Psalms 105
Psalm 105 is praise that takes the long way round. Instead of a single burst of thanksgiving, it tells a story - the whole story, from the promise made to Abraham all the way to the land given to his descendants - and it tells that story in order to praise the God who runs through every chapter of it. Its first fifteen verses were sung on the day David brought the ark of the covenant up to Jerusalem (1 Chron. 16:8-22), which fits exactly: this is a psalm for a people remembering who their God has been, so that they will know who He still is. The summons at the top is the key to everything that follows - Remember his marvellous works that he hath done (v. 5) - and the psalm then spends forty verses doing precisely that.3
The history is held together by a single thread, and it is worth naming before the story starts. At the front the psalm declares it: He hath remembered his covenant for ever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations (v. 8). At the very end it repeats it: For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant (v. 42). Everything between those two lines - the wandering of the patriarchs, the rise of Joseph, the bondage in Egypt, the plagues, the Exodus, the bread and water in the desert, the inheritance of the land - is offered as the working-out of that one remembered promise. The psalmist is not collecting interesting episodes. He is building a case: this is a God who keeps His word, and the proof is a thousand years long.
What makes the psalm pastoral rather than merely historical is the angle from which it tells the story. It does not dwell on Israel's failures - that is the burden of the next psalm, Psalm 106, its deliberate companion. Psalm 105 looks at the same history and sees only the steadiness of God: His promise, His protection of the powerless, His provision in the wilderness, His faithfulness to a word spoken generations before anyone alive had been born. And it ends by telling us what all that faithfulness was for - not merely rescue, but relationship: God gave His people the land that they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws (v. 45). Memory, in this psalm, is never an end in itself. It is the soil in which trust and obedience grow.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 105:1-7Remember His Marvellous Works
1O give thanks unto the LORD; call upon his name: make known his deeds among the people. 2Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him: talk ye of all his wondrous works. 3Glory ye in his holy name: let the heart of them rejoice that seek the LORD. 4Seek the LORD, and his strength: seek his face evermore. 5Remember his marvellous works that he hath done; his wonders, and the judgments of his mouth; 6O ye seed of Abraham his servant, ye children of Jacob his chosen. 7He is the LORD our God: his judgments are in all the earth.
The psalm opens not inward but outward. The first response to God's goodness is thanks - O give thanks unto the LORD - but the second is announcement: call upon his name: make known his deeds among the people. Gratitude here is not a private feeling kept to oneself; it is something to be told. What God has done is news, and news is meant to travel. Notice the verbs pile up across the opening lines: give thanks, call, make known, sing, talk, glory, seek. This is praise as a whole-life activity, the worshipper's mouth and memory and longing all turned the same direction. And the reason it can be sustained is given in verse 7: He is the LORD our God. The deeds worth proclaiming are the deeds of the one true God, whose judgments are in all the earth - not a local deity with a local reputation, but the God of all the world. To make known his deeds among the people is simply to tell the truth about who actually runs things.
At the centre of the opening summons is the command the whole psalm is built to obey: Remember his marvellous works that he hath done; his wonders, and the judgments of his mouth (v. 5). Everything after verse 7 is the carrying-out of this one instruction - forty verses of deliberate, ordered remembering. And the object of memory is carefully specified. Not vague good feelings about God, but works He hath done; not inspiration in the abstract, but wonders and the judgments of his mouth - things God said and then did, words that became history. This is the shape of biblical memory: it is concrete, it is corporate, and it is grounded in events. The faith of Israel was never a private mysticism; it was a community telling and retelling what their God had actually accomplished in time. To remember, here, is not to drift nostalgically into the past. It is to rehearse the record so deliberately that the past steadies the present - so that a people who have seen what God did for their fathers can face their own day without fear.
Psalm 105:8-15He Hath Remembered His Covenant
8He hath remembered his covenant for ever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations. 9Which covenant he made with Abraham, and his oath unto Isaac; 10And confirmed the same unto Jacob for a law, and to Israel for an everlasting covenant: 11Saying, Unto thee will I give the land of Canaan, the lot of your inheritance: 12When they were but a few men in number; yea, very few, and strangers in it. 13When they went from one nation to another, from one kingdom to another people; 14He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he reproved kings for their sakes; 15Saying, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm.
