Psalms 78:40-72 ▼

40 How often they disobeyed Him in the wilderness and grieved Him in the desert!

41 Again and again they tested God and provoked the Holy One of Israel.

42 They did not remember His power—the day He redeemed them from the adversary,

43 when He performed His signs in Egypt and His wonders in the fields of Zoan.

44 He turned their rivers to blood, and from their streams they could not drink.

45 He sent swarms of flies that devoured them, and frogs that devastated them.

46 He gave their crops to the grasshopper, the fruit of their labor to the locust.

47 He killed their vines with hailstones and their sycamore-figs with sleet.

48 He abandoned their cattle to the hail and their livestock to bolts of lightning.

49 He unleashed His fury against them, wrath, indignation, and calamity—a band of destroying angels.

50 He cleared a path for His anger; He did not spare them from death but delivered their lives to the plague.

51 He struck all the firstborn of Egypt, the virility in the tents of Ham.

52 He led out His people like sheep and guided them like a flock in the wilderness.

53 He led them safely, so they did not fear, but the sea engulfed their enemies.

54 He brought them to His holy land, to the mountain His right hand had acquired.

55 He drove out nations before them and apportioned their inheritance; He settled the tribes of Israel in their tents.

56 But they tested and disobeyed God Most High, for they did not keep His decrees.

57 They turned back and were faithless like their fathers, twisted like a faulty bow.

58 They enraged Him with their high places and provoked His jealousy with their idols.

59 On hearing it, God was furious and rejected Israel completely.

60 He abandoned the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent He had pitched among men.

61 He delivered His strength to captivity, and His splendor to the hand of the adversary.

62 He surrendered His people to the sword because He was enraged by His heritage.

63 Fire consumed His young men, and their maidens were left without wedding songs.

64 His priests fell by the sword, but their widows could not lament.

65 Then the Lord awoke as from sleep, like a mighty warrior overcome by wine.

66 He beat back His foes; He put them to everlasting shame.

67 He rejected the tent of Joseph and refused the tribe of Ephraim.

68 But He chose the tribe of Judah, Mount Zion, which He loved.

69 He built His sanctuary like the heights, like the earth He has established forever.

70 He chose David His servant and took him from the sheepfolds;

71 from tending the ewes He brought him to be shepherd of His people Jacob, of Israel His inheritance.

72 So David shepherded them with integrity of heart and guided them with skillful hands.