Catholic Commentary
Repeated Rebellion and the Plagues of Egypt Recalled (Part 1)
40How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness, and grieved him in the desert!41They turned again and tempted God, and provoked the Holy One of Israel.42They didn’t remember his hand, nor the day when he redeemed them from the adversary;43how he set his signs in Egypt, his wonders in the field of Zoan,44he turned their rivers into blood, and their streams, so that they could not drink.45He sent among them swarms of flies, which devoured them; and frogs, which destroyed them.46He also gave their increase to the caterpillar, and their labor to the locust.47He destroyed their vines with hail, their sycamore fig trees with frost.
Psalms 78:40–47 recounts Israel's repeated rebellion against God in the wilderness and catalogs specific plagues God inflicted on Egypt to liberate them, including turning the Nile to blood, sending swarms of insects and locusts, and destroying crops with hail. The passage emphasizes that Israel witnessed these miraculous signs but then forgot God's power and continued to rebel, demanding proof of God's presence rather than trusting in the covenant relationship.
Israel forgot God's hand not through ignorance but through the spiritual laziness of taking salvation for granted—and every believer does the same.
Commentary
Psalms 78:40 — "How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness" The opening exclamation is rhetorical and mournful rather than merely accusatory. The Hebrew verb marah (to rebel, be contentious) carries the force of deliberate opposition — not passive drift but active defiance. The wilderness (midbar) is the charged landscape of Israel's testing, a place where the absence of ordinary sustenance made dependence on God inescapable, yet where Israel repeatedly chose complaint over trust. The phrase "how often" (kammāh) signals pattern and repetition; this is not an isolated failure but a spiritual habit. Numbers 14, 16, 20, and 21 all record distinct episodes of such rebellion, each one following a fresh demonstration of God's care.
Psalms 78:41 — "They turned again and tempted God" "Turned again" (šûb) denotes a U-turn — Israel pivoted away from what they had seen and experienced. The verb "tempted" (nissāh) is the same root used in Exodus 17:7 at Massah, where Israel demanded proof that God was "among them." To "tempt" God in this biblical sense means to demand signs as conditions for loyalty, effectively treating the covenant relationship as a commercial transaction. There is also a verb in the Hebrew here often rendered "grieved" or "pained" ('āzab) the Holy One of Israel — God's response is not cold indifference but wounded intimacy. The phrase "Holy One of Israel" (qĕdōš Yiśrāʾēl), a favorite of Isaiah, underscores the scandal: Israel was affronting not an abstract deity but their utterly transcendent yet covenantally committed Lord.
Psalms 78:42 — "They did not remember his hand" This is the theological hinge of the entire passage. Forgetfulness (lōʾ zākĕrû) is not mere cognitive failure but a moral and spiritual category in the Hebrew Bible. To "remember" God's hand is to allow past saving acts to shape present trust and obedience; to forget is to live as though grace had never come. "His hand" (yādô) is a concrete anthropomorphism for divine power in action — the same outstretched hand that struck Egypt and parted the sea. The verse diagnoses the root cause of all the rebellion catalogued above: it flows from failed anamnesis.
Verses 43–44 — Signs in Egypt; Rivers Turned to Blood The psalmist now pivots to remind the congregation of precisely what Israel forgot. Verse 43 introduces the Egypt-sequence with a general statement — God "set his signs" (môpĕtāyw, wonders/portents) in Egypt and "in the field of Zoan" (the ancient city of Tanis in the Nile Delta, a royal seat of Pharaoh). Naming Zoan grounds the narrative in verifiable geography; this happened in a real place to a real empire. Verse 44 recalls the first plague: the Nile and all Egypt's water sources turned to blood, making them undrinkable (Exodus 7:17–21). The Nile was not merely practical infrastructure; it was a god (Hapi) in Egyptian religion. God struck Egypt's theology before he struck its agriculture or military.
