Week 12 Psalm 78
Right off the top Asaph said: I will teach you hidden lessons from our past and the Lesson that caught my attention today was the plagues of Egypt story (what Asaph called the Lord’s miraculous signs in Egypt). Right away I thought something seemed a bit off. Asaph’s story looked short.
I decided to compare Asaph’s story of the plagues with the full-length Exodus account. I drew up a table with two columns:
Left-hand column (“Plagues in Exodus 7-11”)
Right-hand column (“Plagues in Psalm 78”).
Then I flipped back to scan through Exodus.
I wanted to line up the two accounts point-for-point side-by-side. But it didn’t work like that. There were anomalies. In the original story there were ten plagues. Exodus & Asaph both had six: Water-to-blood Flies Frogs Hail Grasshoppers/Locusts & the Death-of-the-Firstborns.
But Asaph didn’t have Gnats Animal-Plague Boils or Darkness.
Asaph also referred to a band of destroying angels – which wasn’t one of the plagues (even though angels might have been involved).
A couple of quick conclusions:
I figure Asaph knew there were ten plagues
I figure his psalm was a representative sample
I figure that he figured that his readers would get the point (the Lord had led his people)
I figure Asaph’s version was a shorthand literary digest of a longer (very well-known) story.
Note: quotes from Psalm 78:2 43 49 52. Right at the end I spotted a cross-reference to Psalm 105:28-36. A similar psalm. A similar list of plagues. But no time to compare it!