8. When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.
9. For the Lord’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.
In the original planting of the nations the Lord reserved Canaan—best and fairest of all lands—for his people. This refers to those providential agencies by which God assigned to the nations descended from Noah’s sons their geographical localities and national home. In this arrangement he reserved sufficient territory for Israel—“according to their numbers”; and in the best locality for their residence. The Lord accountedthem his own people and gave them his own reserved “lot.”
10. He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.
11. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings:
12. So the LORD alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him.
“He found him in a desert land.” With poetic license the writer touches Hebrew history where he will—in this case at Sinai where God met Israel visibly, and called them into special covenant with himself. All through that wilderness he led Israel about by his guiding pillar of cloud and of fire; instructed him by precepts and statutes; kept him from danger even as a man guards the apple of his eye (which the more poetic Hebrew called the little man of the eye—that diminutive picture of yourself).——The next figure—at once exquisite in beauty and forcible for illustration—comes from the eagle training his young to fly. When he sees that the time has come for this training, he stirs up his nestlings—waking them as the father does his sons at the morning hour; flutters over them as if to show them the exercise; spreads abroad his wings; takes them up aloft, casts them off upon their flying power—coming swift to the rescue if their strength should fail;—all to train them into courage, and strength of wing, and steadiness of stroke. So the Lord alone—he and none other—did lead Israel. There was no strange god there. In all his wilderness training of forty most eventful years—that tender youth-time of Israel, there was not the least help from Baal or Ashtoreth. But the hand of his own God was every-where; in his daily bread; in his rock-gushing waters; in his pillar of cloud and of fire; in his victories over Amalek, Arad, and Midian. This high hand and uplifted arm, strong as the eagle’s pinions, bore the younglings taken from his nest over and through the roughnesses of that waste howling wilderness, until at length he set them down in the promised Canaan.
13. He made him ride on the high places of the earth, that hemight eat the increase of the fields; and he made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock;
14. Butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape.
The fatness of this fertile land calls out the richest poetic imagery.——“He made him ride on the high places of the earth”—letting him down just a little yet but a little from the symbol of the eagle’s lofty flight. “Riding on the high places of the land”—as if his were a railway path, stretched from summit to summit, resting only on mountain peaks, commanding every magnificent prospect; or with an eye to his conquest of Canaan, the poet sees him sweeping through with the tread of a conquerer, for the phrase seems to conceive of the hill-tops as the strategic points in war, commanding the whole country. As we might expect, Isaiah admired and adopted this gem of poetry (Isa. 58: 14).