A teaching poem retells rebellion and mercy: Exodus signs and settlement retold

Wilderness grief is paired with a refusal to remember the enemy's day

How oft did they provoke him in the wilderness, and grieve him in the desert! Yea, they turned back and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel. They remembered not his hand, nor the day when he delivered them from the enemy.

Limiting the Holy One is the poem's charge: treating the Redeemer as a small option. The forgotten day is deliverance, not a private mood.

Egypt's signs are retold so that flock and inheritance can be seen as gift

How he had wrought his signs in Egypt, and his wonders in the field of Zoan: rivers into blood; flies and frogs; caterpillar and locust on increase and labor; hail on vines, frost on sycamores; cattle to hail, flocks to thunderbolts. He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels among them. He made a way to his anger; he spared not their soul from death, but gave their life over to the pestilence, and smote all the firstborn in Egypt, the chief of their strength in the tabernacles of Ham.

But he made his own people to go forth like sheep, and guided them in the wilderness like a flock. He led them on safely, so that they feared not: but the sea overwhelmed their enemies. He brought them to the border of his sanctuary, even to this mountain, which his right hand had purchased. He cast out the heathen also before them, and divided them an inheritance by line, and made the tribes of Israel to dwell in their tents. The plague catalogue is poetic selection, not a complete Exodus chronology, and the phrase evil angels names the agents of those blows, not a demonology to expand. Settlement is Israel's remembered gift. It is not a modern conquest ideology, and the Egyptian dead are not a joke.