Psalms 68:9 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, &c. Hebrew, נדבות, גשׁם, geshem nedaboth, a rain of spontaneousness, or liberality. The Seventy render it, βροχην εκουσιον, a spontaneous, voluntary, or free rain. As we do not read of any showers of rain that fell during the continuance of the Israelites in the wilderness, except that before mentioned on Sinai, the people being supplied with water, partly from wells which they found, and partly by miracle from rocks, Dr. Chandler thinks the plentiful rain here mentioned “relates to the manna and the quails, which were rained down on them from heaven.” Thus God promised, I will rain bread from heaven for you, Exodus 16:4; and the psalmist observes, Psalms 68:23-24; Psalms 68:27, He opened the doors of heaven, and rained down manna upon them to eat, and gave them of the corn of heaven. He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls as the sand of the sea. “This,” he thinks, “may truly be called a kind of spontaneous shower; as both the manna and the quails offered themselves to their hands without any pains or labour in the people to procure them. By this shower, says the sacred writer, thou didst confirm thine inheritance, (see Deuteronomy 32:9;) that is, didst recruit and refresh thy people; for they greatly needed it, as they were weary; that is, tired, and almost worn out with hunger, the hardships of which they bore with great impatience and murmuring.” There is, however, one great objection to this interpretation of the passage. It does not seem to comport with the next verse, which speaks of the congregation of Israel as dwelling in the inheritance refreshed by this rain, which inheritance was certainly the land of Canaan. In this they had dwelt for many ages when David wrote this Psalm, and though they had sometimes been chastised with drought, yet they had often witnessed the descent of abundant rains upon their country, which were the more necessary and desirable, because it was hilly and of a dry soil, and not watered, like Egypt, by the overflowings of a great river. See Deuteronomy 11:10-11.