A Commentary on the Book of Psalms: Psalm 105 — A Confession of the Manifold Sins and Ingratitudes of the Israelites
13–15 The prophet goes on with the relation of the ingratitude of the people, and that, after witnessing the astounding miracle performed in the Red Sea, and for which they had thanked God so profoundly; for no sooner did they feel the slightest want of food and drink than they lost all sight of God’s providence and omnipotence, and broke out in language of impatience and infidelity. “They had quickly done,” without any delay, “they forgot his works,” all the miracles they had witnessed; “and they waited not for his counsel,” they would not wait for the time appointed by God in his counsel or wisdom; for God, in allowing them to suffer for a while, was only trying their faith, their hope, and their love, while they, in ignorance of God’s designs, began to murmur, as if he did not care for them, or could not help them. He now enters into the particulars of their impatience. “And they coveted their desire in the desert; and they tempted God in the place without water.” They could not have patience even for a short time, or endure for a moment the scarcity of bread and water. “They coveted their desire” is not an unusual phrase, meaning, merely, that they longed or wished for. “And he gave them their request,” bread and water, that they asked. “And sent fullness into their hearts,” by not only giving them food and drink, but giving both in abundance, Exod. 16 and 17, Num. 11 and 20.
16–18 He now alludes to Dathan and Abiron, whose history may be found in Numbers 16. “They provoked Moses in the camp.” Core, Dathan, and Abiron, provoked him by charging him with having usurped supreme power. “Aaron, the holy one of the Lord,” and they provoked Aaron too, who was sanctified by God to be his priest. “The earth opened,” etc., and swallowed up the three of them, with all their families and substance, “and covered the congregation,” etc. After opening and swallowing them it closed upon the rebels, and covered them and their families. “And a fire was kindled in the congregation, the flame burned the wicked.” Immediately after the death of those three disaffected, some of the Jews, who were not authorized to offer incense, having presumed to do so, fire from heaven descended and killed two hundred and fifty of them; and when the people began to murmur against Moses, as if he had been the author of it, another fire was sent by God that consumed four thousand seven hundred of them.
19–23 The prophet now gives expression to his detestation of the people’s idolatry, in making a calf of gold, and rendering divine worship to it; and, at the same time, praises God’s mercy, in having, at the instance of Moses, forgiven so great a sin. Exod. 32. “They made also a calf in Horeb;” a calf of gold, to represent an idol they had seen in Egypt, that was made for them by Aaron, who was obliged to comply with their wishes through fear. They did that at Horeb, a mountain quite convenient to mount Sinai. “And they adored the graven thing;” the golden heifer; and though it is not a graven thing, but a molten thing, it is called graven, it being a general term for all idols, whether of timber or marble, that are, properly speaking, graven; or of gold or silver, that are usually molten. He alludes to mount Horeb, and to graven things, because it was on mount Horeb that God, when he appeared not long before, said to them, “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven thing; thou shalt not adore or worship them;” and thus a great aggravation in the sin of the Jews was, that they made and set up for adoration this graven or molten thing, on the very spot on which God had forbidden it. “And they changed their glory into the likeness of a calf that eateth grass.” An aggravation of the folly of the Jews consisted in their setting up an idol in the form of a calf for the true God, thereby changing their glory, the true God, who was their glory, for the image of a brute beast; nor does he say they exchanged God for a beast, but, to render the case worse, for the image of a calf, or, in other words, the most precious thing in existence for the most contemptible. “They forgot God who saved them, who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Cham, terrible things in the Red Sea.” A further aggravation of the folly of the Jews consisted in their having forgotten or deserted that God who freed them from the captivity of Pharao, for the service of a god who could neither save himself nor anyone else; for Moses smashed the calf, and made powder of it without any resistance, or even consciousness, on the part of the golden calf. They also forgot that God of all power, “who hath done great things in Egypt,” which was also called the land of Cham; “terrible things in the Red Sea;”
by drying it up so as to afford a passage through to the children of Israel, and then letting the waters on so as to suffocate the Egyptians; and, notwithstanding all this, they worshipped an empty, an imbecile god, that is to say, a mute and useless image. “And he said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach.” God, then, determined, and said he would destroy them; and he would have done so, had not Moses, his chosen servant, interfered, and by his intercession succeeded “in turning away his wrath lest he should destroy them.” He uses a metaphor, taken from a brave soldier who stands in the breach to repel the enemy until his own reinforcements should come up; and from this we can argue in favor of the power of the intercession of the saints.
24–27 The Prophet now records another sin of the Jews, in their despising the land of promise, which God told them was one flowing with milk and honey. “And they set at naught the desirable land.” They despised and thought little of the land of promise, instead of valuing it highly, as they should have done; for they said, “The land which we have viewed devoureth its inhabitants.”—“They believed not his word;” God’s word, that he had spoken so often to them, as to the quality of the land; and “they murmured in their tents” against him who had brought them out of Egypt to establish them in the land of promise. “They hearkened not to the voice of the Lord;” they did not obey his commands. “And he lifted up his hand over them; to overthrow them in the desert: And he cast down their seed among the nations, and to scatter them in the countries.” He raised his hand, armed with the sword of justice, over his sinful people, in order to slay the murmurers in the desert, and to scatter their posterity abject and desolate, all over the world, so that they could no longer be called a nation. The former has been already accomplished, for all the murmurers perished in the desert; the latter, at the instance of Moses, was not then and there carried out, but, in consequence of the repeated sins of the people, was fully accomplished, both by the king of Babylon, and by Titus and Vespasian. How incensed, then, must not God feel with those who despise the kingdom of heaven, as announced and promised to us by his Son, when he was so grievously incensed with the Jews for having disregarded the land of promise, that was nothing but earth, and a mere figure of the kingdom of heaven?