The promise is staggering precisely because of who received it. God pledges to Abraham an entire land - Unto thee will I give the land of Canaan, the lot of your inheritance - and then the psalm tells us, in the same breath, exactly how unlikely the recipients were: When they were but a few men in number; yea, very few, and strangers in it (v. 12). They did not own the land; they wandered through it as resident aliens, tents pitched among peoples stronger and more numerous than they. A handful of nomads were promised a country full of nations. This is the pattern the whole Bible loves: God stakes enormous promises on people who have, by every visible measure, nothing to make those promises plausible. The gap between the promise and the people is not an embarrassment to be explained away; it is the point. It means that when the promise is kept - as the rest of the psalm will show it kept - no one can credit it to the strength of the recipients. The few and the strangers inherit a land, and the only possible explanation is the faithfulness of the God who swore it.
While the patriarchs were still few and landless, drifting between kingdoms, God Himself stood guard over them: He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he reproved kings for their sakes; Saying, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm (vv. 14-15). The scenes behind this are vivid - Pharaoh and Abimelech both reached out toward Abraham's household and were sharply warned off by God before harm was done. What the psalm draws from those episodes is the lengths to which God will go to protect a promise in progress. Kings - the most powerful figures in the patriarchs' world - are reproved, called to account, by the God who has bound Himself to these wanderers. And notice the titles He gives them: mine anointed, my prophets. These are not yet a nation, not yet anyone of consequence in the world's reckoning; but heaven calls them anointed and prophets because they carry the covenant. The protection is not owed to their strength but to their calling. The God who swore the oath will not let the oath-bearers be destroyed before the oath is kept - and that guardianship will hold all the way down into Egypt.
Psalm 105:16-22Sold for a Servant
16Moreover he called for a famine upon the land: he brake the whole staff of bread. 17He sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for a servant: 18Whose feet they hurt with fetters: he was laid in iron: 19Until the time that his word came: the word of the LORD tried him. 20The king sent and loosed him; even the ruler of the people, and let him go free. 21He made him lord of his house, and ruler of all his substance: 22To bind his princes at his pleasure; and teach his senators wisdom.
The psalm now slows down on a single life, and the way it frames that life is the most theologically daring thing in the chapter. A famine comes - he called for a famine upon the land: he brake the whole staff of bread - and then comes the line that reinterprets everything: He sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for a servant (v. 17). Read the verbs in order. He sent. From Joseph's side, and his brothers', it was a crime: they hated him, threw him in a pit, sold him to traders for silver. But the psalm sets the same event under heaven's grammar - God sent him. The selling and the sending are the identical act, seen from two heights. Joseph himself would later say it to the brothers who betrayed him: “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” What looked like the catastrophic derailing of the whole covenant story - the favoured son sold for a servant, gone into Egypt, lost - was in fact God moving a man into position ahead of his family to keep them alive through a famine that had not yet struck. The pit was not the collapse of the plan. The pit was the plan.
Verse 19 is one of the most searching lines in the psalm: Until the time that his word came: the word of the LORD tried him. Joseph had received words from God - dreams of sheaves bowing and stars bowing, a future of strange exaltation - and then his life ran, for years, in the exact opposite direction: slavery, false accusation, prison. Between the promise and its fulfilment lay a long, dark corridor, and the psalm tells us what was happening in that corridor: the word of the LORD tried him. The very word that promised his future was the instrument that tested him in the waiting. It is worth feeling the weight of that. God's word to us is not only comfort; in the gap before it comes true, it does its refining work, proving and purifying the one who holds it. Joseph in the iron was not a man whose dreams had failed; he was a man being made ready, by the slow pressure of a promise not yet kept, to be trusted with its fulfilment. The trial was not evidence that God had forgotten the word. The trial was the word, at work.
