Psalms 1:1-6 THE Psalter may be regarded as the heart’s echo to the speech of God, the manifold music of its windswept strings as God’s breath sweeps across them. Law and Prophecy are the two main elements of that speech, and the first two psalms, as a double prelude to the book, answer to these, the former setting forth the blessedness of loving and keeping the law, and the latter celebrating the enthronement of Messiah. Jewish tradition says that they were originally one, and a well-attested reading of Act 13:33 quotes "Thou art my Son" as part of "the first Psalm." The diversity of subject makes original unity improbable, but possibly our present first Psalm was prefixed, unnumbered. Its theme, the blessedness of keeping the law, is enforced by the juxtaposition of two sharply contrasted pictures, one in bright light, another in deep shadow, and each heightening the other. Ebal and Gerizim face one another. The character and fate of the lover of the law are sketched in Psalms 1:1-3, and that of the "wicked" in Psalms 1:4-6. "How abundantly is that word Blessed multiplied in the Book of Psalms! The book seems to be made out of that word, and the foundation raised upon that Word, for it is the first word of the book. But in all the book there is not one Woe" (Donne). It is usually taken as an exclamation, but may equally well be a simple affirmation, and declares a universal truth even more strongly, if so regarded. The characteristics which thus bring blessedness are first described negatively, and that order is significant. As long as there is so much evil in the world, and society is what it is, godliness must be largely negative, and its possessors "a people whose laws are different from all people that be on earth." Live fish swim against the stream; dead ones go with it. The tender graces of the devout soul will not flourish unless there be a wall of close-knit and unparticipating opposition round them, to keep off nipping blasts. The negative clauses present a climax, notwithstanding the unquestionable correctness of one of the grounds on which that has been denied-namely, the practical equivalence of "wicked" and "sinner." Increasing closeness and permanence of association are obvious in the progress from walking to standing and from standing to sitting. Increasing boldness in evil is marked by the progress from counsel to way, or course of life, and thence to scoffing. Evil purposes come out in deeds, and deeds are formularised at last in bitter speech. Some men scoff because they have already sinned. The tongue is blackened and made sore by poison in the system. Therefore goodness will avoid the smallest conformity with evil, as knowing that if the hem of the dress or the tips of the hair be caught in the cruel wheels, the whole body will be drawn in. But these negative characteristics are valuable mainly for their efficacy in contributing to the positive, as the wall round a young plantation is there for the sake of what grows behind it. On the other hand, these positive characteristics, and eminently that chief one of a higher love, are the only basis for useful abstinence. Mere conventional, negative virtue is of little power or worth unless it flow from a strong set of the soul in another direction. "So did not I" is good and noble when we can go on to say, as Nehemiah did, "because of the fear of God." The true way of floating rubbish out is to pour water in. Delight in the law will deliver from delight in the counsel of the wicked. As the negative, so the positive begins with the inward man. The main thing about all men is the direction of their "delight." Where do tastes run? what pleases them most? and where are they most at ease? Deeds will follow the current of desires, and be right if the hidden man of the heart be right. To the psalmist, that law was revealed by Pentateuch and prophets; but the delight in it, in which he recognises the germ of godliness, is the coincidence of will and inclination with the declared will of God, however declared. In effect, he reduces perfection to the same elements as the other psalmist who sang, "I delight to do Thy will, yea, Thy law is within my heart." The secret of blessedness is self-renunciation, - A love to lose my will in His, And by that loss be free." Thoughts which are sweet will be familiar. The command to Joshua is the instinct of the devout man. In the distractions and activities of the busy day the law beloved will be with him, illuminating his path and shaping his acts. In hours of rest it will solace weariness and renew strength. That habit of patient, protracted brooding on the revelation of God’s will needs to be cultivated. Men live meanly because they live so fast. Religion lacks depth and volume because it is not fed by hidden springs. The good man’s character being thus all condensed into one trait, the psalm next gathers his blessedness up in one image. The tree is an eloquent figure to Orientals, who knew water as the one requisite to turn desert into garden. Such a life as has been sketched will be rooted and steadfast. "Planted" is expressed by a word which suggests fixity. The good man’s life is deeply anchored, and so rides out storms. It goes down through superficial fleeting things to that Eternal Will, and so stands unmoved and upright when winds howl. Scotch firs lift massive, corrugated boles, and thrust out wide, gnarled branches clothed in steadfast green, and look as if they could face any tempest, but their roots run laterally among the surface gravel, and therefore they go down before blasts which feeble saplings, that strike theirs vertically, meet unharmed. Such a life is fed and refreshed. The law of the Lord is at once soil and stream. In the one aspect fastening a life to it gives stability; in the other, freshening and means of growth. Truly loved, that Will becomes, in its manifold expressions, as the divided irrigation channels through which a great river is brought to the roots of each plant. If men do not find it life giving as rivers of water in a dry place, it is because they do not delight in it. Opposed, it is burdensome and harsh; accepted, this sweet image tells what it becomes-the true good, the only thing that really nourishes and reinvigorates. The disciples came back to Jesus, whom they had left too wearied and faint to go with them to the city, and found Him fresh and strong. Their wonder was answered by, "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me." Such a life is vigorous and productive. It would be artificial straining to assign definite meanings to "fruit" and "leaf." All that belongs to vigorous vitality and beauty is included. These come naturally when the preceding condition is fulfilled. This stage of the psalm is the appropriate place for deeds to come into view. By loving fellowship with God and delight in His law the man is made capable of good. His virtues are growths, the outcome of life. The psalm anticipates Christ’s teaching of the good tree bringing forth good fruit, and also tells how His precept of making the tree good is to be obeyed-namely, by transplanting it from the soil of self-will to that of delight in the law. How that transplanting is to be effected it does not tell. "But now being made free from sin, and become servants of God, ye have your fruit unto holiness," and the fruit of the Spirit in "whatsoever things are lovely and of good report" hangs in clusters on the life that has been shifted from the realm of darkness and rooted in Christ. The relation is more intimate still. "I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit." Such a life will be prosperous. The figure is abandoned here. The meaning is not affected whether we translate "whatsoever he doeth shall prosper," or "whatsoever he shall cause to succeed." That is not unconditionally true now, nor was it then, it referred to what the world calls prospering, as many a sad and questioning strain in the Psalter proves. He whose life is rooted in God will have his full share of foiled plans and abortive hopes, and will often see the fruit nipped by frost or blown green from the boughs, but still the promise is true in its inmost meaning. For what is prosperity? Does the psalmist merely mean to preach the more vulgar form of the doctrine that religion makes the best of both worlds? or are his hopes to be harmonised with experience, by giving a deeper meaning to "prosperity"? They to whom the will of God is delight can never be hurt by evil, for all that meets them expresses and serves that will, and the fellow servants of the King do not wound one another. If a life be rooted in God and a heart delight in His law, that life will be prosperous and that heart will be at rest. The second half of the psalm gives the dark contrast of the fruitless, rootless life (Psalms 1:4-6). The Hebrew flashes the whole dread antithesis on the view at once by its first word, "Not so," a universal negative, which reverses every part of the preceding picture. "Wicked" is preferable to "ungodly," as the designation of the subjects. Whether we take the root idea of the word to be "restless," as most of the older and many modern commentators do, or "crooked" (Hupfeld), or "loose, flaccid" (Delitzsch), it is the opposite of "righteous," and therefore means one who lives not by the law of God, but by his own will. The psalmist has no need to describe him further nor to enumerate his deeds. The fundamental trait of his character is enough. Two classes only, then, are recognised here. If a man has not God’s uttered will for his governor, he goes into the category of "wicked." That sounds harsh doctrine, and not corresponding to the innumerable gradations of character actually seen. But it does correspond to facts, if they are grasped in their roots of motive and principle. If God be not the supreme delight, and His law sovereign, some other object is men’s delight and aim, and that departure from God taints a life, however fair it may be. It is a plain deduction from our relations to God that lives lived irrespective of Him are sinful, whatever be their complexion otherwise. The remainder of the psalm has three thoughts-the real nullity of such lives, their consequent disappearance in "the judgment," and the ground of both the blessedness of the one type of character and the vanishing of the other in the diverse attitude of God to each. Nothing could more vividly suggest the essential nothingness of the "wicked" than the contrast of the leafy beauty of the fruit-laden tree and the chaff, rootless, fruitless, lifeless, light, and therefore the sport of every puff of wind that blows across the elevated and open threshing floor. Such is indeed a true picture of every life not rooted in God and drawing fertility from Him. It is rootless; for what hold fast is there but in Him? or where shall the heart twine its tendrils if not round God’s stable throne? or what basis do fleeting objects supply for him who builds elsewhere than on the enduring Rock? It is fruitless; for what is fruit? There may be much activity and many results satisfying to part of man’s nature and admired by others. One fruit there will be, in character elaborated. But if we ask what ought to be the products of a life, man and God being what they are in themselves and to each other, we shall not wonder if every result of godless energy is regarded by "those clear eyes and perfect judgment" of heaven as barrenness. In the light of these higher demands, achievements hymned by the world’s acclamations seem infinitely small, and many a man, rich in the apparent results of a busy and prosperous life, will find to his dismayed astonishment that he has nothing to show but unfruitful works of darkness. Chaff is fruitless because lifeless. Its disappearance in the winnowing wind is the consequence and manifestation of its essential nullity. "Therefore" draws the conclusion of necessary transiency. Just as the winnower throws up his shovel full into the breeze, and the chaff goes fluttering out of the floor because it is light, while the wheat falls on the heap because it is solid, so the wind of judgment will one day blow and deal with each man according to his nature. It will separate them, whirling away the one, and not the other. "One shall be taken and the other left." When does this sifting take effect? The psalmist does not date it. There is a continually operative law of retribution, and there are crises of individual or national life, when the accumulated consequences of evil deeds fall on the doers. But the definite article prefixed to "judgment" seems to suggest some special "day" of separation. It is noteworthy and perhaps illuminative that John the Baptist uses the same figures of the tree and the chaff in his picture of the Messianic judgments, and that epoch may have been in the psalmist’s mind. Whatever the date, this he is sure of-that the wind will rise some time, and that, when it does, the wicked will be blown out of sight. When the judgment comes, the "congregation of the righteous"-that is, the true Israel within Israel, or, to speak in Christian language, the true invisible Church-will be freed from admixture of outward adherents, whose lives give the lie to their profession. Men shall be associated according to spiritual affinity, and "being let go," will "go to their own company" and "place," wherever that may be. The ground of these diverse fates is the different attitude of God to each life. Each clause of the last verse really involves two ideas, but the pregnant brevity of style states only half of the antithesis in each, suppressing the second member in the first clause and the first member in the second clause, and so making the contrast the more striking by emphasising the cause of an unspoken consequence in the former, and the opposite consequence of an unspoken cause in the latter. "The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous [therefore it shall last]. The Lord knoweth not the way of the wicked [therefore it shall perish]." The way which the Lord knows abides. "Know" is, of course, here used in its full sense of loving knowledge, care, and approval, as in "He knoweth my path" and the like sayings. The direction of the good man’s life is watched, guarded, approved, and blessed by God. Therefore it will not fail to reach its goal. They who walk patiently in the paths which He has prepared will find them paths of peace, and will not tread them unaccompanied, nor ever see them diverging from the straight road to home and rest. "Commit thy way unto the Lord," and let His way be thine, and He shall make thy way prosperous. The way or course of life which God does not know perishes. A path perishes when, like some dim forest track, it dies out, leaving the traveller bewildered amid impenetrable forests, or when, like some treacherous Alpine track among rotten rocks, it crumbles beneath the tread. Every course of life but that of the man who delights in and keeps the law of the Lord comes to a fatal end, and leads to the brink of a precipice, over which the impetus of descent carries the reluctant foot. "The path of the just is as the shining light, which shineth more and more till the noontide of the day. The way of the wicked is as darkness; they know not at what they stumble." Psalms 2:1-12 VARIOUS unsatisfactory conjectures as to a historical basis for this magnificent lyric have been made, but none succeeds in specifying events which fit with the situation painted in it. The banded enemies are rebels, and the revolt is widespread; for the "kings of the earth" is a very comprehensive, if we may not even say a universal, expression. If taken in connection with "the uttermost parts of the earth" (Psalms 2:8), which are the King’s rightful dominion, it implies a sweep of authority and a breadth of opposition quite beyond any recorded facts. Authorship and date must be left undetermined. The psalm is anonymous, like Psalms 1:1-6, and is thereby marked off from the psalms which follow in Book 1, and with one exception are ascribed to David. Whether these two preludes to the Psalter were set in their present place on the completion of the whole book, or were prefixed to the smaller "Davidic" collection, cannot be settled. The date of composition may have been much earlier than that of either the smaller or the larger collection. The true basis of the psalm is not some petty revolt of subject tribes, even if such could be adduced, but Nathan’s prophecy in 2 Samuel 7:1-29, which sets forth the dignity and dominion of the King of Israel as God’s son and representative. The poet-prophet of our psalm may have lived after many monarchs had borne the title, but failed to realise the ideal there outlined, and the imperfect shadows may have helped to lift his thoughts to the reality. His grand poem may be called an idealising of the monarch of Israel, but it is an idealising which expected realisation. The psalm is prophecy as well as poetry; and whether it had contemporaneous persons and events as a starting point or not, its theme is a real person, fully possessing the prerogatives and wielding the dominion which Nathan had declared to be God’s gift to the King of Israel. The psalm falls into four strophes of three verses each, in the first three of which the reader is made spectator and auditor of vividly painted scenes, while in the last the psalmist exhort; the rebels to return to allegiance. In the first strophe (Psalms 2:1-3) the conspiracy of banded rebels is set before us with extraordinary force. The singer does not delay to tell what he sees, but breaks into a question of astonished indignation as to what can be the cause of it all. Then, in a series of swift clauses, of which the vivid movement cannot be preserved in a translation, he lets us see what had so moved him. The masses of the "nations" are hurrying tumultuously to the mustering place; the "peoples" are meditating revolt, which is smitingly stigmatised in anticipation as "vanity." But it is no mere uprising of the common herd; "the kings of the earth" take their stand as in battle array, and the men of mark and influence lay their heads together, pressing close to one another on the divan as they plot. All classes and orders are united in revolt, and hurry and eagerness mark their action and throb in the words. The. rule against which the revolt is directed is that of "Jehovah and His Anointed." That is one rule, not two, -the dominion of Jehovah exercised through the Messiah. The psalmist had grasped firmly the conception that God’s visible rule is wielded by Messiah, so that rebellion against one is rebellion against both. Their "bands" are the same. Pure monotheist as the psalmist was, he had the thought of a king so closely associated with Jehovah, that he could name them in one breath as, in some sense, sharers of the same throne and struck at by the same revolt. The foundation of such a conception was given in the designation of the Davidic monarch as God’s vicegerent and representative, but its full justification is the relation of the historic Christ to the Father whose throne He shares in glory. That eloquent "why" may include both the ideas of "for what reason?" and "to what purpose?" Opposition to that King, whether by communities or individuals, is unreasonable. Every rising of a human will against the rule which it is blessedness to accept is absurd, and hopelessly incapable of justification. The question, so understood, is unanswerable by the rebels or by anyone else. The one mystery of mysteries is that a finite will should be able to lift itself against the Infinite Will, and be willing to use its power. In the other aspect, the question, like that pregnant "vanity," implies the failure of all rebellion. Plot and strive, conspire and muster, as men may, all is vanity and striving of wind. It is destined to break down from the beginning. It is as hopeless as if the stars were to combine to abolish gravitation. That dominion does not depend on man’s acceptance of it, and he can no more throw it off by opposition than he can fling a somersault into space and so get away from earth. When we can vote ourselves out of submission to physical law, we may plot or fight ourselves out of subjection to the reign of Jehovah and of His Anointed. All the self-will in the world does not alter the fact that the authority of Christ is sovereign over human wills. We cannot get away from it; but we can either lovingly embrace it, and then it is our life, or we can set ourselves against it, like an obstinate ox planting its feet and standing stock still, and then the goad is driven deep and draws blood. The metaphor of bands and cords is taken from the fastenings of the yoke on a draught bullock. One can scarcely miss the lovely contrast of this truculent exhortation to rebellion with the gracious summons "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me." The "bands" are already on our necks in a very real sense, for we are all under Christ’s authority, and opposition is rebellion, not the effort to prevent a yoke being imposed, but to shake off one already laid on. But yet the consent of our own wills is called for, and thereby we take the yoke, which is a stay rather than a fetter, and bear the burden which bears up those who bear it. Psalms 1:1-6 set side by side in sharp contrast the godly and the godless. Here a still more striking transition is made in the second strophe (Psalms 2:4-6), which changes the scene to heaven. The lower half of the picture is all eager motion and strained effort; the upper is full of Divine calm. Hot with hatred, flushed with defiant self-confidence and busy with plots, the rebels hurry together like swarming ants on their hillock. "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh." That representation of the seated God contrasts grandly with the stir on earth. He needs not to rise from His throned tranquillity, but regards undisturbed the disturbances of earth. The thought embodied is like that expressed in the Egyptian statues of gods carved out of the side of a mountain, "moulded in colossal calm," with their mighty hands laid in their laps and their wide-opened eyes gazing down on the little ways of the men creeping about their feet. And what shall we say of that daring and awful image of the laughter of God? The attribution of such action to Him is so bold that no danger of misunderstanding it is possible. It sends us at once to look for its translation, which probably lies in the thought of the essential ludicrousness of opposition, which is discerned in heaven to be so utterly