1 Give ear, my people, to my law,
Bow your ear to the sayings of my mouth.
2 I will open my mouth in a parable,
I will utter riddles from the ancient days,
3 What we have heard and known
And our fathers have told us,
4 We will not hide from their sons,
Recounting to the generation to come the praises of Jehovah,
And His might and the wonders that He has done.
5 For He established a testimony in Jacob,
And appointed a law in Israel,
Which He commanded our fathers
To make known to their children;
6 In order that the generation to come might know,
The children who should be born,
[Who] should rise up and tell to their children,
7 That they might place their confidence in God,
And not forget the deeds of God,
But keep His commandments;
8 And not be as their fathers,
A stubborn and rebellious generation,
A generation that did not make its heart steadfast,
And whose spirit was not faithful towards God.
9 The children of Ephraim, bearing [and] drawing bows,
Turned back in the day of onset.
10 They kept not the covenant of God,
And in His law they refused to walk,
11 And they forgot His doings,
And the wonders which He had showed them.
12 Before their fathers He did marvels,
In the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan.
13 He cleft the sea and let them pass through,
And He reared up the waters like a heap of corn,
14 And He guided them in a cloud by day
And all night in a fiery light.
15 He cleft rocks in the wilderness,
And gave them drink abundantly, as [from] ocean depths.
16 And He brought forth streams from the cliff,
And made waters to flow down like rivers.
17 But they went on to sin yet more against Him,
To rebel against the Most High in the desert.
18 And they tempted God in their heart,
In asking meat after their desire.
19 And they spoke against God, they said,
"Is God able to spread a table in the wilderness?
20 Behold, He struck a rock, and waters gushed forth,
And torrents flowed out.
Is He able to give bread also?
Or will He prepare flesh for His people?"
21 Jehovah heard and was wroth,
And a fire was kindled in Jacob,
And wrath also went up against Israel.
22 For they did not believe in God,
And trusted not in His salvation.
23 And He commanded the clouds above,
And opened the doors of heaven,
24 And rained upon them manna to eat,
And gave them the corn of heaven.
25 Men did eat the bread of the Mighty Ones;
He sent them sustenance to the full.
26 He made the east wind go forth in the heavens,
And guided the south wind by His power;
27 And He rained flesh upon them like dust,
And winged fowls like the sand of the seas,
28 And let it fall in the midst of their camp,
Round about their habitations.
29 So they ate and were surfeited,
And their desires He brought to them.
30 They were not estranged from their desires
Their food was yet in their mouths.
31 And the wrath of God rose against them,
And slew the fattest of them,
And struck down the young men of Israel.
32 For all this they sinned yet more,
And believed not in His wonders.
33 So He made their days to vanish like a breath,
And their years in suddenness.
34 When He slew them, then they inquired after Him,
And returned and sought God earnestly.
35 And they remembered that God was their rock,
And God Most High their redeemer.
36 And they flattered Him with their mouth,
And with their tongue they lied to Him,
37 And their heart was not steadfast with Him,
And they were not faithful to His covenant.
38 But He is compassionate, covers iniquity, and destroys not;
Yea, many a time He takes back His anger,
And rouses not all His wrath.
39 So He remembered that they were [but] flesh,
A wind that goes and comes not again.
40 How often did they provoke Him in the wilderness,
Did they grieve Him in the desert!
41 Yea, again and again they tempted God,
And the Holy One of Israel they vexed.
42 They remembered not His hand,
The day when He set them free from the adversary,
43 When He set forth His signs in Egypt,
And His wonders in the field of Zoan.
44 And He turned to blood their Nile streams,
And their streams they could not drink.
45 He sent amongst them flies that devoured them,
And frogs that destroyed them.
46 And He gave their increase to the caterpillar,
And their toil to the locust.
47 He killed their vines with hail,
And their sycamores with frost. [?]
48 And He gave their cattle up to the hail,
And their flocks to the lightnings.
49 He sent against them the heat of His anger,
Wrath and indignation and trouble,
A mission of angels of evil.
