Original Meaning

The Heading (59:0)

NO NEW TERMS appear in the heading. The psalm is referred to “the director of music” and is attributed to David. It is the fourth of five consecutive psalms (Pss. 56–60) categorized as miktam,4 and it shares with Psalms 57–58 the identical tune title ʾal tašḥet (“Do Not Destroy”).5 Like Psalms 56–57 and 60, Psalm 59 also includes a historical note linking the psalm to an event in David’s life (this one recorded in 1 Sam. 19:11). There is nothing in the text of this psalm that specifically recalls this event; in fact, the emphasis in the psalm on vicious verbal attacks makes it unlikely in my opinion that the psalm was composed for that purpose.

Bridging Contexts

THE SNARLING DOGS. The use of dogs as a characterization of the wicked deserves further discussion. Obviously from the number of times they are mentioned in the Old Testament, dogs were a common phenomenon in the ancient Near East. Some dogs were used for work, such as herding sheep (Job 30:1), while others may have been kept to serve as watchdogs (Isa. 56:10). Despite this useful potential, dogs were not particularly well thought of in Israel, and to call another person a “dog” was a serious insult,23 although self-designation could be a form of humility or self-deflation, usually with an edge of sarcasm.24

Packs of ravenous dogs seem to have represented a continuing feature of urban settings (although wild dogs may also have roamed the countryside). “Dogs will eat those belonging to Jeroboam who die in the city, and the birds of the air will feed on those who die in the country. The LORD has spoken!” (1 Kings 14:11). “ ‘I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,’ declares the LORD, ‘the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy’ ” (Jer. 15:3).25 Other than in our psalm, dogs are described as a surrounding threat also in Psalm 22:16, 22.

The images employed in Psalm 59, then, are common enough to have struck a chord with city dwellers. The plight of ill-fed dogs scavenging the streets for anything edible—including garbage and the bodies of executed persons left exposed as a last indignity—would have stuck in the minds of urban citizens and provided an apt cautionary warning. Dogs are dangerous, but ultimately they are an unloved and despised creature doomed to starvation and death.

The wandering witnesses. Like the starving dogs wandering the streets seeking any scrap of food, the rejected enemies are not to be killed but forced to live an agonizing public life of rejection and approbation. Whenever they are seen, they will spark a memory of their vicious sin and God’s punishment. Their hollow eyes will offer testimony to the abandonment of God and the loss of his blessings. The isolated sinners on the fringe of society will provide a cautionary warning to others not to follow their path. The psalmist does not want these “dogs” to be considered a vicious power to be feared and reckoned with, but crushed and unsatisfied creatures living forgotten on the fringes of society.

Scripture records other people who were allowed to live in order to provide continuing testimony and warning. Cain, after he killed his brother, was marked by God to preserve his life and left to wander restlessly (Gen. 4:1–16). Adoni-Bezek, the Canaanite king of Bezek, boasted of having “seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off,” picking up scraps (like dogs!) under his table. These defeated and humiliated kings testified daily to the power of Adoni-Bezek—until he himself suffered the same fate at the hands of the Israelites (Judg. 1:4–7). Similarly Mephibosheth, the crippled son of Saul, was spared by David and sat at David’s table as a continuing sign of the king’s mercy and largess. (I am sure there might have been a less positive motive of showing David’s power and defeat of the family of Saul!) The last true Judahite king, Jehoiachin, was taken into exile by the Babylonians and regularly displayed at the table of the Babylonian king along with the kings of other defeated nations.26

Feeding conquered kings at the table of a sovereign monarch is akin to feeding the dogs with table scraps (cf. Matt. 15:27; Luke 16:21), as the Adoni-Bezek episode makes clear. The monarch displays not only his power and wealth but also his gloating to have all these formerly powerful figures surrounding him. They have been reduced from powerful enemies to practically invisible and certainly powerless dogs, dependent on scraps the king gives out. The same change marks the shift in the “dogs” of Psalm 59—from vicious attackers to starving beasts slinking away at the edges of our peripheral vision.

At the center of the change is God, who laughs with scorn at their pretensions of power (59:8). God is unconcerned by their vicious attack, not in the sense that he does not care about the harm they may do but in the sense that their actions in no way hinder or damage his own purposes. Their visible destruction on the world stage is testimony to “the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob” (59:13).

Contemporary Significance

A LAUGHING GOD. The dogs of our lives remain. They still snarl in the background, bare their fangs, and nip at our heels, threatening to undo us. They have not disappeared as we might have hoped. To us their power is still effective and greatly destructive. I am sure that when technology stocks took a huge beating recently, there were many who felt as if they were being torn and devoured by dogs.

There are many ways the “dogs” of our world continue to plague us. Our economic woes seem minor when we begin to think globally and see the immense pressures of inflation and joblessness that confront many in the Third World. While our own context is relatively free of wars and threats of wars, the same is not true of the rest of the world. Israel, Africa, Indonesia, parts of Latin America—all must deal with the reality of death and destruction. And where there is no war, there is bigotry, hatred, oppression, abuse, and exploitation. On the health front we have AIDS and cancer as well as numerous other common threats to our existence. The environment is invaded by global warming, pollution, and species eradication. Yes, the dogs continue to prowl about the city and the countryside.