groundless and hopeless as to be absurd. "When He came nigh and beheld the city, He wept over it." The two pictures are not incapable of being reconciled. The Christ who wept over sinners is the fullest revelation of the heart of God, and the laughter of the psalm is consistent with the tears of Jesus as He stood on Olivet, and looked across the glen to the Temple glittering in the morning sun. God’s laughter passes into the utterance of His wrath at the time determined by Him. The silence is broken by His voice, and the motionless form flashes into action. One movement is enough to "vex" the enemies and fling them into panic, as a flock of birds put to flight by the lifting of an arm. There is a point, known to God alone, when He perceives that the fulness of time has come, and the opposition must be ended. By long, drawn out, gentle patience He has sought to win to obedience (though that side of His dealings is not presented in this psalm), but the moment arrives when in world wide catastrophes or crushing blows on individuals sleeping retribution wakes at the right moment, determined by considerations inappreciable by us: "Then does He speak in His wrath." The last verse of this strophe is parallel with the last of the preceding, being, like it, the dramatically introduced speech of the actor in the previous verses. The revolters’ mutual encouragement is directly answered by the sovereign word of God, which discloses the reason for the futility of their attempts. The "I" of Psalms 2:6 is emphatic. On one side is that majestic "I have set my King"; on the other a world of rebels. They may put their shoulders to the throne of the Anointed to overthrow it; but what of that? God’s hand holds it firm, whatever forces press on it. All enmity of banded or of single wills breaks against and is dashed by it into ineffectual spray. Another speaker is next heard, the Anointed King, who, in the third strophe (Psalms 2:7-9), bears witness to Himself and claims universal dominion as His by a Divine decree. "Thou art my son; today have I begotten thee." So runs the first part of the decree. The allusion to Nathan’s words to David is clear. In them the prophet spoke of the succession of David’s descendants, the king as a collective person, so to speak. The psalmist, knowing how incompletely any or all of these had fulfilled the words which were the patent of their kingship, repeats them in confident faith as certain to be accomplished in the Messiah-king, who fills the future for him with a great light of hope. He knew not the historic person in whom the word has to be fulfilled, but it is difficult to resist the conclusion that he had before him the prospect of a king living as a man, the heir of the promises. Now, this idea of sonship, as belonging to the monarch, is much better illustrated by the fact that Israel, the nation, was so named, than by the boasts of Gentile dynasties to be sons of Zeus or Ra. The relationship is moral and spiritual, involving Divine care and love and appointment to office, and demanding human obedience and use of dignity for God. It is to be observed that in our psalm the day of the King’s self-attestation is the day of His being "begotten." The point of time referred to is not the beginning of personal existence, but of investiture with royalty. With accurate insight, then, into the meaning of the words, the New Testament takes them as fulfilled in the Resurrection. (Acts 13:33; Romans 1:4) In it, as the first step in the process which was completed in the Ascension, the manhood of Jesus was lifted above the limitations and weaknesses of earth, and began to rise to the throne. The day of His resurrection was, as it were, the day of the birth of His humanity into royal glory. Built upon this exaltation to royalty and sonship follows the promise of universal dominion. Surely the expectation of "the uttermost parts of the earth for a possession" bursts the bonds of the tiny Jewish kingdom! The wildest national pride could, scarcely have dreamed that the narrow strip of seaboard, whose inhabitants never entered on any wide schemes of conquest, should expand into a universal monarchy, stretching even farther than the giant empires on either side. If such were the psalmist’s expectations, they were never even approximately fulfilled; but the reference of the glowing words to Messiah’s kingdom is in accordance with the current of prophetic hopes, and need cause no hesitation to those who believe in prophecy at all. Universal dominion is God’s gift to Messiah. Even while putting His foot on the step of the throne, Jesus said, "All power is given unto me." This dominion is founded not on His essential divinity, but on His suffering and sacrifice. His rule is the rule of God in Him, for He is the highest form of the Divine self-revelation, and whoso trusts, loves, and obeys Christ, trusts, loves, and obeys God in Him. The psalmist did not know in how much more profound a sense than he attached to his words they were true. They had an intelligible, great, and true meaning for him. They have a greater for us. The Divine voice foretells victory over opposition and destruction to opposers. The sceptre is of iron, though the hand that holds it once grasped the reed. The word rendered "break" may also be translated, with a different set of vowels, "shepherd," and is so rendered by the LXX (which Revelation 2:27, etc., follows) and by some other versions. But, in view of the parallelism of the next clause, "break" is to be preferred. The truth of Christ’s destructive energy is too often forgotten, and, when remembered, is too often thrown forward into another world. The history of this world ever since the Resurrection has been but a record of conquered antagonism to Him. The stone cut out without hands has dashed against the images of clay and silver and gold and broken them all. The Gospel of Christ is the great solvent of institutions not based upon itself. Its work is "To cast the kingdoms old Into another mould." Destructive work has still to be done, and its most terrible energy is to be displayed in the future, when all opposition shall be withered into nothingness by the brightness of His presence. There are two kinds of breaking: a merciful one, when His love shatters our pride and breaks into penitence the earthen vessels of our hearts; and a terrible one, when the weight of His sceptre crushes, and His hand casts down in shivers "vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction." We have listened to three voices, and now, in Psalms 2:10-12, the poet speaks in solemn exhortation: "Be wise now, ye kings." The "now" is argumentative, not temporal. It means "since things are so." The kings addressed are the rebel monarchs whose power seems so puny measured against that of "my King." But not only these are addressed, but all possessors of power and influence. Open eyed consideration of the facts is true wisdom. The maddest thing a man can do is to shut his eyes to them and steel his heart against their instruction. This pleading invitation to calm reflection is the purpose of all the preceding. To draw rebels to loyalty which is life, is the meaning of all appeals to terror. God and His prophet desire that the conviction of the futility of rebellion with a poor "ten thousand" against "the king of twenty thousands" should lead to "sending an embassage" to sue for peace. The facts are before men, that they may be warned and wise. The exhortation which follows in Psalms 2:11-12 points to the conduct which will be dictated by wise reception of instruction. So far as regards Psalms 2:11 there is little difficulty. The exhortation to "serve Jehovah with fear and rejoice with trembling" points to obedience founded on awe of God’s majesty, -the fear which love does not cast out, but perfect; and to the gladness which blends with reverence, but is not darkened by it. To love and cleave to God, to feel the silent awe of His greatness and holiness giving dignity and solemnity to our gladness, and from this inmost heaven of contemplation to come down to a life of practical obedience-this is God’s command and man’s blessedness. The close connection between Jehovah and Messiah in the preceding sections, in each of which the dominion of the latter is treated as that of the former and rebellion as against both at once, renders it extremely improbable that there should be no reference to the King in this closing hortatory strophe. The viewpoint of the psalm, if consistently retained throughout, requires something equivalent to the exhortation to "kiss the Son" in token of fealty, to follow, "serve Jehovah." But the rendering "Son" is impossible. The word so translated is Bar, which is the Aramaic for son, but is not found in that sense in the Old Testament except in the Aramaic of Ezra and Daniel and in Proverbs 31:2, a chapter which has in other respects a distinct Aramaic tinge. No good reason appears for the supposition that the singer here went out of his way to employ a foreign word instead of the usual Ben. But it is probably impossible to make any good and certain rendering of the existing text. The LXX and Targum agree in rendering, "Take hold of instruction," which probably implies another reading of Hebrew text. None of the various proposed translations-e.g., Worship purely, Worship the chosen One-are without objection; and, on the whole, the supposition of textual corruption seems best. The conjectural emendations of Gratz, Hold fast by warning, or reproof; Cheyne’s alternative ones, Seek ye His face ("Book of Psalms," adopted from Brull) or Put on [again] His bonds ("Orig. of Psalt.," p. 351, adopted from Lagarde), and Hupfeld’s (in his translation) Cleave to Him, obliterate the reference to the King, which seems needful in this section, as has been pointed out, and depart from the well-established meaning of the verb-namely, "kiss." These two considerations seem to require that a noun referring to Messiah, and grammatically object of the verb, should stand in the place occupied by Son. The Messianic reference of the psalm remains undimmed by the uncertainty of the meaning of this clause. The transition from the representative of Jehovah to Jehovah Himself, which takes place in the next clause, is in accordance with the close union between them which has marked the whole psalm. It is henceforth Jehovah only who appears till the close. But the anger which is destructive, and which may easily flash out like flames from a furnace mouth, is excited by opposition to Messiah’s kingdom, and the exclusive mention of Jehovah in these closing clauses makes the picture of the anger the more terrible. But since the disclosure of the danger of perishing "in [or as to] the way," or course of rebellious conduct is part of an exhortation, the purpose of which is that the threatened flash of wrath may never need to shoot forth, the psalmist will not close without setting forth the blessed alternative. The sweet benediction of the close bends round to the opening words of the companion psalm of prelude, and thus identifies the man who delights in the law of Jehovah with him who submits to the kingdom of God’s Anointed. The expression "put their trust" literally means to take refuge in. The act of trust cannot be more beautifully or forcibly described than as the flight of the soul to God. They who take shelter in God need fear no kindling anger. They who yield to the King are they who take refuge in Jehovah; and such never know aught of His kingdom but its blessings, nor experience any flame of His wrath, but only the happy glow of His love. Psalms 3:1-8 ANOTHER pair of psalms follows the two of the Introduction. They are closely connected linguistically, structurally, and in subject. The one is a morning, the other an evening hymn, and possibly they are placed at the beginning of the earliest psalter for that reason. Ewald and Hitzig accept the Davidic authorship, though the latter shifts the period in David’s life at which they were composed to the mutiny of his men at Ziklag. (1 Samuel 30:1-31) Cheyne thinks that "you will find no situation which corresponds to these psalms," though you "search the story of David’s life from end to end." He takes the whole of the Psalms from 3 to 17, excepting 8, 15, 16, as a group, "the heart utterances of the Church amidst some bitter persecution"-namely, "the period when faithful Israelites were so sorely oppressed both by traitors in their midst and by Persian tyrants" ("Orig. of Psalt.," pp. 226, 227). But correspondences of the two psalms with David’s situation will strike many readers as being at least as close as that which is sought to be established with the "spiritual kernel of the nation during the Persian domination," and the absence of more specific reference is surely not unnatural in devout song, however strange it would be in prosaic narrative. We do not look for mention of the actual facts which wring the poet’s soul and were peculiar to him, but are content with his expression of his religious emotions, which are common to all devout souls. Who expects Cowper to describe his aberrations of intellect in the "Olney Hymns"? But who cannot trace the connection of his pathetic strains with his sad lot? If ever a seeming reference to facts is pointed out in a so called Davidic psalm, it is brushed aside as "prosaic," but the absence of such is, notwithstanding, urged as an argument against the authorship. Surely that is inconsistent. This psalm falls into four strophes, three of which are marked by Selah. In the first (Psalms 3:1-2) the psalmist recounts his enemies. If we regard this as a morning psalm, it is touchingly true to experience that the first waking thought should be the renewed inrush of the trouble which sleep had for a time dammed back. His enemies are many, and they taunt him as forsaken of God. Surely it is a strong thing to say that there is no correspondence here with David’s situation during Absalom’s revolt. It was no partial conspiracy, but practically the nation had risen against him, "ut totidem fete haberet hostes quot subditos" (Calvin). Shimei’s foul tongue spoke the general mind: "The Lord hath delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom". (2 Samuel 16:8) There had been sin enough in the king’s recent past to give colour to the interpretation of his present calamity as the sign of his being forsaken of God. The conviction that such was the fact would swell the rebel ranks. The multitude has delight in helping to drown a sinking man who has been prosperous. The taunt went deep, for the Hebrew has "to my soul," as if the cruel scoff cut like a knife to the very centre of his personality, and wounded all the more because it gave utterance to his own fears. "The Lord hath bidden him," said David about Shimei’s curses. But the psalmist is finding refuge from fears and foes even in telling how many there are, since he begins his complaint with "Jehovah." Without that word the exclamations of this first strophe are the voice of cowardice or despair. With it they are calmed into the appeal of trust. The Selah which parts the first from the second strophe is probably a direction for an instrumental interlude while the singer pauses. The second strophe (Psalms 3:3-4) is the utterance of faith, based on experience, laying hold of Jehovah as defence. By an effort of will the psalmist rises from the contemplation of surrounding enemies to that of the encircling Jehovah. In the thickest of danger and dread there is a power of choice left a man as to what shall be the object of thought, whether the stormy sea or the outstretched hand of the Christ. This harassed man flings himself out of the coil of troubles round about him and looks up to God. He sees in Him precisely what he needs most at the moment, for in that infinite nature is fulness corresponding to all emptiness of ours. "A shield around me," as He had promised to be to Abraham in his peril; "my glory," at a time when calumny and shame were wrapping him about and his kingdom seemed gone; "the lifter up of my head," sunk as it is both in sadness and calamity, since Jehovah can both cheer his spirit and restore his dignity. And how comes this sudden burst of confidence to lighten the complaining soul? Psalms 3:4 tells. Experience has taught him that as often as he cries to Jehovah he is heard. The tenses in Psalms 3:4 express a habitual act and a constant result. Not once or twice, but as his wont, he prays, and Jehovah answers. The normal relation between him and Jehovah is that of frank communion; and since it has long been so and is so now, even the pressure of present disaster does not make faith falter. It is hard to begin to trust when in the grip of calamity, but feet accustomed to the road to God can find it in the dark. There may be an allusion to David’s absence from sanctuary and ark in Psalms 3:4. The expectation of being answered "from His holy hill" gains in pathetic force when the lovely scene of submissive sacrifice in which he sent back the Ark is recalled. (2 Samuel 15:25) Though he be far from the place of prayer, and feeling the pain of absence, the singer’s faith is not so tied to form as to falter in the assurance that his prayer is heard. Jehovah is shield, glory, and strengthener to the man who cries to Him, and it is by means of such crying that the heart wins the certitude that He is all these. Again the instruments sound and the singer pauses. The third strophe (Psalms 3:5-6) beautifully expresses the tranquil courage which comes from trust. Since sleeping and safe waking again in ordinary circumstances is no such striking proof of Divine help that one in the psalmist’s situation would be induced to think especially of it and to found his confidence on it, the view is to be taken that the psalmist in Psalms 3:5 is contemplating the experience which he has just made in his present situation. "Surrounded by enemies, he was quite safe under God’s protection and exposed to no peril even in the night" (Riehm, in Hupfeld in loc.). Surely correspondence with David’s circumstances may be traced here. His little band had no fortress in Mahanaim, and Ahithophel’s counsel to attack them by night was so natural that the possibility must have been present to the king. But another night had come and gone in safety, disturbed by no shout of an enemy. The nocturnal danger had passed, and day was again brightening. They were safe because the Keeper of Israel had kept them. It is difficult to fit this verse into the theory that here the persecuted Israelitish Church is speaking, but it suits the situation pointed to in the superscription. To lie down and sleep in such circumstances was itself an act of faith, and a sign of the quiet heart which faith gives. Like Christ on the hard wooden "pillow" during the storm, or like Peter sleeping an infant’s sleep the night before his purposed execution, this man can shut his eyes and quiet himself to slumber, though "ten thousands have set themselves against him." They ring him round, but cannot reach him through his shield. Psalms 3:6 rises to bold defiance, the result of the experience in Psalms 3:5. How different the tone of reference to the swarms of the enemy here and in Psalms 3:1! There the psalmist was counting them and cowering before them; here their very number is an element in his triumphant confidence. Courage comes from thinking of the one Divine Ally, before whom myriads of enemies are nothing. One man with God to back him is always in the majority. Such courage, based on such experience and faith, is most modest and reasonable, but it is not won without an effort of will, which refuses to fear, and fixes a trustful gaze not on peril, but on the protector. "I will not be afraid" speaks of resolve and of temptations to fear, which it repels, and from "the nettle danger plucks the flower" trust and the fruit safety. Selah does not follow here. The tone of the strophe is that of lowly confidence, which is less congruous with an instrumental interlude than are the more agitated preceding strophes. The last strophe, too, is closely connected with the third, since faith bracing itself against fear glides naturally into prayer. The final strophe (Psalms 3:7-8) gives the culmination of faith in prayer. "Arise, Jehovah," is quoted from the ancient invocation, (Numbers 10:35) and expresses in strongly anthropomorphic form the desire for some interposition of Divine power. Fearlessness is not so complete that the psalmist is beyond the need of praying. He is courageous because he knows that God will help, but he knows, too, that God’s help depends on his prayer. The courage which does not pray is foolish, and will break down into panic; that which fears enough to cry "Arise, Jehovah," will be vindicated by victory. This prayer is built on experience, as the preceding confidence was. The enemies are now, according to a very frequent figure in the Psalter, compared to wild beasts. Smiting on the cheek is usually a symbol of insult, but here is better taken in close connection with the following "breaking the teeth." By a daring image Jehovah is represented as dealing the beasts of prey, who prowl round the psalmist with open mouth, the buffets which shatter their jaws and dislodge their teeth, thus making them powerless to harm him. So it has been in the past, and that past is a plea that so it will be now. God will be but doing as He has done, if now He "arise." If He is to be true to Himself, and not to stultify His past deliverances, He must save his suppliant now. Such is the logic of faith, which is only valid on the supposition that God’s resources and purpose are inexhaustible and unchangeable. The whole ends with confident anticipation of an answer. "Salvation belongeth unto Jehovah." The full spiritual meaning of that salvation was not yet developed. Literally, the word means "breadth," and so, by a metaphor common to many languages, deliverance as an act, and well-being or prosperity as a state. Deliverance from his enemies is the psalmist’s main idea in the word here. It "belongs to Jehovah," since its bestowal is His act. Thus the psalmist’s last utterance of trust traverses the scoff which wounded him so much (Psalms 3:2), but in a form which beautifully combines affiance and humility, since it triumphantly asserts that salvation is in God’s power, and silently implies that what is thus God’s "to will and do" shall certainly be His suppliant’s to enjoy. Intensely personal as the psalm is, it is the prayer of a king; and rebels as the bulk of the people are ("ten thousands