Catholic Commentary
The Lord Awakens: Divine Intervention Against the Enemy
65Then the Lord awakened as one out of sleep, like a mighty man who shouts by reason of wine.66He struck his adversaries backward. He put them to a perpetual reproach.
Psalms 78:65–66 describes God awakening from a period of apparent inactivity to strike Israel's enemies backward in defeat. The passage uses the metaphor of a warrior rising from sleep to convey God's sudden, overwhelming intervention after a long silence, with the historical reference being the Philistines' rout and the return of the Ark from captivity.
After long silence, God does not negotiate with evil—He strikes it backward in rout, and this same blow was struck at Easter.
Catholic tradition reads these verses through several interlocking lenses, each adding depth to what might otherwise seem a merely martial episode.
The Anthropomorphisms of Scripture and Divine Impassibility. The Catechism teaches that "God transcends all creatures" and "is neither man nor woman" (CCC 370), and yet Scripture deliberately employs human language of God sleeping, waking, and striking to convey truths about His active engagement in history. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 3), explains that such anthropomorphisms do not compromise divine simplicity; they accommodate divine action to human understanding. The "sleep" is a metaphor for what, from our perspective, appears as divine inaction. God does not change; our perception of His hiddenness does.
Typology of the Resurrection. St. Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos directly connects Psalm 78:65 to the Resurrection, writing that Christ "slept in death, and rose again as a giant refreshed with wine" — alluding both to this verse and to the parallel image in Psalm 19:5 ("like a strong man ready to run his race"). The Church Fathers uniformly saw the divine awakening as a type of Christ rising from the tomb to defeat the adversaries of humanity: sin, death, and the devil.
Divine Justice and Patience. The structure of Psalm 78 — long patience followed by decisive judgment — mirrors the Catholic understanding of God's justice operating within mercy. Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est (§10), notes that the Old Testament's "wrath of God" is not arbitrary rage but "the reaction of God to injustice." The blow struck in verse 66 is not vengeance for its own sake but the vindication of covenant love long outraged. This coheres with the Catechism's teaching that God's justice and mercy are not in tension but are "two aspects of the one God" (CCC 211).
Contemporary Catholics often wrestle with the silence of God — seasons of prayer that seem unanswered, suffering that appears to go unaddressed, evil that seems to advance unchecked. Psalm 78:65–66 is a specifically Catholic antidote to what Pope Francis calls "spiritual worldliness" — the reduction of faith to what we can see and measure right now. These verses invite the believer to situate their personal moment of "apparent divine sleep" within the larger arc of salvation history, where every silence is prelude to a decisive awakening.
Practically, a Catholic reading these verses might bring to mind a specific area of life — a family situation, a cultural battle, an interior struggle with sin — where God seems absent. The psalm does not promise comfort on our timetable, but it does promise the warrior's rousing. The sacramental life of the Church is itself the continuation of this awakening: at every Mass, the Resurrection — God's great "striking backward" of death — is made present. The Eucharist is not a memorial of a sleeping God but the living encounter with the One who has already struck the decisive blow and invites us into His victory.
Commentary
Psalms 78:65 — "Then the Lord awakened as one out of sleep"
The Hebrew verb יָקַץ (yāqaṣ, "to awake") appears elsewhere of literal waking (Gen 28:16; 1 Kgs 18:27) and carries visceral human energy. The simile "as one out of sleep" (כְּיָשֵׁן, kəyāšēn) is deliberately shocking: the sovereign Creator of the universe is compared to a man shaking off slumber. The Psalmist is not asserting that God literally sleeps — Psalm 121:4 flatly denies this ("He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep") — but is employing an anthropomorphism of the most dramatic kind to describe the transition from a period of apparent divine withdrawal to sudden, overwhelming action. Throughout verses 56–64, God had "forsaken" the tabernacle at Shiloh and "delivered his strength into captivity" (v. 61), appearing to abandon His people and His cause. Now that long silence shatters. The word "then" (אָז, ʾāz) is pivotal: it marks a decisive moment in sacred history, a hinge on which the entire poem turns. The sleeping warrior image also carries overtones of a hero roused to battle — a champion rising, shaking off all restraint. The Targum on this verse heightens the warrior imagery: "Then the Lord was revealed in His might, as a mighty man who shouts on account of wine."
Psalms 78:66 — "He struck his adversaries backward"
The verb יַךְ (yak) is a strong blow, the same root used of plague-strikes against Egypt. "Backward" (אָחוֹר, ʾāḥôr) implies rout and disgrace — enemies fleeing in disarray, struck not in the face (a combatant's wound) but in the back, as they run. The historical referent is the return of the Ark from Philistine captivity (1 Sam 5–6), when the Philistines were afflicted with tumors and compelled to send the Ark back. The "adversaries" (צָרָיו, ṣārāyw) are thus both the literal Philistines and, in the psalm's broader sweep, every force that opposes God's redemptive purpose. The brevity of verse 66 is itself expressive: God's decisive intervention is swift, total, and needs no elaboration. The enemy's defeat is not drawn out — it is accomplished. This verse does not merely report a historical battle; it asserts a theological principle: God's purposes cannot ultimately be frustrated. The apparent triumph of chaos, idolatry, and the enemies of the covenant is always temporary. The "backward" striking also signals reversal — what seemed like the enemy's advance is overturned in an instant.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the allegorical sense, the "sleep" from which the Lord awakens prefigures the three days of Christ's burial. Patristic commentators, including Augustine, read this verse as a prophecy of the Resurrection: the apparent silence of God at Calvary — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Ps 22:1) — gives way to the explosive awakening of Easter morning. As a warrior, Christ rises to "strike His adversaries backward," defeating sin, death, and the devil at the very moment when they seemed most triumphant. The reversal in verse 66 thus maps precisely onto the paschal mystery: what appeared to be the enemy's final victory (the Cross) becomes the decisive blow in the opposite direction (the empty tomb).