What keeps us from dissolving into fear and despair? Most of these problems are beyond my ability to solve. What hope do I have? Psalm 59 offers us the picture of a laughing God. The dogs rip and tear at us. The world seems to spin out of control on its way to destruction, and yet God laughs!

I have often imagined that God must have a great sense of humor. Anyone who would set poor Adam looking for a soul mate among the camels and hippopotamuses must like a good joke. But God’s laughter here is not just good humor breaking to the surface. Nor is it that kind of nervous laughter I emit when I am uncomfortable or embarrassed. God laughs because he is completely relaxed. Even with the vicious snarling and snapping of all the dogs of our world, God remains unconcerned.

By unconcerned I do not mean that God is uncaring and flippant. He knows the snarling dogs for the wicked threat they are. He does not take pleasure in evil. It doesn’t make him laugh because he thinks it is funny. God is unconcerned, but he is not uncaring. He laughs because the dogs’ pretension to ultimate power over life is ridiculous! His laughter is an evidence that he is unimpressed. In the Tower of Babel narrative (Gen. 11:1–9), Yahweh is confronted by the tower built by rebellious humankind, yet he remains unconcerned. Now this is a tower that the humans thought lifted its top “into the heavens.” But Yahweh has to stoop down—get on his knees in the dust of the Plain of Shinar—maybe even get his magnifying glass out of his pocket just to see this tiny pimple protruding from the skin of the earth.

That’s funny! We humans take ourselves so seriously that we think the world revolves around us! And God laughs! I am thankful for a laughing God. Have you ever been approached by a fearful child? My mother-in-law recounts the time my son, who was two or three at the time, wanted to “hep you, Gramma!” to do the vacuuming. But every time the vacuum went on my son was terrified by the noise. Finally Gramma allowed him to vacuum with the noise off!

We may chuckle at the fears of our children. And God may break out in gusts of outright laughter at ours—not because the threats aren’t real to us but because they hold no ultimate power to destroy. “The One enthroned in heaven laughs” (2:4), because he sees the end from the beginning. Because he is the end and the beginning—Alpha and Omega, reigning forever and ever. Amen!

A loving God. It is not enough that God laughs. He also loves! We don’t trust God just because the powers of evil do not concern him. That is important, but it is not enough. Not only is God creator and sustainer, sovereign and all-powerful, but he is a loving God as well. Without the last, God would be a powerful deity with whom we had to deal, but we would not likely trust him. It would be a little like living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The government would exercise the power of life and death over all aspects of our world, and we would have to deal with it and consider it in all our decisions and actions; but we would not have to trust it.

But God is not just sovereign and in control; he is loving. Of course, we are not talking about a romantic or erotic love-god here. God is not in love with us in a sentimental or sexual way. Sometimes the pagan fertility religions got this kind of sexual, emotional “love” mixed up with worship. But Yahweh is not a fertility deity; he is a God of covenant loyalty. The kind of divine love described in Psalm 59, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, is tied to the Hebrew word ḥesed (“covenant loyalty”). The kind of love God expresses toward us is not based on looks, or hormones, or mutual compatibility, or even what I get out of it. Instead, God’s love for us is grounded in a commitment to a relationship. This kind of love is actually what marriage is supposed to be all about: “for richer or poorer, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . .” It is not about emotion or feeling or even benefit, but about commitment.

We trust God because he has shown and continues to show that he is committed to us absolutely. He loves us in that he is willing to suffer our anger and rejection, our sin and rebellion, and still accomplish his will and purpose for us—to woo us to himself in a restored relationship.27 Thus, when the world seems chaotic and beyond control, when our lives seem to disintegrate around us, when the dogs bare their fangs and seek to devour us or to carry us away, we need to remember the laughing God, who is “my fortress, my loving God” (59:17).

Original Meaning

Introductory Plea (59:1–2)

THE PSALMIST PLEADS for “deliverance” and “protection”6 from enemies who “rise up” against him. In verse 2 these opponents are further described as “evildoers” (poʿale ʾawen)7 and “bloodthirsty men” (ʾanše damim).8

Bridging Contexts

THE SNARLING DOGS. The use of dogs as a characterization of the wicked deserves further discussion. Obviously from the number of times they are mentioned in the Old Testament, dogs were a common phenomenon in the ancient Near East. Some dogs were used for work, such as herding sheep (Job 30:1), while others may have been kept to serve as watchdogs (Isa. 56:10). Despite this useful potential, dogs were not particularly well thought of in Israel, and to call another person a “dog” was a serious insult,23 although self-designation could be a form of humility or self-deflation, usually with an edge of sarcasm.24

Packs of ravenous dogs seem to have represented a continuing feature of urban settings (although wild dogs may also have roamed the countryside). “Dogs will eat those belonging to Jeroboam who die in the city, and the birds of the air will feed on those who die in the country. The LORD has spoken!” (1 Kings 14:11). “ ‘I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,’ declares the LORD, ‘the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy’ ” (Jer. 15:3).25 Other than in our psalm, dogs are described as a surrounding threat also in Psalm 22:16, 22.