of the people"), they are still God’s. Therefore all are included in the scope of his pitying prayer. In other psalms evil is invoked on evil-doers, but here hate is met by love, and the self-absorption of sorrow counteracted by wide sympathy. It is a lower exemplification of the same spirit which breathed from the lips of the greater King the prayer, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Psalms 4:1-8 Psalms 3:1-8; Psalms 4:1-8 are a pair. They are similar in expression (my glory, there be many which say, I laid me down and slept) in the psalmist’s situation, and in structure (as indicated by the Selahs). But they need not be contemporaneous, nor need the superscription of Psa 3:1-8 be extended to Psalms 4:1-8. Their tone is different, the fourth having little reference to the personal danger so acutely felt in Psalms 3:1-8 and being mainly a gentle, earnest remonstrance with antagonists, seeking to win them to a better mind. The strophical division into four parts of two verses each, as marked by the Selahs, is imperfectly carried out, as in Psalms 3:1-8, and does not correspond with the logical division-a phenomenon which occurs not infrequently in the Psalter, as in all poetry, where the surging thought or emotion overleaps its bounds. Dividing according to the form, we have four strophes, of which the first two are marked by Selah; dividing by the flow of thought, we have three parts of unequal length-prayer (Psalms 4:1), remonstrance (Psalms 4:2-5), communion and prayer (Psalms 4:6-8). The cry for an answer by deed is based on the name, and on the past acts of God. Grammatically, it would be possible and regular to render "my God of righteousness," i.e., "my righteous God"; but the pronoun is best attached to "righteousness" only, as the consideration that God is righteous is less relevant than that He is the source of the psalmist’s righteousness. Since He is so, He may be expected to vindicate it by answering prayer by deliverance. He who feels that all good in himself comes from God may be quite sure that, sooner or later, and by some means or other, God will witness to His own work. To the psalmist nothing was so incredible as that God should not take care of what He had planted, or let the springing crop be trodden down or rooted up. The Old Testament takes prosperity as the Divine attestation of righteousness; and though they who worship the Man of. Sorrows have new light thrown on the meaning of that conception, the substance of it remains true forever: The compellation "God of my righteousness" is still mighty with God. The second ground of the prayer is laid in the past deeds of God. Whether the clause "Thou hast in straits made space for me" be taken relatively or not, it appeals to former deliverances as reasons for man’s prayer and for God’s act. In many languages trouble and deliverance are symbolised by narrowness and breadth. Compression is oppression. Closely hemmed in by crowds or by frowning rocks, freedom of movement is impossible and breathing is difficult. But out in the open, one expatiates, and a clear horizon means an ample sky. The strophe division keeps together the prayer and the beginning of the remonstrance to opponents, and does so in order to emphasise the eloquent, sharp juxtaposition of God and the "sons of men." The phrase is usually employed to mean persons of position, but here the contrast between the varying height of men’s molehills is not so much in view as that between them all and the loftiness of God. The lips which by prayer have been purged and cured of quivering can speak to foes without being much abashed by their dignity or their hatred. But the very slight reference to the psalmist’s own share in the hostility of these "sons of men" is noticeable. It is their false relation to God which is prominent throughout the remonstrance; and that being so, "my glory," in Psalms 4:2, is probably to be taken, as in Psalms 3:3, as a designation of God. It is usually understood to mean either personal or official dignity, but the suggested interpretation is more in keeping with the tone of the psalm. The enemies were really flouting God and turning that great name in which the singer gloried into a jest. They were not therefore idolaters, but practical heathen in Israel, and their "vanity" and "lies" were their schemes doomed to fail and their blasphemies. These two verses bring most vividly into view the contrast between the psalmist clinging to his helping God and the knot of opponents hatching their plans which are sure to fail. The Selah indicates a pause in the song, as if to underscore the question "How long?" and let it soak into the hearts of the foes, and then, in Psalms 4:3-4, the remonstrating voice presses on them the great truth which has sprung anew in the singer’s soul in answer to his prayer, and beseeches them to let it stay their course and still their tumult. By "the godly" is meant, of course, the psalmist. He is sure that he belongs to God and is set apart, so that no real evil can touch him; but does he build this confidence on his own character or on Jehovah’s grace? The answer depends on the meaning of the pregnant word rendered "godly," which here occurs for the first time in the Psalter. So far as its form is concerned, it may be either active, one who shows chesed (lovingkindness or favour), or passive, one to whom it is shown. But the usage in the Psalter seems to decide in favour of the passive meaning, which is also more in accordance with the general biblical view, which traces all man’s hopes and blessings, not to his attitude to God, but to God’s to him, and regards man’s love to God as a derivative, "Amati amamus, amantes amplius meremur amari" (Bern). Out of His own deep heart of love Jehovah has poured His lovingkindness on the psalmist, as he thrillingly feels, and He will take care that His treasure is not lost; therefore this conviction, which has flamed up anew since the moment before when he prayed, brings with it the assurance that He "hears when I cry," as he had just asked Him to do. The slight emendation, adopted by Cheyne from Gratz and others, is tempting, but unnecessary. He would read, with a small change which would bring this verse into parallelism with Psalms 31:22, See how passing great lovingkindness Jehovah hath shown me; but the present text is preferable, inasmuch as what we should expect to be urged upon the enemies is not outward facts, but some truth of faith neglected by them. On such a truth the singer rests his own confidence; such a truth he lays, like a cold hand, on the hot brows of the plotters, and bids them pause and ponder. Believed, it would fill them with awe, and set in a lurid light the sinfulness of their assault on him. Clearly the rendering "Be ye angry" instead of "Stand in awe" gives a less worthy meaning, and mars the picture of the progressive conversion of the enemy into a devout worshipper, of which the first stage is the recognition of the truth in Psalms 4:3; the second is the awestruck dropping of the weapons, and the third is the silent reflection in the calm and solitude of night. The psalm being an evening song, the reference to "your bed" is the more natural; but "speak in your hearts"-what? The new fact which you have learned from my lips. Say it quietly to yourselves then, when forgotten truths blaze on the waking eye, like phosphorescent writing in the dark, and the nobler self makes its voice heard. "Speak and be silent," says the psalmist, for such meditation will end the busy plots against him, and in a wider application "that dread voice," heard in the awed spirit, "shrinks the streams" of passion and earthly desires, which otherwise brawl and roar there. Another strain of the "stringed instruments" makes that silence, as it were, audible, and then the remonstrance goes on once more. It rises higher now, exhorting to positive godliness, and that in the two forms of offering "sacrifices of righteousness," which here simply means those which are prescribed or which are offered with right dispositions, and of trusting in Jehovah-the two aspects of true religion, which outwardly is worship and inwardly is trust. The poet who could meet hate with no weapon but these earnest pleadings had learned a better lesson than "the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love," and anticipated "bless them which curse you." The teacher who thus outlined the stages of the way back to God as recognition of His relation to the godly, solitary meditation thereon, forsaking of sin and hushing of the Spirit thereby, and finally worship and trust, knew the discipline for rebellious souls. Psalms 4:6 seems at first sight to belong more closely to what follows than to what precedes, and is taken by those who hold the Davidic authorship as addressed to his followers beginning to despond. But it may be the continuance of the address to the enemies, carrying on the exhortation to trust. The sudden appearance of the plural "us" suggests that the psalmist associates himself with the persons whom he has been addressing, and, while he glances at the vain cries of the "many" would make himself the mouthpiece of the nascent faith which he hopes may follow his beseechings. The cry of the many would, in that case, have a general reference to the universal desire for "good," and would pathetically echo the hopelessness which must needs mingle with it, so long as the heart does not know who is the only good. The passionate weariness of the question, holding a negation in itself, is wonderfully contrasted with the calm prayer. The eyes fail for want of seeing the yearned for blessing; but if Jehovah lifts the light of His face upon us. as He will certainly do in answer to prayer, "in His light we shall see light." Every good, however various, is sphered in Him. All colours are smelted into the perfect white and glory of His face. There is no Selah after Psalms 4:6, but, as in Psalms 3:6, one is due, though omitted. Psalms 4:7-8 are separated from Psalms 4:6 by their purely personal reference. The psalmist returns to the tone of his prayer in Psalms 4:1, only that petition has given place, as it should do, to possession and confident thankfulness. The many ask, Who? he prays, "Lord." They have vague desires after God; he knows what he needs and wants. Therefore in the brightness of that Face shining on him his heart is glad. The mirth of harvest and vintage is exuberant, but it is poor beside the deep, still blessedness which trickles round the heart that craves most the light of Jehovah’s countenance. That craving is joy and the fruition is bliss. The psalmist here touches the bottom, the foundation fact on which every life that is not vanity must be based, and which verifies itself in every life that is so based. Strange and tragic that men should forget it and love vanity which mocks them, and, though won. still leaves them looking wearily round the horizon for any glimmer of good! The glad heart possessing Jehovah can, on the other hand. lay itself down in peace and sleep, though foes stand round. The last words of the psalm flow restfully like a lullaby. The expression of confidence gains much if "alone" be taken as referring to the psalmist. Solitary as he is, ringed round by hostility as he may be, Jehovah’s presence makes him safe, and being thus safe, he is secure and confident. So he shuts his eyes in peace, though he may be lying in the open, beneath the stars, without defences or sentries. The Face brings light in darkness, gladness in want, enlargement in straits, safety in peril, and any and every good that any and every man needs. Psalms 5:1-12 THE reference to the temple in Psalms 5:7 is not conclusive against the Davidic authorship of this psalm, since the same word is applied in 1 Samuel 1:9; 1 Samuel 3:3 to the house of God in Shiloh. It means a palace, and may well be used for any structure, even if a hair tent, in which God dwelt. No doubt it is oftenest used for the Solomonic temple, but it does not necessarily refer to it. Its use here, then. cannot be urged as fatal to the correctness of the superscription. At the same time, it does create a certain presumption against it. But there is nothing in the psalm to determine its date, and its worth is quite independent of its authorship. The psalmist is surrounded by foes, and seeks access to God. These are constant features of the religious life, and their expression here fits as closely to the present time as to any past. The psalm falls into two main parts: Psalms 5:1-7 and Psalms 5:8-12. The former division deals with the inner side of the devout life, its. access to God, to whom sinful men cannot approach, the latter with the outward side, the conduct, "the way" in which the psalmist seeks to be led, and in which sinful men come to ruin because they will not walk. Naturally the inward comes first, for communion with God in the secret place of the Most High must precede all walking in His way and all blessed experience of His protection, with the joy that springs from it. These two halves of the psalm are arranged in inverted parallelism, the first verse of the second part (Psalms 5:8) corresponding to the last verse of the first (Psalms 5:7) and being, like it, purely personal; Psalms 5:9-10 corresponding similarly to Psalms 5:4-6 and like them, painting the character and fate of evil-doers; and, finally, Psalms 5:11-12, answering to Psalms 5:1-3 and representing the blessedness of the devout soul, as in the one case led and protected by God and therefore glad, and in the other abiding in His presence. The whole is a prayerful meditation on the inexhaustible theme of the contrasted blessedness of the righteous and misery of the sinner as shown in the two great halves of life: the inward of communion and the outward of action. In the first part (Psalms 5:1-7) the central thought is that of access to God’s presence, as the desire and purpose of the psalmist (Psalms 5:1-3), as barred to evildoers (Psalms 5:4-6), and as permitted to, and embraced as his chief blessing by, the singer (Psalms 5:7). The petition to be heard in Psalms 5:1-2 passes into confidence that he is heard in Psalms 5:3. There is no shade of sadness nor trace of struggle with doubt in this prayer, which is all sunny and fresh, like the morning sky, through which it ascends to God. "Consider [or Understand] my meditation"-the brooding, silent thought is spread before God, who knows unspoken desires, and "understands thoughts afar off." The contrast between "understanding the meditation" and "hearkening to the voice of my cry" is scarcely unintentional, and gives vividness to the picture of the musing psalmist, in whom, as he muses, the fire burns, and he speaks with his tongue, in a "cry" as loud as the silence from which it issued had been deep. Meditations that do not pass into cries and cries which are not preceded by meditations are alike imperfect. The invocation "my King" is full of meaning if the singer be David, who thus recognises the delegated character of his own royalty; but whoever wrote the psalm, that expression equally witnesses to his firm grasp of the true theocratic idea. Noteworthy is the intensely personal tone of the invocation in both its clauses, as in the whole of these first verses, in every clause of which "my" or "I" occurs. The poet is alone with God and seeking to clasp still closer the guiding hand, to draw still nearer to the sweet and awful presence where is rest. The invocation holds a plea in itself. He who says, "My King and my God," urges the relation, brought about by God’s love and accepted by man’s faith, as a ground for the hearing of his petition. And so prayer passes into swift assurance; and with a new turn in thought, marked by the repetition of the name "Jehovah" (Psalms 5:3), he speaks his confidence and his resolve. "In the morning" is best taken literally, whether we suppose the psalm to have been composed for a morning song or no. Apparently the compilers of the first Psalter placed it next to Psalms 4:1-8, which they regarded as an evening hymn, for this reason. "I will lay me down and sleep" is beautifully followed by "In the morning shalt Thou hear my voice." The order of clauses in Psalms 5:3 is significant in its apparent breach of strict sequence, by which God’s hearing is made to precede the psalmist’s praying. It is the order dictated by confidence, and it is the order in which the thoughts rise in the trustful heart. He who is sure that God will hear will therefore address himself to speak. First comes the confidence, and then the resolve. There are prayers wrung from men by sore need, and in which doubt causes faltering, but the happier, serener experience is like that of this singer. He resolves to "order" his prayer, using there the word employed for the priest’s work in preparing the materials for the morning sacrifice. Thus he compares his prayer to it, and stands at the same level as the writer of Psa 4:1-8, with whose command to "offer the sacrifices of righteousness" this thought again presents a parallel. A psalmist who has grasped the idea that the true sacrifice is prayer is not likely to have missed the cognate thought that the "house of the Lord," of which he will presently speak, is something other than any material shrine. But to offer the sacrifice is not all which he rejoices to resolve. He will "keep watch," as Habakkuk said that he would do, on his watchtower; and that can only mean that he will be on the outlook for the answer to his prayer, or, if we may retain the allusion to sacrifice, for the downward flash of the Divine fire, which tells his prayer’s acceptance. Many a prayer is offered, and no eyes afterwards turned to heaven to watch for the answer, and perhaps some answers sent are like water spilled on the ground, for want of such observance. The confidence and resolve ground themselves on God’s holiness, through which the necessary condition of approach to Him comes to be purity-a conviction which finds expression in all religions, but is nowhere so vividly conceived or construed as demanding such stainless inward whiteness as in the Psalter. The "for" of Psalms 5:4 would naturally have heralded a statement of the psalmist’s grounds for expecting that he would be welcomed in his approach, but the turn of thought, which postpones that, and first regards God’s holiness as shutting out the impure, is profoundly significant. "Thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness" means more than the simple "Thou hast not pleasure" would do; it argues from the character of God, and glances at some of the foul deities whose nostrils snuff up sensual impurity as acceptable sacrifice. The one idea of absolute contrariety between God and evil is put in a rich variety of shapes in Psalms 5:4-6 which first deal with it negatively in three clauses (not a God; not dwell; not stand in Thy sight) and then positively in other three (hatest; shalt destroy; abhorreth). "Evil shall not sojourn with Thee." The verb is to be taken in its full meaning of sojourning as a guest-friend, who has the right to hospitality and defence. It thus constitutes the antithesis to Psalms 5:7. Clearly the sojourning does not mean access to the temple, but abiding with God. The barriers are of the same nature as the communion which they hinder, and something far deeper is meant than outward access to any visible shrine. No one sojourned in the temple. In like manner, the "standing in Thy sight" is a figure drawn from courts, reminding us of "my King" in Psalms 5:2 and suggesting the impossibility of evil or its doers approaching the Divine throne. But there is more than a negative side to the relation between God and evil, which the psalm goes on to paint in sombre colours, for God not only does not delight in sin, but hates it with a hatred like the physical loathing of some disgusting thing, and will gather all His alienation into one fatal lightning bolt. Such thoughts do not exhaust the truth as to the Divine relation to sin. They did not exhaust the psalmist’s knowledge of that relation, and still less do they exhaust ours, but they are parts of the truth today as much as then, and nothing in Christ’s revelation has antiquated them. The psalmist’s vocabulary is full of synonyms for sin, which witness to the profound consciousness of it which law and ritual had evoked in devout hearts. First, he speaks of it in the abstract, as "wickedness" and "evil." Then he passes to individuals, of whom he singles out two pairs, the first a more comprehensive and the second a more specific designation. The former pair are "the foolish" and "workers of iniquity." The word for "foolish" is usually translated by the moderns "arrogant," but the parallelism with the general expression "workers of iniquity" rather favours a less special meaning, such as Hupfeld’s "fools" or the LXX’s "transgressors." Only in the last pair are special forms of evil mentioned, and the two selected are significant of the psalmist’s own experience. Liars and men of blood and craft are his instances of the sort of sinners most abominable to God. That specification surely witnesses to his own sufferings from such. In Psalms 5:7 the psalmist comes back to the personal reference, contrasting his own access to God with the separation of evil-doers from His presence. But he does not assert that he has the right of entrance because he is pure. Very strikingly he finds the ground of his right of entry to the palace in God’s "multitude of mercy." not in his own innocence. Answering to "in Thy righteousness" is "in Thy fear." The one phrase expresses God’s disposition to man which makes access possible, the other man’s disposition to God which makes worship acceptable. "In the multitude of Thy mercy" and "in Thy fear," taken together, set forth the conditions of approach. Having regard to Psalms 5:4, it seems impossible to restrict the meaning of "Thy house" to the material sanctuary. It is rather a symbol of communion, protection, and friendship. Does the meaning pass into the narrower sense of outward worship in the material "temple" in the second clause? It may be fairly taken as doing so (Hupfeld). But it may be maintained that the whole verse refers to the spiritual realities of prayer and fellowship, and not at all to the externalities of worship, which are used as symbols, just as in Psalms 5:3 prayer is symbolised by the morning sacrifice. But probably it is better to suppose that the psalmist’s faith, though not tied to form, was fed by form, and that symbol and reality, the outward and the