50 He levelled a path for His anger,
He spared not their souls from death,
But delivered over their life to the pestilence.
51 And He smote all the first-born of Egypt,
The firstlings of [their] strength in the tents of Ham.
52 And He made His people go forth like sheep,
And guided them like a flock in the desert.
53 And He led them safely, that they did not fear,
And the sea covered their enemies.
54 And He brought them to His holy border,
This mountain, which His right hand had won.
55 And He drove out the nations before them,
And allotted them by line as an inheritance,
And made the tribes of Israel to dwell in their tents.
56 But they tempted and provoked God Most High,
And His testimonies they did not keep.
57 And they turned back and were faithless like their fathers,
They were turned aside like a deceitful bow;
58 And they provoked Him to anger with their high places,
And with their graven images they moved Him to jealousy.
59 God heard and was wroth,
And loathed Israel exceedingly.
60 So that He rejected the habitation of Shiloh,
The tent [which] He had pitched among men.
61 And He gave His strength to captivity,
And His beauty into the hand of the adversary.
62 And He delivered His people to the sword,
And against His inheritance He was wroth.
63 Their young men the fire devoured,
And their maidens were not praised in the marriage-song.
64 Their priests fell by the sword,
And their widows made no lamentation.
65 Then the Lord awoke as one that had slept,
Like a warrior shouting because of wine.
66 And He beat His adversaries back,
He put on them a perpetual reproach.
67 And He loathed the tent of Joseph,
And the tribe of Ephraim He did not choose.
68 But He chose the tribe of Judah,
Mount Zion, which He loved.
69 And He built His sanctuary like [heavenly] heights,
Like the earth which He has founded for ever.
70 And He chose David His servant,
And took him from the sheepfolds;
71 From following the ewes that give suck, He brought him
To feed Jacob His people,
And Israel His inheritance.
72 So he fed them according to the integrity of his heart,
And with the skilfulness of his hands he guided them.
This psalm is closely related to Psalms cv.-cvii.
Like them, it treats the history of Israel, and especially the Exodus
and wilderness wanderings, for purposes of edification, rebuke,
and encouragement. The past is held up as a mirror to the present
generation. It has been one long succession of miracles of mercy met
by equally continuous ingratitude, which has ever been punished by
national calamities. The psalm departs singularly from chronological
order. It arranges its contents in two principal masses, each
introduced by the same formula (vv. 12, 43) referring to "wonders in
Egypt and the field of Zoan." But the first mass has nothing to do
with Egypt, but begins with the passage of the Red Sea, and is wholly
occupied with the wilderness. The second group of wonders begins in
ver. 44 with the plagues of Egypt, touches lightly on the wilderness
history, and then passes to the early history of Israel when settled
in the land, and finishes with the establishment of David on the
throne. It is difficult to account for this singular _bouleversement_
of the history. But the conjecture may be hazarded that its reason
lies in the better illustration of continual interlacing of mercy
and unthankfulness afforded by the events in the wilderness, than by
the plagues of Egypt. That interlacing is the main point on which
the psalmist wishes to lay stress, and therefore he begins with the
most striking example of it. The use of the formula in ver. 12 looks
as if his original intention had been to follow the order of time.
Another peculiarity is the prominence given to Ephraim, both in ver.
9 as a type of faithlessness, and in ver. 67 as rejected in favour of
Judah. These references naturally point to the date of the psalm as
being subsequent to the separation of the kingdoms; but whether it is
meant as rebuke to the northern kingdom, or as warning to Judah from
the fate of Ephraim, is not clear. Nor are there materials for closer
determination of date. The tone of the closing reference to David
implies that his accession belongs to somewhat remote times.
There are no regular strophes, but a tendency to run into paragraphs
of four verses, with occasional irregularities.
Vv. 1-4 declare the singer's didactic purpose. He deeply feels the
solidarity of the nation through all generations--how fathers and
children are knit by mystic ties, and by possession of an eternal
treasure, the mighty deeds of God, of which they are bound to pass on
the record from age to age. The history of ancient days is "a parable"
and a "riddle" or "dark saying," as containing examples of great
principles, and lessons which need reflection to discern and draw out.
