28 He sent darkness, and made it dark, And they rebelled not against His words. 29 He turned their waters to blood, And slew their fish. 30 Their land swarmed [with] frogs, In the chambers of their kings. 31 He spake and the gad-fly came, Gnats in all their borders. 32 He gave hail [for] their rains, Flaming fire in their land. 33 And He smote their vine and their fig-tree, And broke the trees of their borders. 34 He spoke and the locust came, And caterpillar-locusts without number, 35 And ate up every herb in their land, And ate up the fruit of their ground. 36 And He smote every first-born in their land, The firstlings of all their strength. 37 And He brought them out with silver and gold, And there was not one among His tribes who stumbled. 38 Glad was Egypt at their departure, For the fear of them had fallen upon them. 39 He spread a cloud for a covering, And fire to light the night. 40 They asked and He brought quails, And [with] bread from heaven He satisfied them. 41 He opened the rock and forth gushed waters, They flowed through the deserts, a river. 42 For He remembered His holy word, [And] Abraham His servant; 43 And He brought out His people [with] joy, With glad cries His chosen [ones]; 44 And He gave them the lands of the nations, And they took possession of the toil of the peoples, 45 To the end that they might observe His statutes, And keep His laws. Hallelujah! It is a reasonable conjecture that the Hallelujah at the end of Psalm civ., where it is superfluous, properly belongs to this psalm, which would then be assimilated to Psalm cvi., which is obviously a companion psalm. Both are retrospective and didactic; but Psalm cv. deals entirely with God's unfailing faithfulness to Israel, while Psalm cvi. sets forth the sad contrast presented by Israel's continual faithlessness to God. Each theme is made more impressive by being pursued separately, and then set over against the other. The long series of God's mercies massed together here confronts the dark uniformity of Israel's unworthy requital of them there. Half of the sky is pure blue and radiant sunshine; half is piled with unbroken clouds. Nothing drives home the consciousness of sin so surely as contemplation of God's loving acts. Probably this psalm, like others of similar contents, is of late date. The habit of historical retrospect for religious purposes is likely to belong to times remote from the events recorded. Vv. 1-15 are found in 1 Chron. xvi. as part of the hymn at David's setting up of the Ark on Zion. But that hymn is unmistakably a compilation from extant psalms, and cannot be taken as deciding the Davidic authorship of the psalm.