Psalm 114

Psalms 114:1-2

When Israel went out of Egypt opens the psalm at the exodus itself, a people of strange language marking Egypt as the land of a foreign tongue Israel no longer had to hear. Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion states the exodus's outcome in one line: the nation itself becomes the place where God dwells and the people over whom he rules, before any tabernacle is built. This psalm belongs to the Egyptian Hallel, the six psalms sung at Passover by long liturgical practice, and it is the one that names the exodus outright.

Psalms 114:3-6

The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back sets the two water crossings of Exodus 14 and Joshua 3 side by side as one act, the sea at the start of the wilderness years and the river at their end. The mountains skipped like rams carries the same personification to Sinai's trembling at the giving of the law in Exodus 19:18. Verses 5 and 6 turn and ask the sea and the mountains directly what ailed them, a question the psalm withholds its answer to until the final couplet.

Psalms 114:7-8

The question of verses 5 and 6 is answered here: tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord summons the whole world, not only the sea and Jordan, to the same fear those waters showed. Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters recalls the water struck from the rock at Rephidim and again at Meribah in Exodus 17:6 and Numbers 20:11, the wilderness years compressed into the psalm's closing image. The God who moved a sea and a river can turn the hardest stone in the desert into a spring, and the psalm ends on that note rather than on the conquest.