God's hidden way made known in leading Israel, and the causes of his turning away

Yet even though your journey is invisible, this at least became known and clear to human beings: that you led the people on their journey out of Egypt as sheep led by Moses and Aaron. So the psalm gives this instruction... in misfortunes...

Others have explained these things this way. The psalm just mentioned ended in silence, neither searching out nor stating the reasons why the people were so despised by God their guardian. But this psalm indicates from the outset the cause of God's turning away, which God later declared through Isaiah when he said: "Is the Lord's hand not strong enough to save? Or has his ear grown too heavy to hear? No, your sins stand between you and God, and because of your sins he turned his face away from you so as not to show mercy" (Isaiah 59:1-2), and so on. So the psalm recalls Israel's disbelief and contradiction in the wilderness, in order to show that those who stand apart from God become the cause of their own evils, as David clearly narrates the events. And he begins at once in royal fashion, commanding his own people to attend to his law—or to his own instructions, as Symmachus renders it. For he says, "I offer the present exhortation as a kind of law."

And if, he says, God's love of humanity and pity and abundant propitiation had not preserved their succession, but he had pursued them with full wrath, they would have perished and become nameless. For God did not approve their choice, but had compassion on their weakness, as in the case of flesh that decays and spirit that departs.

The interpreters have given different accounts of this psalm's subject. One says the prophet simply laments a captivity and what happened to Jerusalem in it, without specifying which one. Another says it refers to the captivity under the Romans that took place after the betrayal of our Savior Jesus Christ. Others say it refers to the one under Antiochus, called Epiphanes. So let us set that question aside and examine some of the actual words.

The plea is against the nations, because they acted impiously and, being unclean, defiled the holy land and polluted the sacred temple. The appeal on behalf of Jerusalem is that the city once called holy to God has become a mound and a heap of stones—which Theodotion renders as "into a stone heap." These things can serve as a reminder of the election that had been made concerning Jerusalem. And he also speaks of the pitiable fate of its inhabitants: that even after death they were left unburied and exposed as food for birds, showing how great and savage was the enemies' treatment of the conquered. And he calls those who suffered these things God's servants, which carries a claim of kinship toward God and an appeal to the Master. For even if there are just charges against the servants, still there is a sparing of what belongs to him when it is inhumanly ravaged by an outsider. He also says that the bodies of the holy ones became food for wild beasts and that their blood was poured out without restraint like water before Jerusalem. Perhaps he calls the fallen "holy ones" because of their original election, just as the apostle also calls holy even the branches broken off for impiety, because they belonged to a holy root (Romans 11:16). Or perhaps he means that holy ones perished together with the unjust, which happens in the capture and destruction of a city and a nation, and which was shown through Ezekiel as happening. For he says: "Thus says the Lord: Behold, I am against you, and I will draw my dagger from its sheath and destroy from among you"—Aquila says "righteous and impious"; the Septuagint, "and I will cut off from you righteous and impious" (Ezekiel 21:3-4). This had also been said more allegorically: "Behold, I kindle a fire in you, and it will consume every tree in you"—Aquila says "moist"; the Septuagint, "and every dry tree" (Ezekiel 20:47). The moist tree is an allegory for the righteous man, and the dry tree for the impious. The Lord himself showed that he is the true righteous tree when he said, "If they do these things when the wood is moist, what will happen when it is dry?" (Luke 23:31). And if the Lord shared in the misfortunes brought upon the world insofar as he shared in flesh, though he had no sin, it is no wonder that righteous human beings, who are in some way partakers of sin, also become partakers of the misfortunes that follow upon sins. They suffer equally with the unjust, being put to death just as he himself was counted among the lawless, yet they are distinguished before God. Such was the case of Jeremiah, taken captive among the ungodly, yet holding some distinction even among men after the captivity, in the honor he received from the one who took him captive.