Biblion Bible Commentary
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We Have Sinned With Our Fathers
Psalms 106:1-23
1 Praise Yahweh! Give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good, for his loving kindness endures forever. · WEB
The same history retold from the other side, by people who put themselves in it with the word we.
Praise Yahweh! Give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good, for his loving kindness endures forever Psalms 106:1.
The psalm opens in praise and then does something no other national history in Scripture does at this length: it confesses.
We have sinned with our fathers. We have committed iniquity. We have done wickedly Psalms 106:6.
The pronoun is the psalm's whole method. Not they — we, sinning with our fathers, which places the singers inside a story that finished centuries before they were born. Where the hundred and fifth psalm recounted what God did and left the failures out, this one recounts the failures and puts the congregation in them.
Our fathers didn't understand your wonders in Egypt... but were rebellious at the sea, even at the Red Sea Psalms 106:7.
Rebellious at the sea — before the crossing, with the water in front and the chariots behind Exodus 14:11.
Nevertheless he saved them for his name's sake, that he might make his mighty power known Psalms 106:8.
The first of the psalm's several neverthelesses, and the reason given for the rescue is not their condition but his reputation. It is the same argument the seventy-ninth psalm makes when it has nothing else to plead.
Then they believed his words. They sang his praise. They soon forgot his works Psalms 106:12–13.
Three sentences covering the fifteenth chapter of Exodus and the sixteenth. Belief, singing, and forgetting, in that order and at that speed. The word soon is the psalm's judgment on the whole generation.
But gave in to craving in the desert, and tested God in the wasteland. He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their soul Psalms 106:14–15.
The verse that has haunted readers ever since. He answered the prayer, and the answer impoverished them. It is the collection's most serious statement about getting what one asks for, and it is offered without any suggestion that God was being unfair.
They made a calf in Horeb, and worshiped a molten image. Thus they exchanged their glory for an image of a bull that eats grass Psalms 106:19–20.
The last clause is the sharpest line in the psalm. What they swapped was their glory — and what they got was a statue of an animal whose chief characteristic is that it eats grass. Paul echoes the verse when describing the human race exchanging the glory of God for images of created things Romans 1:23.
Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had Moses, his chosen, not stood before him in the breach Psalms 106:23.
The image is military: a gap in a city wall, and one man standing in it. That is the psalm's description of intercession, and it is why the nation survived chapter thirty-two of Exodus.
settled What this mark means