Exodus 15:17

Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place, O LORD, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.

Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance-or possession. Since the ostensible reason for their departure from Egypt was to celebrate the worship of God, and a mountain was commonly chosen as the most suitable spot for the performance of sacred rites, so Moses, who was well aware of the destiny of his nation in the promised land, anticipates with prophetic foresight the completion of the purpose for which they were selected, in their keeping up the national worship of God in a definite locality. Some, indeed as Aben Ezra, Rosenmuller, Lowth, etc, take the phrase 'the mountain of God's inheritance,' as a poetical designation of Canaan, which is a mountainous country (cf. Deuteronomy 3:25); and in that view it was God assuredly who not only "brought in" the Israelites into the possession of it, but "planted" them in it, by establishing the Jewish polity in that land.

But Hengstenberg and others maintain, on the ground of the two following clauses, that Moriah-appropriated to God by the typical sacrifice of Isaac, and on which the temple afterward stood (Psalms 78:54) - was intended by 'the mountain of God's inheritance.' Rationalists have founded on this expression an objection against the historical character of the song; and de Wette ('Introduction to the Old Testament' Parker's edition) maintains, on the ground of allusion to the sanctuary, that the date of this composition must be fixed after the temple had been built. 'But the reference to "the sanctuary" is so general that we have here only the idea of a mountain set apart for the divine honour, and consecrated as the habitation of Yahweh-an expression which, in the mouth of Moses, should surprise us the less, as the whole system of laws in its ceremonial part relates to such a definite sanctuary of Yahweh, and we must unquestionably attribute to him such a previous knowledge of the divine counsel' (Havernick's 'Introduction to the Pentateuch,' p. 267).

The Septuagint represents this verse as an invocation: eisagagoon katafiteuson. Bringing in, plant them, etc. Whether in this precatory form, or prophetically expressed as in our version, the change of person is too common in all poetry to warrant any conclusion being drawn from that feature in the poem, that it belongs to a late and artificial age.