From that point of view, the psalmist will sum up the past. He is not
a chronicler, but a religious teacher. His purpose is edification,
rebuke, encouragement, the deepening of godly fear and obedience. In a
word, he means to give the spirit of the nation's history.
Vv. 5-8 base this purpose on God's declared will that the knowledge of
His deeds for Israel might be handed down from fathers to sons. The
obligations of parents for the religious training of their children,
the true bond of family unity, the ancient order of things when oral
tradition was the principal means of preserving national history,
the peculiarity of this nation's annals, as celebrating no heroes
and recording only the deeds of God by men, the contrast between the
changing bearers of the story and the undying deeds which they had
to tell, are all expressed in these verses, so pathetic in their
gaze upon the linked series of short-lived men, so stern in their
final declaration that Divine commandment and mercy had been in
vain, and that, instead of a tradition of goodness, there had been
a transmission of stubbornness and departure from God, repeating
itself with tragic uniformity. The devout poet, who knows what God
meant family life to be and to do, sadly recognises the grim contrast
presented by its reality. But yet he will make one more attempt to
break the flow of evil from father to son. Perhaps his contemporaries
will listen and shake themselves clear of this entail of disobedience.
The reference to Ephraim in vv. 9-11 is not to be taken as alluding
to any cowardly retreat from actual battle. Ver. 9 seems to be a
purely figurative way of expressing what is put without a metaphor in
the two following verses. Ephraim's revolt from God's covenant was
like the conduct of soldiers, well armed and refusing to charge the
foe. The better their weapons, the greater the cowardice and ignominy
of the recreants. So the faithlessness of Ephraim was made darker
in criminality by its knowledge of God and experience of His mercy.
These should have knit the tribe to Him. A general truth of wide
application is implied--that the measure of capacity is the measure of
obligation. Guilt increases with endowment, if the latter is misused.
A poor soldier, with no weapon but a sling or a stick, might sooner be
excused for flight than a fully armed archer. The mention of Ephraim
as prominent in faithlessness may be an allusion to the separation
of the kingdoms. That allusion has been denied on the ground that it
is the wilderness history which is here before the psalmist's mind.
But the historical retrospect does not begin till ver. 12, and this
introduction may well deal with an event later than those detailed in
the following verses. Whether the revolt of the Ten Tribes is here in
view or not, the psalmist sees that the wayward and powerful tribe of
Ephraim had been a centre of religious disaffection, and there is no
reason why his view should not be believed, or should be supposed to
be due to mere prejudiced hostility.
The historical details begin with ver. 12, but, as has been noticed
above, the psalmist seems to change his intention of first narrating
the wonders in Egypt, and passes on to dilate on the wilderness
history. "The field of Zoan" is the territory of the famous Egyptian
city of Tzan, and seems equivalent to the Land of Goshen. The wonders
enumerated are the familiar ones of the passage of the Red Sea, the
guidance by the pillar of cloud and fire, and the miraculous supply of
water from the rock. In vv. 15, 16, the poet brings together the two
instances of such supply, which were separated from each other by the
forty years of wandering, the first having occurred at Horeb in the
first year, and the second at Kadesh in the last year. The two words
"rocks," in ver. 15, and "cliff," in ver. 16, are taken from the two
narratives of these miracles, in Exod. xvii. and Numb. xx.
