Biblion Bible Commentary
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He Brought Them Out With Joy
Psalms 105:26-45
26 He sent Moses, his servant, and Aaron, whom he had chosen. · WEB
The plagues listed as a series of divine sendings, and the whole rescue given a purpose in the last line.
He sent Moses, his servant, and Aaron, whom he had chosen Psalms 105:26.
Sent, as Joseph was sent. The psalm's vocabulary is consistent: everything that happens is dispatched.
He sent darkness, and made it dark Psalms 105:28.
The list of plagues follows, and it is not in the order of Exodus. Darkness comes first, which was the ninth, and the tally is shorter than ten. The psalm is recalling rather than cataloguing, and it takes the liberty a memory takes.
What is uniform is the grammar. He sent, he turned, he spoke, he gave, he struck — every plague is a verb with God as its subject, and Egypt's kings appear only as the owners of rooms the frogs got into Psalms 105:30.
He struck also all the firstborn in their land, the first fruits of all their manhood Psalms 105:36.
The phrase first fruits is the language of harvest and offering, used here of the dead. It is the only comment the psalm makes on the tenth plague.
He brought them out with silver and gold. There was not one feeble person among his tribes Psalms 105:37.
Two details, and the second is the more remarkable. A population of slaves, leaving in a night, and nobody stumbling — the psalm reports the departure as though a nation of manual laborers had been made fit for a march.
Egypt was glad when they departed Psalms 105:38. The nation that would not let them go for a festival is relieved to see them leave.
He spread a cloud for a covering, fire to give light in the night Psalms 105:39.
The pillar described by what it was for rather than what it looked like: shade in a desert day, light in a desert night.
They asked, and he brought quails, and satisfied them with the bread of the sky Psalms 105:40.
And here the two histories part company. The seventy-eighth psalm treats the same request as a test of God, and the hundred and sixth says he sent leanness into their soul Psalms 106:15. This psalm records only that they asked and were satisfied. It is not contradiction but selection, and it is deliberate: this is the account of what God did, with the complaining left out.
For he remembered his holy word, and Abraham, his servant Psalms 105:42.
The thesis restated at the end. The exodus happened because of a sentence spoken to a man four hundred years earlier.
He gave them the lands of the nations... that they might keep his statutes, and observe his laws Psalms 105:44–45.
The purpose clause of the whole psalm, and it comes last. The land was not the point either; obedience was what the land was for.
settled What this mark means