PSALM 77

The Hand, Arm and Footprint of God

The Right Hand Of The Most High Has Changed (vv.1-10)

1 My voice rises to God,		and I will cry aloud;
My voice rises to God,		and He will hear me.
2 In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord;	In the night my hand (yad)[1] was stretched out without weariness;		My soul refused to be comforted.
3 When I remember [2] God,		then I am disturbed;
When I sigh,		then my spirit grows faint. Selah.
4 You have held my eyelids open;		I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
5 I have considered the days of old,		The years of long ago.
6 I will remember my song in the night;	I will meditate (śı̂aḥ) with my heart,		And my spirit ponders:
7 Will the Lord reject forever?		And will He never be favorable again?
8 Has His lovingkindness ceased forever?		Has His promise come to an end forever?
9 Has God forgotten to be gracious,		Or has He in anger withdrawn His compassion? Selah.
10 Then I said, “It is my grief,		That the right hand (yamiyn) of the Most High has changed.”[3] [4] [5] [6]

You Led Your People…by the Hand of Moses and Aaron (vv.11-20)

11 I shall remember the deeds of Yah; [7]		Surely I will remember Your wonders of old.
12 I will meditate (hāgâ) on all Your work		And muse on Your deeds.
13 Your way, O God, is holy;		What god is great like our God?
14 You are the God who works wonders;		You have made known Your strength among the peoples.
15 You have by Your ~~power~~ arm [8] redeemed [9] Your people, (Exodus 6:6; 15:16; Psalm 136:10-12; Isaiah 52:10; 53:1)		The sons of Jacob and Joseph. Selah.
16 The waters saw You, O God;	The waters saw You, they were in anguish;		The deeps [10] also trembled.
17 The clouds poured out water;	The skies gave forth a sound/voice;		Your arrows flashed here and there.
18 The sound/voice of Your thunder was in the whirlwind;	The lightnings lit up the world;		The earth trembled and shook.
19 Your way was in the sea	And Your paths in the mighty waters,		And Your footprints may not be known.
20 You led Your people like a flock (Exodus 15:13; Psalm 78:70; 79:13; 80:1)		By the hand (yad) of Moses and Aaron.

[1] The stretched out hand is a key image of Psalm 77 going back to the Exodus and Moses and Aaron (Exodus 3:20; 4:2-4; 7:19; 8:5-6; 17; 9:22-23,33; 10:12; 21-22; 13:3; 14:21; 26-27; 15:6,12; 17:8-12). Psalm 77 ends with God leading Israel by the hand of Moses and Aaron. Most striking is the center of the Psalm, “the right hand of the Most High has changed.”

[2] “Remember” is used a total of 12x total in the Psalms of Asaph. Here in Psalm 74 it occurs 4x (vv.3,6,11[2x]; cf. 74:2,18,22; 78:35,39,42; 79:8; 83:4). Other related “memory” words are: meditate (v.6b [siyach]), ponders (v.6c), meditate (v.12a [hagah]) and muse (v.12b). Biblically speaking, you have spiritual Alzheimer’s disease if you don't remember what happened 2,000 years ago.

[3] There are 73 Hebrew words in vv.1-10 and 74 in vv.11-20 (Clifford, 38).

[4] “Most commentators divide Psalm 77 into two parts: the first, a lament over the speaker’s distress; the second, a hopeful hymn celebrating God’s glorious deeds in the past. Because there is no apparent transition between the two sections, a variety of solutions have been offered, including the suggestion that a priestly oracle intervened, or that participation in a cultic festival has reenlivened the power of Israel’s redemptive past for the speaker. Behind these and other psychological explanation lies the faulty assumption that the real time it takes to recite a psalm must correspond to the inner changes it reports in its speaker. A number of the verbs in the psalm point to a process of repeated meditation, which induces in the mediator a suspension of ordinary temporal perceptions. A psalm based on meditative practice can therefore telescope a lengthy need to undertake a similar meditation. Furthermore, the many verbal links between the two sections suggest that we have in Psalm 77 one composition, written from the start by someone who knew where it would finish” (Herbert J. Levine, Sing Unto God a New Song p.146).

[5] This verse is so candid and straightforward it has posed a problem for translators.

ü NIV: Then I thought, “To this I will appeal: the years of the right hand of the Most High.”

ü King James: And I said, “This is my anguish; But I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High.”

ü English Standard Version: Then I said, “I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the Most High.”

ü The New American Standard 95 is closest to the Hebrew and the LXX: Then I said, “It is my grief, That the right hand of the Most High has changed.”

In the Psalmist’s experience it seemed as though what is theologically impossible had happened! God’s right hand had changed (cf. Malachi 3:6).

[6] Jesus is now at the right hand of God (Hebrews 1:3). Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

[7] This contracted form of Yahweh occurs 50x in the Hebrew Scriptures, 43 of which are in the Psalms. Psalm 68 is the first song in the Psalter that YAH occurs (vv.4,18) and Psalm 77 is the second.

The contracted form of Yahweh here brings us back to the Psalmist’s remembrance of the Exodus (vv.15,16,19). In fact, the first time Yah occurs in Scripture is Moses' song which Israel sang after crossing the Red Sea.

Then Moses and the sons of Israel sang this song to Yahweh, and said, “I will sing to Yahweh, for He is highly exalted; The horse and its rider He has hurled into the sea.
“YAH is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation; This is my God, and I will praise Him; My father’s God, and I will extol Him. (Exodus 15:1-2)

[8] The “hand,” “arm” and “footprint” of God is not merely anthropomorphic language but Incarnational.

“One of the most salient characteristics of biblical Hebrew is its extraordinary concreteness, manifested especially in a fondness for images rooted in the human body. The general predisposition of modern translators is to convert most of this concrete language into more abstract terms that have the purported advantage of clarity but turn the pungency of the original into stale paraphrase” (Robert Altar, Genesis xii).

[9] Outside of Exodus, the only place in which ga’al is used in reference to the redemption from Egypt is in the Psalms (74:2; 77:15; 106:10) (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 5:652).

[10] The same word is used in Genesis 1:2, “darkness was over the surface of the deep.” It is common for the Scriptures to speak of redemption in terms of creation and exodus.