inward worship, the access to the temple and the approach of the silent soul to God, are fused in his psalm as they tended to be in his experience. Thus the first part of the psalm ends with the psalmist prostrate (for so the word for "worship" means) before the palace sanctuary of his King and God. It has thus far taught the conditions of approach to God, and given a concrete embodiment of them in the progress of the singer’s thoughts from petition to assurance and from resolve to accomplishment. The second part may be taken as his prayer when in the temple, whether that be the outward sanctuary or no. It is likewise a further carrying out of the contrast of the condition of the wicked and of the lovers of God, expressed in terms applying to outward life rather than to worship. It fails into three parts: the personal prayer for guidance in life, the contemplation of evil-doers, and the vehement prayer for their destruction, corresponding to Psalms 5:4-6, and the contrasted prayer for the righteous, among whom he implies his own inclusion. The whole of the devout man’s desires for himself are summed up in that prayer for guidance. All which the soul needs is included in these two: access to God in the depths of still prostration before His throne as the all-sufficient good for the inner life; guidance, as by a shepherd, on a plain path, chosen not by self-will but by God, for the outward. He who has received the former in any degree will in the same measure have the latter. To dwell in God’s house is to desire His guidance as the chief good. "In Thy righteousness" is capable of two meanings: it may either designate the path by which the psalmist desired to be led, or the Divine attribute to which he appealed. The latter meaning, which is substantially equivalent to "because Thou art righteous," is made more probable by the other instances in the psalm of a similar use of "in" (in the multitude of Thy mercy; in Thy fear; in the multitude of their transgressions). His righteousness is manifested in leading those who seek for His guidance. (compare Psalms 25:8; Psalms 31:1, etc.) Then comes the only trace in the psalm of the presence of enemies, because of whom the singer prays for guidance. It is not so much that he fears failing into their hands as that he dreads lest, if left to himself, he may take some step which will give them occasion for malicious joy in his fall or his calamity. Wherever a man is earnestly God fearing, many eyes watch him, and gleam with base delight if they see him stumble. The psalmist, whether David or another, had that cross to carry, like every thorough going adherent of the religious ideal (or of any lofty ideal, for that matter); and his prayer shows how heavy it was, since thoughts of it mingled with even his longings for righteousness. "Plain" does not mean obvious, but level, and may possibly include both freedom from stumbling blocks ("Lead us not into temptation") and from calamities, but the prevalent tone of the psalm points rather to the former. He who knows his own weaknesses may legitimately shrink from snares and occasions to fall, even though, knowing the wisdom of his Guide and the help that waits on his steps, he may "count it all joy" when he encounters them. The picture of the evil-doers in Psalms 5:9 is introduced, as in Psalms 5:4, with a "for." The sinners here are evidently the enemies of the previous verse. Their sins are those of speech; and the force of the rapid clauses of the picture betrays how recently and sorely the psalmist had smarted from lies, flatteries, slanders, and all the rest of the weapons of smooth and bitter tongues. He complains that there is no faithfulness or steadfastness in "his mouth"-a distributive singular, which immediately passes into the plural - nothing there that a man can rely on, but all treacherous. "Their inward part is destruction." The other rendering, "engulfing ruin" or "a yawning gulf," is picturesque; but destruction is more commonly the meaning of the word and yields a vigorous sense here. They plot inwardly the ruin of the men whom they flatter. The figure is bold. Down to this pit of destruction is a way like an open sepulchre, the throat expanded in the act of speech; and the falsely smoothed tongue is like a slippery approach to the descent (so Jennings and Lowe). Such figures strike Western minds as violent, but are natural to the East. The shuddering sense of the deadly power of words is a marked characteristic of the Psalter. Nothing stirs psalmists to deeper indignation than "God’s great gift of speech abused," and this generation would be all the better for relearning the lesson. The psalmist is "in the sanctuary," and there "understands their end," and breaks into prayer which is also prophecy. The vindication of such prayers for the destruction of evil-doers is that they are not the expressions of personal enmity ("They have rebelled against Thee"), and that they correspond to one side of the Divine character and acts, which was prominent in the Old Testament epoch of revelation, and is not superseded by the New. But they do belong to that lower level; and to hesitate to admit their imperfection from the Christian point of view is to neglect the plain teaching of our Lord, who built His law of the kingdom on the declared relative imperfection of the ethics of the Old. Terrible indeed are the prayers here. Hold them guilty-that is, probably, treat them as such by punishing; let them fall; thrust them out-from Thy presence, if they have ventured thither, or out into the darkness of death. Let us be thankful that we dare not pray such prayers, but let us not forget that for the psalmist not to have prayed them would have indicated, not that he had anticipated the tenderness of the Gospel, but that he had failed to learn the lesson of the law and was basely tolerant of baseness. But we come into the sunshine again at the close, and hear the contrasted prayer, which thrills with gladness and hope. "When the wicked perish there is shouting." The servants of God, relieved from the incubus and beholding the fall of evil, lift up their praises. The order in which the designations of these servants occur is very noteworthy. It is surely not accidental that we have them first described as "those that trust in Thee," then as "all them that love Thy name," and finally as "the righteous." What is this sequence but an anticipation of the evangelical order? The root of all is trust, then love, then righteousness. Love follows trust. "We have known and believed the love which God hath to us." Righteousness follows trust and love, inasmuch as by faith the new life enters the heart and inasmuch as love supplies the great motive for keeping the commandments. So root, stem, and flower are here, wrapped up, as it were, in a seed, which unfolds into full growth in the New Testament. The literal meaning of the word rendered "put their trust" is "flee as to a refuge," and that beautifully expresses the very essence of the act of faith; while the same metaphor is carried on in "defendest," which literally means coverest. The fugitive who shelters in God is covered by the shadow of His wing. Faith, love, and righteousness are the conditions of the purest joy. Trusts joy; love is joy; obedience to a loved law is joy. And round him who thus, in his deepest self, dwells in God’s house and in his daily life walks, with these angels for his companions, on God’s path, which by choice he has made his own, there is ever cast the broad buckler of God’s favour. He is safe from all evil on whom God looks with love, and he on whom God so looks is he whose heart dwells in God’s house and whose feet "travel on life’s common way in cheerful godliness." Psalms 6:1-10 THE theme and progress of thought in this psalm are very common, especially in those attributed to David. A soul compassed by enemies, whose hate has all but sapped the life out of it, "catches at God’s skirts and prays," and thence wins confidence which anticipates deliverance and victory. There are numerous variations of this leitmotif, and each of the psalms which embody it has its own beauty, its own discords resolved into its own harmonies. The representation of the trouble of spirit as producing wasting of the body is also frequent, and is apparently not to be taken as metaphor, though not to be pressed, as if the psalmist were at once struck with the two calamities of hostility and disease, but the latter is simply the result of the former, and will disappear with it. It is needless to look for a historical occasion of the psalm, but to an ear that knows the tones of sorrow, or to a heart that has itself uttered them, the supposition that in these pathetic cries we hear only a representative Israelite bewailing the national ruin sounds singularly artificial. If ever the throb of personal anguish found tears and a voice, it does so in this psalm. Whoever wrote it wrote with his blood. There are in it no obvious references to events in the recorded life of David, and hence the ascription of it to him must rest on something else than the interpretation of the psalm. The very absence of such allusions is a fact to be dealt with by those who deny the accuracy of the attribution of authorship. But, however that question may be settled, the worth of this little plaintive cry depends on quite other considerations than the discovery of the name of the singer or the nature of his sorrow. It is a transcript of a perennial experience, a guide for a road which all feet have to travel. Its stream runs turbid and broken at first, but calms and clears as it flows. It has four curves or windings, which can scarcely be called strophes without making too artificial a framework for such a simple and spontaneous gush of feeling. Still the transitions are clear enough. In Psalms 6:1-3 we have a cluster of sharp, short cries to God for help, which all mean the same thing. In each of these the great name of Jehovah is repeated, and in each the plea urged is simply the sore need of the suppliant. These are no "vain repetitions," which are pressed out of a soul by the grip of the rack; and it is not "taking the name of the Lord in vain" when four times in three short verses the passionate cry for help is winged with it as the arrow with its feather. Two thoughts fill the psalmist’s consciousness, or rather one thought-the Lord-and one feeling-his pains. In Psalms 6:1 the Hebrew makes "in Thine anger" and "in Thine hot wrath" emphatic by setting these two phrases between the negative and the verb: "Not in Thine anger rebuke me; not in Thy heat chasten me." He is willing to submit to both rebuke and chastisement; but he shrinks appalled from that form of either which tends to destruction, not to betterment. There are chastisements in tenderness, which express God’s love, and there are others which manifest His alienation and wrath. This psalmist did not think that all Divine retribution was intended for reformation. To him there was such a thing as wrath which slew. Jeremiah has the same distinction, (Jeremiah 10:24) and the parallel has been made an argument for the later date of the psalm. Cheyne and others assume that Jeremiah is the original, but that is simple conjecture, and the prophet’s conspicuous fondness for quotations from older authors makes the supposition more probable that the psalm is the earlier. Resignation and shrinking blend in that cry, in which a heart conscious of evil confesses as well as implores, recognises the justice and yet deprecates the utmost severity of the blow. He who asks, "Not in Thine anger rebuke me," thereby submits to loving chastisement. Then follow in Psalms 6:2-3 three short petitions, which are as much cries of pain as prayers, and as much prayers as cries of pain. In the two former the prayer is put first, and its plea second; in the last the order is reversed, and so the whole is, as it were, enclosed in a circlet of prayer. Two words make the petition in each clause, "Have mercy on me, Jehovah" (tastelessly corrected by Gratz into "Revive me"), and "Heal me, Jehovah." The third petition is daring and pregnant in its incompleteness. In that emphatic "And Thou, Jehovah," the psalmist looks up, with almost reproach in his gaze, to the infinite Personality which seems so unaccountably passive. The hours that bring pain are leaden footed, and their moments each seem an eternity. The most patient sufferer may cry, "How long?" and God will not mistake the voice of pain for that of impatience. This threefold prayer, with its triple invocation, has a triple plea, which is all substantially one. His misery fills the psalmist’s soul, and he believes that God will feel for him. He does not at first appeal to God’s revealed character, except in so far as the plaintive reiteration of the Divine name carries such an appeal, but he spreads out his own wretchedness, and he who does that has faith in God’s. pity. "I am withered away" like a faded flower. "My bones are vexed"; -the physical effects of his calamity, "bones" being put for the whole body, and regarded as the seat of sensibility, as is frequently the usage. "Vexed" is too weak a rendering. The idea is that of the utmost consternation. Not only the body, but the soul, partakes in the dismay. The "soul" is even more shaken than the "bones"; that is to say, mental agitation rather than physical disease (and the latter as the result of the former) troubles the psalmist. We can scarcely fail to remember the added sanctity which these plaintive words have received, since they were used by the Prince of sufferers when all but in sight of the cross. The next turn of thought includes Psalms 6:4-5, and is remarkable for the new pleas on which it rests the triple prayer, "Return; deliver; save." God is His own motive, and His self-revelation in act must always be self-consistent. Therefore the plea is presented, "for Thy lovingkindness sake." It beseeches Him to be what He is, and to show Himself as still being what He had always been. The second plea is striking both in its view of the condition of the dead and in its use of that view as an argument with God. Like many other psalmists, the writer thinks of Sheol as the common gathering place of the departed, a dim region where they live a poor shadowy life, inactive, joyless, and all but godless, inasmuch as praise, service, and fellowship with Him have ceased. That view is equally compatible with the belief in a resurrection and the denial of it, for it assumes continued individual consciousness. It is the prevailing tone in the Psalter and in Job and Ecclesiastes. But in some psalms, which embody the highest rapture of inward and mystical devotion, the sense of present union with God bears up the psalmist into the sunlight of the assurance that against such a union death can have no power, and we see the hope of immortality in the very act of dawning on the devout soul. May we not say that the subjective experience of the reality of communion with God now is still the path by which the certainty of its perpetuity in a future life is reached? The objective proof in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is verified by this experience. The psalmists had not the former, but, having the latter, they attained to at all events occasional confidence in a blessed life beyond. But the tone of such triumphant glimpses as Psalms 16:10; Psalms 17:15; Psalms 49:15; Psalms 73:24, is of a higher mood than that of this and other psalms, which probably represent the usual view of devout Hebrews. The fact, as it appeared to those at the then stage of revelation, that remembrance and praise of God were impossible in Sheol, is urged as a plea. That implies the psalmist’s belief that God cared for men’s praise-a thought which may be so put as to make Him an almighty Selfishness, but which in its true aspect is the direct inference from the faith that He is infinite Love. It is the same sweet thought of Him which Browning has when he makes God say, "I miss my little human praise." God’s joy in men’s praise is joy in men’s love and in their recognition of His love. The third turn of feeling is in Psalms 6:6-7. The sense of his own pains which, in the two previous parts of the psalm, had been contending with the thought of God, masters the psalmist in these dreary verses, in which the absence of the name of God is noteworthy as expressive of his absorption in brooding over His misery. The vehemence of the manifestations of sorrow and the frankness of the record of these manifestations in the song are characteristic of the emotional, demonstrative Eastern temperament, and strike our more reticent dispositions as excessive. But however expressed in unfamiliar terms, the emotion which wails in these sad verses is only too familiar to men of all temperaments. All sad hearts are tempted to shut out God and to look only at their griefs. There is a strange pleasure in turning round the knife in the wound and recounting the tokens of misery. This man feels some ease in telling how he had exhausted his strength with groaning and worn away the sleepless night with weeping. Night is ever the nurse of heavy thought, and stings burn again then. The hyperbolical expressions that he had set his bed afloat with his tears and "melted" it (as the word means) are matched by the other hyperboles which follow, describing the effect of this unmeasured weeping on his eyes. He had wept them away, and they were bleared and dim like those of an old man. The cause of this passion of weeping is next expressed, in plain words, which connect this turn of the thought with the next verses, and seem to explain the previously mentioned physical pain, as either metaphorical or consequent on the hostility of "mine adversaries." But even while thus his spirit is bitterly burying itself in his sorrows the sudden certainty of the answer to his prayer flashes on him. "Sometimes a light surprises," as Cowper, who too well knew what it was to be worn with groaning, has sung. That swift conviction witnesses its origin in a Divine inspiration by its very suddenness. Nothing has changed in circumstances, but everything has changed in aspect. Wonder and exultation throb in the threefold assurance that the prayer is heard. In the two former clauses the "hearing" is regarded as a present act; in the latter the "receiving" is looked for in the future. The process which is usually treated as one simple act, is here analysed. "God has heard; therefore God will receive"-i.e., answer-"my weeping prayer." Whence came that confidence but from the breath of God on the troubled spirit? "The peace of God" is ever the reward of submissive prayer. In this confidence a man can front the close-knit ring of enemies, of whatever sort they be, and bid them back. Their triumphant dismissal is a vivid way of expressing the certainty of their departure, with their murderous hate unslaked and baulked. "Mine enemies" are "workers of iniquity." That is a daring assumption, made still more remarkable by the previous confession that the psalmist’s sorrow was God’s rebuke and chastening. But a man has the right to believe that his cause is God’s in the measure in which he makes God’s cause his. In the confidence of prayer heard, the psalmist can see "things that are not as though they were," and, though no change has passed on the beleaguering hosts, triumphs in their sure rout and retreat. Very significantly does he predict in Psalms 6:10 the same fate for them which he bad bewailed as his own. The "dismay" which had afflicted his soul shall pass to them ("sore vexed"). Since God "returns" (Psalms 6:4), the enemy will have to "return" in baffled abandonment of their plans, and be "ashamed" at the failure of their cruel hopes. And all this will come as suddenly as the glad conviction had started up in the troubled heart of the singer. His outward life shall be as swiftly rescued as his inward has been. One gleam of God’s presence in his soul had lit its darkness, and turned tears into sparkling homes of the rainbow; one flash of that same presence in his outward life shall scatter all his foes with like swiftness. Psalms 7:1-17 THIS is the only psalm with the title "Shiggaion." The word occurs only here and in Habakkuk 3:1, where it stands in the plural, and with the preposition "upon," as if it designated instruments. The meaning is unknown, and commentators, who do not like to say so, have much ado to find one. The root is a verb, "to wander," and the explanation is common that the word describes the disconnected character of the psalm, which is full of swiftly succeeding emotions rather than of sequent thoughts. But there is no such exceptional discontinuity as to explain the title. It may refer to the character of the musical accompaniment rather than to that of the words. The authorities are all at sea, the LXX shirking the difficulty by rendering "psalm," others giving "error" or "ignorance," with allusion to David’s repentance after cutting off Saul’s skirt or to Saul’s repentance of his persecuting David. The later Jewish writers quoted by Neubauer ("Studia Biblic.," 2:36, sq.) guess at most various meanings, such as "love and pleasure," "occupation with music," "affliction," "humility," while others, again, explain it as the name of a musical instrument. Clearly the antiquity of the title is proved by this unintelligibility. If we turn to the other part of it, we find further evidence of age and of independence. Who was "Cush, a Benjamite"? He is not mentioned elsewhere. The author of the title, then, had access to some sources for David’s life other than the Biblical records; and, as Hupfeld acknowledges, we have here evidence of ancient ascription of authorship which "has more weight than most of the others." Cush has been supposed to be Shimei or Saul himself, and to have been so called because of his swarthy complexion (Cush meaning an African) or as a jest, because of his personal beauty. Cheyne, following Krochmal, would correct into "because of [Mordecai] the son of Kish, a Benjamite," and finds in this entirely conjectural and violent emendation an "attestation that the psalm was very early regarded as a work of the Persian age" ("Orig. of Psalt.," p. 229). But there is really no reason of weight for denying the Davidic authorship, as Ewald, Hitzig, Hupfeld, and Riehm allow; and there is much in 1 Samuel 24:1-22; 1 Samuel 25:1-44; 1 Samuel 26:1-25, correspondent with the situation and emotions of the psalmist here, such as, e.g., the protestations of innocence, the calumnies launched at him, and the