The images employed in Psalm 59, then, are common enough to have struck a chord with city dwellers. The plight of ill-fed dogs scavenging the streets for anything edible—including garbage and the bodies of executed persons left exposed as a last indignity—would have stuck in the minds of urban citizens and provided an apt cautionary warning. Dogs are dangerous, but ultimately they are an unloved and despised creature doomed to starvation and death.

The wandering witnesses. Like the starving dogs wandering the streets seeking any scrap of food, the rejected enemies are not to be killed but forced to live an agonizing public life of rejection and approbation. Whenever they are seen, they will spark a memory of their vicious sin and God’s punishment. Their hollow eyes will offer testimony to the abandonment of God and the loss of his blessings. The isolated sinners on the fringe of society will provide a cautionary warning to others not to follow their path. The psalmist does not want these “dogs” to be considered a vicious power to be feared and reckoned with, but crushed and unsatisfied creatures living forgotten on the fringes of society.

Scripture records other people who were allowed to live in order to provide continuing testimony and warning. Cain, after he killed his brother, was marked by God to preserve his life and left to wander restlessly (Gen. 4:1–16). Adoni-Bezek, the Canaanite king of Bezek, boasted of having “seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off,” picking up scraps (like dogs!) under his table. These defeated and humiliated kings testified daily to the power of Adoni-Bezek—until he himself suffered the same fate at the hands of the Israelites (Judg. 1:4–7). Similarly Mephibosheth, the crippled son of Saul, was spared by David and sat at David’s table as a continuing sign of the king’s mercy and largess. (I am sure there might have been a less positive motive of showing David’s power and defeat of the family of Saul!) The last true Judahite king, Jehoiachin, was taken into exile by the Babylonians and regularly displayed at the table of the Babylonian king along with the kings of other defeated nations.26

Feeding conquered kings at the table of a sovereign monarch is akin to feeding the dogs with table scraps (cf. Matt. 15:27; Luke 16:21), as the Adoni-Bezek episode makes clear. The monarch displays not only his power and wealth but also his gloating to have all these formerly powerful figures surrounding him. They have been reduced from powerful enemies to practically invisible and certainly powerless dogs, dependent on scraps the king gives out. The same change marks the shift in the “dogs” of Psalm 59—from vicious attackers to starving beasts slinking away at the edges of our peripheral vision.

At the center of the change is God, who laughs with scorn at their pretensions of power (59:8). God is unconcerned by their vicious attack, not in the sense that he does not care about the harm they may do but in the sense that their actions in no way hinder or damage his own purposes. Their visible destruction on the world stage is testimony to “the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob” (59:13).

Contemporary Significance

A LAUGHING GOD. The dogs of our lives remain. They still snarl in the background, bare their fangs, and nip at our heels, threatening to undo us. They have not disappeared as we might have hoped. To us their power is still effective and greatly destructive. I am sure that when technology stocks took a huge beating recently, there were many who felt as if they were being torn and devoured by dogs.

There are many ways the “dogs” of our world continue to plague us. Our economic woes seem minor when we begin to think globally and see the immense pressures of inflation and joblessness that confront many in the Third World. While our own context is relatively free of wars and threats of wars, the same is not true of the rest of the world. Israel, Africa, Indonesia, parts of Latin America—all must deal with the reality of death and destruction. And where there is no war, there is bigotry, hatred, oppression, abuse, and exploitation. On the health front we have AIDS and cancer as well as numerous other common threats to our existence. The environment is invaded by global warming, pollution, and species eradication. Yes, the dogs continue to prowl about the city and the countryside.

What keeps us from dissolving into fear and despair? Most of these problems are beyond my ability to solve. What hope do I have? Psalm 59 offers us the picture of a laughing God. The dogs rip and tear at us. The world seems to spin out of control on its way to destruction, and yet God laughs!

I have often imagined that God must have a great sense of humor. Anyone who would set poor Adam looking for a soul mate among the camels and hippopotamuses must like a good joke. But God’s laughter here is not just good humor breaking to the surface. Nor is it that kind of nervous laughter I emit when I am uncomfortable or embarrassed. God laughs because he is completely relaxed. Even with the vicious snarling and snapping of all the dogs of our world, God remains unconcerned.