Psalm 105:23-27He Sent Moses His Servant
23Israel also came into Egypt; and Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham. 24And he increased his people greatly; and made them stronger than their enemies. 25He turned their heart to hate his people, to deal subtilly with his servants. 26He sent Moses his servant; and Aaron whom he had chosen. 27They shewed his signs among them, and wonders in the land of Ham.
The story leaps forward across generations in a single verse. Joseph had brought his family of seventy down to Egypt as guests; now the psalm says, he increased his people greatly; and made them stronger than their enemies (v. 24). The handful of strangers from verse 12 has become a multitude. This is the covenant quietly working itself out - the same God who promised Abraham descendants beyond counting making good on it, even in a foreign land, even before the deliverance. But growth brings danger. The very strength God gave His people made the Egyptians fear them, and so - in a line the psalm does not flinch from - He turned their heart to hate his people. The psalmist sees God's hand even in the rising hostility, even in the bondage that is about to fall. This is the hard, steady confidence that runs through the whole poem: nothing in the story, not even the malice of enemies, is outside the reach of the God who is keeping His covenant. The hatred of Egypt did not catch heaven off guard. It became, like Joseph's pit, part of the road.
Against the bondage God raises up deliverers, and the psalm marks them with the same word it used for Joseph and will use again: He sent Moses his servant; and Aaron whom he had chosen (v. 26). Twice now the pattern has held - when His people are in trouble, God sends someone ahead of the rescue. Joseph was sent before the famine; Moses and Aaron are sent before the Exodus. And the titles matter: Moses is God's servant, Aaron the one God had chosen. They do not appoint themselves; deliverance is never a human achievement in this psalm but always a divine initiative, a God who sees His people's affliction and acts. Through them, they shewed his signs among them, and wonders in the land of Ham (v. 27) - the plagues that the next section will detail. But notice whose signs they are: his signs. Moses and Aaron are the hands; the wonders belong to God. The deliverer is sent, equipped, and chosen by the One doing the delivering - a shape that prepares the reader, across the long arc of Scripture, for a final Sent One who would do not signs against a foreign land but the work of rescue itself.
Psalm 105:28-36Wonders in the Land of Ham
28He sent darkness, and made it dark; and they rebelled not against his word. 29He turned their waters into blood, and slew their fish. 30Their land brought forth frogs in abundance, in the chambers of their kings. 31He spake, and there came divers sorts of flies, and lice in all their coasts. 32He gave them hail for rain, and flaming fire in their land. 33He smote their vines also and their fig trees; and brake the trees of their coasts. 34He spake, and the locusts came, and caterpillers, and that without number, 35And did eat up all the herbs in their land, and devoured the fruit of their ground. 36He smote also all the firstborn in their land, the chief of all their strength.
The psalm marches through the plagues with a drumbeat that is easy to miss until you listen for it: He sent… He turned… He gave… He spake… He smote. Every line begins with God as the subject and an active verb. The plagues are not natural disasters that happened to fall on Egypt; they are the deliberate acts of a sovereign God, each one aimed. And twice the psalm uses the simplest, most weighted phrase of all: He spake, and there came… He spake, and the locusts came (vv. 31, 34). The God who created the world by speaking now bends the created order against the oppressor by speaking - flies and locusts come at His mere word. This is the same power Israel had heard about in the story of creation, now turned toward rescue. There is a deep comfort buried in the relentlessness of these verses. The forces that hold God's people captive - however vast, however entrenched, the full might of the greatest empire of the age - are no match for a word from God. He needs only to speak, and the strength of Egypt comes apart, blow by blow, down to the chief of all their strength.
