Psalms 114: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This short psalm looks back at Israel leaving Egypt and entering the land. It pictures the sea, the Jordan River, and the mountains reacting to God's presence, then asks them directly why they behaved that way. It closes by calling the earth to tremble before the God of Jacob, who turned rock into water in the desert.

Claim by Claim

1. 114:1
   • Israel went out from Egypt.
   • The house of Jacob went out from a people whose speech was foreign and unintelligible.
   • The events that follow are placed at the time of this departure.
2. 114:2
   • Judah became his sanctuary.
   • The one whose sanctuary Judah became is not named in the verse.
   • Israel became his dominion.
3. 114:3
   • The sea saw.
   • What the sea saw is not stated.
   • The sea fled.
   • The Jordan turned back.
4. 114:4
   • The mountains skipped like rams.
   • The hills skipped like lambs.
5. 114:5
   • The sea is asked what was the matter with it that it fled.
   • The Jordan is asked why it turned back.
6. 114:6
   • The mountains are asked why they skipped like rams.
   • The hills are asked why they skipped like lambs.
7. 114:7
   • The earth is commanded to tremble before the Lord.
   • The earth is commanded to tremble before the God of Jacob.
8. 114:8
   • He turned the rock into a pool of water.
   • He turned the flint into a spring of water.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

114:1

The exodus: the departure of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the founding event of Israel's national story. "The family of Jacob" means the nation descended from Jacob, also called Israel, the same man is given both names in Genesis, and both names are used for his descendants. The King James "strange language" means foreign, not odd; the Hebrew describes a people whose speech was unintelligible to them.

114:2

"Judah" and "Israel" here are a matched poetic pair, two names for the same people, not two separate kingdoms. A sanctuary is a holy place, a dwelling set apart for a god; the line says the nation itself became the place where God lived. "Dominion" means the territory a ruler holds.

114:3

Two separate events, forty years apart. The sea is the one Israel crossed when it escaped Egypt, which drew back to let them through. The Jordan is the river they crossed a generation later, entering the land of Canaan; its water is described as stopping and piling up so they could walk over. The poem sets the two crossings side by side as the opening and closing of the same journey.

114:4

Mountains shaking is the standard way Hebrew poetry describes a god arriving, the language echoes accounts of Mount Sinai quaking during the giving of the law. "Skipped like rams" is a deliberately startling image: massive things behaving like frisking animals.

114:5

"What ailed thee" is old English for "what was the matter with you?" The poet turns and speaks straight to the sea and the river, as if they could answer. Poets do this to make a scene feel alive.

114:7

The Hebrew verb translated "tremble" means to writhe or whirl, and is used both of shaking in fear and of dancing; the ambiguity is in the original. "The presence of the Lord" repeated twice is a Hebrew way of intensifying, roughly "at the very presence."

114:8

A reference to the desert story in which water came out of a rock when it was struck, giving the people something to drink. "Flint" is a hard stone that will not absorb or hold water, the point of naming it is that this is the least likely material for a spring.