Psalms 81 - Introduction

LXXXI.

This is plainly a festival song, but by no means one of that jubilant class of festival songs that conclude the Psalter. The poet is in the truest sense a prophet, and, while calling on all the nation to join in the music of the feast, he tries to convince them of the sad lapse in religion from the ideal which the appointed feasts were intended to support. By a poetic turn of high order, he represents himself as catching suddenly, amid the blare of trumpets and clash of drums, the accents of a strange, unknown voice. He listens. It is God Himself speaking and recalling, by a few brief incisive touches, the history of the ancient deliverance from Egypt. The servitude, the storm passage of the Red Sea, the miraculous supply of water, with the revelation it made of the faithlessness of the people; the covenant at Sinai, the Decalogue, by its opening commandment — are all glanced at; and then comes the sad sequel, the stubbornness and perversity of the nation for which all had been done.
But the psalm does not end with sadness. After the rebuke comes the promise of rich and abundant blessing, upon the condition of future obedience.

The particular festival for which the psalm was composed, or which it celebrates, has been matter of controversy. The arguments in favour of the Feast of Tabernacles will be found stated in the Note to Psalms 81:3. But the mode of treatment would equally well suit any of the great Israelite feasts. They were at once memorials of God’s goodness and witnesses of the ingratitude and perverseness which, with these significant records continually before them, the nation so sadly displayed. After the prologue the poem falls into two nearly equal strophes.

Title. — See Titles, Psalms 4; Psalms 8:1.