By unconcerned I do not mean that God is uncaring and flippant. He knows the snarling dogs for the wicked threat they are. He does not take pleasure in evil. It doesn’t make him laugh because he thinks it is funny. God is unconcerned, but he is not uncaring. He laughs because the dogs’ pretension to ultimate power over life is ridiculous! His laughter is an evidence that he is unimpressed. In the Tower of Babel narrative (Gen. 11:1–9), Yahweh is confronted by the tower built by rebellious humankind, yet he remains unconcerned. Now this is a tower that the humans thought lifted its top “into the heavens.” But Yahweh has to stoop down—get on his knees in the dust of the Plain of Shinar—maybe even get his magnifying glass out of his pocket just to see this tiny pimple protruding from the skin of the earth.

That’s funny! We humans take ourselves so seriously that we think the world revolves around us! And God laughs! I am thankful for a laughing God. Have you ever been approached by a fearful child? My mother-in-law recounts the time my son, who was two or three at the time, wanted to “hep you, Gramma!” to do the vacuuming. But every time the vacuum went on my son was terrified by the noise. Finally Gramma allowed him to vacuum with the noise off!

We may chuckle at the fears of our children. And God may break out in gusts of outright laughter at ours—not because the threats aren’t real to us but because they hold no ultimate power to destroy. “The One enthroned in heaven laughs” (2:4), because he sees the end from the beginning. Because he is the end and the beginning—Alpha and Omega, reigning forever and ever. Amen!

A loving God. It is not enough that God laughs. He also loves! We don’t trust God just because the powers of evil do not concern him. That is important, but it is not enough. Not only is God creator and sustainer, sovereign and all-powerful, but he is a loving God as well. Without the last, God would be a powerful deity with whom we had to deal, but we would not likely trust him. It would be a little like living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The government would exercise the power of life and death over all aspects of our world, and we would have to deal with it and consider it in all our decisions and actions; but we would not have to trust it.

But God is not just sovereign and in control; he is loving. Of course, we are not talking about a romantic or erotic love-god here. God is not in love with us in a sentimental or sexual way. Sometimes the pagan fertility religions got this kind of sexual, emotional “love” mixed up with worship. But Yahweh is not a fertility deity; he is a God of covenant loyalty. The kind of divine love described in Psalm 59, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, is tied to the Hebrew word ḥesed (“covenant loyalty”). The kind of love God expresses toward us is not based on looks, or hormones, or mutual compatibility, or even what I get out of it. Instead, God’s love for us is grounded in a commitment to a relationship. This kind of love is actually what marriage is supposed to be all about: “for richer or poorer, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . .” It is not about emotion or feeling or even benefit, but about commitment.

We trust God because he has shown and continues to show that he is committed to us absolutely. He loves us in that he is willing to suffer our anger and rejection, our sin and rebellion, and still accomplish his will and purpose for us—to woo us to himself in a restored relationship.27 Thus, when the world seems chaotic and beyond control, when our lives seem to disintegrate around us, when the dogs bare their fangs and seek to devour us or to carry us away, we need to remember the laughing God, who is “my fortress, my loving God” (59:17).

Original Meaning

The Enemy Attack (59:3–9)

IT IS NOT immediately clear that the enemy attack is a matter of “slander” (59:10). The enemy “lie in wait/ambush” and “attack” (cf. 56:6) the psalmist for no cause (59:3c, 4a). His protestation of innocence is no protection from their rushing attack.9

Arise. The psalmist wants God to stir himself and take note of the psalmist’s desperate situation. Contrary to the general tendency in the Elohistic Psalter to avoid the divine name Yahweh, the psalmist addresses God three times in this psalm as Yahweh (“LORD” in 59:3, 5, 8). In 59:5, God is even more effusively identified as (lit.) “Yahweh, God of hosts, God of Israel”—the somewhat awkward appearance of both yhwh and ʾelohim suggesting that an adaptation has been made of the more usual militant designation of the God of Israel as “Yahweh of hosts.”10

Punish the nations. As in Psalms 56 and 57, the concerns of the individual psalmist for more personal and localized enemies take on a more communal and national flavor. “LORD Almighty” is called to rout the enemy nations and protect his people (cf. 59:8). Tate suggests an original setting in which a king was beset by both domestic and international attacks, though he admits the possibility that an earlier individual lament may have been adapted to a more communal purpose.11 Regardless, these concerns would have new meaning for the postexilic community living in situations of foreign domination. The local enemies do not escape unscathed, however, as the psalmist pleads for God to show no favor to “wicked traitors.” The verb bgd, from which the term “traitors” is derived, has the meaning “deal faithlessly” and implies a breach of agreement, covenant, or other obligation.