The group of four verses (13-16) sets forth God's mighty deeds; the next
quartet of verses (17-20) tells of Israel's requital. It is significant
of the thoughts which filled the singer's heart, that he begins the
latter group with declaring that, notwithstanding such tokens of God's
care, the people "went on to sin yet more," though he had specified no
previous acts of sin. He combines widely separated instances of their
murmurings, as he had combined distant instances of God's miraculous
supply of water. The complaints which preceded the fall of the manna
and the first supply of quails (Exod. xvi.), and those which led to
the second giving of these (Numb. xi.) are thrown together, as one in
kind. The speech put into the mouths of the murmurers in vv. 19, 20, is
a poetic casting into bitter, blasphemous words of the half-conscious
thoughts of the faithless, sensuous crowd. They are represented as
almost upbraiding God with His miracle, as quite unmoved to trust by
it, and as thinking that it has exhausted His power. When they were
half dead with thirst, they thought much of the water, but now they
depreciate that past wonder as a comparatively small thing. So, to the
churlish heart, which cherishes eager desires after some unattained
earthly good, past blessings diminish as they recede, and leave neither
thankfulness nor trust. There is a dash of intense bitterness and
ironical making light of their relation to God in their question,
"Can He provide flesh for _His people_?" Much good that name has done
us, starving here! The root of all this blasphemous talk was sensuous
desire; and because the people yielded to it, they "tempted God"--that
is, they "unbelievingly and defiantly demanded, instead of trustfully
waiting and praying" (Delitzsch). To ask food for their desires was sin;
to ask it for their need would have been faith.
In ver. 21 the allusion is to the "fire of the Lord," which, according
to Numb. xi. 3, burnt in the camp, just before the second giving of
quails. It comes in here out of chronological order, for the sending
of manna follows it; but the psalmist's didactic purpose renders him
indifferent to chronology. The manna is called "corn of heaven" and
"bread of the Mighty Ones"--_i.e._, angels, as the LXX. renders the
word. Both designations point to its heavenly origin, without its
being necessary to suppose that the poet thought of angels as really
eating it. The description of the fall of the quails (vv. 26-29) is
touched with imaginative beauty. The word rendered above "made to go
forth" is originally applied to the breaking up an encampment, and
that rendered "guided" to a shepherd's leading of his flock. Both
words are found in the Pentateuch, the former in reference to the wind
that brought the quails (Numb. xi. 31), the latter in reference to
that which brought the plague of locusts (Exod. x. 13). So the winds
are conceived of as God's servants, issuing from their tents at His
command, and guided by Him as a shepherd leads his sheep. "He let it
fall in the midst of their camp" graphically describes the dropping
down of the wearied, storm-beaten birds.
Vv. 30-33 paint the swift punishment of the people's unbelief, in
language almost identical with Numb. xi. 33. The psalmist twice
stigmatises their sin as "lust," and uses the word which enters
into the tragical name given to the scene of the sin and the
punishment--Kibroth-Hat _taavah_ (the graves of Lust). In vv. 32, 33,
the faint-hearted despondency after the return of the spies, and the
punishment of it by the sentence of death on all that generation, seem
to be alluded to.
The next group of four verses describes the people's superficial and
transient repentance, "When He slew them they sought Him"--_i.e._,
when the fiery serpents were sent among them. But such seeking after
God, which is properly not seeking Him at all, but only seeking to
escape from evil, neither goes deep nor lasts long. Thus the end of it
was only lip reverence, proved to be false by life, and soon ended.
"Their heart was not steadfast." The pressure being removed, they
returned to their habitual position, as all such penitents do.
From the midst of this sad narrative of faithlessness, springs up,
like a fountain in a weary land, or a flower among half-cooled lava
blocks, the lovely description of God's forbearance in vv. 38, 39.
It must not be read as if it merely carried on the narrative, and
was in continuation of the preceding clauses. The psalmist does not
say "He _was_ full of compassion," though that would be much, in
the circumstances; but he is declaring God's eternal character. His
compassions are unfailing. It is always His wont to cover sin and to
spare. Therefore He exercised these gracious forbearances towards
those obstinate transgressors. He was true to His own compassion in
remembering their mortality and feebleness. What a melancholy sound,
as of wind blowing among forgotten graves, has that summing up of
human life as "a breath that goes and comes not again"!
With ver. 40 the second portion of the psalm may be regarded as
beginning. The first group of historical details dealt first with
God's mercies, and passed on to man's requital. The second starts
with man's ingratitude, which it paints in the darkest colours,
as provoking Him, grieving Him, tempting Him, and vexing Him. The
psalmist is not afraid to represent God as affected with such emotions
by reason of men's indifference and unbelief. His language is not to
be waved aside as anthropomorphic and antiquated. No doubt, we come
nearer to the unattainable truth, when we conceive of God as grieved
by men's sins and delighting in their trust, than when we think of Him
as an impassive Infinitude, serenely indifferent to tortured or sinful
hearts. For is not His name of names Love?
