Ps. 78.18 (fathers' first words)

They willfully / put God to the test
asking about / the food they craved. 

The psalmist will describe two forms of rebellion by Israel, both in two geographic locations: in the dessert, it will be food; in the land, it will be idolatry. Both will have the same tragic consequences: the destruction of the youths. Stated thus, the desert portion seems out of proportion. Idolatry would seem, at first glance, to be the more flagrant of the challenges hurled at God. However, the psalmist has chosen the ‘testing of bread and meat’ for a particular reason. It flies in the face of the ‘water provision’ God had just enacted in their midst. In this way it is the height of ingratitude. Before we proceed, however, it is important to note that this verse represents the first spoken words by the ‘fathers’ in the psalm. This is highly problematic for several reasons, but perhaps the most important one is the fact that they are never portrayed as thanking God or giving praise to him for either his parting of the sea or his providing rivers in a dessert. In the story as contained in the book of Exodus it is immediately following the parting of the sea that we find the ‘song of Moses’. Here, however, God’s family is utterly silent. Rather, their first words are a ‘putting God to the test’ and an ‘asking…’. More troubling still, this ‘asking’ revolves not around their necessities but around ‘what they crave’. One cannot help but sense that these fathers’ hearts are a type of black hole, that due to their inability to thank or praise God, nothing would, in fact, ever satiate their cravings. If they can stand on the other side of the ‘split’ sea and have just quenched their thirst from the ‘split’ rock, there is little doubt that were they to receive their request it would only lead to a further craving. The point (or, a point) may be, then, that there is something deeply flawed about these fathers, that no matter how prodigal God is with his blessing, it only serves to heighten their cravings. As we will see this bears out in the following verses in this way: that the prodigal blessing of God is met by a type of prodigal request for more from the fathers. Whereas God’s blessing should move them into a type of festive liturgy of thanks, it instead moves them into its opposite: a type of reckless and uncontained request for more. The boundary that was crossed in God’s blessing is, to the fathers, not enough, and never would be.