Psalm 107
43 verses · BSBPsalms book hub →
Speaks with:Psalms 107×10Psalms 22×4Matthew 8×4Psalms 106×3Luke 1×3Isaiah 42×3
Summary
Chapter summary
Book V opens with four rescues and one refrain. Wanderers in the desert waste; prisoners in affliction and iron, 'because they rebelled against the words of God'; fools afflicted for their iniquities, drawing near unto the gates of death; they that go down to the sea in ships, reeling at their wits' end. Each time: 'Then they cried unto Jehovah in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses', and each time: 'Oh that men would praise Jehovah for his lovingkindness!' He turns rivers into a wilderness, and a wilderness into standing water. 'Whoso is wise will give heed to these things.'
Context
Poetry · David, Asaph, Sons of Korah, others — Psalms overview
The world behind this chapter
Psalms 107The history
This psalm opens the fifth and final book of the Psalter, and it works like a thanksgiving service. A person who had vowed a sacrifice while in danger came to the sanctuary afterward, brought the offering, and told the congregation what had happened. Four such testimonies are gathered here, each ending in the same refrain.
The first is a caravan story. Travelers who missed the route between wells could wander in dry country until strength gave out; the road between towns was marked by nothing but landmarks and memory, and getting lost was a death sentence rather than an inconvenience.
The second is a prison story, with darkness, iron, bronze gates, and forced labor. The third is a sickbed, where a man's appetite is gone and he cannot stand food. The fourth is the sea, and it is told by a landsman: Israelites were farmers and herders, not sailors, so the wave lifting a ship to the sky and dropping it to the depths is the terror of people who did not belong out there.
The closing section is agricultural geography. Rivers become desert and salt flats where people have behaved wickedly, and desert becomes farmland with a city and vineyards where God blesses. Anyone who had seen the salt waste around the Dead Sea and the green of a spring-fed valley knew both halves of that picture on sight.
What it meant to them
For people just back from Babylon, the refrain about being gathered out of the east and the west was their own story with the details filled in.
But the four testimonies deliberately cover every kind of trouble — lost, imprisoned, sick, storm-tossed — so that no one in the congregation could say the psalm was not about him. The wise, it ends, will think hard about these things.
Sources cited
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David on Psalm 107
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Psalms 107. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.