Psalms 74:6

The Holy Bible, Berean Study Bible

Contextual Overview

¹A Maskil of Asaph. Why have You rejected us forever, O God? Why does Your anger smolder against the sheep of Your pasture? ²Remember Your congregation, which You purchased long ago and redeemed as the tribe of Your inheritance-Mount Zion where You dwell. ³Turn Your steps to the everlasting ruins, to everything in the sanctuary the enemy has destroyed. ⁴Your foes have roared within Your meeting place; they have unfurled their banners as signs, ⁵like men wielding axes, in a thicket of trees, ⁶and smashing all the carved work with hatchets and picks.⁷They have burned Your sanctuary to the ground; they have defiled the dwelling place of Your Name. ⁸They said in their hearts, "We will crush them completely." They burned down every place where God met us in the land. ⁹There are no signs for us to see. There is no longer any prophet. And none of us knows how long this will last. ¹⁰How long, O God, will the enemy taunt You? Will the foe revile Your name forever?

Bible Verse Review
  from Treasury of Scripure Knowledge

1 Kings 6:18, 1 Kings 6:29, 1 Kings 6:32, 1 Kings 6:35

Reciprocal: Jeremiah 7:14 - as Jeremiah 52:13 - burned

Gill's Notes on the Bible

But now they break down the carved work thereof at once with axes and hammers. Formerly it was an honour to be employed in cutting down a tree for the building of the temple; but now so little regard was paid to it, that all its fine carved work, which Solomon made, 1 Kings 6:18, was demolished at once in a rude and furious manner with axes and hammers; which was done either by the Chaldeans in Nebuchadnezzar's time, or by the Syrians in the times of Antiochus, or by the Romans in the times of Vespasian; the first seems intended; see

Jeremiah 46:22.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

But now they break down the carved work thereof ... - literally, “But now the carvings of it together, at once, with sledge and hammers they beat down.” The carved work refers evidently to the ornaments of the temple. The word used here - פתוח pittûach - is rendered engraving, carved work, or carving; Exodus 28:11, Exodus 28:21, Exodus 28:36; Exodus 39:6, Exodus 39:14, Exodus 39:30; Zechariah 3:9; 2 Chronicles 2:14. It is the very word which in 1 Kings 6:29 is applied to the ornaments around the walls of the temple - the “carved figures of cherubim, and palm trees, and open flowers,” and there can be no doubt that the allusion here is to those ornaments. These were rudely cut down, or knocked off, with axes and hammers, as a man lays low the trees of the wood. The phrase “at once” means that they drove forward the work with all despatch. They spared none of them. They treated them all alike as an axeman does the trees of a forest when his object is to clear the land.