Five-minute study · Day 201 · Psalms 90
Psalm 90:12
A word worth stopping on: number/count מָנָה manah
Moses wrote one psalm. This is it. He is old, watching a generation die in the wilderness, and he prays: 'So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.' The Hebrew verb for 'number' is manah. It means to count by assigning, to allot, to apportion. The same word appears when a commander counts troops for battle or when an inheritance is divided among heirs. Moses is asking God to teach him to look at his remaining days the way a steward looks at a limited fund: each one allocated, each one spent on something specific. A man who has watched forty years of funerals in the desert understands that days are inventory, and inventory runs out.
Word study: number/count
- Hebrew
- מָנָה
- Pronounced
- manah
- Strong's
- H4487
- Definition
- To count, to number, to reckon, to assign, to appoint, to allot. Carries the sense of deliberate allocation: counting with a purpose, assigning each unit to its place.
Manah appears 28 times in the Hebrew Bible. BDB defines it as 'to count, reckon, assign, allot.' The word does not describe idle arithmetic. It describes purposeful distribution. When Joab counted the fighting men of Israel (2 Samuel 24:1-9), manah was the verb: he was allocating military resources, counting each man as a unit in a formation. When Daniel 5:26 says 'God hath numbered thy kingdom,' manah means God has assigned the limit, measured the boundary, set the endpoint.
Tate's Word Biblical Commentary on Psalms 51-100 notes that Psalm 90 is the only psalm attributed to Moses in the Hebrew Psalter. The superscription calls him 'the man of God,' a title used elsewhere for prophets (1 Samuel 9:6, 1 Kings 17:18). The psalm moves from God's eternity (vv. 1-2) to human brevity (vv. 3-6) to divine anger (vv. 7-11) to the prayer of verse 12. The progression matters. Moses arrives at the request to number his days only after establishing two things: God is permanent, and humans are grass.
The phrase 'apply our hearts unto wisdom' uses the verb bo (to bring, to carry). Moses asks God to teach him to manah his days so that he can bo (bring, deliver) a heart of wisdom. The image is transactional. You count the days. You invest them. The return is a wise heart. The days are the currency. The wisdom is the yield.
The wilderness context sharpens every word. Moses had watched the generation that left Egypt die, one funeral after another, over four decades. Numbers 14:29 records the sentence: 'Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward.' The verb 'numbered' in that passage is paqad, a census word. God had already counted them for death. Moses' prayer in Psalm 90:12 is the response of a man who knows what it looks like when a generation's days run out. He wants the counting to produce something: wisdom, carried into whatever time remains.
Historical context · Late second millennium BC, Israelite wilderness wandering
A Prayer From the Desert Floor
Psalm 90 stands at the head of Book IV of the Psalter (Psalms 90-106). Its placement is significant. Book III ends with Psalm 89, a lament over the apparent failure of God's covenant with David: 'Thou hast made void the covenant of thy servant: thou hast profaned his crown by casting it to the ground' (89:39). The editors of the Psalter placed Moses' psalm immediately after this crisis. The response to the failure of the Davidic covenant is a return to Moses, to the God who was Israel's dwelling place 'before the mountains were brought forth' (90:2). Before David, before the monarchy, before the conquest, God was already home.
The wilderness wandering lasted forty years (Numbers 14:33-34). During that time, every adult who had left Egypt, except Joshua and Caleb, died before reaching the promised land. The daily reality was funerals. Tate estimates that if approximately 600,000 men over twenty left Egypt (Numbers 1:46), and all of them died within forty years, the average was roughly 40-50 deaths per day across the camp. Moses led a community in perpetual mourning.
Verse 10 captures this experience: 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.' The lifespan Moses describes, seventy to eighty years, was not the norm for the ancient Near East. Average life expectancy was considerably lower. Moses himself lived to 120 (Deuteronomy 34:7), an exception he does not mention. The psalm speaks from the perspective of the people he buried, the ones whose strength was labor and sorrow.
The request to 'number our days' would have sounded concrete in a camp where days were literally numbered. The generation had a sentence: forty years. Everyone knew the clock. Moses' prayer asks God to transform that countdown from a death sentence into a wisdom project. The days were already being subtracted. The question was whether anything would be gained from the subtraction.
For reflection
Manah means to count by allotting, the way a commander assigns troops or a steward distributes an inheritance. Moses asks God to teach him this skill with days. Take your age. Subtract it from eighty. Multiply by 365. That is a rough count of your remaining days. Write the number down. Look at it. Moses prayed this prayer while burying a generation in the desert. He understood that days are inventory. What are you spending yours on this week that will still matter in ten years?
The counting is the means. The wise heart is the goal. Moses asks God to teach the counting, because left to ourselves we lose track.
Sources: BDB; Tate, 'Psalms 51-100' (WBC); Numbers 14:29-34; Daniel 5:26