Psalm 90

Psalms 90:1-2

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads A Prayer of Moses the man of God, the Psalter's oldest ascription by the titles, and the bench reads the whole wilderness wandering behind the psalm. Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations answers forty years without a settled home with the one home that never moved, the Lord himself. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God sets that permanence against the oldest features of creation, and Delitzsch reads the doubled everlasting to everlasting as eternity without a starting or an ending edge.

Psalms 90:3-6

Thou turnest man to destruction, and sayest, Return, ye children of men answers Genesis 3:19's dust to dust in Moses' own later words, the lawgiver who buried a whole generation in the wilderness speaking from what he had watched. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past is taken up almost word for word at 2 Peter 3:8 to argue that God's patience is not slowness, which the commentators note as the verse's afterlife in the New Testament. The flood that carries men away, the sleep that ends, and the grass that flourishes at dawn and withers by evening pile up three pictures for the same brevity, each one shorter than the last.

Psalms 90:7-9

For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled names what the wilderness generation's dying meant to Moses, wrath and mortality run together in one sentence. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance reads sin and death together, the hidden fault held up to the one light nothing escapes. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath, we spend our years as a tale that is told turns a whole life into a story reaching its last page, told and then finished.

Psalms 90:10

The days of our years are threescore years and ten states the ordinary human span in round Hebrew numbers, seventy years, with fourscore named for the unusually strong. Yet is their strength labour and sorrow refuses to romanticize a long life, and Spurgeon reads the line as Moses' own verdict after a hundred and twenty years, most of them hard. For it is soon cut off, and we fly away closes the verse with two pictures of suddenness, a thread snapped and a bird gone.

Psalms 90:11-12

Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath asks a question the psalm never answers, wrath measured only by the fear it produces in those who feel it. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom is the psalm's best known line, a prayer that mortality itself become the classroom mortality does not teach on its own. Henry reads the verse as asking not for a longer life but for a wiser use of the life already granted.

Psalms 90:13-15

Return, O Lord, how long: Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants turns the complaint of verses 3 through 10 into direct petition, the same word return now aimed back at God rather than at dying men. O satisfy us early with thy mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days asks for mercy at the day's beginning to answer a life shortened by wrath, morning set against the grass that withers by evening in verse 6. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil asks for joy measured on the same scale as the sorrow, not a smaller one.

Psalms 90:16-17

Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children prays for the next generation to see what this one, dying in the wilderness, mostly did not. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us closes the psalm on the one request the whole poem has been building toward, God's own favor resting visibly on a short life. Establish thou the work of our hands upon us, repeated in the Hebrew's own doubling, asks that what mortal hands build outlast the hands that built it, which the bench reads as Moses' last plea over a nation he would not himself enter Canaan with.