call on God to judge. The tone of the psalm is high and courageous, in remarkable contrast to the depression of spirit in the former psalm, up out of which the singer had to pray himself. Here, on the contrary, he fronts the enemy, lion like though he be, without a quiver. It is the courage of innocence and of trust. Psalms 6:1-10 wailed like some soft flute; Psalms 7:1-17 peals like the trumpet of judgment, and there is triumph in the note. The whole may be divided into three parts, of which the close of the first is marked by the Selah at the end of Psa 7:5; and the second includes Psalms 7:6-10. Thus we have the appeal of innocence for help (Psalms 7:1-5), the cry for more than help-namely, definite judgment (Psalms 7:6-10)-and the vision of judgment (Psalms 7:11-17). The first section has two main thoughts: the cry for help and the protestation of innocence. It is in accordance with the bold triumphant tone of the psalm that its first words are a profession of faith in Jehovah. It is well to look to God before looking at dangers and foes. He who begins with trust can go on to think of the fiercest antagonism without dismay. Many of the psalms ascribed to David begin thus, but it is no mere stereotyped formula. Each represents a new act of faith, in the presence of a new danger. The word for "put trust" here is very illuminative and graphic, meaning properly the act of fleeing to a refuge. It is sometimes blended with the image of a sheltering rock, sometimes with the still tenderer one of a mother bird, as when Ruth "came to trust under the wings of Jehovah," and in many other places. The very essence of the act of faith is better expressed by that metaphor than by much subtle exposition. Its blessedness as bringing security and warm shelter and tenderness more than maternal is wrapped up in the sweet and instructive figure. The many enemies are, as it were, embodied in one, on whom the psalmist concentrates his thoughts as the most formidable and fierce. The metaphor of the lion is common in the psalms attributed to David, and is, at all events, natural in the mouth of a shepherd king, who had taken a lion by the beard. He is quite aware of his peril, if God does not help him, but he is so sure of his safety, since he trusts, that he can contemplate the enemy’s power unmoved, like a man standing within arm’s length of the lion’s open jaws, but with a strong grating between. This is the blessing of true faith, not the oblivion of dangers, but the calm fronting of them because our refuge is in God. Indignant repelling of slander follows the first burst of triumphant trust (Psalms 7:3-5). Apparently "the words of Cush" were calumnies poisoning Saul’s suspicious nature, such as David refers to in 1 Samuel 24:9: "Wherefore hearkenest thou to men’s words, saying, Behold, David seekest thy hurt?" The emphatic and enigmatic This in Psalms 7:3 is unintelligible, unless it refers to some slander freshly coined, the base malice of which stirs its object into flashing anger and vehement self-vindication. The special point of the falsehood is plain from the repudiation. He had been charged with attempting to injure one who was at peace with him. That is exactly what "men’s words" charged on David, "saying, Behold, David seeketh thy hurt" (1 Samuel, as above), "If there be iniquity in my hands" is very like. "See that there is neither evil nor transgression in mine hand, and I have not sinned against thee"! "Thou huntest after my soul to take it" (1 Samuel) is also like our Psalms 7:1: "them that pursue me," and Psalms 7:5: "let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it." The specific form of this protestation of innocence finds no explanation in the now favourite view of the sufferer in the psalm as being the righteous nation. The clause which is usually treated as a parenthesis in Psalms 7:4, and translated, as in the R.V, "I have delivered him that without cause was mine adversary," is needlessly taken by Delitzsch and others as a continuation of the hypothetical clauses, and rendered, with a change in the meaning of the verb, "And if I have despoiled him," etc.; but it is better taken as above and referred to the incident in the cave when David spared Saul’s life. What meaning would that clause have with the national reference? The metaphor of a wild beast in chase of its prey colours the vehement declaration in Psalms 7:5 of readiness to suffer if guilty. We see the swift pursuit, the victim overtaken and trampled to death. There may also be an echo of the Song of Miriam: (Exodus 15:9) "The enemy said, I will pursue; I will overtake." To "lay my glory in the dust" is equivalent to "bring down my soul to the dust of death." Man’s glory is his "soul." Thus, nobly throbbing with conscious innocence and fronting unmerited hate, the rush of words stops, to let the musical accompaniment blare on, for a while, as if defiant and confident. The second section of the psalm (Psalms 7:6-10) is a cry for the coming of the Divine Judge. The previous prayer was content with deliverance, but this takes a bolder flight, and asks for the manifestation of the punitive activity of God on the enemies, who, as usually, are identified with "evil-doers." The grand metaphors in "Arise," "Lift up Thyself." "Awake." mean substantially the same thing. The long periods during which evil works and flaunts with impunity are the times when God sits as if passive and, in a figure still more daring, as if asleep. When His destructive power flashed into act, and some long-tolerated iniquity was smitten at a blow, the Hebrew singers saw therein God springing to His feet or awaking to judgment. Such long stretches of patient permission of evil and of swift punishment are repeated through, the ages, and individual lives have them in miniature. The great judgments of nations and the small ones of single men embody the same principles, just as the tiniest crystal has the same angles and lines of cleavage as the greatest of its kind. So this psalmist has penetrated to a true discernment of the relations of the small and the great, when he links his own vindication by the judicial act of God with the pomp and splendour of a world wide judgment, and bases his prayer for the former on the Divine purpose to effect the latter. The sequence, "The Lord ministereth judgment to the peoples"-therefore-"judge me, O Lord," does not imply that the "me" is the nation, but simply indicates as the ground of the individual hope of a vindicating judgment the Divine fact, of which history had given him ample proof and faith gave, him still fuller evidence, that God, though He sometimes seemed to sleep, did indeed judge the nations. The prerogative of the poet, and still more, the instinct of the inspired spirit, is to see the law of the greatest exemplified in the small and to bring every triviality of personal life into contact with God and His government. The somewhat harsh construction of the last clause of Psa 7:6 begins the transition from the prayer for the smaller to the assurance of the greater judgment which is its basis, and similarly the first clause of Psa 7:8 closes the picture of that wider act, and the next clause returns to the prayer. This picture, thus embedded in the heart of the supplication, is majestic in its few broad strokes. First comes the appointment of judgment, then the assembling of the "peoples," which here may, perhaps, have the narrower meaning of the "tribes," since "congregation" is the word used for them in their national assembly, and would scarcely be employed for the collection of Gentile nations. But whether the concourse be all Israel or all nations, they are gathered in silent expectance as in a great judgment hall. Then enters the Judge. If we retain the usual reading and rendering of Psa 7:7 b, the act of judgment is passed over in silence, and the poet beholds God, the judgment finished, soaring above the awe-struck multitudes, in triumphant return to the repose of His heavenly throne. But the slight emendation of the text, needed to yield the meaning "Sit Thou above it," is worthy of consideration. In either case, the picture closes with the repeated assurance of the Divine judgment of the peoples, and (Psalms 7:8) the prayer begins again. The emphatic assertion of innocence must be taken in connection with the slanders already repudiated. The matter in hand is the evils charged on the psalmist, for which he was being chased as if by lions, the judgment craved is the chastisement of his persecutors, and the innocence professed is simply the innocence which they calumniated. The words have no bearing at all on the psalmist’s general relation to the Divine law, nor is there any need to have recourse to the hypothesis that the speaker is the "righteous nation." It is much more difficult to vindicate a member of that remnant from the charge of overestimating the extent and quality of even the righteous nation’s obedience, if he meant to allege, as that interpretation would make him do, that the nation was pure in life and heart, than it is to vindicate the single psalmist vehemently protesting his innocence of the charges for which he was hunted. Cheyne confesses (Commentary in loc.) that the "psalmist’s view may seem too rose coloured," which is another way of acknowledging that the interpretation of the protestation as the voice of the nation is at variance with the facts of its condition. The accents require Psalms 7:9 a to be rendered "Let wickedness make an end of the wicked," but that introduces an irrelevant thought of the suicidal nature of evil. It may be significant that the psalmist’s prayer is not for the destruction of the wicked, but of their wickedness. Such annihilation of evil is the great end of God’s judgment, and its consequence will be the establishment of the righteous. Again the prayer strengthens itself by the thought of God as righteous and as trying the hearts and reins (the seat of feeling). In the presence of rampant and all but triumphant evil, a man needs to feed hopes of its overthrow that would else seem vainest dreams, by gazing on the righteousness and searching power of God. Very beautifully does the order of the words in Psalms 7:9 suggest the kindred of the good man with God by closing each division of the verse with "righteous." A righteous man has a claim on a righteous God. Most naturally then the prayer ends with the calm confidence of Psa 7:10: "My shield is upon God." He Himself bears the defence of the psalmist. This confidence he has won by his prayer, and in it he ceases to be a suppliant and becomes a seer. The last section (Psalms 7:11-17) is a vision of the judgment prayed for, and may be supposed to be addressed to the enemy. If so, the hunted man towers above them, and becomes a rebuker. The character of God underlies the fact of judgment, as it had encouraged the prayer for it. What he had said to himself when his hope drooped, he now, as a prophet, peals out to men as making retribution sure: "God is a righteous Judge, yea a God that hath indignation every day." The absence of an object specified for the indignation makes its inevitable flow wherever there is evil the more vividly certain. If He is such, then of course follows the destruction of everyone who "turns not." Retribution is set forth with solemn vigour under four figures. First, God is as an armed enemy sharpening His sword in preparation for action, a work of time which in the Hebrew is represented as in process, and bending His bow, which is the work of a moment, and in the Hebrew is represented as a completed act. Another second, and the arrow will whizz. Not only is the bow bent, but (Psalms 7:11) the deadly arrows are aimed, and not only aimed, but continuously fed with flame. The Hebrew puts "At him" (the wicked) emphatically at the beginning of the verse, and uses the form of the verb which implies completed action for the "aiming" and that which implies incomplete for "making" the arrows burn. So the stern picture is drawn of God as in the moment before the outburst of His punitive energy-the sword sharpened, the bow bent, the arrows fitted, the burning stuff being smeared on their tips. What will happen when all this preparation blazes into action? The next figure in Psalms 7:14 insists on the automatic action of evil in bringing punishment. It is the Old Testament version of "Sin when it is finished bringeth forth death." The evil-doer is boldly represented as "travailing with iniquity," and that metaphor is broken up into the two parts "He hath conceived mischief" and "He hath brought forth falsehood." The "falsehood," which is the thing actually produced, is so called, not because it deceives others, but because it mocks its producer with false hopes and never fulfils his purposes. This is but the highly metaphorical way of saying that a sinner never does what he means to do, but that the end of all his plans is disappointment. The law of the universe condemns him to feed on ashes and to make and trust in lies. A third figure brings out more fully the idea implied in "falsehood," namely, the failure of evil to accomplish its doer’s purpose. Crafty attempts to trap others have an ugly habit of snaring their contriver. The irony of fortune tumbles the hunter into the pitfall dug by him for his prey. The fourth figure (Psalms 7:16) represents the incidence of his evil on the evil-doer as being certain as the fall of a stone thrown straight up, which will infallibly come back in the line of its ascent. Retribution is as sure as gravitation, especially if there is an Unseen Hand above, which adds impetus and direction to the falling weight. All these metaphors, dealing with the "natural" consequences of evil, are adduced as guarantees of God’s judgment, whence it is clear both that the psalmist is thinking not of some final future judgment, but of the continuous one of daily providence, and that he made no sharp line of demarcation between the supernatural and the natural. The qualities of things and the play of natural events are God’s working. So the end of all is thanksgiving. A stern but not selfish nor unworthy thankfulness follows judgment, with praise which is not inconsistent with tears of pity, even as the act of judgment: which calls it forth is not inconsistent with Divine love. The vindication of God’s righteousness is worthily hymned by the choral thanksgivings of all who love righteousness. By judgment Jehovah makes Himself known as "most high," supreme over all creatures; and hence the music of thanksgiving celebrates Him under that name. The title "Elyon" here employed is regarded by Cheyne and others as a sign of late date, but the use of it seems rather a matter of poetic style than of chronology. Melchizedek, Balaam, and the king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:14) use it; it occurs in Daniel, but, with these exceptions, is confined to poetical passages, and cannot be made out to be a mark of late date, except by assuming the point in question-namely, the late date of the poetry, principally nineteen psalms, in which it occurs. Psalms 8:1-9 THE exclamation which begins and ends this psalm, enclosing it as a jewel in a setting, determines its theme as being neither the nightly heaven with all its stars, nor the dignity of man, but the name of the Lord as proclaimed by both. The Biblical contemplation of nature and man starts from and ends in God. The main thought of the psalm is the superiority of the revelation in man’s nature and place to that in the vault of heaven. The very smallness of man makes the revelation of God in His dealings with him great. In his insignificance is lodged a Divine spark, and, lowly as is his head as he stands beneath the midnight sky blazing with inaccessible lights, it is crowned with a halo which reflects God’s glory more brightly than does their lustre. That one idea is the theme of both parts of the psalm. In the former (Psalms 8:1-2) it is briefly stated; in the latter (Psalms 8:3-8) it is wrought out in detail. The movement of thought is by expansion rather than progress. The name of the Lord is His character as made known. The psalmist looks beyond Israel, the recipient of a fuller manifestation, and, with adoring wonder, sees far flashing through all the earth, as if written in light, the splendour of that name. The universal revelation in the depths of the sparkling heavens and the special one by which Israel can say, "our Lord," are both recognised. The very abruptness of the exclamation in Psalms 8:1 tells that it is the end of long, silent contemplation, which overflows at last in speech. The remainder of Psa 8:1 and Psalms 8:2 present the two forms of Divine manifestation which it is the main purpose of the psalm to contrast, and which effect the world wide diffusion of the glory of the Name. These are the apocalypse in the nightly heavens and the witness from the mouth of babes and sucklings. As to the former, there is some difficulty in the text as it stands; and there may be a question also as to the connection with the preceding burst of praise. The word rendered "hast set" is an imperative, which introduces an incongruous thought, since the psalm proceeds on the conviction that God has already done what such a reading would be asking him to do. The simplest solution is to suppose a textual corruption, and to make the slight change required for the rendering of the A.V and R.V God’s name is glorious in all the earth, first, because He has set His glory upon the heavens, which stretch their solemn magnificence above every land. It is His glory of which theirs is the shimmering reflection, visible to every eye upturned from "this dim spot which men call earth." May we attach significance to the difference between "Thy name" and "Thy glory"? Possibly there is a hint of the relative inferiority even of the heavenly proclamation, inasmuch as, while it rays out "glory," the lustre of power and infinitude, it is only on earth that that revelation becomes the utterance of the Name, since here are hearts and minds to interpret. The relative at the beginning of the last clause of Psa 8:1 seems to require that the initial exclamation should not be isolated, as it is in the last verse; but, in any case, the two methods of revelation must be taken in the closest connection and brought into line as parallel media of revelation. Psalms 8:2 gives the second of these. The sudden drop from the glories of the heavens to the babble and prattle of infancy and childhood is most impressive, and gives extraordinary force to the paradox that the latter’s witness is more powerful to silence gainsayers than that of the former. This conviction is expressed in a noble metaphor, which is blurred by the rendering "strength." The word here rather means a strength in the old use of the term-that is, a stronghold or fortress-and the image, somewhat more daring than colder Western taste finds permissible, is that, out of such frail material as children’s speech, God builds a tower of strength, which, like some border castle, will bridle and still the restless enemy. There seems no sufficient reason for taking "children and sucklings" in any but its natural meaning, however the reference to lowly believers may accord with the spirit of the psalm. The children’s voices are taken as a type of feeble instruments, which are yet strong enough to silence the enemy. Childhood, "with no language but a cry," is, if rightly regarded in its source, its budding possibilities, its dependence, its growth, a more potent witness to a more wondrous name than are all the stars. In like manner, man is man’s clearest revelation of God. The more lowly he is, the more lofty his testimony. What are all His servants’ words but the babbling of children who "do not know half the deep things they speak"? God’s strongest fortress is built of weakest stones. The rendering of the LXX, which is that used by our Lord in the Temple when He claimed the children’s shrill hosannas as perfected praise, is an explanation rather than a translation, and as such is quite in the line of the psalmist’s meaning. To find in the "children and sucklings" a reference either to the humble believers in Israel or to the nation as a whole, and in the "enemy and the vengeful man" hostile nations, introduces thoughts alien to the universality of the psalm, which deals with humanity as a whole and with the great revelations wide as humanity. If the two parts of the psalm are to be kept together, the theme of the compendious first portion must be the same as that of the second, namely, the glory of God as revealed by nature and man, but most chiefly by the latter, notwithstanding and even by his comparative feebleness. The second part (Psalms 8:3-8) expands the theme of the first. The nightly sky is more overwhelming than the bare blue vault of day. Light conceals and darkness unveils the solemn glories. The silent depths, the inaccessible splendours, spoke to this psalmist, as they do to all sensitive souls, of man’s relative insignificance, but they spoke also of the God whose hand had fashioned them, and the thought of Him carried with it the assurance of His care for so small a creature, and therefore changed the aspect of his insignificance. To an ear deaf to the witness of the heavens to their Maker, the only voice which sounds from their crushing magnificence is one which counsels unmitigated despair, insists on man’s nothingness, and mocks his aspirations. If we stop with "What is man?" the answer is, A fleeting nothing. The magnitude, the duration, the multitudes of these awful suns and stars dwarf him. Modern astronomy has so far increased the impression that it has landed many minds in blank unbelief that God has visited so small a speck as earth, and abundant ridicule has been poured on the arrogance which dreams that such stupendous events, as the Christian revelation asserts, have been transacted on earth for man. If we begin with man, certainly his insignificance makes it supremely absurd to suppose him thus distinguished; but if we begin at the other end, the supposition takes a new appearance of probability. If there is a God, and men are His creatures, it is supremely unlikely that He should not have a care of them. Nothing can be more absurd than the supposition of a dumb God, who has never spoken to such a being as man. The psalmist gives full weight to man’s smallness, his frailty, and his lowly origin, for his exclamation, "What is man?" means, "How little is he!" and he uses the words which connote frailty and mortality, and emphasise the fact