They Did Not Remember His Hand

Psalm 78 is the great historical psalm of the Book of Psalms — a maskil of Asaph, the second-longest in the book. Part 5 revealed the secret of mercy; Part 6 turns back to the great night of Egypt and tells again the story of the plagues — plague after plague, wave after wave. Asaph does not count them to remember a victory, but to ask a painful question: how can one see all that great hand — and then forget? This is a song of memory against forgetting, rolling like a wheel that never stops, from darkness until it breaks into light.

The central verse, chosen as the name of the song, is:

"They remembered not his hand, nor the day when he delivered them from the enemy"

This is the heart of the whole part: they did not remember the hand that redeemed them in their distress. It is not that they did not know — they forgot. A deeper tragedy than denial: a heart that saw the miracles with its own eyes, and let them fade away. The psalm warns us of the forgetting within us — remembering is itself a work of the heart.