Psalms 78:45 — Swarms of Flies; Frogs Verse 45 compresses the fourth plague (swarms of flies/insects, Exodus 8:20–24) and, in some textual traditions, alludes also to frogs. The word ʿārōb (swarm) likely refers to a mixture of biting insects that brought economic ruin and physical torment. That they "devoured" the Egyptians points to a creational reversal: the creature world, ordered by God to serve human flourishing, is conscripted as an instrument of judgment against those who oppress God's people.
Psalms 78:46 — Caterpillar and Locust The eighth plague (Exodus 10:1–20) consumed what the swarms had left. "Caterpillar" (ḥāsîl, the gnawing locust) and "locust" (ʾarbeh) represent the total stripping of agricultural produce — Egypt's "increase" (yĕgîʿām, their hard-earned yield) is handed over entirely to insects. The economic devastation is complete: Egypt's superpower status, built on agricultural surplus from the Nile flood plain, is annihilated by the tiniest of creatures.
Psalms 78:47 — Hail Destroys the Vines The seventh plague (Exodus 9:13–35) is recalled with poetic specificity: vines and sycamore-fig trees — luxury produce and staple food respectively — are destroyed by hail and frost. The vine (gephen) in the ancient Near East symbolized prosperity, peace, and divine blessing; its destruction signals the complete inversion of Egypt's supposed divine favor. Asaph's selection of these specific plagues — blood, insects, locusts, hail — is not random; they represent the undoing of Egypt's natural, economic, and religious order, all to free a people who then promptly forgot.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition reads this passage on multiple levels simultaneously, a practice rooted in the Church's fourfold sense of Scripture articulated by St. John Cassian and enshrined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 115–119).
Typologically, the plagues of Egypt prefigure the sacramental and eschatological acts of God in Christ. St. Augustine, in his City of God (Book X), interprets the plagues as signs of divine sovereignty over false gods — each plague dismantling one dimension of Egyptian idolatry. The early Church read the blood of the Nile as a dark foreshadowing of the Blood of Christ: where Egyptian water became blood as judgment, the water from Christ's pierced side (John 19:34) pours forth blood as redemption. Tertullian and Cyprian developed this typology extensively in their baptismal catechesis.
On ingratitude and memory, the Catechism teaches that ingratitude is among the gravest responses to grace: "Man's sin is ingratitude toward God, his failure to recognize God as God" (CCC 398, developing Gen 3 but applicable here). The Council of Trent (Session VI, Decree on Justification, Ch. 11) emphasized that the justified must persevere precisely because they can, through negligence, fall — a warning this psalm enacts historically.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§ 29), stressed that liturgical anamnesis — "Do this in memory of me" — is the antidote to precisely the forgetfulness Asaph laments. The Eucharist is God's answer to Israel's amnesia: a memorial that not only recalls but makes present the saving act, preventing the spiritual atrophy of verse 42.
St. John Chrysostom (Homily on Psalm 78) observed that Israel's pattern of rebellion-rescue-rebellion is a portrait of the human soul in every age, and that the rehearsal of God's deeds in liturgy is the medicine prescribed against it.
For Today
Contemporary Catholics live in a culture of relentless novelty that structurally encourages the same forgetfulness Asaph mourns. Social media, consumption cycles, and therapeutic individualism conspire to shrink memory to the last twenty-four hours, making spiritual gratitude nearly impossible to sustain. Psalm 78:40–42 diagnoses this condition with surgical precision: rebellion follows not from malice but from the failure to remember "his hand."
A practical response rooted in this passage would be the deliberate cultivation of personal and communal anamnesis. The Examen prayer of St. Ignatius — reviewing each day for God's presence and one's responses to it — is a direct antidote to the forgetfulness of verse 42. Attending Mass not as routine but as conscious recollection of the Exodus-made-perfect-in-Christ confronts the temptation of verse 41 head-on.
Catholics might also examine whether they "tempt God" by conditionalizing their faith: trusting only when prayers are answered as expected, practicing devotion only during crisis. The psalmist implies that such transactional faith is indistinguishable from the wilderness generation's pattern — and that it is answered not by God's abandonment but, painfully, by his continued pursuit.
Cross-References