of birth as if in contrast with "the work of Thy fingers"; but all these points only enhance the wonderfulness of what is to the poet an axiom-that God has personal relations with His creature. "Thou art mindful of him" refers to God’s thought, "Thou visitest him" to His acts of loving care; and both point to God’s universal beneficence, not to His special revelation. The bitter parody in Job 7:17-18 takes the truth by the other handle, and makes the personal relations those of a rigid inspector on the one hand and a creature not worth being so strict with on the other. Mindfulness is only watchfulness for slips and visiting means penal visitation. So the same fact may be the source of thankful wonder or of almost blasphemous murmuring. Psalms 8:5-8 draw out the consequences of God’s loving regard which has made the insignificance of man the medium of a nobler manifestation of the Divine name than streams from all the stars. There is no allusion here to sin; and its absence has led to the assertion that this psalmist knew nothing of a fall, and was not in harmony with the prevalent Old Testament tone as to the condition of humanity. But surely the contemplation of the ideal manhood, as it came from God’s hand, does not need to be darkened by the shadows of the actual. The picture of man as God made him is the only theme which concerns the psalmist; and he paints it with colours drawn from the Genesis account, which tells of the fall as well as the creation of man. The picture contains three elements: man is Deiform, crowned with glory and honour, and lord of the creatures on earth. The rendering "than the angels" in the A.V comes from the LXX, but though defensible, is less probable than the more lofty conception contained in "than God," which is vindicated, not only by lexical considerations, but as embodying an allusion to the original creation "in the image of God." What then is the "little" which marks man’s inferiority? It is mainly that the spirit, which is God’s image, is confined in and limited by flesh, and subject to death. The distance from the apex of creation to the Creator must ever be infinite; but man is so far above the non-sentient, though mighty, stars and the creatures which share earth with him, by reason of his being made in the Divine image-i.e., having consciousness, will, and reason-that the distance is foreshortened. The gulf between man and matter is greater than that between man and God. The moral separation caused by sin is not in the psalmist’s mind. Thus man is invested with some reflection of God’s glory, and wears this as a crown. He is king on earth. The enumeration of his subjects follows, in language reminding again of the Genesis narrative. The catalogue begins with those nearest to him, the long-tamed domestic animals, and of these the most submissive (sheep) first; it then passes to the untamed animals, whose home is "the field" or uncultivated land, and from them goes to the heights and depths, where the free fowls of the air and fish of the sea and all the mysterious monsters that may roam the hidden ways of that unknown ocean dwell. The power of taming and disciplining some, the right to use all, belong to man, but his subjects have their rights and their king his limits of power and his duties. Such then is man, as God meant him to be. Such a being is a more glorious revelation of the Name than all stars and systems. Looked at in regard to his duration, his years are a hand-breadth before these shining ancients of days that have seen his generations fret their little hour and sink into silence; looked at in contrast with their magnitude and numbers numberless, he is but an atom, and his dwelling place a speck. Science increases the knowledge of his insignificance, but perhaps not the impression of it made on a quiet heart by the simple sight of the heavens. But besides the merely scientific view, and the merely poetic, and the grimly Agnostic, there is the other, the religious, and it is as valid today as ever. To it the heavens are the work of God’s finger, and their glories are His, set there by Him. That being so, man’s littleness magnifies the name, because it enhances the condescending love of God, which has greatened the littleness by such nearness of care and such gifts of dignity. The reflection of His glory which blazes in the heavens is less bright than that which gleams in the crown of glory and honour on man’s lowly yet lofty head. The "babe and suckling" of creation has a mouth from which the strength of perfected praise issues and makes a bulwark against all gainsayers. The use made of this psalm in the Epistle to the Hebrews proceeds on the understanding that it describes ideal humanity. Where, then, says the writer of the epistle, shall we look for the realisation of that ideal? Do not the grand words sound liker irony than truth? Is this poor creature that crawls about the world, its slave, discrowned and sure to die, the Man whom the psalmist saw? No. Then was the fair vision a baseless fabric, and is there nothing to be looked for but a dreary continuance of such abortions dragging out their futile being through hopeless generations? No; the promise shall be fulfilled for humanity, because it has been fulfilled in one Man: the Man Christ Jesus. He is the realised ideal, and in Him is a life which will be communicated to all who trust and obey Him, and they, too, will become all that God meant man to be. The psalm was not intended as a prophecy, but every clear vision of God’s purpose is a prophecy, for none of His purposes remain unfulfilled. It was not intended as a picture of the Christ, but it is so; for He, and He alone, is the Man who answers to that fair Divine Ideal, and He will make all His people partakers of His royalty and perfect manhood. So the psalm ends, as it began, with adoring wonder, and proclaims this as the result of the twofold witness which it has so nobly set forth: that God’s name shines glorious through all the earth, and every eye may see its lustre. Psalms 9:1-20 Psalms 7:1-17; Psalms 9:1-20 are connected by the recurrence of the two thoughts of God as the Judge of nations and the wicked falling into the pit which he digged. Probably the original arrangement of the Psalter put these two next each other, and Psalms 8:1-9 was inserted later. Psalms 9:1-20 is imperfectly acrostic. It falls into strains of two verses each, which are marked by sequence of thought as well as by the acrostic arrangement. The first begins with Aleph, the second with Beth, and so on, the second verse of each pair not being counted in the scheme. The fourth letter is missing, and Psalms 9:7, which should begin with it, begins with the sixth. But a textual correction, which is desirable on other grounds, makes the fifth letter (He) the initial of Psa 9:7, and then the regular sequence is kept up till Psalms 9:19, which should begin with the soft K, but takes instead the guttural Q. What has become of the rest of the alphabet? Part of it is found in Psalms 10:1-18, where the first verse begins with the L, which should follow the regular K for Psalms 9:19. But there is no more trace of acrostic structure in 10 till Psalms 10:12, which resumes it with the Q which has already appeared out of place in Psalms 9:19; and it goes on to the end of the alphabet, with only the irregularity that the R strain (Psalms 10:14) has but one verse. Verses with the missing letters would just about occupy the space of the non-acrostic verses in Psalms 10:1-18, and the suggestion is obvious that the latter are part of some other psalm which has been substituted for the original; but there are links of connection between the non-acrostic and acrostic portions of Psa 10:1-18, which make that hypothesis difficult. The resemblances between the two psalms as they stand are close, and the dissimilarities not less obvious. The psalmist’s enemies are different. In the former they are foreign, in the latter domestic. Psalms 8:1-9 rings with triumph; Psalms 10:1-18 is in a minor key. The former celebrates a judgment as accomplished which the latter almost despairingly longs to see begun. On the whole, the two were most probably never formally one, but are a closely connected pair. There is nothing to discredit the Davidic authorship. The singer’s enemies are "nations" and the destruction of these foreign foes is equivalent to "maintaining his cause." That would be language natural in the mouth of a king, and there were foreign wars enough in David’s reign to supply appropriate occasions for such a song. The psalm falls into two parts, Psalms 9:1-12 and Psalms 9:13-20, of which the second substantially repeats the main thoughts of the first, but with a significant difference. In the first part the sequence is praise and its occasion (Aleph and Beth verses, Psalms 9:1-4), triumphant recounting of accomplished judgment (Gimel Psalms 9:5-6), confident expectation of future wider judgment (amended He and Vav pairs, Psalms 9:7-10), and a final call to praise. (Psalms 7:12) Thus set, as it were, in a circlet of praise, are experience of past and consequent confidence of future deliverance. The second part gives the same order, only, instead of praise, it has prayer for its beginning and end, the two central portions remaining the same as in part 1. The Cheth pair (Psalms 9:13-14) is prayer, the deliverance not being perfected, though some foes have fallen; the past act of accomplished judgment is again celebrated in the Teth pair (Psalms 9:15-16), followed, as before, by the triumphant confidence of future complete crushing of enemies (Yod strain, Psalms 9:17-18); and all closes with prayer (Qoph pair, Psalms 9:19-20). Thus the same thoughts are twice dwelt on; and the different use made of them is the explanation of the repetition, which strikes a cursory reader as needless. The diamond is turned a little in the hand, and a differently tinted beam flashes from its facet. In the first pair of verses, the song rushes out like some river breaking through a dam and flashing as it hurries on its course. Each short clause begins with Aleph; each makes the same fervid resolve. Wholehearted praise is sincere, and all the singer’s being is fused into it. "All Thy marvellous works" include the great deliverances of the past, with which a living sense of God’s working associates those of the present, as one in character and source. Today is as full of God to this man as the sacred yesterdays of national history, and his deliverances as wonderful as those of old. But high above the joy in God’s work is the joy in Himself to which it leads, and "Thy name, O thou Most High," is the ground of all pure delight and the theme of all worthy praise. The second stanza (Beth, Psalms 9:3-4) is best taken as giving the ground of praise. Render in close connection with preceding "because mine enemies turn back; they stumble and perish at [or from] Thy presence." God’s face blazes out on the foe, and they turn and flee from the field, but in their flight they stumble, and, like fugitives, once fallen can rise no more. The underlying picture is of a battlefield and a disastrous rout. it is God’s coming into action that scatters the enemy, as Psalms 9:4 tells by its "for." When he took His seat on the throne (of judgment rather than of royalty), they fled; and that act of assuming judicial activity was the maintaining of the psalmist’s cause. The third pair of verses (Gimel, Psalms 9:5-6) dwells on the grand picture of judgment, and specifies for the first time the enemies as "the nations" or "heathen," thus showing that the psalmist is not a private individual, and probably implying that the whole psalm is a hymn of victory, in which the heat of battle still glows, but which writes no name on the trophy but that of God. The metaphor of a judgment seat is exchanged for a triumphant description of the destructions fallen on the land of the enemy, in all which God alone is recognised as the actor. "Thou hast rebuked"; and just as His creative word was all powerful, so His destructive word sweeps its objects into nothingness. There is a grand and solemn sequence in that "Thou hast rebuked; Thou hast destroyed." His breath has made; His breath can unmake. In Psalms 9:6 the rendering to be preferred is substantially that of the R.V: "The enemy are ended, [they are] ruins forever, and cities hast Thou rooted out; perished is their memory." To take "enemy" as a vocative breaks the continuity of the address to God, and brings in an irrelevant reference to the former conquests of the foe ("Thou hast destroyed cities") which is much more forcible if regarded as descriptive of God’s destruction of his cities. "Their memory" refers to the enemy, not to the cities. Utter, perpetual ruin, so complete that the very name is forgotten, has fallen on the foe. In the fourth pair of verses a slight emendation of the text is approved of by most critics. The last word of Psa 9:6 is the pronoun "they," which. though possible in such a position, is awkward. If it is transferred to the beginning of Psa 9:7, and it is further supposed that "are perished" has dropped out, as might easily be the case, from the verb having just occurred in the singular, a striking antithesis is gained: "They perish, but Jehovah shall sit," etc. Further, the pair of verses then begins with the fifth letter; and the only irregularity in the acrostic arrangement till Psalms 9:19 is the omission of the fourth letter: Daleth. A very significant change in tenses takes place at this point. Hitherto the verbs have been perfects, implying a finished act; that is to say, hitherto the psalm has been dealing with facts of recent but completed experience. Now the verbs change to imperfects or futures, and continue so till Psalms 9:12; that is to say, "experience doth attain to something of prophetic strain," and passes into confidence for the future. That confidence is cast in the mould supplied by the deliverance on which it is founded. The smaller act of judgment, which maintained the psalmist’s cause, expands into a world wide judgment in righteousness, for which the preparations are already made. "He hath prepared His throne for judgment" is the only perfect in the series. This is the true point of view from which to regard the less comprehensive acts of judgment thinly sown through history, when God has arisen to smite some hoary iniquity or some godless conqueror. Such acts are premonitions of the future. and every "day of the Lord" is a miniature of that final dies ira. The psalmist probably was rather thinking of other acts of judgment which would free him and his people from hostile nations, but his hope was built on the great truth that all such acts are prophecies of others like them, and it is a legitimate extension of the same principle to view them all in relation to the last and greatest of the series. The fifth pair (Vav stanza, Psalms 9:9-10) turns to the glad contemplation of the purpose of all the pomp and terror of the judgment thus hoped for. The Judge is seated on high, and His elevation makes a "lofty stronghold" for the crushed or downtrodden. The rare word rendered "extremity" in Psalms 9:9 occurs only here and in Psalms 10:1. It means a cutting off, i.e., of hope of deliverance. The notion of distress intensified to despair is conveyed. God’s judgments show that even in such extremity He is an inexpugnable defence, like some hill fortress, inaccessible to any foe. A further result of judgment is the (growing) trust of devout souls (Psalms 9:10). To "know Thy name" is here equivalent to learning God’s character as made known by His acts, especially by the judgments anticipated. For such knowledge some measure of devout trust is required, but further knowledge deepens trust. The best teacher of faith is experience; and, on the other hand, the condition of such experience is faith. The action of knowledge and of trust is reciprocal. That trust is reinforced by the renewed evidence, afforded by the judgments, that Jehovah does not desert them that seek Him. To "seek Him" is to long for Him, to look for His help in trouble, to turn with desire and obedience to Him in daily life; and anything is possible rather than that He should not disclose and give Himself to such search. Trust and seeking, fruition and desire, the repose of the soul on God and its longing after God, are inseparable. They are but varying aspects of the one thing. When a finite spirit cleaves to the infinite God, there must be longing as an element in all possession and possession as an element in all longing; and both will be fed by contemplation of the self-revealing acts which are the syllables of His name. Section 6, the last of the first part (Zayin, Psalms 9:11-12), circles round to section 1, and calls on all trusters and seekers to be a chorus to the solo of praise therein. The ground of the praise is the same past act which has been already set forth as that of the psalmist’s thanksgiving, as is shown by the recurrence here of perfect tenses (hath remembered; hath not forgotten). The designation of God as "dwelling" in Zion is perhaps better rendered, with allusion to the same word in Psalms 9:7, "sitteth." His seat had been there from the time that the Ark was brought thither. That earthly throne was the type of his heavenly seat, and from Zion He is conceived as executing judgment. The world wide destination of Israel’s knowledge of God inspires the call to "show forth His doings" to "the peoples." The "nations" are not merely the objects of destructive wrath, but are to be summoned to share in the blessing of knowing His mighty acts. The psalmist may not have been able to harmonise these two points of view as to Israel’s relation to the Gentile world, but both thoughts vibrate in his song. The designation of God as "making inquisition for blood" thinks of him as the Goel, or Avenger. To seek means, here to demand back as one who had entrusted property to another who had destroyed it would do, thence to demand compensation or satisfaction, and thus finally comes to mean to avenge or punish (so Hupfeld, Delitzsch, etc.). "The poor" or "meek" (R.V and margin) whose cry is heard are the devout portion of the Jewish people, who are often spoken of in the Psalms and elsewhere as a class. The second part of the psalm begins with Psalms 9:13. The prayer in that verse is the only trace of trouble in the psalm. The rest is triumph and exultation. This, at first sight discordant, note has sorely exercised commentators; and the violent solution that the whole Cheth stanza (Psalms 9:13-14) should be regarded as "the cry of the meek," quoted by the psalmist, and therefore be put in inverted commas (though adopted by Delitzsch and Cheyne), is artificial and cold. If the view of the structure of the psalm given above is adopted, there is little difficulty in the connection. The victory has been completed over certain enemies, but there remain others; and the time for praise unmingled with petition has not yet come for the psalmist, as it never comes for any of us in this life. Quatre Bras is won, but Waterloo has to be fought tomorrow. The prayer takes account of the dangers still threatening, but it only glances at these, and then once more turns to look with hope on the accomplished deliverance. The thought of how God had lifted the suppliant up from the very gates of death heartens him to pray for all further mercy needed. Death is the lord of a gloomy prison house, the gates of which open inwards only and permit no egress. On its very threshold the psalmist had stood. But God had lifted him thence, and the remembrance wings his prayer. "The gates of the daughter of Zion" are in sharp, happy contrast with the frowning portals of death. A city’s gates are the place of cheery life, stir, gossip, business. Anything proclaimed there flies far. There the psalmist resolves that he will tell his story of rescue, which he believes was granted that it might be told. God’s purpose in blessing men is that they may open their lips to proclaim the blessings and so bring others to share in them. God’s end is the spread of his name, not for any good to Him, but because to know it is life to us. The Teth pair (Psalms 9:15-16) repeats the thoughts of the Gimel Stanza (Psalms 9:5-6), recurring to the same significant perfects and dwelling on the new thought that the destruction of the enemy was self-caused. As in Psalms 7:1-17, the familiar figure of the pitfall catching the hunter expresses the truth that all evil, and especially malice, recoils on its contriver. A companion illustration is added of the fowler’s (or hunter’s) foot being caught in his own snare. Psalms 9:16 presents the other view of retribution, which was the only one in Psalms 9:5-6, namely that it is a Divine act. It is God who executes judgment, and who "snareth the wicked," though it be "the work of his own hands" which weaves the snare. Both views are needed for the complete truth. This close of the retrospect of deliverance which is the main motive of the psalm is appropriately marked by the musical direction "Higgaion. Selah," which calls for a strain of instrumental music to fill the pause of the song and to mark the rapture of triumph in accomplished deliverance. The Yod stanza (Psalms 9:17-18), like the He and Vav stanzas (Psalms 9:7-10), passes to confidence for the future. The correspondence is very close, but the two verses of this stanza represent the four of the earlier ones; thus Psalms 9:17 answers to Psalms 9:7-8, while Psalms 9:18 is the representative of Psa 9:9-10. In Psalms 9:17 the "return to Sheol" is equivalent to destruction. In one view, men who cease to be may be regarded as going back to original nothingness, as in Psalms 90:3. Sheol is not here a place of punishment, but is the dreary dwelling of the dead, from the gates of which the psalmist had been brought up. Reduction to nothingness and yet a shadowy, dim life or death-in-life will certainly be the end of the wicked. The psalmist’s experience in his past deliverance entitles him to generalise thus. To forget God is the sure way to be forgotten. The reason for the certain destruction of the nations who forget God and for the psalmist’s assurance of it is (Psalms 9:18) the confidence he has that "the needy shall not always be forgotten." That confidence corresponds precisely to Psalms 9:9-10, and also looks back to the "hath remembered" and "not forgotten" of Psalms 9:12. They who remember God are remembered by Him; and their being remembered- i.e. by deliverance-necessitates the wicked’s being forgotten, and