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³⁸Yet he, being compassionate, forgave their iniquity, and did not destroy them; often he restrained his anger, and did not stir up all his wrath.

³⁹He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and does not come again.

⁴⁰How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert!

⁴¹They tested God again and again, and provoked the Holy One of Israel.

⁴²They did not keep in mind his power, or the day when he redeemed them from the foe;

⁴³when he displayed his signs in Egypt, and his miracles in the fields of Zoan.

⁴⁴He turned their rivers to blood, so that they could not drink of their streams.

⁴⁵He sent among them swarms of flies, which devoured them, and frogs, which destroyed them.

⁴⁶He gave their crops to the caterpillar, and the fruit of their labor to the locust.

⁴⁷He destroyed their vines with hail, and their sycamores with frost.

⁴⁸He gave over their cattle to the hail, and their flocks to thunderbolts.

⁴⁹He let loose on them his fierce anger, wrath, indignation, and distress, a company of destroying angels.

⁵⁰He made a path for his anger; he did not spare them from death, but gave their lives over to the plague.

⁵¹He struck all the firstborn in Egypt, the first issue of their strength in the tents of Ham.

⁵²Then he led out his people like sheep, and guided them in the wilderness like a flock.

⁵³He led them in safety, so that they were not afraid; but the sea overwhelmed their enemies.

⁵⁴And he brought them to his holy hill, to the mountain that his right hand had won.

⁵⁵He drove out nations before them; he apportioned them for a possession and settled the tribes of Israel in their tents.

⁵⁶Yet they tested the Most High God, and rebelled against him. They did not observe his decrees,

⁵⁷but turned away and were faithless like their ancestors; they twisted like a treacherous bow.

⁵⁸For they provoked him to anger with their high places; they moved him to jealousy with their idols.

⁵⁹When God heard, he was full of wrath, and he utterly rejected Israel.

⁶⁰He abandoned his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where he dwelt among mortals,

⁶¹and delivered his power to captivity, his glory to the hand of the foe.

⁶²He gave his people to the sword, and vented his wrath on his heritage.

⁶³Fire devoured their young men, and their girls had no marriage song.

⁶⁴Their priests fell by the sword, and their widows made no lamentation.

⁶⁵Then the Lord awoke as from sleep, like a warrior shouting because of wine.

⁶⁶He put his adversaries to rout; he put them to everlasting disgrace.

⁶⁷He rejected the tent of Joseph, he did not choose the tribe of Ephraim;

⁶⁸but he chose the tribe of Judah, Mount Zion, which he loves.

⁶⁹He built his sanctuary like the high heavens, like the earth, which he has founded forever.

⁷⁰He chose his servant David, and took him from the sheepfolds;

⁷¹from tending the nursing ewes he brought him to be the shepherd of his people Jacob, of Israel, his inheritance.

⁷²With upright heart he tended them, and guided them with skillful hand.