to put (used in a great variety of applications · verb, qal jussive, 3rd person masculine singular
rivers
נְהָר֣וֹתne.ha.Rot
H5104
a stream (including the sea · noun, common feminine plural absolute
wilderness
לְמִדְבָּ֑רle.mid.Bar
H4057
a pasture (i.e. open field · preposition + noun, common masculine singular absolute
watersprings
מַ֝֗יִםMa.yim
H4325
water · noun, common masculine plural absolute
ground
לְצִמָּאֽוֹןle.tzi.ma.'on
H6774
a thirsty place · preposition + noun, common masculine singular absolute
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Isaiah 42:15 I will make waste mountains and hills, and dry up all their herbs; and I will make the rivers islands, and I will dry up the pools.
Isaiah 50:2 Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was there none to answer? Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or ha…
Amos 4:7-8 And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and ca…
1 Kings 17:1-7 And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there…
1 Kings 18:5 And Ahab said unto Obadiah, Go into the land, unto all fountains of water, and unto all brooks: peradventure we may find grass to save the h…
Psalms 74:15 Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: thou driedst up mighty rivers.
Isaiah 13:19-21 And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
Isaiah 19:5-10 And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Psalms 107:33–end
The psalmist, having given God the glory of the providential reliefs granted to persons in distress, here gives him the glory of the revolutions of providence, and the surprising changes it sometimes makes in the affairs of the children of men.
I. He gives some instances of these revolutions.
1. Fruitful countries are made barren and barren countries are made fruitful. Much of the comfort of this life depends upon the soil in which our lot is cast. Now, (1.) The sin of man has often marred the fruitfulness of the soil and made it unserviceable, Psa 107:33, Psa 107:34. Land watered with rivers is sometimes turned into a wilderness, and that which had been full of water-springs now has not so…
He turneth rivers into a wilderness,.... A country abounding with rivers, as the country round about Sodom and the land of Canaan were, Genesis 13:10. Such an one is sometimes, by the just judgment of God, turned into a desert.
And the water springs into dry ground: what was like a well watered garden becomes like dry and barren earth, on which nothing grows.
John Calvin on Psalms 107:33-41
Psalm 107:33-41
33. He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and springs of water into dryness; 34. A fruitful land into saltness, [287] because of the wickedness of those who dwell in it. 35. He turneth the desert into a pool of water, and the land of barrenness into springs of water. 36. And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may build a city of habitation; 37. And sow fields, and plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of the increase. 38. And he blesses them, and they multiplied greatly; and he maketh not their cattle to decrease. 39. Afterwards they are lessened and dejected, by reason of anguish, misery, and sorrow. 40. He poureth contempt upon princes, and maketh them to wander in…
Since in Psa 107:36 the historical narration is still continued, a meaning relating to the contemporaneous past is also retrospectively given to the two correlative ישׂם. It now goes on to tell what those who have now returned have observed and experienced in their own case. Psa 107:33 sounds like Isa 50:2; Psa 107:33 like Isa 35:7; and Psa 107:35 takes its rise from Isa 41:18. The juxtaposition of מוצאי and צמּאון, since Deu 8:15, belongs to the favourite antithetical alliterations, e.g., Isa 61:3. מלחה, that which is salty (lxx cf. Sir. 39:23: ἅλμη), is, as in Job 39:6, the name for the uncultivated, barren steppe. A land that has been laid waste for the punishment of its inhabitants has…
The Church Fathers
...What then did God, resisting the proud, but giving grace to the humble; cutting off the natural branches for their pride; grafting in the wild olive for its humility? "He made the rivers a wilderness" (ver. 33). Waters did run there, prophecies were in course. Seek now a prophet among the Jews; thou findest none. For "He made the outgoings of waters to be thirst." Let them say, "Now there is no prophet more, and He will not know us any more."
Concerning the allegorical interpretation, it might be said as follows: Jesus once walked openly among the Jews when the word of God through the prophets was with them; for Jesus' bold proclamation was "Thus says the Lord." But now, Jesus no longer walks openly among the Jews, and He has departed from them, and there is no word of God among the Jews. And having departed from them (I mean from the Jews), He went to the region near the desert, about which it is said: "Many are the children of the desolate more than of her who has a husband," and to which it is said: "Rejoice, O barren one who does not give birth; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor." Now, the city near the desert is Ephraim, to which Jesus went, no longer walking openly among the Jews. Ephraim is interpreted as "fruitfulness," being the brother of Manasseh, who is the elder of the "people of forgetfulness." After the people left "in oblivion," the fruitfulness of the nations arose, when God "turned rivers in Israel into desert and the watercourses there into thirst and their fruitful land into brine, due to the wickedness of those who dwelled there." But from among the nations, "He turned the desert into lakes of water, and their dry land into watercourses."
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Poetry — Has been well defined as “the measured language of emotion.” Hebrew poetry deals almost exclusively with the great question of man’s relation to God. “Guilt, condemnation, punishment, pardon,…
Psalms, Book Of — The present Hebrew name of the book is Tehill’im, “Praises;” but in the actual superscriptions of the psalms the word Tehillah is applied only to one, (Psalms 145:1) ... which is indeed emphatically…
Wandering — Of the Israelites in the wilderness in consequence of their rebellious fears to enter the Promised Land (Num. 14:26-35). They wandered for forty years before they were permitted to cross the Jordan…
Fountains And Springs · Drying up of, a severe punishment — Drying up of, a severe punishment
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
These two sections (107:33-38, 39-42) expand the theme of the Lord’s sovereignty over things that humans cannot control.
107:33-35 The Lord can choose to make the earth fertile or barren (74:15; Isa 35:6-7).
Spurgeon's Treasury of David on Psalms 107:33
He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into dry ground;
He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into dry ground. When the Lord deals with rebellious men he can soon deprive them of those blessings of which they feel most assured: their rivers and perennial springs they look upon as certain never to be taken from them, but the Lord at a word can deprive them even of these. In hot climates after long droughts streams of water utterly fail, and even springs cease to flow, and this also has happened in other parts of the world when great convulsions of the earth's surface have occurred. In providence this physical catastrophe finds its counterpart when busin…
