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Despite its more hopeful beginning, Psalm 81 ends with God’s complaint against his people. In the light of this, this is a second complaint by God (here we would assume that God is speaking against the gods of other peoples in verses 2–4 and 6–7); or it is a complaint by the people to God, contrasting with Psalm 81 and here assuming that the psalmist is speaking throughout verses 2–8, charging God in several ways about issues of injustice. It is difficult to know which reading fits best: it is possible to see as many as four speakers in this psalm (vv. 2, 3–4, 5–6, 7) and the use of a prophetic oracle is much less clear than in Psalm 81. Whatever the interpretation, it is clear that verse 8 (‘Rise up, O God, judge the earth…’) is an address by the psalmist to God: much depends on whether we see this as an affirmation of the justice of God, or an accusation that God is hidden and doing little about injustice. In either case, in the context of verse 1, where God takes his place in the heavenly council, this is a psalm which both challenges and affirms monotheism.

The link with Pss. 79:5 and 80:4 is clear in the theme of ‘How Long?’ in verse 2. The interaction between human and divine speech—wherever the boundaries are—has resonances with Psalm 81, and Psalm 82 also anticipates Psalm 83 in its imagined downfall of the wicked: here the wicked seem to be deities (although as we shall see below, this has been much debated), whilst in Psalm 83 they are the enemies of the people (noting the deliberate connection made in the *Septuagint, which for 82:7 and 83:11 uses the same Greek word for ‘prince’: the Hebrew uses two different words). It is the mythical background of this psalm which is most contentious. The myth of a heavenly council, the myth that gods have lands, and the myth of one god rising to prominence are all evident in this one psalm; it may well originate from an early period when the attraction of Canaanite religion was seductive. Later Jewish and Christian reception was thus faced with how to read these traces of polytheism in the psalm.

The *Septuagint, surprisingly, preserves the mythical connotations. For example, it reads the reference to the gods in verse 1b as an ‘assembly of gods’, whilst other Greek versions refer to an ‘assembly of the mighty’. *Qumran, meanwhile, uses the term ‘the holy ones of God’: verses 1–2 are found in 11QMelch2, lines 10–11, which combines Lev. 25:9, 13, Deut. 15:2, Isa. 52:7, 61:1–3 and Dan. 9:25 along with Ps. 7:7–9 to describe in eschatological terms the redemption to be brought about by the heavenly Melchizedek: in the ‘year of grace’ he will execute judgement over these mysterious ‘holy ones of God’, who are perhaps by that time angelic beings.¹⁵⁶

Interestingly, the New Testament also does not explicitly deny the mythical and polytheistic associations of this psalm. John 10:34 cites Ps. 82:6 (here calling the Book of Psalms ‘your Law’) and the implication seems to be that those who reject Jesus as God will be judged, by angelic deities, as blasphemers and thus strangers to God. In the light of the Qumran reading, which in effect understands the ‘sons of God’ as angelic judges, acting as God’s agents, it might be that the Johannine use of this psalm might be a way of demonstrating that Jesus is the supreme Divine Judge.

The Church Fathers, influenced by the use of this psalm in John 10, had much to say about its contribution to the doctrine of what later became known as the ‘deification’ of humanity (encapsulated in his De Incarnatione by the fourth-century theologian, *Athanasius of Alexandria: ‘God became man so that we might become God’). For example, the second-century Apologist (or defended of the faith) *Justin Martyr, in Dial. 124, discusses whether Christians are ‘sons of God’ and cites this psalm in full; without criticising its polytheistic stance he reads this as about the disobedience of all humankind, and the judgement on all things, earthly and heavenly, thus negating the (later) idea of ‘deification’. It would appear that Justin used two Greek texts, only one of which was the *Septuagint. So here he reads verses 6–7 as ‘You are gods… you shall die like a man’ as a reference to humanity losing its godlike status through Adam in Eden.¹⁵⁷ *Irenaeus cites this psalm over sixty times, and his view of verse 1 is that the threefold use of the word ‘God’ refers to the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit, whilst in verse 6 the phrase ‘gods’ is addressed to humanity: hence ‘you are gods’ applies to humankind as a whole and illustrates a Pauline view of humanity being adopted as divine sons (rather than the Johannine notion of being begotten as children of God).¹⁵⁸ *Clement of Alexandria, one of the first theologians to express more explicitly the idea of deification (and in this influenced by Hellenistic and Platonic ideas, for example in Stromata I v. 155.2), uses Ps. 82:6 (‘you are gods’) as an example of humanity losing, in Adam, the gift of immortality to regain it in Christ. Hence Clement reads verses 6 and 7 as an account of the whole of salvation history, from Adam to Christ.¹⁵⁹ By contrast, *Tertullian, in Marc. (Book II Ch. XIX and Book I Ch. VII), cites Ps. 82:1 and 6–7, also against the background of John 10:34, and sees that it refers not to humanity but to other beings who are to be judged as ‘non gods’. Only later, for example in *Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Lectures, is there a re-reading that ‘you are gods’ refers to mere human beings whom only the divine Judge can appraise.¹⁶⁰ *Cassiodorus, asserting that the Godhead as Trinity is the only ‘God of gods’, also read the references to the judgement of the gods as about judgement on humans: here too there is no indication of their deification.¹⁶¹

