Wiersbe calls Psalm 78 the History Psalm because it overviews Israel’s history from the Exodus to the present. I am not a fan of Hegel but he was right: we don’t seem to learn from history. We distort it by trying to make it fit our agenda and we deny it but we do not learn from it. An honest Jew could look back over their history and determine two things: [1] God had always been faithful; He was indeed a covenant keeping God and [2] Israel had been faithless, rebellious and ungrateful. George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past or condemned to repeat it.” This is exactly what the Israelites did, they repeated their sin and rebellion. Practically every generation made the same mistakes. When the Psalmist refers to Ephraim, he is probably talking about the Ten Northern Tribes who rebelled to the extent they started their own religion which was just another form of idolatry. The entire North is referred to as Ephraim because they had the same inordinate pride as did the Tribe of Ephraim, a pride that kept then in constant trouble. The Tribe of Ephraim was one of the larger Tribes but they were as unreliable as a crooked bow. In battle, they could not be counted on: they gave both Joshua and Gideon problems. The Israelites were prone to wander; they struggled with obedience and they demanded their own way.