Psalm 78:38 - 78:72

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But He, being compassionate, atoned for their iniquity and did not destroy them;

And He abounded in turning back His anger

And did not arouse all His wrath.

Thus He remembered that they were but flesh,

A wind that goes and does not return.

How often they rebelled against Him in the wilderness

And grieved Him in the wasteland!

Again and again they tested God,

And pained the Holy One of Israel.

They did not remember His power,

The day when He redeemed them from the adversary,

When He performed His signs in Egypt

And His miracles in the field of Zoan,

And turned their rivers to blood,

And their streams, they could not drink.

He sent among them swarms of flies which devoured them,

And frogs which destroyed them.

He gave also their crops to the grasshopper

And the fruit of their labor to the locust.

He killed their vines with hailstones

And their sycamore trees with frost.

He gave over their cattle also to the hailstones

And their herds to bolts of lightning.

He sent upon them His burning anger,

Fury and indignation and distress,

A band of destroying angels.

He leveled a path for His anger;

He did not hold back their soul from death,

But gave over their life to the plague,

So He struck all the firstborn in Egypt,

The first of their vigor in the tents of Ham.

But He led forth His own people like sheep

And guided them in the wilderness like a flock;

He led them safely, so that they did not fear;

But the sea covered their enemies.

So He brought them to His holy land,

To this hill country which His right hand had acquired.

He also drove out the nations before them

And apportioned them for an inheritance by measurement,

And made the tribes of Israel dwell in their tents.

Yet they tested and rebelled against the Most High God

And did not keep His testimonies,

But turned back and acted treacherously like their fathers;

They turned aside like a treacherous bow.

For they provoked Him with their high places

And aroused His jealousy with their graven images.

God heard and was filled with wrath

And greatly rejected Israel;

So that He abandoned the dwelling place at Shiloh,

The tent which He caused to dwell among men,

And gave up His strength to captivity

And His beauty into the hand of the adversary.

He also gave over His people to the sword,

And was filled with wrath at His inheritance.

Fire devoured His choice men,

And His virgins had no wedding songs.

His priests fell by the sword,

And His widows could not weep.

Then the Lord awoke as if from sleep,

As if He were a warrior overcome by wine.

He struck His adversaries backward;

He put on them an everlasting reproach.

He also rejected the tent of Joseph,

And did not choose the tribe of Ephraim,

But chose the tribe of Judah,

Mount Zion which He loved.

And He built His sanctuary like the heights,

Like the earth which He has founded forever.

He also chose David His servant

And took him from the sheepfolds;

From following the nursing ewes He brought him

To shepherd Jacob His people,

And Israel His inheritance.

So he shepherded them according to the integrity of his heart,

And led them with his skillful hands.

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