Catholic Commentary
Prologue: A Call to Hear and Remember
1A contemplation by Asaph. Hear my teaching, my people. Turn your ears to the words of my mouth.2I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old,3which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.4We will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of Yahweh, his strength, and his wondrous deeds that he has done.5For he established a covenant in Jacob, and appointed a teaching in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children;6that the generation to come might know, even the children who should be born; who should arise and tell their children,7that they might set their hope in God, and not forget God’s deeds, but keep his commandments,8and might not be as their fathers— a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that didn’t make their hearts loyal, whose spirit was not steadfast with God.
Psalm 78:1–8 presents a call to hear wisdom teaching about God's covenant with Israel and the moral obligation to transmit sacred memory across generations. The passage emphasizes that knowledge of God's historical works and faithfulness must not be withheld from children, so they might trust God and avoid the spiritual rebellion of their ancestors.
Sacred memory is not nostalgia—it is the only antidote to inherited spiritual failure, and you are responsible for passing it on to children you will never meet.
Commentary
Psalms 78:1 — "Hear my teaching, my people." The opening word ha'azinah (give ear / hear attentively) places this psalm squarely in the tradition of Israel's wisdom literature and prophetic address. The poet assumes a teacher's authority — not unlike Moses in Deuteronomy 32:1 ("Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak") — calling the assembly to active, obedient listening. The phrase "my people" ('ammi) is covenantal: this is not an address to spectators but to a community already in relationship with God, bound by obligation and love.
Psalms 78:2 — "I will open my mouth in a parable." The Hebrew mashal (parable, proverb, dark saying) signals that what follows will be more than a history lesson. Parables in the Semitic tradition reveal by concealing: they require the listener to search for meaning. The second half of the verse, "dark sayings of old" (hidoth miqqedem), suggests that Israel's history itself is a kind of encoded wisdom — events that carry a meaning deeper than their surface. Matthew 13:35 quotes this verse explicitly, applying it to Jesus's use of parables, making this the most directly messianic verse of the psalm.
Psalms 78:3 — "Which we have heard and known." The psalmist does not claim private revelation. The truths about to be related are communally received — heard, known, and transmitted through a living tradition. This is the logic of Tradition itself: truth is not reinvented by each generation but handed on (traditio). The community is the custodian of memory.
Psalms 78:4 — "We will not hide them from their children." A pivotal commitment: the deliberate, active transmission of sacred memory across generations. The verb "hide" (kasad) implies that silence and forgetfulness are not neutral — they are a form of withholding what children are owed. The psalmist frames catechesis as a moral duty, not an optional supplement to faith. The "praises of the LORD," His "strength," and His "wonderful works" are the content of transmission — not doctrines in the abstract but the living acts of God in history.
Psalms 78:5 — "For he established a covenant in Jacob." The theological grounding shifts to the divine initiative. The transmission of tradition is obligatory because God first acted — establishing His Torah (Torah here rendered "law," but meaning the full instructional gift) in Jacob/Israel. The parallelism of "Jacob" and "Israel" (the two names of the patriarch and the people) signals that this covenant encompasses both the ancestor and the nation descended from him. It is God's fidelity, not human merit, that grounds the entire teaching enterprise.
Psalms 78:6 — "That the generation to come might know." The purpose clause (lema'an) reveals the telos of the entire undertaking: children not yet born are already in view. Sacred history is never merely about the past or the present generation; it is always reaching forward into futures God already knows. This is eschatological catechesis — formation for a future the teacher will not live to see.
Psalms 78:7 — "That they might set their hope in God." The goal of remembering is not nostalgia but hope (yakhilu). Memory of God's past faithfulness becomes the ground of trust in His future faithfulness. The three-part resolution — set hope in God, not forget His works, keep His commandments — shows that memory, hope, and obedience form an inseparable unity in Israel's spiritual life. To remember correctly is to obey; to obey is to hope.
Psalms 78:8 — "And might not be as their fathers." The solemn anti-type appears: a generation that was "stubborn and rebellious," whose heart was "not steadfast" and whose spirit was "not faithful to God." This is the negative image against which every subsequent generation must measure itself. The fathers here are not Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (models of faith) but the Exodus generation — those who witnessed miracle after miracle and still hardened their hearts. Their failure is not recorded to shame the dead but to warn the living.
Catholic Commentary
From a Catholic perspective, these eight verses are nothing less than a theology of Tradition in miniature. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that Divine Revelation is transmitted through both Scripture and Tradition, and that this transmission is entrusted to the living Church in every age (CCC 80–83). Psalm 78:1–8 dramatizes precisely this mechanism: an authoritative teacher, a communally received deposit of truth, an obligation to transmit it whole and intact to the next generation.
St. Augustine, in his Expositions on the Psalms, saw Asaph as a type of the Church's preaching office — the one commissioned to open hidden things and make them accessible to the people. The "parable" of verse 2, quoted in Matthew 13:35, received its fullest expression in Christ Himself, who is the living parable of God — the one in whom the "hidden things from the foundation of the world" are finally disclosed. The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (§8) echoes this logic when it affirms that Tradition "makes progress in the Church" as each generation receives, lives, and transmits what it has inherited.
The intergenerational dimension of verse 6 resonates with the Catholic theology of the family as the Ecclesia domestica (domestic Church). Familiaris Consortio (§38) of St. John Paul II calls parents the "first heralds" of the faith to their children — a direct echo of the psalmist's commitment not to hide the Lord's works from coming generations. The warning of verse 8 against a "stubborn and rebellious" generation also has sacramental resonance: the rites of Baptism and Confirmation explicitly invoke the breaking of cycles of sin and the reception of a new identity, oriented toward faithfulness rather than rebellion.
For Today
Contemporary Catholic families and parishes face a genuine crisis of intergenerational transmission: studies consistently show that large proportions of baptized Catholics do not pass on active faith to their children. Psalm 78:1–8 confronts this not as a sociological problem but as a spiritual and moral one. The psalmist's commitment — "we will not hide them from their children" — is a vow, not a preference.
Concretely, this passage calls Catholic parents to see family prayer, the domestic keeping of liturgical seasons, and the telling of Scripture stories as non-negotiable responsibilities — not supplementary enrichment. It calls parish catechists to understand their work as participation in an ancient, sacred chain of transmission that runs from Sinai through the apostles to the present. It calls every Catholic to honest self-examination: Am I a link that holds, or one that breaks? Am I setting my own hope in God in ways visible enough to form the next generation? The antidote to the "stubborn and rebellious" generation of verse 8 is not mere information but encounter — a living witness to the "wonderful works" of God.
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