He turned their rivers to blood, and from their streams they could not drink. He sent swarms of flies that devoured them, and frogs that devastated them. He gave their crops to the grasshopper, the fruit of their labor to the locust. He killed their vines with hailstones and their sycamore-figs with sleet. He abandoned their cattle to the hail and their livestock to bolts of lightning. He unleashed His fury against them, wrath, indignation, and calamity—a band of destroying angels. He cleared a path for His anger; He did not spare them from death but delivered their lives to the plague. He struck all the firstborn of Egypt, the virility in the tents of Ham.
This is a plague recital, not a law text. Psalm 78:44 reuses the clause of Exodus 7:20 with three shared lexemes, including a distinctive one: הפך (haphak, "turned") + יְאֹר (ye'or, the Nile and its canals) + דָּם (dam, "blood"). יְאֹר is the Egyptian loanword Exodus uses throughout chapter 7, and the psalm's plural "their Niles" matches Exodus 7:19's list of Egypt's waters. The preceding verse frames the whole with Exodus 7:3's programmatic pair — אוֹת (oth, "signs") and מוֹפֵת (mopheth, "wonders") — set "in the fields of Zoan" (78:43).
Found via
Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type
Allusion
Connection Method(s)
Redemptive-Historical Progression
Psalm 78 gives seven plagues, in an order of its own, omitting gnats, boils, and darkness. It also adds an element found nowhere in Exodus: "He unleashed His fury against them, wrath, indignation, and calamity — a band of destroying angels" (78:49). That is the psalmist's interpretation, not the narrative's report: the plagues were the deployment of God's own anger, not merely a contest of signs.
The decisive difference from Psalm 105, which recites the same events from the same chapter, is the purpose. Psalm 105 recites the plagues to celebrate a promise kept. Psalm 78 recites them so "that they should put their confidence in God, not forgetting His works... Then they will not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation" (78:7-8). Identical events, opposite rhetorical use — which is a lesson in how Scripture handles its own history, and part of why this pair is Redemptive-Historical Progression rather than typology: the psalm is placing Israel at a point in the story and telling the next generation where the story goes if they repeat it.
The Old Testament's own reception of this psalm runs to Christ: Matthew 13:35 cites Psalm 78:2 as fulfilled in Jesus' teaching in parables. And the psalm's climax — "He struck all the firstborn of Egypt" (78:51) — has its answer in the one firstborn who was not passed over: "He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all" (Romans 8:32). The plagues are remembered rightly when they make a generation refuse the stubbornness of the last one, and they make that refusal desirable rather than merely required, because the God who did not spare His Son will "along with Him, freely give us all things."