Snarling like dogs. In 59:6 and again later (59:14), the enemy is characterized as a roving pack of dogs that roam the city looking for vulnerable prey. Comparison of humans to dogs is normally a form of disparagement and contempt; similar negative comparisons are found in the ancient Near Eastern literature outside Israel.12

Some suggest that the reference to “evening” in these verses, coupled with the vow to sing of God’s love “in the morning” (59:16), point to an underlying context of “incubation,” where an individual in distress spent the night before Yahweh in the temple, pleading for deliverance and receiving a priestly proclamation of release in the morning.13 Tate notes that the phrase “hire of a dog” (Deut. 23:18) is normally taken to mean the wages of a male prostitute, confirming the negative comparison associated with the term “dog.”14

Who can hear us? As in 55:21 and 57:4, the enemy’s verbal attacks are likened to vicious thrusts with a sword. The enemy “spew out swords from their lips” (59:7b), thinking they can speak and act with impunity: “Who can hear us?”15 But the psalmist is confident that God does hear—both the violent words of the enemy and the psalmist’s pleas for deliverance—and that God holds the enemies’ pretensions to unbridled power in scorn. In words that recall his contempt for the rebellious plots of the kings in 2:4, God “laughs” and “scoffs” at the blustering enemy nations.16

O my Strength. Yahweh is the psalmist’s “Strength” and “refuge,” although deliverance is still an anticipated future experience. Like the watchman of a besieged city straining to see the expected arrival of the relieving troops, the psalmist “watches” for the appearance of “my loving God” (59:10a).17 This refrain ends the first major section of the psalm.

Bridging Contexts

THE SNARLING DOGS. The use of dogs as a characterization of the wicked deserves further discussion. Obviously from the number of times they are mentioned in the Old Testament, dogs were a common phenomenon in the ancient Near East. Some dogs were used for work, such as herding sheep (Job 30:1), while others may have been kept to serve as watchdogs (Isa. 56:10). Despite this useful potential, dogs were not particularly well thought of in Israel, and to call another person a “dog” was a serious insult,23 although self-designation could be a form of humility or self-deflation, usually with an edge of sarcasm.24

Packs of ravenous dogs seem to have represented a continuing feature of urban settings (although wild dogs may also have roamed the countryside). “Dogs will eat those belonging to Jeroboam who die in the city, and the birds of the air will feed on those who die in the country. The LORD has spoken!” (1 Kings 14:11). “ ‘I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,’ declares the LORD, ‘the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy’ ” (Jer. 15:3).25 Other than in our psalm, dogs are described as a surrounding threat also in Psalm 22:16, 22.

The images employed in Psalm 59, then, are common enough to have struck a chord with city dwellers. The plight of ill-fed dogs scavenging the streets for anything edible—including garbage and the bodies of executed persons left exposed as a last indignity—would have stuck in the minds of urban citizens and provided an apt cautionary warning. Dogs are dangerous, but ultimately they are an unloved and despised creature doomed to starvation and death.

The wandering witnesses. Like the starving dogs wandering the streets seeking any scrap of food, the rejected enemies are not to be killed but forced to live an agonizing public life of rejection and approbation. Whenever they are seen, they will spark a memory of their vicious sin and God’s punishment. Their hollow eyes will offer testimony to the abandonment of God and the loss of his blessings. The isolated sinners on the fringe of society will provide a cautionary warning to others not to follow their path. The psalmist does not want these “dogs” to be considered a vicious power to be feared and reckoned with, but crushed and unsatisfied creatures living forgotten on the fringes of society.

Scripture records other people who were allowed to live in order to provide continuing testimony and warning. Cain, after he killed his brother, was marked by God to preserve his life and left to wander restlessly (Gen. 4:1–16). Adoni-Bezek, the Canaanite king of Bezek, boasted of having “seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off,” picking up scraps (like dogs!) under his table. These defeated and humiliated kings testified daily to the power of Adoni-Bezek—until he himself suffered the same fate at the hands of the Israelites (Judg. 1:4–7). Similarly Mephibosheth, the crippled son of Saul, was spared by David and sat at David’s table as a continuing sign of the king’s mercy and largess. (I am sure there might have been a less positive motive of showing David’s power and defeat of the family of Saul!) The last true Judahite king, Jehoiachin, was taken into exile by the Babylonians and regularly displayed at the table of the Babylonian king along with the kings of other defeated nations.26

Feeding conquered kings at the table of a sovereign monarch is akin to feeding the dogs with table scraps (cf. Matt. 15:27; Luke 16:21), as the Adoni-Bezek episode makes clear. The monarch displays not only his power and wealth but also his gloating to have all these formerly powerful figures surrounding him. They have been reduced from powerful enemies to practically invisible and certainly powerless dogs, dependent on scraps the king gives out. The same change marks the shift in the “dogs” of Psalm 59—from vicious attackers to starving beasts slinking away at the edges of our peripheral vision.

At the center of the change is God, who laughs with scorn at their pretensions of power (59:8). God is unconcerned by their vicious attack, not in the sense that he does not care about the harm they may do but in the sense that their actions in no way hinder or damage his own purposes. Their visible destruction on the world stage is testimony to “the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob” (59:13).

Contemporary Significance

A LAUGHING GOD. The dogs of our lives remain. They still snarl in the background, bare their fangs, and nip at our heels, threatening to undo us. They have not disappeared as we might have hoped. To us their power is still effective and greatly destructive. I am sure that when technology stocks took a huge beating recently, there were many who felt as if they were being torn and devoured by dogs.

