1. O Lord, your acts of judgement are marvellous and hard to explain; that is why people who had not been taught about them went astray.
2. When lawless people imagined that they had your holy nation in their power, they were themselves imprisoned in a long night of darkness. They lay in their own houses, shut off from your eternal care.
18-19. They were panic-stricken by the sighing of the wind or by the singing of birds in the trees or by the roar of rushing water or by the rumble of falling rocks or by the sound of unseen creatures running about or by the savage roaring of wild animals or by the echoes from the mountains.