Psalms 82:8

THE CONCLUSION

"Arise, O God, judge the earth;

For thou shalt inherit all the nations."

In these words, we have a petition by the psalmist, God's message to the false judges having been just concluded by the sentence of death pronounced upon them by God, with the strong intimation that their death would be by providential action upon God's part to remove them.

The psalmist here seems to have been one of those Israelites mentioned by the prophet Amos 5:18-20. Such persons were always calling for God to "Arise and bring on the Judgment Day." As Amos so thoroughly explained, the Judgment Day would be a day of sorrow rather than a day of joy for the vast majority of mankind.

Many of the ancient Jews, however, believed that the Day of Judgment would be a time when God would suddenly appear, kill all the Gentiles, or reduce them to slavery under the Jews, and commit the management of the whole world to "the chosen people." Amos did his best to destroy that conception, but, nevertheless, the attitude persisted; and it appears to us that there remains some residue of it in this concluding verse. (See our comment on this in Vol. 1 of the minor prophets Series, under Amos 5:18.)

It might have been this possible meaning of verse 8 that led Briggs to label the verse as a gloss.[7] However, there is no necessity whatever to deny the verse as a true statement by the psalmist, regardless of its implications.