Verse 28 contains a small, much-discussed line: God sent darkness, and made it dark; and they rebelled not against his word. The most natural sense, reading the psalm's own grammar, is that the agents God sent - Moses and Aaron, who carry out these wonders throughout the section - did not rebel against His word but obeyed it exactly, bringing the darkness just as they were commanded. The plagues unfold with such terrible precision because the men through whom they came did not flinch from what God said. There is a quiet lesson in that. Set against the proud refusal of Pharaoh, who hardened himself again and again against the word of God, stand the servants who simply did as they were told. The whole deliverance turned, in part, on obedience that did not argue. And it sharpens the theme of the section: God's word is the engine of everything here. By His word the plagues come; by faithful obedience to His word they are carried out; and against His word the empire of Egypt finally cannot stand. The contrast the psalm draws is between hearts that bow to God's word and a heart that will not - and only one of those survives the encounter.3
Psalm 105:37-45The Bread of Heaven and the Opened Rock
37He brought them forth also with silver and gold: and there was not one feeble person among their tribes. 38Egypt was glad when they departed: for the fear of them fell upon them. 39He spread a cloud for a covering; and fire to give light in the night. 40The people asked, and he brought quails, and satisfied them with the bread of heaven. 41He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out; they ran in the dry places like a river. 42For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant. 43And he brought forth his people with joy, and his chosen with gladness: 44And gave them the lands of the heathen: and they inherited the labour of the people; 45That they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws. Praise ye the LORD.
The deliverance is total and even abundant: He brought them forth also with silver and gold: and there was not one feeble person among their tribes (v. 37). God did not merely free a people; He brought them out enriched, the Egyptians pressing their treasures on them in their eagerness to be rid of them - the back-wages, in a sense, of generations of unpaid labour. And not one stumbled: a whole nation, infants and elderly alike, marched out and not one was too weak to make the journey. The detail is lavish on purpose. The same theme then carries into the wilderness, where God becomes His people's shelter and guide directly: He spread a cloud for a covering; and fire to give light in the night (v. 39). By day the cloud shaded them from the desert sun; by night the fire gave light and warmth. God Himself was canopy over them and lamp before them - not a distant rescuer who freed them and left, but a present companion who travelled with them, His visible glory shading and lighting the road. The God of this psalm does not deliver and depart. He goes with.
Set verse 39 beside the plagues that came just before it, and a striking thing emerges: the same God uses the same elements toward opposite ends. Against Egypt He sent flaming fire in the hail (v. 32) and a darkness that could be felt (v. 28); for Israel He gives fire to give light in the night and a cloud for a covering by day. Fire that judged the oppressor now warms and lights the redeemed; cloud that might have hidden the sky now shelters His people from its blaze. This is the consistent witness of the chapter - that everything in creation is in God's hand, and the very forces that fall as judgment on those set against Him become mercy and protection for those He has claimed. The pillar of cloud and fire was the constant, visible sign that God had not delivered His people only to abandon them in a wilderness that could kill them. Day and night, without a single break, the sign of His presence went before them. They were never, for one hour of that journey, left to find the way alone.
The psalm ends not merely with arrival but with purpose, and the purpose reframes the whole history. God gave His people the land - he brought forth his people with joy… And gave them the lands of the heathen - and then states why: That they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws (v. 45). The deliverance was not an end in itself. Freedom from Egypt, bread in the desert, water from the rock, a land of their own - all of it was given so that a redeemed people could live in covenant faithfulness with the God who redeemed them. This is the great order the whole of Scripture keeps: rescue first, then response; grace first, then obedience. God did not give Israel His laws so that they might earn their way out of Egypt; He brought them out of Egypt first, by sheer covenant mercy, and gave them His statutes after, as the shape of life with Him. The closing Praise ye the LORD - a single word in Hebrew, Hallelujah - is therefore exactly right. A history that began with a summons to remember ends with a summons to praise; and between them lies the whole reason a rescued people exists: to know their God, to walk in His ways, and to tell His deeds among the people, just as the psalm began.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 105 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the repeated verb zakar (vv. 5, 8, 42, “remember”), for berith (vv. 8, 10, “covenant”), and for the close parallels between verses 1-15 and the ark-psalm of 1 Chronicles 16.
- Traces the threads tying Psalm 105 to the rest of Scripture - the Genesis narratives it retells, the ark-liturgy of 1 Chronicles 16 that reuses its opening, the covenant-seed the apostle names as Christ (Gal. 3:16), and the bread and rock of the wilderness the New Testament reads forward (John 6; 1 Cor. 10:4).
