Psalm 136

The Hebrew word for “mercy” is hesed. It’s a word thick in meaning, and translated many ways, depending on the context: steadfast love, lovingkindness, kindness, mercy, compassion, goodness, favor. It’s the kind of love perhaps most appreciated by people who seem hardest to love, such as folks who make one bad decision after another. That’s a fair description of the Jewish nation, with their on and off again worship of God. Sometimes the nation seemed to prefer God. Sometimes idols. Sometimes both. God would punish this idolatry in various ways. But he never gave up on his chosen people. He could have erased them from history, as Germany’s Adolph Hitler tried during World War Two. But even when they messed up and had to live with the consequences, he loved them through those consequences and onto a new day.

This “Lord” is not in all capital letters like most other “LORD” spellings in Psalms and throughout the Bible. “LORD” appears around 7,000 times in the Christian Bible, which makes it the most common way of referring to God.  The lower-case “Lord” is a translation of the Hebrew word Adonai. It refers to God as our master, our life coach, or the boss. He’s in charge of us, and we try to obey him. “LORD” is the spelling most Bibles use when the writer refers to the name of God. Moses asked God what his name was, and God said Moses should tell the Israelite ancestors of the Jews that his name is “I AM” (Exodus 3:14). In the original Hebrew language, the name is spelled with only consonants—no vowels. It’s an ancient shorthand, to save hides used to make scrolls. The name is YHWH. Without knowing which vowels, most scholars have settled on YAHWEH, pronounced YAH-way. God’s name is so sacred to many Jews that they refuse to speak it. Instead, they’ll use names that describe the character of God, such as Adonai, which means “my Lord.” They won’t even write the name. In English, they’ll spell the name G-d.

That’s not a typo. Many Bibles say “Red Sea.” But the Hebrew words are yam suph, “sea reeds.” Scholars usually track Moses and the Hebrews escaping Egypt by walking southeast, out of the Nile Delta fields and toward the Red Sea and the Sinai Peninsula. They would have passed through lake regions along what is now the Suez Canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. These lakes and ponds reportedly had reeds growing along the banks, like the ones the Bible says grew along the Nile River and helped anchor Baby Moses in a basket (Exodus 2:3).

Sihon and Og (verse 20) were two Amorite kings in what is now the Arab country of Jordan, east of Israel and the Jordan River. They refused to let Moses and the Hebrew ancestors of the Jewish people to peacefully pass through their territory. These refugees from Egyptian slavery were on their way to the land Moses said God promised them, in what is now Israel and Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territory.