Ps. 83.2 (spying the enemy)

For lo / your enemies / are roaring
and those who hate you / have raised their heads. 

One aspect to this psalm that has been noted by others it he fact that it employs a large amount of standard (‘generic’) language. This verse is one example in that the ‘roaring’ of enemies and the ‘raising of the head’ is seen in many psalms representing the ascendency of the enemies. As valid as that point may be it misses something important and may in fact come close to obscuring the import of the language in this psalm. The point is this: the immediately preceding verse implored God not to ‘remain silent’ and to neither rest or be still. This verse immediately refers to the wicked “roaring” and “raising their heads”; they ‘are not silent’ nor are they ‘resting’ or ‘being still’.  In light of the previous reflection, this juxtaposition takes on an added depth. There, we saw how, by framing the petition in the negative the psalmist was not asking that God ‘speak’ because he is now silent but, rather, to speak and move in order to address the unique danger that is confronting him and his people. In this verse, it begins with “For lo…” as if calling God’s attention to a rising foe in the distance, one that represents a new and more terrible threat than what is generally arrayed against him and his people. Within this context, the ‘roaring’ and ‘head raising’ of the enemy is anything but generic—it represents something profound, something that is uniquely formidable. This ‘roaring’ is not like the generic ‘roaring’ of the wicked. Just as the ‘action’ that God is called to will later be seen to be a thunderous and awe-inspiring form of judgment so too is the type of ‘roaring’ and ‘head-raising’ here something of a uniquely powerful sort—we will see later that this ‘head-raising’ is actually a multi-headed-but-unified threat. Imagistically, it calls to mind the ‘beasts’ of apocalyptic literature where a single beast contains either numerous heads or horns or both, the point being that in its unity it is massively powerful.