Jewish tradition is of course neither interested in deification nor in the effects of any Trinitarian doctrine; so, arriving at the same issue by a different route, and eradicating all polytheistic references, it reads this psalm as about human rebellion and judgement by God. This might explain the title in the *Targum: ‘A Psalm by Asaph. As for God, his *Shekinah dwells in the assembly of the righteous who are mighty in the Law; he judges among the judges of truth.’ So for verses 6–7 Targum reads: ‘You are like angels … in truth as humans you will die’.¹⁶² Here we are not dealing with gods who will die like men, nor with men who will die like the gods; they are, quite simply, ordinary men. This reading dominated rabbinic tradition: the psalm is a general condemnation of all who falsify God’s law.¹⁶³ *Rashi makes this clear: he reads verse 1 not about a divine assembly but about a judicial body—i.e. about Israel’s law courts over which God works through human judges.¹⁶⁴

This controversial psalm has nevertheless been assigned in the *Mishnah Tamid 7.4 as ‘The Song of the Day as the Third Day of the Week’. Like Psalm 81 before it, this heading is omitted in the *Septuagint, which assigns only five psalms (in the NRSV, Psalms 24; 48; 94; 93 and 102) to different days of the week.¹⁶⁵ The third day of creation was when God, separating the waters from the land (Gen. 1:9), covered the earth with his wisdom; it was also when the earth brought forth vegetation: Pirkei Avot 1:18 notes that the word for vegetation, deshe’, could be an acronym for the Hebrew words din (justice), shalom (peace) and emet (truth), thus fitting with the theme of judgement in this psalm. So as well as indicating God’s role in creation it also is about God standing in the congregation of the mighty, to judge all human corruption.¹⁶⁶

It is extraordinary that a psalm with so much drama, both human and divine speeches, and so many possibilities for liturgical responses, should present such little evidence of later musical engagement: perhaps the theological issues referred to above hindered such creativity. The contemporary musicologist David Mitchell’s reconstruction of the psalm in its earliest setting is an original exception.¹⁶⁷ The proposed score, offered in Figure 4, is imagined as part of a temple performance, sung by a chorus and an *Asaphite precentor, usually half verse by half verse. The first two verses are an introduction. The term *selah at the end of verse 2 Mitchell reads not as a pause, but as a derivation from the verb ‘lift up’: he argues that the use of selah is therefore to bring in the trumpets and cymbals to announce the theme of the justice of God in the following section. For emphasis, verse 3 is envisaged as sung entirely by the precentor and verse 4 entirely by the choir. The rest of the psalm is an exchange, again in half verses, between the two parts; the finale is in verse 8 (‘Rise up!’) which allows the cantor’s voice to rise from the tonic to the fifth, accompanied, possibly, by the *shofar—with all its associations of military advance, fitting well the subject matter of the verse (O God, judge the earth!’). The performance of the entire psalm reaches a resolution by closing on the tonic, ending (in the Hebrew) with the word ‘nations’. It is of course impossible to know precisely what the psalm sounded like in its original performative setting, but Mitchell has given us fresh insights on the possibilities of Hebrew cantillation, as his score makes clear.

FIGURE 4 Interpretation of singing of Psalm 82 in its earliest setting.

Reproduced with the kind permission of David Mitchell, Director of Music in Holy Trinity Pro-Cathedral, Brussels; website https://brightmorningstar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Ps-082.pdf

The references to God taking his place ‘in the midst of the gods’ (verse 1) and God’s address ‘you are gods’ (verse 6) have received several different interpretations in art. The image in the *Stuttgart Psalter (fol. 98v) is simply of Christ judging the people; that in the *Utrecht Psalter (fol. 49v) is of the Christ Logos (with six angels) judging groups of men from his place in the heavens: on the left are the poor and needy, walking into the safety of a cave (although their bearing crosses might indicate they are martyrs, ‘children of the Most High’ who will die [verse 6]). To the right is another group and the angels are hurling down idols from pedestals: these are the ‘gods’ whom God has been addressing in verse 1 and who will fall like princes (verse 7).¹⁶⁸

Another motif found in other Psalters is the depiction of the *Harrowing of Hell: the *Khludov Psalter (fol. 82v) offers this. The *Pantokrator Psalter (fol. 114v) uses the psalm for anti-Jewish polemic: it presents an image of the Jews threatening to stone Christ, taken from John 10:33–34 (the text is above the scene). The wickedness of the Jews is portrayed in their menacing and hunched stance.¹⁶⁹

By total contrast, and as a contemporary Jewish example, this psalm was the third of five used by Martin *Buber to address the apparent eclipse of God after the Holocaust and the attendant challenge to Jewish faith.¹⁷⁰ Psalm 82 is a psalm of ‘startling cruelty’, revealing God as a hidden ruler allowing injustice to reign on earth. The only resolution is in the last verse, where the psalmist cries to God to judge all the earth (including all inferior gods). ‘The cry… becomes our own cry, which bursts forth from our hearts and rises to our lips in a time of God’s hiddenness’.¹⁷¹

This is a mysterious psalm which has elicited a wide range of theological responses, particularly about God’s relation to humanity and humanity’s relation to God and to heavenly (angelic?) beings. It is not surprising that it has had such a different reception in Christian and Jewish tradition. The only reading which brings the two traditions together is again one which sees the psalm as essentially about God’s protection of the weak and poor, and about his ultimate judgement on evil.