There are many ways the “dogs” of our world continue to plague us. Our economic woes seem minor when we begin to think globally and see the immense pressures of inflation and joblessness that confront many in the Third World. While our own context is relatively free of wars and threats of wars, the same is not true of the rest of the world. Israel, Africa, Indonesia, parts of Latin America—all must deal with the reality of death and destruction. And where there is no war, there is bigotry, hatred, oppression, abuse, and exploitation. On the health front we have AIDS and cancer as well as numerous other common threats to our existence. The environment is invaded by global warming, pollution, and species eradication. Yes, the dogs continue to prowl about the city and the countryside.

What keeps us from dissolving into fear and despair? Most of these problems are beyond my ability to solve. What hope do I have? Psalm 59 offers us the picture of a laughing God. The dogs rip and tear at us. The world seems to spin out of control on its way to destruction, and yet God laughs!

I have often imagined that God must have a great sense of humor. Anyone who would set poor Adam looking for a soul mate among the camels and hippopotamuses must like a good joke. But God’s laughter here is not just good humor breaking to the surface. Nor is it that kind of nervous laughter I emit when I am uncomfortable or embarrassed. God laughs because he is completely relaxed. Even with the vicious snarling and snapping of all the dogs of our world, God remains unconcerned.

By unconcerned I do not mean that God is uncaring and flippant. He knows the snarling dogs for the wicked threat they are. He does not take pleasure in evil. It doesn’t make him laugh because he thinks it is funny. God is unconcerned, but he is not uncaring. He laughs because the dogs’ pretension to ultimate power over life is ridiculous! His laughter is an evidence that he is unimpressed. In the Tower of Babel narrative (Gen. 11:1–9), Yahweh is confronted by the tower built by rebellious humankind, yet he remains unconcerned. Now this is a tower that the humans thought lifted its top “into the heavens.” But Yahweh has to stoop down—get on his knees in the dust of the Plain of Shinar—maybe even get his magnifying glass out of his pocket just to see this tiny pimple protruding from the skin of the earth.

That’s funny! We humans take ourselves so seriously that we think the world revolves around us! And God laughs! I am thankful for a laughing God. Have you ever been approached by a fearful child? My mother-in-law recounts the time my son, who was two or three at the time, wanted to “hep you, Gramma!” to do the vacuuming. But every time the vacuum went on my son was terrified by the noise. Finally Gramma allowed him to vacuum with the noise off!

We may chuckle at the fears of our children. And God may break out in gusts of outright laughter at ours—not because the threats aren’t real to us but because they hold no ultimate power to destroy. “The One enthroned in heaven laughs” (2:4), because he sees the end from the beginning. Because he is the end and the beginning—Alpha and Omega, reigning forever and ever. Amen!

A loving God. It is not enough that God laughs. He also loves! We don’t trust God just because the powers of evil do not concern him. That is important, but it is not enough. Not only is God creator and sustainer, sovereign and all-powerful, but he is a loving God as well. Without the last, God would be a powerful deity with whom we had to deal, but we would not likely trust him. It would be a little like living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The government would exercise the power of life and death over all aspects of our world, and we would have to deal with it and consider it in all our decisions and actions; but we would not have to trust it.

But God is not just sovereign and in control; he is loving. Of course, we are not talking about a romantic or erotic love-god here. God is not in love with us in a sentimental or sexual way. Sometimes the pagan fertility religions got this kind of sexual, emotional “love” mixed up with worship. But Yahweh is not a fertility deity; he is a God of covenant loyalty. The kind of divine love described in Psalm 59, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, is tied to the Hebrew word ḥesed (“covenant loyalty”). The kind of love God expresses toward us is not based on looks, or hormones, or mutual compatibility, or even what I get out of it. Instead, God’s love for us is grounded in a commitment to a relationship. This kind of love is actually what marriage is supposed to be all about: “for richer or poorer, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . .” It is not about emotion or feeling or even benefit, but about commitment.

We trust God because he has shown and continues to show that he is committed to us absolutely. He loves us in that he is willing to suffer our anger and rejection, our sin and rebellion, and still accomplish his will and purpose for us—to woo us to himself in a restored relationship.27 Thus, when the world seems chaotic and beyond control, when our lives seem to disintegrate around us, when the dogs bare their fangs and seek to devour us or to carry us away, we need to remember the laughing God, who is “my fortress, my loving God” (59:17).

Original Meaning

Punishment and Confidence (59:10–17)

FOLLOWING THE FIRST refrain, the psalmist shifts to a description of the hoped-for response by God to the empty pride of the enemy. God—who is the “shield” (magen)18 of his people—will go before them into the conflict with the enemy.19 As a result, the psalmist will “see [triumph]” (rather than the NIV’s “gloat”)20 over “those who slander me.”21 He desires both public vindication and the destruction of the enemy. He does not ask for a complete decimation of the opponents (“do not kill them”), but he does want God to reduce their power and make them wander rootlessly through society as a constant reminder of the consequences of opposing the righteous. The picture may well depict the kind of rootless sense of homelessness that the exiled communities experienced in the Diaspora.

