Psalm 72

The Hebrew Bible uses a wide and varied vocabulary to talk about the poor. The various books of the Old Testament use at least nine terms, each with a slightly different meaning or connotation. The New Testament, using different languages, has a less extensive vocabulary.

So why is it that the language of ancient Hebrew, the language He chose for His people to speak to one another and to praise Him, is so well equipped to talk about the poor? Could it be because the poor are very important to God, and he did not want them dealt with in a broad-brush sort of way?

English has several ways of referring to the poor…at least it has lots of modifiers. We talk of the working class-poor, the poverty line, the dirt poor, the desperately poor… we have ways of differentiating exactly which class of the poor we are referring to. But at the end of the day it seems we fall into a similar trap that the people of Israel fell into…not noticing and caring for the poor.

The twenty verses of Psalm 72 mention the poor nine times. When we think of the poor, we tend to think of their deprivation, but Psalm 72 focuses on their powerlessness instead. Psalm 72 asks God to empower the chief politician of the day, the king, to defend the poor against those who tried to exploit them. Not unlike many places today, the people of means (the haves) corrupted the courts and judicial system through bribery. We see this in the many references to bribery in ancient Israel’s legal, prophetic, and wisdom traditions. The wealthy (the haves) were apparently able to preserve their interests at the expense of the rights of the poor (the have-nots), who (not unlike today) did not have the resources to protect themselves.

As scholar Leslie J. Hoppes says, “Psalm 72 presents the king as the instrument by which God’s justice and righteousness come to the people, especially the poor (vv. 1-2). There is no spiritualization of the poor here. When Psalm 72 speaks about the poor and needy, it is speaking about those people whose lack of material resources makes their exploitation a simple matter for the wealthy.”

Today we look at what the Psalms teach us about the poor and how doing something about it must be part of our faith.

Mark