Immerse: Poets Full Volume - Flipbook - Page 98
86
IMMERSE
•
POETS
Oh, how often they rebelled against him in the wilderness
and grieved his heart in that dry wasteland.
Again and again they tested God’s patience
and provoked the Holy One of Israel.
They did not remember his power
and how he rescued them from their enemies.
They did not remember his miraculous signs in Egypt,
his wonders on the plain of Zoan.
For he turned their rivers into blood,
so no one could drink from the streams.
He sent vast swarms of flies to consume them
and hordes of frogs to ruin them.
He gave their crops to caterpillars;
their harvest was consumed by locusts.
He destroyed their grapevines with hail
and shattered their sycamore-figs with sleet.
He abandoned their cattle to the hail,
their livestock to bolts of lightning.
He loosed on them his fierce anger—
all his fury, rage, and hostility.
He dispatched against them
a band of destroying angels.
He turned his anger against them;
he did not spare the Egyptians’ lives
but ravaged them with the plague.
He killed the oldest son in each Egyptian family,
the flower of youth throughout the land of Egypt.
But he led his own people like a flock of sheep,
guiding them safely through the wilderness.
He kept them safe so they were not afraid;
but the sea covered their enemies.
He brought them to the border of his holy land,
to this land of hills he had won for them.
He drove out the nations before them;
he gave them their inheritance by lot.
He settled the tribes of Israel into their homes.
But they kept testing and rebelling against God Most High.
They did not obey his laws.
They turned back and were as faithless as their parents.
They were as undependable as a crooked bow.
They angered God by building shrines to other gods;
they made him jealous with their idols.
78:40-58
