Israel's conquest of Canaan did not fulfill the divine mandate. The inhabitants, whose sins had become a menace to mankind, were allowed to exist side by side with the Hebrew immigrants; and, as is often the case, the conquerors were conquered, and the invaders were contaminated by the morals of the invaded. Intermarriage poured a large admixture of alien blood into Israel, and the excesses of idolatry, even to the hideous practice of human sacrifices, became intensified by the ties of kinship and neighborhood.
The whole history of Israel is summed up as alternating cycles of sin and punishment, repentance and deliverance; and we are left wondering, first at the inveterate evil of the human heart, which learns nothing from experience, and next at the inexhaustible long-suffering of God, which, while justice strikes, yet finds some way of alleviating the smart of the stroke, Psalms 106:46. The love of God persists all through humanism and outreaches it.
The prayer of Psalms 106:47 shows that this psalm was written in exile. The psalmist hopes and believes that one result of his people's restoration will be thankfulness and the expression upon grateful lips of never-ending praise. So ends the fourth book of the Psalter.
For Review Questions, see the e-Sword Book Comments. [source]
Chapter Summary: Psalm 106
1The psalmist exhorts to praise God 4He prays for pardon of sin, as God pardoned the fathers 7The story of the people's rebellion, and God's mercy 47He concludes with prayer and praise
What do the individual words in Psalms 106:39 mean?
Thus they were defiledby their own worksand played the harlotby their own deeds
Parse: Conjunctive waw, Verb, Qal, Consecutive imperfect, third person masculine plural
Root: טָמֵא
Sense: to be unclean, become unclean, become impure.
Parse: Conjunctive waw, Verb, Qal, Consecutive imperfect, third person masculine plural
Root: זָנָה
Sense: to commit fornication, be a harlot, play the harlot.