“O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps.”
Psalm 79 opens with a communal lament describing national catastrophe: "O God, the nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins." The violation of the divine inheritance (the land) and the defilement of the temple represent the most profound form of covenantal crisis. The mention of the temple's defilement evokes imagery of foreign contamination of the sacred space; the city's destruction represents not merely military loss but theological rupture. This psalm likely responds to a historical destruction (possibly the Babylonian siege of 586 BCE) from the perspective of survivors attempting to articulate the theological meaning of catastrophe.
Church Fathers on Psalms 79:1
1. Over the title of this Psalm, being so short and so simple, I think we need not tarry. But the prophecy which here we read sent before, we know to be evidently fulfilled. For when these things were being sung in the times of King David, nothing of such sort, by the hostility of the Gentiles, as yet had befallen the city Jerusalem, nor the Temple of God, which as yet was not even built. For that after the death of David his son Salomon made a temple to God, who is ignorant?…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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