- Psalm 105 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 105 - the historical-psalm genre, the force of “remember” as covenant-language, the difficult line about Joseph in verse 18 (“his soul came into iron”), and the syntax of the closing purpose-clause in verse 45.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Remember His Marvellous Works
- 1 Chronicles 16:8-12Give thanks unto the LORD, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the people... Remember his marvellous works that he hath done.Verses 1-15 of this psalm, sung on the day the ark was brought up to Jerusalem.
- Deuteronomy 8:2And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness.The same summons to remember (v. 5) as the ground of faith, given by Moses on the edge of the land.
- Psalm 77:11I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old.A troubled soul doing exactly what verse 5 commands - steadying itself by deliberate memory.
- Psalm 106:1-3Praise ye the LORD. O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good... Blessed are they that keep judgment.The deliberate companion-psalm: the same history told from the angle of Israel’s failures rather than God’s steadiness.
He Hath Remembered His Covenant
- Galatians 3:16Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made... but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.The covenant-seed of verses 8-9 named: the promise to Abraham comes to rest on Christ.
- Genesis 17:7-8And I will establish my covenant... for an everlasting covenant... and I will give unto thee... all the land of Canaan.The original swearing of the everlasting covenant (v. 10) and the promise of the land (v. 11).
- Hebrews 11:8-10By faith Abraham... sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country... For he looked for a city which hath foundations.The “strangers” of verse 12 seen as pilgrims whose true inheritance was larger than Canaan.
- Genesis 20:6-7I also withheld thee from sinning against me... he is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee.God reproving a king for the patriarch’s sake (vv. 14-15) - “touch not mine anointed.”
Sold for a Servant
- Genesis 50:20But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to save much people alive.Joseph’s own reading of the “sending” of verse 17 - the same act seen as crime and as providence.
- Acts 7:9-10The patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him... and he made him governor over Egypt.The descent and ascent of verses 18 and 21 retold - the rejected one raised to rule and to save.
- Genesis 41:39-41Thou shalt be over my house... See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt.The exaltation of verse 21 - the prisoner made lord of the house and ruler of all.
- 1 Peter 1:6-7Though now... ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: that the trial of your faith... might be found unto praise.The principle of verse 19 - God’s word and promise trying the one who waits, to refine and prove.
He Sent Moses His Servant
- Exodus 1:7-11The children of Israel were fruitful... and the land was filled with them... Therefore they did set over them taskmasters.The increase and the rising hostility of verses 24-25 - strength that bred fear, and fear that bred bondage.
- Exodus 3:9-10The cry of the children of Israel is come unto me... Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh.The sending of Moses (v. 26) - deliverance begun by God’s initiative, not human ambition.
- Acts 7:34-35I have seen the affliction of my people... This Moses... did God send to be a ruler and a deliverer.Moses named as the sent deliverer (v. 26), and the pattern of the God who sends rescue.
- Genesis 15:13-14Thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs... and also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge.The bondage and the coming judgment on Egypt foretold to Abraham - the covenant already reckoning with verse 25.
Wonders in the Land of Ham
- Exodus 7:3-5I will... multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt... and the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD.The signs and wonders of verses 27-36 - aimed not at chaos but at making God known.
- Exodus 12:29-30The LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt... and there was a great cry in Egypt.The final blow of verse 36 - “the chief of all their strength.”
- Psalm 78:43-51How he had wrought his signs in Egypt... and turned their rivers into blood... He smote also all the firstborn.The companion catalogue of the plagues, told in a parallel historical psalm.
- Romans 9:17For this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee.The deeper purpose under the plagues of verses 28-36 - God’s power displayed against the proud.
The Bread of Heaven and the Opened Rock
- John 6:48-51I am that bread of life... I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever.The “bread of heaven” of verse 40 reaching its fulfilment - manna pointing to the living bread.
- 1 Corinthians 10:3-4And did all eat the same spiritual meat... for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.The opened rock of verse 41 named outright - the source of the water that saved a thirsting people.
- Exodus 13:21-22The LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud... and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light.The cloud and fire of verse 39 - God Himself as covering and lamp through the wilderness.
- Titus 2:14Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us... and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.The order of verse 45 - redemption first, then a people shaped to keep His ways.