Psalm 83

Living Bible

83 O God, don’t sit idly by, silent and inactive when we pray. Answer us! Deliver us!

² Don’t you hear the tumult and commotion of your enemies? Don’t you see what they are doing, these proud men who hate the Lord? ³ They are full of craftiness and plot against your people, laying plans to slay your precious ones. ⁴ “Come,” they say, “and let us wipe out Israel as a nation—we will destroy the very memory of her existence.” ⁵ This was their unanimous decision at their summit conference—they signed a treaty to ally themselves against Almighty God— ⁶ these Ishmaelites and Edomites and Moabites and Hagrites; ⁷ people from the lands of Gebal, Ammon, Amalek, Philistia and Tyre; ⁸ Assyria has joined them too, and is allied with the descendants of Lot.^[a]

⁹ Do to them as once you did to Midian, or as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon, ¹⁰ and as you did to your enemies at Endor, whose decaying corpses fertilized the soil. ¹¹ Make their mighty nobles die as Oreb did, and Zeeb;^[b] let all their princes die like Zebah and Zalmunna, ¹² who said, “Let us seize for our own use these pasturelands of God!”

¹³ O my God, blow them away like dust; like chaff before the wind— ¹⁴ as a forest fire that roars across a mountain. ¹⁵ Chase them with your fiery storms, tempests, and tornados. ¹⁶ Utterly disgrace them until they recognize your power and name, O Lord. ¹⁷ Make them failures in everything they do; let them be ashamed and terrified ¹⁸ until they learn that you alone, Jehovah, are the God above all gods in supreme charge of all the earth.