those who are forgotten by God perish. The second clause of Psa 9:18 echoes the other solemn word of doom from Psalms 9:3-6. There the fate of the evil-doers was set forth as "perishing"; their very memory was to "perish." But the "expectation of the poor shall not perish." Apparently fragile and to the eve of sense unsubstantial as a soap bubble, the devout man’s hope is more solid than the most solid-seeming realities, and will outlast them all. The final stanza (Psalms 9:19-20) does not take Kaph as it should do, but Qoph. Hence some critics suspect that this pair of verses has been added by another hand, but the continuity of sense is plain, and is against this supposition. The psalmist was not so bound to his form but that he could vary it, as here. The prayer of this concluding stanza circles round to the prayer in Psalms 9:13, as has been noticed, and so completes the whole psalm symmetrically. The personal element in Psalms 9:13 has passed away; and the prayer is general, just as the solo of praise in Psalms 9:1 broadened into the call for a chorus of voices in Psalms 9:12. The scope of the prayer is the very judgment which the previous stanza has contemplated as certain. The devout man’s desires are moulded on God’s promises, and his prayers echo these. "Let not mortal man grow strong," or rather "vaunt his strength." The word for man here connotes weakness. How ridiculous for him, being such as he is, to swell and swagger as if strong, and how certain his boasted strength is to shrivel like a leaf in the fire, if God should come forth, roused to action by his boasting! Psalms 9:20 closes the prayer with the cry that some awe-inspiring act of Divine justice may be flashed before the "nations," in order to force the conviction of their own weakness home to them. "Set terror for them," the word terror meaning not the emotion, but the object which produces it, namely an act of judgment such as the whole psalm has had in view. Its purpose is not destruction, but conviction, the wholesome consciousness of weakness, out of which may spring the recognition of their own folly and of God’s strength to bless. So the two parts of the psalm end with the thought that the "nations" may yet come to know the name of God, the one calling upon those who have experienced his deliverance to "declare among the peoples His doings," the other praying God to teach by chastisement what nations who forget Him have failed to learn from mercies. Psalms 10:1-18 Psalms 9:1-20; Psalms 10:1-18 are alike in their imperfectly acrostic structure, the occurrence of certain phrases-e.g., the very uncommon expression for "times of trouble," (Psalms 9:9; Psalms 10:1) "Arise, O Lord" (Psalms 9:19; Psalms 10:12) -and the references to the nation’s judgment. But the differences are so great that the hypothesis of their original unity is hard to accept. As already remarked, the enemies are different. The tone of the one psalm is jubilant thanksgiving for victory won and judgment affected; that of the other is passionate portraiture of a rampant foe and cries for a judgment yet unmanifested. They are a pair, though why the psalmist should have bound together two songs of which the unlikenesses are at least as great as the likenesses it is not easy to discover. The circumstances of his day may have brought the cruelty of domestic robbers close upon the heels of foreign foes, as is often the case, but that is mere conjecture. The acrostic structure is continued into Psalms 10:1-18, as if the last stanza of 9 had begun with the regular Kaph instead of the cognate Qoph; but it then disappears till Psalms 10:12, from which point it continues to the end of the psalm, with the anomaly that one of the four stanzas has but one verse: the unusually long Psalms 10:14. These four stanzas are allotted to the four last letters of the alphabet. Six letters are thus omitted, to which twelve verses should belong. The nine non-acrostic verses (Psalms 10:3-11) are by some supposed to be substituted for the missing twelve, but there are too many verbal allusions to them in the subsequent part of the psalm to admit of their being regarded as later than it. Why, then, the break in the acrostic structure? It is noticeable that the (acrostic) Psalms 9:1-20 is wholly addressed to God, and that the parts of 10 which are addressed to Him are likewise acrostic, the section Psalms 10:3-11 being the vivid description of the "wicked," for deliverance from whom the psalmist prays. The difference of theme may be the solution of the difference of form, which was intended to mark off the prayer stanzas and to suggest, by the very continuity of the alphabetical scheme and the allowance made for the letters which do not appear, the calm flow of devotion and persistency, of prayer throughout the parenthesis of oppression. The description of the "wicked" is as a black rock damming the river, but it flows on beneath and emerges beyond. The psalm falls into two parts after the introductory verse of petition and remonstrance: Psalms 10:3-11, the grim picture of the enemy of the "poor"; and Psalms 10:12-18, the cry for deliverance and judgment. The first stanza (Psalms 10:1-2) gives in its passionate cry a general picture of the situation, which is entirely different from that of Psa 9:1-20. The two opposite characters, whose relations occupy so much of these early psalms, "the wicked" and "the poor," are, as usual, hunter and hunted, and God is passive, as if far away, and hiding His eyes. The voice of complaining but devout remonstrance is singularly like the voice of arrogant godlessness (Psalms 10:4-11), but the fact which brings false security to the one moves the other "to prayer. The boldness and the submissiveness of devotion are both throbbing in that "Why?" and beneath it lies the entreaty to break this apparent apathy. Psalms 10:2 spreads the facts of the situation before God. "Through the pride of the "wicked the afflicted is burned," i.e., with anguish, pride being the fierce fire and burning being a vigorous expression for anguish, or possibly for destruction. The ambiguous next clause may either have "the wicked" or "the poor" for its subject. If the former (R.V), it is a prayer that the retribution which has been already spoken of in Psalms 9:1-20 may fall, but the context rather suggests the other construction, carrying on the description of the sufferings of the poor, with an easy change to the plural, since the singular is a collective. This, then, being how things stand, the natural flow of thought would be the continuance of the prayer; but the reference to the enemy sets the psalmist on fire, and he "burns" in another fashion, flaming out into a passionate portraiture of the wicked, which is marked as an interruption to the current of his song by the cessation of the acrostic arrangement. The picture is drawn with extraordinary energy, and describes first the character (Psalms 10:3-6) and then the conduct of the wicked. The style reflects the vehemence of the psalmist’s abhorrence, being full of gnarled phrases and harsh constructions. As with a merciless scalpel the inner heart of the man is laid open. Observe the recurrence of "saith," "thoughts," and "saith in his heart." But first comes a feature of character which is open and palpable. He "boasts of his soul’s desire." What is especially flagrant in that? The usual explanation is that he is not ashamed of his shameful lusts, but glories in them, or that he boasts of succeeding in all that he desires. But what will a good man do with his heart’s desires? Psalms 10:17 tells us, namely breathe them to God; and therefore to boast of them instead is the outward expression of godless self-confidence and resolve to consult inclination and not God. The word rendered boast has the two significations of pray and boast, and the use of it here, in the worse one, is parallel with the use of bless or renounce in the next clause. The wicked is also "rapacious," for "covetous" is too weak. He grasps all that he can reach by fair or foul means. Such a man in effect and by his very selfish greed "renounces, contemns God." He may be a worshipper; but his "blessing" is like a parting salutation, dismissing Him to whom it is addressed. There is no need to suppose that conscious apostacy is meant. Rather the psalmist is laying bare the under meaning of the earth-bound man’s life, and in effect anticipates Christ’s "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" and Paul’s "covetousness which is idolatry." The next trait of character is practical atheism and denial of Divine retribution. The Hebrew is rough and elliptical, but the A.V misses its point, which the R.V gives by the introduction of "saith." "The pride of his countenance" is literally "the elevation of his nose." Translate those upturned nostrils into words, and they mean that God will not require (seek, in the sense of punish). But a God who does not punish is a dim shape, through which the empty sky is seen, and the denial (or forgetfulness) of God’s retributive judgment is equivalent to denying that there is a God at all. Thus armed, the wicked is in fancied security. "His ways are firm"-i.e., he prospers-and, in the very madness of arrogance, he scoffs at God’s judgments as too high up to be seen. His scoff is a truth, for how can eyes glued to earth see the solemn lights that move in the heavens? Purblind men say, We do not see them, and mean, They are not; but all that their speech proves is their own blindness. Defiant of God, he is truculent to men, and "snorts contempt at his enemies." "In his heart he says, I shall not be moved." The same words express the sane confidence of the devout soul and the foolish presumption of the man of the earth; but the one says, "because He is at my right hand," and the other trusts in himself. "To all generations I shall not be in adversity" (R.V). The Hebrew is gnarled and obscure; and attempts to amend the text have been made (compare Cheyne, Gratz in loc.), but needlessly. The confidence has become almost insane, and has lost sight altogether of the brevity of life. "His inward thought is that he shall continue forever". (Psalms 49:1-20) "Pride stifles reason. The language of the heart cannot be translated into spoken words without seeming exaggeration" (Cheyne). He who can be so blind to facts as to find no God may well carry his blindness a step further and wink hard enough to see no death, or may live as if he did not. Following the disclosure of the inner springs of life in the secret thoughts comes, in Psalms 10:7-10, the outcome of these in word and deed. When the wicked "lets the rank tongue blossom into speech," the product is affronts to God and maledictions, lies, mischiefs, for men. These stuff the mouth full, and lie under the tongue as sweet morsels for the perverted taste or as stored there, ready to be shot out. The deeds match the words. The vivid picture of a prowling lion seems to begin in Psalms 10:8, though it is sometimes taken as the unmetaphorical description of the wicked man’s crime. The stealthy couching of the beast of prey, hiding among the cover round the unwalled village or poorly sheltered fold, the eyes gleaming out of the darkness and steadfastly fixed on the victim with a baleful light in them, belong to the figure, which is abruptly changed in one clause (Psalms 10:9 c) into that of a hunter with his net, and then is resumed and completed in Psalms 10:10, where the R.V is, on the whole, to be preferred-"He croucheth; he boweth down"-as resuming the figure at the point where it had been interrupted and finishing it in the next clause, with the helpless victim fallen into the grip of the strong claws. With great emphasis the picture is rounded off (Psalms 10:11) with the repetition of the secret thought of God’s forgetfulness, which underlies the cruel oppression. This whole section indicates a lawless condition in which open violence, robbery, and murder were common. In Hosea’s vigorous language, "blood touched blood," the splashes being so numerous that they met, and the land was red with them. There is no reason to suppose that the picture is ideal or exaggerated. Where in the turbulent annals of Israel it is to be placed must remain uncertain; but that it is a transcript of bitter experience is obvious, and the aspect which it presents should be kept in view as a corrective of the tendency to idealise the moral condition of Israel, which at no time was free from dark stains, and which offered only too many epochs of disorganisation in which the dark picture of the psalm could have been photographed from life. The phrases for the victims in this section are noteworthy: "the innocent"; "the helpless"; "the poor." Of these the first and last are frequent, and the meaning obvious. There is a doubt whether the last should be regarded as the designation of outward condition or of disposition, i.e. whether "meek" or "poor" is the idea. There are two cognate words in Hebrew, one of which means one who is bowed down, i.e. by outward troubles, and the other one who bows himself down, i.e. is meek. The margin of the Hebrew Bible is fond of correcting these words when they occur in the text and substituting the one for the other, but arbitrarily; and it is doubtful whether in actual usage there is any real distinction between them. "Helpless" is a word only found in this psalm (Psalms 10:8, Psalms 10:10, Psalms 10:14), which has received various explanations, but is probably derived from a root meaning to be black, and hence comes to mean miserable, hapless, or the like. All the designations refer to a class-namely, the devout minority, the true Israel within Israel-and hence the plurals in Psalms 10:10, Psalms 10:12, and Psalms 10:17. The second part of the psalm (Psalms 10:12-18) is the prayer, forced from the heart of the persecuted remnant, God’s little flock in the midst of wolves. No trace of individual reference appears in it, nor any breath of passion or vengeance, such as is found in some of the psalms of persecution; but it glows with indignation at the blasphemies which are, for the moment, triumphant, and cries aloud to God for a judicial act which shall shatter the dream that He does not see and will not requite. That impious boast, far more than the personal incidence of sufferings, moves the prayer. As regards its form, the reappearance of the acrostic arrangement is significant, as is the repetition of the prayer and letter of Psa 9:19, which binds the two psalms together. The acrostic reappears with the direct address to God. The seven verses of the prayer are divided by, it into four groups, one of which is abnormal as containing but one verse, the unusual length of which, however, somewhat compensates for the irregularity (Psalms 10:14). The progress of thought in them follows the logic of emotional prayer rather than of the understanding. First, there are a vehement cry for God’s intervention and a complaint of His mysterious apparent apathy. The familiar figure for the Divine flashing forth of judgment, Arise, O Lord, is intensified by the other cry that He would "lift His hand." A God who has risen from His restful throne and raised His arm is ready to bring it down with a shattering blow; but before it falls the psalmist spreads in God’s sight the lies of the scornful men. They had said (Psalms 10:11) that He forgot; the prayer pleads that He would not forget. Their confidence was that He did not see nor would requite; the psalmist is bold to ask the reason for the apparent facts which permit such a thought. The deepest reverence will question God in a fashion which would be daring, if it were not instinct with the assurance of the clearness of His Divine knowledge of evil and of the worthiness of the reasons for its impunity. "Wherefore doest Thou thus?" may be insolence or faith. Next, the prayer centres itself on the facts of faith, which sense does not grasp (Psalms 10:14). The specific acts of oppression which force out the psalmist’s cry are certainly "seen" by God, for it is His very nature to look on all such ("Thou" in Psalms 10:14 is emphatic); and faith argues from the character to the acts of God and from the general relation of all sin towards Him to that which at present afflicts the meek. But is God’s gaze on the evil an idle look? No; he sees, and the sight moves Him to act. Such is the force of "to take it into Thy hand," which expresses the purpose and issue of the beholding. What He sees He "takes in hand," as we say, with a similar colloquialism. If a man believes these things about God, it will follow of course that he will leave himself in God’s hand, that uplifted hand which prayer has moved. So Psalms 10:14 is like a great picture in two compartments, as Raphael’s Transfiguration. Above is God, risen with lifted arm, beholding and ready to strike; beneath is the helpless man, appealing to God by the very act of "leaving" himself to Him. That absolute reliance has an all-prevalent voice which reaches the Divine heart, as surely as her child’s wail the mother’s: and wherever it is exercised the truth of faith which the past has established becomes a truth of experience freshly confirmed. The form of the sentence in the Hebrew (the substantive verb with a participle, "Thou hast been helping") gives prominence to the continuousness of the action: It has always been Thy way, and it is so still. Of course "fatherless" here is tantamount to the "hapless," or poor, of the rest of the psalm. Then at last comes the cry for the descent of God’s uplifted hand (Psalms 10:15-16). It is not invoked to destroy, but simply to "break the arm" of the wicked, i.e., to make him powerless for mischief, as a swordsman with a shattered arm is one blow from God’s hand lames, and the arm hangs useless. The impious denial of the Divine retribution still affects the psalmist with horror; and he returns to it in the second clause of Psa 10:15: in which he prays that God would "seek out"-i.e., require and requite, so as to abolish, and make utterly nonexistent-the wicked man’s wickedness. The yearning of every heart that beats in sympathy with and devotion to God, especially when it is tortured by evil experienced or beheld flourishing unsmitten, is for its annihilation. There is no prayer here for the destruction of the doer; but the reduction to nothingness of his evil is the worthy aspiration of all the good, and they who have no sympathy with such a cry as this have either small experience of evil, or a feeble realisation of its character. The psalmist was heartened to pray his prayer, because "the nations are perished out of His land." Does that point back to the great instance of exterminating justice in the destruction of the Canaanites? It may do so, but it is rather to be taken as referring to the victories celebrated in the companion psalm. Note the recurrence of the words "nations" and "perished," which are drawn from it. The connection between the two psalms is thus witnessed, and the deliverance from foreign enemies, which is the theme of Psa 9:1-20, is urged as a plea with God and taken as a ground of confidence by the psalmist himself for the completion of the deliverance by making domestic oppressors powerless. This lofty height of faith is preserved in the closing stanza, in which the agitation of the first part and the yearning of the second are calmed into serene assurance that the Ecclesia pressa has not cried nor ever can cry in vain. Into the praying, trusting heart "the peace of God, which passeth understanding," steals, and the answer is certified to faith long before it is manifest to sense. To pray and immediately to feel the thrilling consciousness, "Thou hast heard," is given to those who pray in faith. The wicked makes a boast of his "desire"; the humble makes a prayer of it, and so has it fulfilled. Desires which can be translated into petitions will be converted into fruition. If the heart is humble, that Divine breath will be breathed over and into it which will prepare it to desire only what accords with God’s will, and the prepared heart will always find God’s ear open. The cry of the hapless, which has been put into their lips by God Himself, is the appointed prerequisite of the manifestations of Divine judgment which will relieve the earth of the incubus of "the man of the earth." "Shall not God avenge His own elect, though He bear long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily." The prayer of the humble, like a whisper amid the avalanches, has power to start the swift, white destruction on its downward path; and when once that gliding mass has way on it, nothing which it smites can stand. Psalms 11:1-7 The correctness of the superscription is, in the present case, defended by Ewald and Hitzig. Delitzsch refers the psalm to the eve of Absalom’s conspiracy, while other supporters of the Davidic authorship prefer the Sauline persecution. The situation as described in the psalm corresponds sufficiently well to either of these periods, in both of which David was surrounded by stealthy hostility and counselled by prudence to flight. But there are no definite marks of date in the psalm itself; and all that is certain is its many affinities with the other psalms of the group which Cheyne calls the "persecution psalms," including Psalms 37:9-14; Psalms 37:17. These resemblances make a common authorship probable. The structure of the psalm is simple and striking. There are two vividly contrasted halves; the first gives the suggestions of timid counsellors who see only along the low levels of earth, the second the brave answer of faith which looks up into heaven. In the first part (Psalms 11:1-3) the psalmist begins with an utterance of faith, which makes him recoil with wonder and aversion from the cowardly, well-meant counsels of his friends. "In Jehovah have I taken refuge"-a profession of faith which in Psalms 7:1-17. I was laid as the basis of prayer for deliverance and is here the ground for steadfastly remaining where he stands. The metaphor of flight to a stronghold, which is in the word for trust, obviously colours the context, for what can be more absurd than that he who has sought and found shelter in God Himself should listen to the whisperings of his own heart or to the advice of friends and hurry to some other hiding place? "He that believeth shall not make haste," and, even when the floods come, shall not need to seek in wild hurry for an asylum above the rising waters. Safe in God, the psalmist wonders why such counsel should be given, and his question expresses its irrationality and