The ultimate consequence is, of course, the final destruction and disappearance of the enemy. The psalmist asks that God “bring them down”—a probable reference to being brought down to Sheol, the abode of the dead22—and “consume them till they are no more” (59:13). This object lesson has two purposes: (1) to punish the enemy for their arrogant slander (59:12a, b), and (2) to make it clear that God, not the “nations,” is the effective ruler of Israel (59:13b).

Snarling like dogs. Once again the enemy is described as a pack of prowling dogs, scouring the city for food. But whereas the first description (59:6–7) viewed the dogs as vicious and fearsome attackers roaming about seeking to do harm, now they are pathetic hungry beasts, unsatisfied and constantly on the move in search of food. The tables have been turned, and the fearsome beast has become the starving wanderer.

I will sing of your strength. By contrast, the psalmist (and the besieged people of God) are set free within the protective “fortress” (miśgab) and “refuge” (manos) provided by God to sing praises for the gifts of God’s “strength” and “love” (ḥesed, “enduring loyalty”) rather than to howl in want like the miserable dogs.

O my Strength! In this new context, this concluding refrain takes on a subtly different meaning. In its first occurrence (59:9), the psalmist responded to the enemy’s attack by watching diligently for the coming of God’s strength as deliverance. Here God’s “strength” has already become a cause for praise, and the psalmist moves to acknowledge that God is the source of his own strength (also using ʿoz). God is not only the power that delivers but also provides the psalmist with strength to endure faithfully in the face of the enemy onslaught. That is standing within the protective refuge of God.

Bridging Contexts

THE SNARLING DOGS. The use of dogs as a characterization of the wicked deserves further discussion. Obviously from the number of times they are mentioned in the Old Testament, dogs were a common phenomenon in the ancient Near East. Some dogs were used for work, such as herding sheep (Job 30:1), while others may have been kept to serve as watchdogs (Isa. 56:10). Despite this useful potential, dogs were not particularly well thought of in Israel, and to call another person a “dog” was a serious insult,23 although self-designation could be a form of humility or self-deflation, usually with an edge of sarcasm.24

Packs of ravenous dogs seem to have represented a continuing feature of urban settings (although wild dogs may also have roamed the countryside). “Dogs will eat those belonging to Jeroboam who die in the city, and the birds of the air will feed on those who die in the country. The LORD has spoken!” (1 Kings 14:11). “ ‘I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,’ declares the LORD, ‘the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy’ ” (Jer. 15:3).25 Other than in our psalm, dogs are described as a surrounding threat also in Psalm 22:16, 22.

The images employed in Psalm 59, then, are common enough to have struck a chord with city dwellers. The plight of ill-fed dogs scavenging the streets for anything edible—including garbage and the bodies of executed persons left exposed as a last indignity—would have stuck in the minds of urban citizens and provided an apt cautionary warning. Dogs are dangerous, but ultimately they are an unloved and despised creature doomed to starvation and death.

The wandering witnesses. Like the starving dogs wandering the streets seeking any scrap of food, the rejected enemies are not to be killed but forced to live an agonizing public life of rejection and approbation. Whenever they are seen, they will spark a memory of their vicious sin and God’s punishment. Their hollow eyes will offer testimony to the abandonment of God and the loss of his blessings. The isolated sinners on the fringe of society will provide a cautionary warning to others not to follow their path. The psalmist does not want these “dogs” to be considered a vicious power to be feared and reckoned with, but crushed and unsatisfied creatures living forgotten on the fringes of society.

Scripture records other people who were allowed to live in order to provide continuing testimony and warning. Cain, after he killed his brother, was marked by God to preserve his life and left to wander restlessly (Gen. 4:1–16). Adoni-Bezek, the Canaanite king of Bezek, boasted of having “seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off,” picking up scraps (like dogs!) under his table. These defeated and humiliated kings testified daily to the power of Adoni-Bezek—until he himself suffered the same fate at the hands of the Israelites (Judg. 1:4–7). Similarly Mephibosheth, the crippled son of Saul, was spared by David and sat at David’s table as a continuing sign of the king’s mercy and largess. (I am sure there might have been a less positive motive of showing David’s power and defeat of the family of Saul!) The last true Judahite king, Jehoiachin, was taken into exile by the Babylonians and regularly displayed at the table of the Babylonian king along with the kings of other defeated nations.26

Feeding conquered kings at the table of a sovereign monarch is akin to feeding the dogs with table scraps (cf. Matt. 15:27; Luke 16:21), as the Adoni-Bezek episode makes clear. The monarch displays not only his power and wealth but also his gloating to have all these formerly powerful figures surrounding him. They have been reduced from powerful enemies to practically invisible and certainly powerless dogs, dependent on scraps the king gives out. The same change marks the shift in the “dogs” of Psalm 59—from vicious attackers to starving beasts slinking away at the edges of our peripheral vision.

