Catholic Commentary
Appeals to God's Past Victories
9Do to them as you did to Midian, as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the river Kishon;10who perished at Endor, who became as dung for the earth.11Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, yes, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,12who said, “Let’s take possession of God’s pasture lands.”
Psalms 83:9–12 presents the psalmist's petition for God to defeat a coalition of enemies with the same overwhelming power shown against the Midianites under Gideon, specifically at Endor where their forces were destroyed and left unburied. The passage emphasizes that the enemies' own words—their boast to possess God's land—condemn them, and their nobles deserve the fate of Midianite princes Oreb and Zeeb who were executed during Gideon's pursuit.
The psalmist doesn't beg God for justice—he commands it on the basis of history: You crushed Midian before; crush our enemies now the same way.
Commentary
Psalms 83:9 — "Do to them as you did to Midian" The psalmist does not plead from nowhere; he anchors his petition in salvation history. The reference is to Gideon's rout of the Midianite confederation in Judges 6–8, one of the most celebrated deliverances in Israel's memory. The Midianites had oppressed Israel for seven years, reducing the people to hiding in caves, before God raised up Gideon with a force of a mere three hundred men. The prayer is essentially: You have done this before with impossible odds; do it again. The verb "do" (עֲשֵׂה, aseh) is an imperative of confident petition, not a desperate cry — the psalmist commands God's action on the basis of covenant fidelity.
Psalms 83:10 — "who perished at Endor" Endor (not the Endor of Saul's necromancer, but a site in the Jezreel Valley near the hill of Moreh) was the location where the Midianite armies were slaughtered and left unburied on the ground — their corpses becoming "dung for the earth" (Psalm 83:10b, the immediately following verse). The detail is precise: the psalmist is not trading in vague generalities but citing a specific geography of God's power. The Midianite corpses rotting in the open field signified total, shameful defeat — the opposite of a warrior's honorable burial. By invoking this image, the psalmist asks for a defeat so complete that the enemies are rendered as nothing.
Psalms 83:11 — "Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb" Oreb ("Raven") and Zeeb ("Wolf") were princes of Midian captured and executed during Gideon's pursuit (Judges 7:25). Their deaths were so memorable that the sites of their executions — the rock of Oreb and the winepress of Zeeb — were named in their memory. Crucially, the execution was carried out by the Ephraimites after the main battle, showing that God's judgment extended even into the aftermath. The psalmist singles out the nobles of the current coalition — not the foot soldiers but the architects of the aggression — for this fate. Leadership in injustice carries leadership in judgment.
Psalms 83:12 — "who said, 'Let's take possession of God's pasture lands'" This verse reaches its rhetorical climax: the enemies condemn themselves out of their own mouths. The Hebrew נְאוֹת אֱלֹהִים (ne'ot Elohim, "pastures/habitations of God") refers to the Land of Israel understood as God's own possession, entrusted to His people. That the enemies want to possess it is not merely a geopolitical threat — it is a theological outrage, a direct assault on God's sovereign ownership. Their boast is cited as evidence before the divine tribunal. In Gideon's day, the Midianites had made the same presumption and were destroyed. The psalmist argues by analogy: these enemies have spoken the same blasphemy; let them meet the same end.
Typological and Spiritual Senses The Church Fathers read Gideon himself as a type of Christ — his three hundred men prefiguring, in St. Augustine's reading, the mystery of the Cross (the number 300 being the Greek letter Tau, the sign of the cross). The rout at Endor thus becomes, in the spiritual sense, a foreshadowing of Christ's decisive defeat of the powers of darkness. The enemies of Psalm 83 — who conspire to erase God's name from the earth (v. 4) — are read by Origen and Augustine as figures of the spiritual enemies of the soul: diabolical forces, heresy, and the disordered passions that seek to evict God from the "pasture lands" of the human heart.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition reads this passage at multiple levels, all of which are illuminated by the Church's approach to the Old Testament as "the pedagogy of God" (Dei Verbum, §15).
First, the theology of divine memory and covenant fidelity is central. The psalmist's appeal to Midian and Endor is not mere nostalgia — it is an invocation of God's character. The Catechism teaches that God's mighty acts in history are "a pledge and guarantee" of what He will do (CCC §1363). To pray do again what you did then is to pray in the logic of the covenant.
Second, St. Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos (on Psalm 82 in the Septuagint numbering) interprets the enemies of this coalition as figures of vice and heresy arrayed against the Church. The "pasture lands of God" become the Church herself — the mystical body entrusted to God's care — and the enemies' boast reflects every force that seeks to reduce the Church to nothing. The prayer is thus not merely historical but ecclesial: the Church prays this psalm when she prays the Liturgy of the Hours.
Third, the execution of Oreb and Zeeb raises what modern readers may find difficult: a prayer for the destruction of enemies. Catholic teaching, following Thomas Aquinas (ST II-II, Q. 25, a. 6), distinguishes between desiring the annihilation of persons and desiring the annihilation of evil in its current form. The prayer is for God's justice to prevail, not for personal vengeance. Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, noted that the imprecatory psalms must be read as cries for God's righteousness to overcome the structures of evil — cries that Christ himself absorbed and transformed on the Cross.
Finally, the "pasture lands of God" (ne'ot Elohim) anticipates the New Testament image of Christ as the Good Shepherd (John 10), whose flock the enemy constantly seeks to scatter.
For Today
For the contemporary Catholic, this passage is a school in the spirituality of petition. When we pray these verses in the Liturgy of the Hours, we are not endorsing political violence — we are doing something more demanding: we are taking seriously that evil is real, organized, and aggressive, and that God has historical precedent for overcoming it. The "pasture lands of God" that the enemy seeks to seize can be read concretely today as the spaces of faith, family, and conscience under pressure: a child's formation in the faith, a Catholic institution's identity, a culture's openness to the Gospel.
Practically, this passage invites Catholics to pray from memory — to recall God's concrete acts in their own lives and in Church history, and to use those memories as the grounds of present petition. "You delivered the martyrs; deliver us. You preserved the Church through persecution; preserve her now." This is not presumption; it is the logic of covenant prayer that Israel modeled and Christ himself embodied in Gethsemane. Pray boldly, pray from history, and trust that the God of Gideon is the God of today.
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