Psalm 80:11

Psalm 80 is a lament prayed by the whole nation, one of the psalms of Asaph (Psalms 73–83). It calls on God as the “Shepherd of Israel” (Psalm 80:1) and names Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh (Psalm 80:2), the tribes descended from Rachel. A refrain runs through it, asking God to “turn us again” and “cause thy face to shine”, so that his people may be saved (Psalm 80:3, 80:7, 80:19).

The psalm comes from a time of great national distress. The naming of Ephraim and Manasseh points many to the Assyrian invasions of the eighth century BC, which ended with the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC. It may also come from a time of severe trouble for Judah, during or after the exile. Either way, the prayer fits every season in which God’s people find their walls broken down.

The vine’s glory in verses 8–11 makes its ruin in verses 12–13 all the harder to bear, and that ruin drives the plea that follows, for God to “turn again” and “look down from heaven” (Psalm 80:14–19).

“Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt” sums up the exodus in a single line: the night of the Passover and the going out (Exodus 12), and the sea opened before the people (Exodus 14:21). The word for vine, gephen, is the ordinary word for a grape vine. Israel left Egypt weak and lately enslaved, like a young plant lifted out of hostile ground, and God is the one who lifted it. Moses sang of the LORD leading the people he had redeemed (Exodus 15:13), and the psalm sees the same God as a gardener carrying his vine to a better place.

“Thou hast cast out the heathen” moves on to the conquest of Canaan, which began when Israel crossed the Jordan (Joshua 3) and is told in the books of Joshua and Judges (Joshua 1, Judges 1). The verb gârash means to drive out or expel, and God is the one doing it. He had promised to drive the nations out “by little and little” (Exodus 23:29–30), and Joshua records that he kept every promise he made about the land (Joshua 21:43–45). The “heathen” are the gôwy, the nations, here the idolatrous Canaanites who held the land. Their driving out was God’s judgment on their wickedness and his gift to Israel at the same time, the keeping of what he had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

“And planted it” completes the picture. The verb nâṭaʻ means to plant. A gardener sets a vine in the ground so that it will grow and bear fruit, and God settled his people in the land so that they would flourish there as his own.

In a land of vineyards the vine stood for prosperity, fruitfulness and the nation itself. The picture says three things at once. Israel belongs to God as a vine belongs to the one who planted it. Israel depends on him for its life, as a vine depends on the soil and the one who tends it. And he looks for fruit from it, which means righteousness, justice and faithfulness to his covenant.

The prophets use the same picture, often to grieve over fruit that failed. Isaiah’s song of the vineyard says it outright, “the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel”, and tells how the vineyard God tended so carefully brought forth bad fruit and came under judgment (Isaiah 5:1–7). Through Jeremiah God says that he planted Israel a noble vine, and asks how it became a degenerate one (Jeremiah 2:21). Hosea calls Israel a vine in a passage about its guilt (Hosea 10:1–2), and Ezekiel tells a parable of a great eagle and a vine (Ezekiel 17:5–6). Psalm 80 tells the vine’s story from the side of God’s care, and that care is what makes its ruin so hard to understand.

“Thou preparedst room before it” pictures ground cleared so that the vine can spread. The verb is pânâh, which means to turn or to face, and the KJV renders it here as “preparedst”. The word “room” was supplied by the translators to complete the sense. The clearing is the driving out of the nations from verse 8, and the care in it comes from the one who does it, since the whole verse is addressed to God.

“And didst cause it to take deep root” joins the verb shârash, to take root, with the noun sheresh, a root. A plant with deep roots stands firm in wind and drought and draws its nourishment well. God gave his people that kind of stability in the land, and Jeremiah uses the same picture for the man who trusts in the LORD, who is like a tree planted by the waters (Jeremiah 17:7–8).

“And it filled the land” uses mâlêʼ, to fill or to be full. The vine spread until it occupied the whole territory, a picture of a growing people and widening borders from the conquest through the reigns of David and Solomon, when the kingdom reached its greatest extent. This was God keeping his word to Abraham about the land and his descendants (Genesis 12:7, Genesis 15:18–21). It also echoes God’s first blessing on mankind, to be fruitful and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28), the blessings he promised Israel for obedience (Deuteronomy 28:1–14), and his description of the good land of plenty he was bringing them into (Deuteronomy 8:7–9).

“The hills were covered with the shadow of it” stretches the picture far beyond any real vine, whose shade covers a small patch of ground. The word tsêl means shadow or shade, and figuratively shelter and protection. A vine whose shade lies over the hills is a nation whose reach is wide and under whose protection those within its borders live securely.

“And the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars” compares the vine’s branches with the most famous trees of the ancient world. The word for cedars is ʼerez, and the Hebrew behind “goodly” is ʼêl, the word for God. Strong’s and BDB also give it the sense of strength or might, and here it works as a superlative: “cedars of God” are the mightiest cedars there are. The cedars of Lebanon were renowned for their size, their durable and fragrant wood, and their grandeur, and Solomon sent to Hiram for cedar to build the temple (1 Kings 5:6). A vine whose boughs rival those trees is a picture of Israel in its prime, strong, stable and majestic because God had made it so.

