Ps. 77.15 (geneology and promise)

By your arm / you redeemed / your people – the sons of Jacob and Joseph. We are now firmly entering into the realm of salvation history. The exodus has been present throughout the psalm, but it is here that we come to see it specified. The note struck here is of ‘redemption’. Such an act is, by and large, an act of a kinsman; a kin is one who ‘redeems’ another kin from someone else. By performing this act of ‘redemption’, therefore, God is acting to Israel like its divine Kinsman; we might say, its ‘father’. This is confirmed in the follow-up phrase of “your people”. One wonders whether this could be translated as ‘your family’. Regardless, the familial connection is then struck again as it refers to the “sons of Jacob and Joseph”. In other words, the “sons of Jacob and Joseph” are, in this redemption, also the ‘sons of God’, his kin and family. We see that throughout salvation history—the family of man is made possible by the fruitfulness of God’s blessing and, in that way, is also God’s family. This sense of both human and divine patrimony (one through biology, the other through covenant) recalls to mind one of the central questions of the psalm: “Will his promises fail, for generation after generation?” In the exodus, the promises, flowing through the generations, were powerfully fulfilled and perpetuated. What the psalmist considers is whether, now, those promises are now coming to an end. If so, the past is severed. The exodus power of redemption is and will be, forever, past. Has this subterranean stream dried up?