The author of the Seventy-eighth Psalm is a person with his eye on the events that have shaped Israel. Not that he is engrossed in the bare facts of her history. He is too strongly steeped in the traditions of his people in general and the prophets in particular for that. It is rather that he sees the happenings of her past as God’s footprints in the sands of time.

History: A Sacred Trust

The psalmist’s approach to his country’s story takes advantage of a poet’s license regarding it. So he departs from the chronology of the nation’s annals the better to impress on his hearers the amazing mercies by which the Almighty has brought her down the years. Accordingly, he divides his song into two parts. The first he devotes to the Lord’s mighty acts of deliverance at the Red Sea and in the wild…