Ps. 78.54 (his holy territory and mountain)

And then / he brought them / to his holy territory
to the mountain / which his right hand got. 

On first glance we might miss it—that the wilderness wanderings have been completely removed from this portion of the psalm. Of course, it has already been covered in verses 12 and following, but it stills seems odd when it is pointed out. Why not simply construct the psalm with the entire story in one coherent chronology? Why divide it like this? I think there is an answer to this and it is found in the “And then…” statements. What we see in this portion of the psalm is the transfer of Israel from Egyptian ‘territory’ to God’s ‘holy territory’.  The focus is not on the blessings provided in the wilderness, but the blessing of the land itself. By sidelining the wanderings the psalmist is drawing our attention to the very profound reality of the land as God’s ‘holy territory’. Including the wandering section here would water-down its reality. And, perhaps more importantly, it would slow down the ‘momentum’ of this section. The ‘And then…’ phrase indicates a type of clear and unequivocal focus of God on bringing them to himself. The movement is almost staccato in its brevity. Holy territory. The goal toward which Israel is heading is God’s ‘holy territory’. Because it has a geographical specificity we need to see this in contrast to the land of Egypt and Zoan where God had ‘placed his signs’. Egypt had become, as we saw, the land of ‘uncreation’ and curse. God’s ‘signs’ had unraveled its existence (from water, to vegetation to animal to human life). We need to see then God’s holy territory as the antithesis of Egypt—the place of abundant life and overflowing. Conquering holiness. Further, we need to see it, as described here, as a territory that has been obtained by God’s military display of conquering (“…which his right hand got.”). This conquering, I think, should be understood as the act of ‘making holy’ the territory. In other words, the goal is not destruction. The goal is the making fit a territory for God’s holiness (his presence in tabernacle and Temple) and his people. Again, it is creating the condition necessary for a land to be the antithesis of Egypt. That ‘condition’ requires the conquering force of holiness. (One wonders, “I go before you to prepare a place…”; could the Ascension be understood as Christ’s bringing with him the conquering force of his resurrection power into the divine realm such that he would make it ‘habitable’ for his people? Does his ‘return to the father’ entail a reordering of the spiritual realm similar to the reordering necessary for the Promised Land? The Ascension of Isaiah seems to envision something along these lines as well as Revelation.). Territory or mountain. The psalmist has provided an interesting problem in this verse. On the one hand he describes Israel arriving at God’s holy territory and then describes it as their arrival at his mountain. The next verses make clear that the ‘arrival’ is not at Sinai but the promised land. The question then is what this ‘mountain’ is he is referring to. It can’t be Zion as that is referred to later in the psalm. It seems as if it could be Shiloh, the place where his tabernacle will dwell. What is interesting for our purposes is that ‘territory and mountain’ are so closely wed. Mountains, typically understood, are either the places of God’s visitation or his dwelling. In other words, the territory is God’s because the mountain is his dwelling/visitation place. Because God ‘dwells there’, the territory will then, in the next verse, be able to be apportioned out to Israel. So God gives them his holy territory, while maintaining his ‘throne’ on the mountain (he begins the establishment of his kingdom).