At the center of the change is God, who laughs with scorn at their pretensions of power (59:8). God is unconcerned by their vicious attack, not in the sense that he does not care about the harm they may do but in the sense that their actions in no way hinder or damage his own purposes. Their visible destruction on the world stage is testimony to “the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob” (59:13).

Contemporary Significance

A LAUGHING GOD. The dogs of our lives remain. They still snarl in the background, bare their fangs, and nip at our heels, threatening to undo us. They have not disappeared as we might have hoped. To us their power is still effective and greatly destructive. I am sure that when technology stocks took a huge beating recently, there were many who felt as if they were being torn and devoured by dogs.

There are many ways the “dogs” of our world continue to plague us. Our economic woes seem minor when we begin to think globally and see the immense pressures of inflation and joblessness that confront many in the Third World. While our own context is relatively free of wars and threats of wars, the same is not true of the rest of the world. Israel, Africa, Indonesia, parts of Latin America—all must deal with the reality of death and destruction. And where there is no war, there is bigotry, hatred, oppression, abuse, and exploitation. On the health front we have AIDS and cancer as well as numerous other common threats to our existence. The environment is invaded by global warming, pollution, and species eradication. Yes, the dogs continue to prowl about the city and the countryside.

What keeps us from dissolving into fear and despair? Most of these problems are beyond my ability to solve. What hope do I have? Psalm 59 offers us the picture of a laughing God. The dogs rip and tear at us. The world seems to spin out of control on its way to destruction, and yet God laughs!

I have often imagined that God must have a great sense of humor. Anyone who would set poor Adam looking for a soul mate among the camels and hippopotamuses must like a good joke. But God’s laughter here is not just good humor breaking to the surface. Nor is it that kind of nervous laughter I emit when I am uncomfortable or embarrassed. God laughs because he is completely relaxed. Even with the vicious snarling and snapping of all the dogs of our world, God remains unconcerned.

By unconcerned I do not mean that God is uncaring and flippant. He knows the snarling dogs for the wicked threat they are. He does not take pleasure in evil. It doesn’t make him laugh because he thinks it is funny. God is unconcerned, but he is not uncaring. He laughs because the dogs’ pretension to ultimate power over life is ridiculous! His laughter is an evidence that he is unimpressed. In the Tower of Babel narrative (Gen. 11:1–9), Yahweh is confronted by the tower built by rebellious humankind, yet he remains unconcerned. Now this is a tower that the humans thought lifted its top “into the heavens.” But Yahweh has to stoop down—get on his knees in the dust of the Plain of Shinar—maybe even get his magnifying glass out of his pocket just to see this tiny pimple protruding from the skin of the earth.

That’s funny! We humans take ourselves so seriously that we think the world revolves around us! And God laughs! I am thankful for a laughing God. Have you ever been approached by a fearful child? My mother-in-law recounts the time my son, who was two or three at the time, wanted to “hep you, Gramma!” to do the vacuuming. But every time the vacuum went on my son was terrified by the noise. Finally Gramma allowed him to vacuum with the noise off!

We may chuckle at the fears of our children. And God may break out in gusts of outright laughter at ours—not because the threats aren’t real to us but because they hold no ultimate power to destroy. “The One enthroned in heaven laughs” (2:4), because he sees the end from the beginning. Because he is the end and the beginning—Alpha and Omega, reigning forever and ever. Amen!

A loving God. It is not enough that God laughs. He also loves! We don’t trust God just because the powers of evil do not concern him. That is important, but it is not enough. Not only is God creator and sustainer, sovereign and all-powerful, but he is a loving God as well. Without the last, God would be a powerful deity with whom we had to deal, but we would not likely trust him. It would be a little like living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The government would exercise the power of life and death over all aspects of our world, and we would have to deal with it and consider it in all our decisions and actions; but we would not have to trust it.

But God is not just sovereign and in control; he is loving. Of course, we are not talking about a romantic or erotic love-god here. God is not in love with us in a sentimental or sexual way. Sometimes the pagan fertility religions got this kind of sexual, emotional “love” mixed up with worship. But Yahweh is not a fertility deity; he is a God of covenant loyalty. The kind of divine love described in Psalm 59, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, is tied to the Hebrew word ḥesed (“covenant loyalty”). The kind of love God expresses toward us is not based on looks, or hormones, or mutual compatibility, or even what I get out of it. Instead, God’s love for us is grounded in a commitment to a relationship. This kind of love is actually what marriage is supposed to be all about: “for richer or poorer, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . .” It is not about emotion or feeling or even benefit, but about commitment.

We trust God because he has shown and continues to show that he is committed to us absolutely. He loves us in that he is willing to suffer our anger and rejection, our sin and rebellion, and still accomplish his will and purpose for us—to woo us to himself in a restored relationship.27 Thus, when the world seems chaotic and beyond control, when our lives seem to disintegrate around us, when the dogs bare their fangs and seek to devour us or to carry us away, we need to remember the laughing God, who is “my fortress, my loving God” (59:17).