Psalm 74--Commonplace Book (from my readthrough of the Bible)

I've recently gotten a bit distracted in my readthrough of the Bible, but I am making slow progress through Psalms.

Psalm 74 had a number of interesting features, so I thought I'd mention it. 

The Jerusalem Bible (which is the Bible I'm reading) titles this Psalm "Lament on the destruction of the Temple", so I guess right away we can guess that there's no use pretending this Psalm was written by David.  The NIV translation doesn't give this Psalm a title.  (The NIV translation is the translation that was used in my community, and the translation I grew up with, so whenever I see something surprising in The Jerusalem Bible, I try to cross reference it with the NIV.)

Anyway, from the beginning, according to The Jerusalem Bible translation, Psalm 74 reads:

God, have you finally rejected us,

raging at the flock you used to pasture?

Remember the people you long since made your own,

your hereditary tribe whom you redeemed, 

and this Mount Zion where you came to live.

Pick your steps over these endless ruins:

the enemy have sacked everything in the sanctuary.

They roared where your Assemblies used to take place,

they stuck their enemy emblems over the entrance, *

emblems we have never seen before.

 As you can see, there's an asterisk by entrance, which references to a footnote at the bottom of the page in The Jerusalem Bible, which reads:

Probably a description of the destruction of the temple by the 'mad king', Antiochus Epiphanes.

Interesting.  I guess this must come from First Maccabees chapter 1, in which Antiochus Epiphanes erects the Abomination of desolation in the Temple. But I had never realized that some of the Psalms were written as late as the Seleucid period.  I had known some of them were from the Babylonian exile, but I didn't realize they came from even later than that.  (The NIV, by the way, does not have this same footnote.  Nor is it as clear from the NIV translation that someone is putting something over the entrance to the temple.  See NIV version here.)

For what it's worth, Wikipedia backs up the idea that there's a tradition of attributing this Psalm to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes.  From Psalm 74 Wikipedia page:

The enemy is not named, but may refer to King Nebuchadnezzar. According to the Targum, the reference is to Antiochus Epiphanes.^[4]

The second interesting thing comes a bit further down in Psalm 74, from verse 12.  Quoting again from The Jerusalem Bible:

Yet, God my king from the first,

author of saving acts throughout the earth,

by your power you split the sea in two,

and smashed the heads of monsters on the waters,

You crushed Leviathan's heads,

leaving him for wild animals to eat,

This section is interesting to me because it seems to be explicitly referencing the Babylonian creation myths, in which at the beginning of time the sea is subdued and the sea monsters killed.  

I'm currently reading Babylonian Creation Myths by W.G. Lambert, so those stories are fresh in my mind at the moment, and it's interesting to see the influence in the Psalms.  

Although I had long known that these references were in the Psalms.  Christine Hayes in her lectures on the Old Testament  had mentioned that the Babylonian creation stories about subduing the sea monsters were absent from Genesis, but in the Psalms and in the book of Job.  I even wrote about this fact in a previous post.  But even though I had known this was in the Psalms, it still jumped out at me when I read it because I'm currently reading the Babylonian Creation Myths.

And finally, the other thing I find interesting about Psalm 74 is that, just like Psalm 44, the author seems to be accusing God of abandoning Israel to its enemies without justification.