Psalm 78

This is a teaching psalm, and it says so: what we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us, we will not hide from their children. Israel's history moved by mouth, inside households. The Passover meal was built as a child's question with a father's answer, so the retelling was not optional and not left to specialists.

The plagues here happen in the field of Zoan. Zoan is Tanis, a real Egyptian city in the eastern Nile delta, in the same region as the Israelite settlement of Goshen. A delta setting is exactly where the Exodus account places the confrontation, and it is not where a later writer inventing a story would naturally have put it.

The plague list in this psalm is shorter than the account in Exodus and comes in a different order. That is what poets did with a known story — they selected and compressed. The prose account is the fuller record; this is the song version, made to be memorised.

Then it turns on Shiloh. God forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent he placed among men, and gave his strength into captivity. Shiloh in the Ephraimite hills housed the tabernacle for generations until the ark was captured in battle, and excavation at the site has found a destruction layer from about that period. The psalm treats that day as the reason worship moved south — he refused the tent of Joseph and did not choose Ephraim, but chose Judah, and Zion, and David.