You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning:
Moses opens by anchoring the people to God's covenant favor before he addresses their misery and judgment. He means to say: yes, you die like all men, yes, God punishes sin, but He has adopted you, and that peculiar grace is your true dwelling place through all generations.
AI summary
Commenting on Psalm 90:1-17
Thou carriest them away as with a flood. As when a torrent rushes down the river bed and bears all before it, so does the Lord bear away by death the succeeding generations of men. As the hurricane sweeps the clouds from the sky, so time removes the children of men. They are as a sleep.
This psalm is entitled a prayer of Moses. Where, and in what volume, it was preserved from Moses's time till the collection of psalms was begun to be made, is uncertain; but, being divinely inspired, it was under a special protection: perhaps it was written in the book of Jasher, or the book of the wars of the Lord.
Commenting on Psalm 90:1-6