“She sent out her boughs unto the sea” uses shâlach, to send or to stretch out, for the vine reaching outward on every side. The word for boughs, qâtsîyr, usually means harvest, but it also names a bough or branch as a sense of its own. Its partner in the second line, yôwneqeth, comes from a root meaning to suckle and names young shoots. Together the two words picture a vine putting out branches wherever it can reach.

The sea, yâm, is the Mediterranean, the western edge of the land. Strong’s ties the word’s root, “to roar”, to the noise of the surf, and the same word can mean the west itself. The river, nâhâr, is the Euphrates in the east. These are the bounds God promised to Abraham (Genesis 15:18) and set before Israel at Sinai and on the plains of Moab (Exodus 23:31, Deuteronomy 11:24). Israel came nearest to them in Solomon’s day, when Judah and Israel were as many as the sand and his rule reached over the kingdoms (1 Kings 4:20–21). The verse sets out the full measure of what God gave and intended, and it is the high point of the vine’s story just before the fall.

The psalmist lays the vine’s ruin at God’s own door, because he believes God rules over everything that happens to his people. “Why hast thou then broken down her hedges” uses pārats, to break through, make a breach or tear down. The hedges are gādêr, a wall, fence or enclosure. Vineyards in Israel were ringed with stone walls or thick thorn hedges to keep out wild animals, thieves and encroaching neighbours. For Israel those walls stood for God’s protection, his providential care and the boundaries he set around his people to keep them secure and distinct.

With the walls down, “all they which pass by the way do pluck her.” The verb ‘ārāh means to pluck or gather, a rare word found in only two verses. Anyone walking past can reach in and take the fruit, and that is how easily neighbouring nations and invading armies stripped Israel of its goods, its people and its prosperity once God’s hand was lifted.

The ruin goes further in verse 13. The boar is chăzîyr, a hog or wild pig, and it comes “out of the wood”, yaʻar, the forest, wild and untamed. Wild boars are notorious for rooting up fields and vineyards and leaving wreckage behind them. The verb for “waste”, kirçêm, pictures that tearing and rooting up. The pig was also an unclean animal under the law of Moses (Leviticus 11:7), so to an Israelite a boar in God’s vineyard adds defilement and contempt to the damage.

“The wild beast of the field” widens the threat. The word zîyz means moving creatures, and Strong’s derives it from a root apparently meaning to be conspicuous. The field is sâdeh, the open country, from a root meaning to spread out. The verb “devour” is râʻâh, which usually means to tend a flock or graze, and here describes the beasts feeding on the vine. The first line names one destroyer and the second opens the vineyard to every creature that roams, so the pair describes ruin from every side. The animals stand for the hostile nations, such as Assyria, that were devouring God’s people.

The vine of Psalm 80 leads on to Jesus, who says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” (John 15:1). The vine God planted in Canaan so often failed to bear the fruit he looked for. Jesus is the faithful Israel, the one who fully bears the fruit the vine was planted for. Those who are joined to him by faith are his branches and draw their life from him: “I am the vine, ye are the branches” (John 15:5).

The vine’s history foreshadows his work. God brought his vine out of Egypt, and in Christ he brings his people out of slavery to sin and death. Christ triumphed over the powers that held them (Colossians 2:15) and opened a new and living way to God through his own flesh (Hebrews 10:19–20). The deep root of verse 9 becomes being “rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith” (Colossians 2:6–7), and the fruit God looked for is the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23), a life fruitful in every good work (Colossians 1:10). The cedars that built Solomon’s temple have a counterpart in believers built together on Christ as a holy temple in the Lord (Ephesians 2:20–22).

The vine that reached from the sea to the river becomes the gospel going out to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8), toward the day when “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). The promise to bless all nations through Abraham’s seed is fulfilled in Christ (Galatians 3:16).

The broken hedges find their answer at the cross, where Christ bore the judgment for his people’s unfaithfulness as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Believers are sealed with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13–14), and Jesus says of his sheep, “neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28–29). That “pluck” shares its English word with verse 12, and it promises the opposite of what the vine suffered. The refrain’s prayer for God’s face to shine is answered in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6), and the story ends in the new heavens and new earth, where God dwells with his people for ever (Revelation 21:1).

Everything good in the vine’s story came from God’s hand. He brought it out, cleared the ground, planted it, gave it deep roots and made it spread to the sea and the river. The ruin came under his hand too, and the psalmist says so honestly. He brings his bewilderment straight to God in the words “Why hast thou then broken down her hedges”, and that is faith, because he takes his complaint to the only one who can answer it.

These verses show us a God who gives himself to his people as a gardener gives himself to his vine, who looks for fruit, who disciplines, and who can be asked to turn again. His past faithfulness is the reason to ask. In Christ the vine has been planted anew, and those who abide in him are held in a hand from which no passer-by can pluck them. When the hedges around our own lives lie broken, this psalm gives us words to pray, addressed to the same God who planted the vine and is able to restore it.