Psalms 80:12,13 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Why hast thou broken down her hedges That is, taken away thy protection, which was to thy people for walls and bulwarks: so that all they which pass by do pluck her Pluck off her grapes, or tear off her boughs, as the word ארוה, aruah, implies. Thus “the psalmist, having described the exaltation of Israel, under the figure of a vine, proceeds, under the same figure, to lament her depression. She is now represented as deprived of the protection of God, the counsels of the wise, and the arms of the valiant; of all her bulwarks and fortifications, and whatever else could contribute to her defence and security; so that, like a vineyard without a fence, she lay open, on every side, to the incursion and ravages of her neighbouring adversaries, who soon stripped her of all that was valuable, and trod her under foot.” Horne. The boar of the wood doth waste it By which he means some one of their most fierce and furious enemies; and the wild beasts of the field doth devour it Some other potent enemy that made war upon and wasted them. Theodoret says, that Nebuchadnezzar was intended, and that he is very properly termed, The wild beast of the field, because he was more fierce than any other monarch. But the psalmist seems rather to refer to times antecedent to the period in which the Jews suffered so much from Nebuchadnezzar, and to intend some of their other cruel and unrelenting heathen enemies, who, like wild beasts, issuing out of a forest, invaded their country, resolved not only to spoil and plunder, but, if possible, to eradicate and extirpate this vine for ever. The metaphor of the vine is thus continued to a considerable length, and carried on very happily through the several particulars. “Among the many elegances with which this allegory abounds, that nicety, observable both in the beginning and close of it, is not the least; the author sliding, as it were, from the comparison into the subject itself, and from thence into the comparison, by an almost insensible gradation.” See Bishop Lowth's Tenth Prelection.