The Sea Saw It and Fled
1 When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of foreign language, 2 Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. 3 The sea saw it, and fled. The Jordan was driven back. 4 The mountains skipped like rams, the little hills like lambs. 5 What was it, you sea, that you fled? You Jordan, that you turned back? 6 You mountains, that you skipped like rams? You little hills, like lambs? 7 Tremble, you earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, 8 who turned the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of waters.
Eight verses in which the landscape panics, and the psalm asks it what the matter was.
When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of foreign language,
The exodus in eight verses, and it is the wittiest poem in the Psalter.
3 The sea saw it, and fled. The Jordan was driven back. 4 The mountains skipped like rams, the little hills like lambs.
Two miracles forty years apart are put in consecutive lines, and then the mountains are described as behaving like a flock of startled sheep. Sinai shook; the psalm makes it skip.
5 What was it, you sea, that you fled? You Jordan, that you turned back? 6 You mountains, that you skipped like rams? You little hills, like lambs?
The psalm turns and interrogates the scenery. It is a joke, and it is theology: the question is asked as though the sea had behaved oddly and owed an explanation, and the answer is delayed by two verses.
Tremble, you earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob,
The answer, and it is a command rather than a statement. What made the sea run is named only as a presence, and the whole earth is told to do the same thing.
who turned the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of waters.
The last line reverses the first miracle. Water was turned to dry land at the sea; here rock is turned to water. Whatever the elements normally do, this presence has them doing the opposite in both directions.
Nothing in the psalm mentions God by any title until verse seven, and Israel does nothing at all. The nation walks out of Egypt and the landscape does the reacting.
settled What this mark means