likewise, what is clear is that Israel’s growth depends upon its being a private, domesticated, and enclosed Garden. The fact that it necessitates a wall at all points to the fact that outside its boundary stands wild, chaotic and threatening forces. The book of Job describes a very similar reality: when Satan approaches God in the book of Job, he complains that God has “put a hedge around” Job making it impossible for him to attack him. It is when God removes the hedge that Satan is given access to Job. Israel and Job are both contained within God’s protective sphere, not only for their ‘protection’, though, but for their growth. They are cultivated for their fruitfulness and for their beauty.

Preparing for the collapse. Without warning, the psalm shifts perspective. It is jarring, and it is meant to be. This prized Vine, the most astonishing in all the world, has been taken by her Gardner from near death (in Egypt), and transplanted into his own garden. He clears the Land of its weeds and he himself plants the Vine. And the Vine’s growth is beyond astonishing. It actually brings a type of unity to the Garden that is entirely unpredictable (dwarfing mountains and covering cedars). It is crucial to see how lovingly the psalmist has developed the drama of the Vine. It is, by far, the most developed and lengthy portion of the psalm. Its growth is nine lines. Its destruction is less than half that, at four lines. There are two reasons for this. One, the growth of the Vine is a constant source of joy—we might even say the constant source of joy—precisely because it involves the intimate dialogue of concern between the Gardner and his Vine. Second, the psalmist, as we have shown, is attempting to lift this history past the fumes of God’s wrath so that it could move him to act again for the Vine. In other words, he is crafting this beautiful story in order to get God’s attention, to remind him not only of his past concern but of what his concern can accomplish. The Vine is the display of covenant power, a theophany of God’s concern. Everything, then, has been leading up to the question now posed.

The collapse. At the zenith of the Vine’s glory, her wall collapses. It is important to see that the psalmist has orchestrated his psalm to emphasize the utterly absurd. Her moment of fulfilling the promise made to her by God becomes the moment at which he tears down the wall protecting her and allows the flood of chaos to come raging into the Garden. She was not in decline; she was not in the ascendant. She had arrived—and then she is destroyed. It, quite literally, makes no sense. It is not the case that her Gardner could not maintain the wall; quite the opposite, he is so sovereign over his own Garden that for the wall to fail is the same as his breaking it down (vs. 12a). Just as the responsibility for her redemption and astonishing grown reside solely in the graciousness of her Gardner, so too does the responsibility for her collapse reside solely within him. Yet, perhaps importantly, she does not resign herself into a type of, “The Gardner gives and the Gardner takes away…”. Rather, she asks why he would treat her so unjustly. His history with her has convinced her that he is good(ness), that he is, in fact, a Gardener. And no gardener deploys so much effort and concern for a plant, raising her to the glory of the world, and then breaks down her protective barrier. What could possibly motivate him to act like this?

The flood. Through the breach comes all of the forces that the wall had meant to protect the Vine against: undomesticated and unholy beasts. The first act of despoiling involves her fruit. It is plucked by ‘vagrants’. Actually, this is the first mention of the Vine’s produce. She has provided benefits in other ways, in particular, shade to the mountains. She has also been a force of unity to the Land/Garden. The problem is not that her fruit is ‘plucked’, but who plucks it. She was made to produce this fruit (this, wine). But her fruit was made to be enjoyed by ‘holy ones’, not ‘vagrants’. When the wall collapses, the first tragedy is the making banal of her fruit, the profanation of her produce. The second act is her ‘rooting up’ by wild boars. This act is more devastating as it begins to attack her life. She can produce more fruit, but a plant that is rooted up is likely to die. The same applies to the ‘wild animals’ that feed on her. What we witness here is a type of ‘top-down’ destruction of the Vine, as the wall’s breach leads to her loss of beauty (her fruit) and to her loss of life. The wall is what protected all of these aspects. Further, it is important to see how each of these levels of destruction is identified with a certain party: vagrants, boars and ‘field animals’. There are not subsumed under a generic ‘enemy’. Rather, in conjunction with the Vine-metaphor, they are given a distinctly un-holy designation. These are ‘agents of chaos and profanation’. They are given a type of moral (un-holy) and aesthetic (ugly, perverse) quality.