Psalm 105

The first fifteen verses of this psalm appear almost word for word in Chronicles as part of the song appointed for the day the ark of the covenant was carried into Jerusalem. That gives us a rare glimpse of how these songs were used: sung by the Levites, assigned by the king, repeated at the great occasions.

The story it recites is a land story. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were resident foreigners — people living in a country that was not theirs, with no title to a field and no legal standing except the protection of whoever took them in. That is why the promise of a deed to Canaan mattered so much and why the psalm keeps circling back to it.

Joseph's section is precise about prison. His feet were put in fetters and his neck went into iron. Egyptian prisoners were held in state workhouses attached to a granary or a fortress, and irons on both the ankles and the throat were a normal restraint for a slave under sentence.

The famine and the grain stores are ordinary Egyptian life. Egypt's harvest depended on the Nile flood rather than on rain, so when the rains failed across Canaan and Syria, Egypt often still had grain — and pharaoh's officials, with their granaries and ration lists, controlled who ate.

The plagues are then run through as a rapid list. The psalm does not tell them in the same order as Exodus; ancient poets recited a known story by its highlights, trusting hearers to fill the rest in.