The psalmist traces Israel's sin to forgetfulness of God's mercy,
and thus glides into a swift summing up of the plagues of Egypt,
regarded as conducing to Israel's deliverance. They are not arranged
chronologically, though the list begins with the first. Then follow
three of those in which animals were the destroyers: namely, the
fourth, that of flies; the second, that of frogs; and the eighth,
that of locusts. Then comes the seventh, that of hail; and, according
to some commentators, the fifth, that of the murrain, in ver. 49,
followed by the tenth in ver. 51. But the grand, sombre imagery of
ver. 49 is too majestic for such application. It rather sums up the
whole series of plagues, likening them to an embassy (lit., a sending)
of angels of evil. They are a grim company to come forth from His
presence--Wrath, Indignation, and Trouble. The same power which sent
them out on their errand prepared a way before them; and the crowning
judgment, which, in the psalmist's view was also the crowning mercy,
was the death of the first-born.
The next quartet of verses (vv. 52-55) passes lightly over the
wilderness history and the settlement in the land, and hastens on to
a renewed narration of repeated rebellion, which occupies the next
group (vv. 56-59). These verses cover the period from the entrance on
Canaan to the fall of the sanctuary of Shiloh, during which there was
a continual tendency to relapse into idolatry. That is the special sin
here charged against the Israel of the time of the Judges. The figure
of a "deceitful bow," in ver. 57, well describes the people as failing
to fulfil the purpose of their choice by God. As such a weapon does
not shoot true, and makes the arrow fly wide, however well aimed and
strongly drawn, so Israel foiled all Divine attempts, and failed to
carry God's message to the world, or to fulfil His will in themselves.
Hence the next verses tell, with intense energy and pathos, the sad
story of Israel's humiliation under the Philistines. The language
is extraordinarily strong in its description of God's loathing and
rejection of the nation and sanctuary, and is instinct with sorrow,
blended with stern recognition of His righteousness in judgment. What
a tragic picture the psalmist draws! Shiloh, the dwelling-place of
God, empty for evermore; the "Glory"--that is, the Ark--in the enemy's
hands; everywhere stiffening corpses; a pall of silence over the land;
no brides and no joyous bridal chaunts; the very priests massacred,
unlamented by their widows, who had wept so many tears already that
the fountain of them was dried up, and even sorrowing love was dumb
with horror and despair!
The two last groups of verses paint God's great mercy in delivering
the nation from such misery. The daring figure of His awaking as from
sleep and dashing upon Israel's foes, who are also His, with a shout
like that of a hero stimulated by wine, is more accordant with Eastern
fervour than with our colder imagination; but it wonderfully expresses
the sudden transition from a period, during which God seemed passive
and careless of His people's wretchedness, to one in which His power
flashed forth triumphant for their defence. The prose fact is the long
series of victories over the Philistines and other oppressors, which
culminated in the restoration of the Ark, the selection of Zion as
its abode, which involved the rejection of Shiloh and consequently of
Ephraim (in whose territory Shiloh was), and the accession of David. The
Davidic kingdom is, in the psalmist's view, the final form of Israel's
national existence; and the sanctuary, like the kingdom, is perpetual as
the lofty heavens or the firm earth. Nor were his visions vain, for that
kingdom subsists and will subsist for ever, and the true sanctuary, the
dwelling-place of God among men, is still more closely intertwined with
the kingdom and its King than the psalmist knew. The perpetual duration
of both is, in truth, the greatest of God's mercies, outshining all
earlier deliverances; and they who truly have become the subjects of the
Christ, the King of Israel and of the world, and who dwell with God in
His house, by dwelling with Jesus, will not rebel against Him any more,
nor ever forget His wonders, but faithfully tell them to the generations
to come.