Catholic Commentary
Craving in the Wilderness: The Sin of Ingratitude
13They soon forgot his works. They didn’t wait for his counsel,14but gave in to craving in the desert, and tested God in the wasteland.15He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their soul.
Psalms 106:13–15 describes Israel's swift forgetfulness of God's mighty Exodus acts and their subsequent craving for Egyptian food in the wilderness, which God granted but accompanied with spiritual emptiness and plague. The passage illustrates a theological principle: desires pursued in defiance of God's will, when satisfied, ultimately hollow and destroy the soul rather than fulfill it.
Forgetting God's past mercy opens the door to craving — and when God grants disordered desires, the satisfaction hollows the soul rather than filling it.
Psalms 106:13 — "They soon forgot his works." The Hebrew word מִהֲרוּ (miharu, "they hurried/were quick") is striking and deliberate. The people did not merely forget over time — they forgot swiftly, almost immediately after the parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh's armies (vv. 9–12). The verb "forgot" (שָׁכְחוּ, shakhehu) in the Psalter carries more than cognitive lapse; it connotes a willful turning away from the memory of God's saving intervention. The "works" (מַעֲשָׂיו, ma'asav) refer specifically to the mighty acts of the Exodus — the plagues, the crossing of the sea, the pillar of cloud and fire. This forgetfulness is the root sin from which all else follows. The Psalmist structures the whole of Psalm 106 as a litany of such forgettings, and this is the first and paradigmatic instance.
Psalms 106:14 — "But gave in to craving in the desert." The Hebrew uses an intensified construction: וַיִּתְאַוּוּ תַאֲוָה (vayit'avu ta'avah), literally "they lusted a lust" — a figura etymologica emphasizing the obsessive, self-consuming character of the desire. This directly recalls Numbers 11, where the Israelites wept for the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic of Egypt, despising the manna God provided daily. The location, "the desert" (בַּמִּדְבָּר), is theologically loaded: the wilderness is the place of testing and purification, the very arena where God seeks to form His covenant people. To "crave" in the desert is to resist transformation and reach backward toward Egypt — that is, toward slavery and false comfort. The Septuagint renders this with ἐπεθύμησαν ἐπιθυμίαν (epethymēsan epithymian), a phrase echoed in the New Testament's language of concupiscence (cf. 1 Cor 10:6).
Psalms 106:15 — "He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their soul." This verse is among the most theologically haunting in the entire Psalter. God does not simply refuse the craving — He grants it. The quail come (Num 11:31–34), and the people eat. But simultaneously, God "sent leanness" (וַיְשַׁלַּח רָזוֹן, vayeshalach razon) — literally "wasting" or "emaciation" — "into their soul" (בְּנַפְשָׁם). This is not merely physical affliction; the nephesh (soul/life-force) is wasted. The satisfaction of the disordered desire does not fill; it hollows. The narrative in Numbers 11:33–34 tells us a plague struck while the meat was still between their teeth. The place is named "Kibroth-hattaavah" — "the graves of craving." Typologically, this verse expresses the spiritual law that what we demand from God in defiance of His will, if granted, becomes our desolation. The "thin soul" is the soul that has gotten what it wanted and found it empty.
Catholic tradition finds in these three verses a luminous teaching on concupiscence, the proper ordering of desire, and the nature of divine permission. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2514) defines concupiscence as the movement of the sensitive appetite that inclines toward disordered goods — precisely what Israel displays in v. 14. Crucially, the CCC (§377) notes that before the Fall, the human person enjoyed "integrity," meaning that reason and will governed the passions; original sin shattered this order, making the wilderness of self-mastery the perpetual condition of fallen humanity.
St. Augustine reflects directly on this passage in his Confessions (Book I): "Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." The "leanness of soul" in v. 15 is, for Augustine, the universal consequence of the soul seeking its rest in lesser things — inquietum est cor nostrum. The desert craving is the Augustinian libido disordered, grasping at Egypt when it should be reaching toward the Promised Land.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 77) identifies this pattern as the logical structure of vice: the intellect darkened by passion forgets prior goods (v. 13), the will cleaves to sensible pleasure (v. 14), and the soul, having obtained the object of its lust, is not satisfied but further deformed (v. 15). This is what Thomas calls the poena damni in its temporal form — not yet eternal loss, but the lived experience of a soul diminished by its own disordered choices.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est (§5), distinguishes eros (possessive, ascending desire) from agape (self-giving love), warning that eros unordered by truth "becomes a caricature of love." Israel's craving in the desert is precisely eros untethered from the covenant relationship — desire that consumes rather than unites.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with the wilderness of v. 14 — not desert sand, but digital noise, consumer culture, and instant gratification. The structure of Psalm 106:13–15 maps with alarming precision onto the cycle of addiction, compulsive consumption, and the spiritual acedia that follows: we forget God's past mercies (v. 13), we crave the next thing — content, comfort, status, sensation (v. 14) — and we are granted it, only to find ourselves more hollowed than before (v. 15).
The practical application is Augustinian and concrete: cultivate the memoria Dei — the active, practiced remembrance of what God has done in your life. The Israelites forgot "quickly." The antidote is the discipline of gratitude: the Daily Examen of St. Ignatius, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary as a meditation on God's saving acts. Before each craving arises, ask: What has God already given me? What am I being formed into in this wilderness moment? The desert is not an obstacle to God's will — it is the very place of it. To crave an exit is to resist transformation. To receive the manna — ordinary, sufficient, daily — is to be made whole.