When?

And He gave up His strength to captivity and His glory into the hand of the enemy.  He also turned His people over to the sword, And was filled with wrath at His inheritance.  Psalm 78:61-62  NASB

The hand of the enemy – Okay, let’s agree that Asaph is a poet, not an historian.  Let’s agree that he takes certain liberties with the story of the wilderness.  He likes to exaggerate for effect.  He uses some loaded words.  But when did God give up His strength and turn His glory over to the hand of an enemy?  I don’t recall anything in the wilderness legends that suggest such actions.  In fact, except for the debacle of the returning spies, Israel eventually marches into Canaan and according to the biblical text, fairly much subdues all the potential enemies there.  Not until the time of the chieftains (Judges) do we discover the brooding civil unrest that allows various opponents to conquer portions of Israel, and even then, God comes to the rescue through various saviors.  What can Asaph be writing about?  When did God send them back into captivity or turn them over to the sword?  None of these things seem to have happened until long after David’s reign.

Except for the time of the chieftains.  The book of Judges (really chieftains) is filled with one invasion after another, rescues followed by disobedience followed by captivity followed by repentance, time after time, until God finally gives up on them (for a while).  The end of all this waffling behavior is the cry of the people for a monarch.  Saul, then David, then Solomon and then a whole line of mostly wicked and corrupt kings.  Of course, if Asaph’s poem is written during the time of David, then he doesn’t know it will continue to go badly.  What he does know is that until the monarchy, things went from bad to worse.  Asaph describes it like this:

Fire devoured His young men,
And His virgins had no wedding songs.
His priests fell by the sword,
And His widows could not weep.  Psalm 78:63-64

It paints a gruesome picture, even if it’s not quite historically accurate.  But it serves Asaph’s poetic purpose.  What’s coming is the justification of the Davidic dynasty, and Asaph’s politics sets David’s reign in stark opposition to the chaos and sorrow that preceded it.  As we will see, David is the supreme rescuer, the true shepherd, the best leader Israel has ever had.

What else do we learn beside the political propaganda here?  What we learn is the biblical penchant to write history according to an agenda.  Actually, that shouldn’t be too surprising.  A neutral recording of the chronological series of events isn’t within the scope of ancient historians (and one wonders if the same isn’t true today, e.g., critical race theory’s rewriting of American history).  All the biblical authors do this.  It was completely acceptable.  Asaph’s example only helps us realize that we need to account for this fact in every other part of Scripture.  When the prophets decry the idolatry of the “people,” we need to acknowledge that the general population was not idolatrous.  The leadership was, and in some cases, only a small part of the leadership (e.g., Ahab and Jezebel).  But the prophetic broad-brush sets the tone for repentance.  Ezekiel, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea—they follow suit.  One must wonder if Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t do the same thing with their portrait of the opponents of Yeshua.  The bottom line:  the Bible isn’t history, at least not the kind of history that we think is historically accurate.  It’s not a neutral record of what happened next.  It’s political history, historical recounting with an agenda.  It’s selective, expositional, deliberate, purposeful history.  But how could it be anything else?  After all, it’s got God’s motives in mind.

Topical Index: history, politics, Psalm 78:61-62, Psalm 78:63-64