his rejection of it. But these timid voices spoke to his "soul," and the speakers are undefined. Is he apostrophising his own lower nature? Have we here a good man’s dialogue with himself? Were there two voices in him: the voice of sense, which spoke to the soul, and that of the soul, which spoke authoritatively to sense? Calvin finds here the mention of spirituales luctas; and whether there were actual counsellors of flight or no, no doubt prudence and fear said to and in his soul, "Flee." If we might venture to suppose that the double thought of the oneness of the psalmist’s personality and the manifoldness of his faculties was in his mind, we should have an explanation of the strange fluctuation between singulars and plurals in Psalms 11:1 b. "Flee" is plural, but is addressed to a singular subject: "my soul"; "your" is also plural, and "bird" singular. The Hebrew marginal correction smooths away the first anomaly by reading the singular imperative, but that leaves the anomaly in "your." The LXX and other old versions had apparently a slightly different text, which got rid of that anomaly by reading (with the addition of one letter and a change in the division of words), "Flee to the mountain as a bird"; and that is probably the best solution of the difficulty. One can scarcely fail to recall the comparison of David to a partridge hunted on the mountains. Cheyne finds in the plurals a proof that "it is the Church within the Jewish nation of which the poet thinks." The timid counsel is enforced by two considerations: the danger of remaining a mark for the stealthy foe and the nobler thought of the hopelessness of resistance, and therefore the quixotism of sacrificing one’s self in a prolongation of it. The same figure employed in Psalms 7:12 of God’s judgments on the wicked is here used of the wicked’s artillery against the righteous. The peril is imminent, for the bows are bent, and the arrows already fitted to the string. In midnight darkness the assault will be made. (compare Psalms 64:3-4) The appeal to the instinct of self-preservation is reinforced by the consideration (Psalms 11:3) of the impotence of efforts to check the general anarchy. The particle at the beginning of the verse is best taken as in the same sense as at the beginning of Psa 11:2, thus introducing a second coordinate reason for the counsel. The translation of it as hypothetical or temporal (if or when) rather weakens the urgency of Psa 11:3 as a motive for flight. The probably exaggerated fears of the advisers, who are still speaking, are expressed in two short, breathless sentences: "The foundations [of society] are being torn down; the righteous-what has he achieved?" or possibly, "What can he do?" In either case, the implication is, Why wage a hopeless conflict any longer at the peril of life? All is lost; the wise thing to do is to run. It is obvious that this description of the dissolution of the foundations of the social order is either the exaggeration of fear, or poetic generalisation from an individual case (David’s), or refers the psalm to some time of anarchy, when things were much worse than even in the time of Saul or Absalom. All these suggestions may well represent the voice of our own fears, the whispers of sense and sloth, which ever dwell on and exaggerate the perils in the road of duty, and bid us abandon resistance to prevailing evils as useless and betake ourselves to the repose and security of some tempting nest far away from strife. But such counsels are always base, and though they be the result of "prudence," are short-sighted, and leave out precisely the determining factor in the calculation. The enemy may have fitted his arrows to the string, but there is another bow bent which will be drawn before his. (Psalms 7:12) The foundations are not being destroyed, however many and strong the arms that are trying to dig them up. The righteous has done much, and can do more, though his work seem wasted. Self-preservation is not a man’s first duty: flight is his last. Better and wiser and infinitely nobler to stand a mark for the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and to stop at our post though we fall there, better infinitely to toil on, even when toil seems vain, than cowardly to keep a whole skin at the cost of a wounded conscience or despairingly to fling up work, because the ground is hard and the growth of the seed imperceptible. Prudent advices, when the prudence is only inspired by sense, are generally foolish; and the only reasonable attitude is obstinate hopefulness and brave adherence to duty. So the psalm turns, in its second part, from these creeping counsels, which see but half the field of vision, and that the lower, to soar and gaze on the upper half. "God is in heaven; all’s right with the world," and with the good men who are trying to help to make it right. The poet opposes to the picture drawn by fear the vision of the opened heaven and the throned Jehovah. In Psalms 11:4 the former part is not to be taken as a separate affirmation: "The Lord is," etc., but "Jehovah" is a nominative absolute, and the weight of the sentence falls on the last clause. The "holy palace" in which Jehovah is beheld enthroned is not on earth, as the parallelism of the clauses shows. To the eyes that have seen that vision and before which it ever burns, all earthly sorrows and dangers seem small. There is the true asylum of the hunted soul; that is the mountain to which it is wise to flee. If the faint hearted had seen that sight, their timid counsels would have caught a new tone. They are preposterous to him who does see it. For not only does he behold Jehovah enthroned, but he sees Him scrutinising all men’s acts. We bring the eyelids close when minutely examining any small thing. So God is by a bold figure represented as doing, and the word for "beholds" has to divide as its root idea, and hence implies a keen discriminating gaze. As fire tries metal, so He tries men. And the result of the trial is twofold, as is described in the two clauses of Psa 11:5, which each require to be completed from the other: "The Lord trieth the righteous (and finding him approved, loveth), but the wicked" (He trieth, and finding him base metal), His soul "hateth." In the former clause the process of trial is mentioned, and its result omitted; in the latter the process is omitted, and the result described. The strong anthropomorphism which attributes a "soul" to God and "hatred" to His soul is not to be slurred over as due to the imperfection of Hebrew ideas of the Divine nature. There is necessarily in the Divine nature an aversion to evil and to the man who has so completely given himself over to it as to "love" it. Such perverted love can only have turned to it that side of the Divine character which in gravity of disapprobation and recoil from evil answers to what we call hate, but neither desires to harm nor is perturbed by passion. The New Testament is as emphatic as the Old in asserting the reality of "the wrath of God." But there are limitation and imperfection in this psalm in that it does not transcend the point of view which regards man’s conduct as determining God’s attitude. Retribution, not forgiveness nor the possibility of changing the moral bias of character, is its conception of the relations of man and God. The Divine estimate, which in Psalms 11:5 is the result of God’s trial of the two classes, is carried forward in Psalms 11:6-7 to its twofold issues. But the form of Psa 11:6 is that of a wish, not of a prediction; and here again we encounter the tone which, after all allowances, must be regarded as the result of the lower stage of revelation on which the psalmist stood, even though personal revenge need not be ascribed to him. In the terrible picture of the judgment poured down from the open heavens into which the singer has been gazing, there is a reproduction of the destruction of the cities of the plain, the fate of which stands in the Old Testament as the specimen and prophecy of all subsequent acts of judgment. But the rain from heaven is conceived as consisting of "snares," which is a strangely incongruous idea. Such mingled metaphors are less distasteful to Hebrew poets than to Western critics; and the various expedients to smooth this one away, such as altering the text and neglecting the accents and reading "coals of fire," are unnecessary sacrifices to correctness of style. Delitzsch thinks that the "snares" are "a whole discharge of lassoes," i.e., lightnings, the zigzag course of which may be compared to a "noose thrown down from above"! The purpose of the snares is to hold fast the victims so that they cannot escape the fiery rain-a terrible picture, the very incongruity of figure heightening the grim effect. The division of the verse according to the accents tarts the snares from the actual components of the fatal shower, and makes the second half of the verse an independent clause, which is probably to be taken, like the former clause, as a wish: "Fire and brimstone and a burning wind [Zornhauch, Hupfeld] be the portion of their cup," again an incongruity making the representation more dreadful. What a draught-flaming brimstone and a hot blast as of the simoom! The tremendous metaphor suggests awful reality. But the double judgment of Psa 11:5 has a gentler side, and the reason for the tempest of wrath is likewise that for the blessed hope of the upright, as the "for" of Psalms 11:7 teaches. "Jehovah is righteous." That is the rock foundation for the indomitable faith of the Psalter in the certain ultimate triumph of patient, afflicted righteousness. Because God in his own character is so, He must love righteous acts-His own and men’s. The latter seems to be the meaning here, where the fate of men is the subject in hand. The Divine "love" is here contrasted with both the wicked man’s "love" of "violence" and God’s "hate" (Psalms 11:5), and is the foundation of the final confidence, "The upright shall behold His face." The converse rendering, "His countenance doth behold the upright" (A.V). is grammatically permissible. but would be flat, tautological-since Psalms 11:4 has already said so-and inappropriate to the close. where a statement as to the upright, antithetical to that as to the wicked, is needed. God looks on the upright, as has been said; and the upright shall gaze on Him, here and now in the communion of that faith which is a better kind of sight and hereafter in the vision of heaven, which the psalmist was on the verge of anticipating. That mutual gaze is blessedness. They who looking up behold Jehovah are brave to front all foes and to keep calm hearts in the midst of alarms. Hope burns like a pillar of fire in them when it is gone out in others; and to all the suggestions of their own timidity or of others they have the answer, "In the Lord have I put my trust; how say ye to my soul, Flee? Here I stand; I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen." Psalms 12:1-8 ONE penalty of living near God is keen pain from low lives. The ears that hear God’s word cannot but be stunned and hurt by the babble of empty speech. This psalm is profoundly melancholy, but without trace of personal affliction. The psalmist is not sad for himself, but sick of the clatter of godless tongues, in which he discerns the outcome of godless lives. His plaint wakes echoes in hearts touched by the love of God and the visions of man’s true life. It passes through four clearly marked stages, each consisting of two verses: despondent contemplation of the flood of corrupt talk which seems to submerge all (Psalms 12:1-2); a passionate prayer for Divine intervention, wrung from the psalmist by the miserable spectacle (Psalms 12:3-4); the answer to that cry from the voice of God, with the rapturous response of the psalmist to it (Psalms 12:5-6); and the confidence built on the Divine word, which rectifies the too despondent complaint at the beginning, but is still shaded by the facts which stare him in the face (Psalms 12:7-8). The cry for help (Save, LXX) abruptly beginning the psalm tells of the sharp pain from which it comes. The psalmist has been brooding over the black outlook till his overcharged heart relieves itself in this single-worded prayer. As he looks round he sees no exceptions to the prevailing evil. Like Elijah, he thinks that he is left alone, and love to God and men and reliableness and truth are vanished with their representatives. No doubt in all such despondent thoughts about the rarity of Christian charity and of transparent truthfulness there is an element of exaggeration, which in the present case is, as we shall see, corrected by the process of God-taught meditation. But the clearer the insight into what society should be, the sadder the estimate of what it is. Roseate pictures of it augur ill for the ideal which their painters have. It is better to be too sensitive to evils than to be contented with them. Unless the passionate conviction of the psalmist has burned itself into us, we shall but languidly work to set things right. Heroes and reformers have all begun with "exaggerated estimates" of corruption. The judgment formed of the moral state of this or of any generation depends on the clearness with which we grasp as a standard the ideal realised in Jesus Christ and on the closeness of our communion with God. As in Psalms 5:1-12, sins of speech are singled out, and of these "vanity" and "smooth lips with a heart and a heart" are taken as typical. As in Ephesians 4:25, the guilt of falsehood is deduced from the bond of neighbourliness, which it rends. The sin, to which a "high civilisation" is especially prone, of saying pleasant things without meaning them, seems to this moralist as grave as to most men it seems slight. Is the psalmist right or wrong in taking speech for an even more clear index of corruption than deeds? What would he have said if he had been among us, when the press has augmented the power of the tongue, and floods of "vanity," not only in the form of actual lies, but of inane trivialities and nothings of personal gossip, are poured over the whole nation? Surely, if his canon is right, there is something rotten in the state of this land; and the Babel around may well make good men sad and wise men despondent. Shall we venture to follow the psalmist in the second turn of his thoughts (Psalms 12:3-4), where the verb at the beginning is best taken as an optative and rendered, "May Jehovah cut off"? The deepest meaning of his desire every true man will take for his own, namely the cessation of the sin; but the more we live in the spirit of Jesus the more we shall cherish the hope that that may be accomplished by winning the sinner. Better to have the tongue touched with a live coal from the altar than cut out. In the one case there is only a mute in the other an instrument for God’s praise. But the impatience of evil and the certainty that God can subdue it, which make the very nerve of the prayer, should belong to Christians yet more than to the psalmist. A new phase of sinful speech appears as provoking judgment even more than the former did. The combination of flattery and boastfulness is not rare, discordant as they seem; but the special description of the "proud things" spoken is that they are denials of responsibility to God or man for the use of lips and tongue. Insolence has gone far when it has formulated itself into definite statements. Twenty men will act on the principle for one who will put it into words. The conscious adoption and cynical avowal of it are a mark of defiance of God. "To our tongues we give strength"-an obscure expression which may be taken in various shades of meaning, e.g. as = We have power over, or = Through, or as to, our tongues we are strong, or = We will give effect to our words. Possibly it stands as the foundation of the daring defiance in the last clause of the verse, and asserts that the speaker is the author of his power of speech and therefore responsible to none for its use. "Our lips are with us" may be a further development of the same godless thought. "With us" is usually taken to mean "our allies," or confederates, but signifies rather "in our possession, to do as we will with them." "Who is lord over us?" There speaks godless insolence shaking off dependence, and asserting shamelessly licence of speech and life, unhindered by obligations to God and His law. With dramatic swiftness the scene changes in the next pair of verses (Psalms 12:5-6). That deep voice, which silences all the loud bluster, as the lion’s roar hushes the midnight cries of lesser creatures, speaks in the waiting soul of the psalmist. Like Hezekiah with Sennacherib’s letter, he spreads before the Lord the "words with which they reproach Thee," and, like Hezekiah. he has immediate answer. The inward assurance that God will arise is won by prayer at once, and changes the whole aspect of the facts which as yet remain unchanged. The situation does not seem so desperate when we know that God is moving. Whatever delay may intervene before the actual Divine act, there is none before the assurance of it calms the soul. Many wintry days may have to be faced, but a breath of spring has been in the air, and hope revives. The twofold reason which rouses the Divine activity is very strikingly put first in Psalms 12:5. Not merely the "oppression or spoiling of the meek," but that conjoined with the "sighing of the needy," bring God into the field. Not affliction alone, but affliction which impels to prayer, moves Him to "stir up His strength." "Now will I arise." That solemn "now" marks the crisis, or turning point, when long forbearance ends and the crash of retribution begins. It is like the whirr of the clock that precedes the striking. The swiftly following blow will ring out the old evil. The purpose of God’s intervention is the safety of the afflicted who have sighed to Him; but while that is clear, the condensed language of Psa 12:5 is extremely obscure. The AV rendering, "I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him," requires a too liberal use of supplemental words to eke out the sense; and the rendering of the R.V (margin), "the safety he panteth for," is most congruous with the run of the sentence and of the thought. What has just been described as a sigh is now, with equal naturalness, figured as a pant of eager desire. The former is the expression of the weight of the affliction, the latter of yearning to escape from it. The latter is vain waste of breath unless accompanied with the former, which is also a prayer; but if so accompanied, the desire of the humble soul is the prophecy of its own fulfilment: and the measure of the Divine deliverance is regulated by His servant’s longing. He will always, sooner or later, get "the safety for which he pants." Faith determines the extent of God’s gift. The listening psalmist rapturously responds in Psalms 12:6 to God’s great word. That word stands, with strong force of contrast, side by side with the arrogant chatter of irresponsible frivolity, and sounds majestic by the side of the shrill feebleness of the defiance. Now the psalmist lifts his voice in trustful acceptance of the oracle. The general sense of Psa 12:6 is clear, and the metaphor which compares God’s words to refined silver is familiar, but the precise meaning of the words rendered "in a furnace on the earth" (R.V) is doubtful. The word for "furnace" occurs only here, and has consequently been explained in very different ways, is omitted altogether by the LXX, and supposed by, Cheyne to be a remnant of an ancient gloss. But the meaning of furnace or crucible is fairly made out and appropriate. But what does "tried in a furnace to the earth" mean? The "on the earth" of the R.V is scarcely in accordance with the use of the preposition "to," and the best course is to adopt a supplement and read "tried in a furnace [and running down] to the earth." The sparkling stream of molten silver as, free from dross, it runs from the melting pot to the mould on the ground, is a beautiful figure of the word of God, clear of all the impurities of men’s words, which the psalm has been bewailing and raining down on the world. God’s words are a silver shower, precious and bright. The last turn of the psalm builds hope on the pure words just heard from heaven. When God speaks a promise, faith repeats it as a certitude and prophesies in the line of the revelation. "Thou shalt" is man’s answer to God’s "I will." In the strength of the Divine word, the despondency of the opening strain is brightened. The godly and faithful shall not "cease from among the children of men," since God will keep them; and His keeping shall preserve them. "This generation" describes a class rather than an epoch. It means the vain talkers who have been sketched in such dark colours in the earlier part of the psalm. These are "the children of men" among whom the meek and needy are to live, not failing before them because God holds them up. This hope is for the militant Church, whose lot is to stand for God amidst wide-flowing evil, which may swell and rage against the band of faithful ones, but cannot sweep them away. Not of victory which annihilates opposition, but of charmed lives invulnerable in conflict, is the psalmist’s confidence. There is no more lamenting of the extinction of good men and their goodness, neither is there triumphant anticipation of present extinction of bad men and their badness, but both are to grow together till the harvest. But even the pure words which promise safety and wake the response of faith do not wholly scatter the clouds. The psalm recurs very pathetically at its close to the tone of its beginning. Notice the repetition of "the children of men" which links Psalms 12:8 with Psalms 12:1. If the fear that the. faithful should fail is soothed by God’s promise heard by the psalmist sounding in his soul, the hard fact of dominant evil is not altered thereby. That "vileness is set on high among the sons of men" is the description of a world fumed upside down. Beggars are on horseback and princes walking. The despicable is honoured, and corruption is a recommendation to high position. There have been such epochs of moral dissolution; and there is always a drift in that direction, which is only checked by the influence of the "faithful." "If vileness is set on high among the sons of men," it is because the sons of men prefer it to the stern purity of goodness. A corrupt people will crown corrupt men and put them aloft. The average goodness of the community is generally fairly represented by its heroes, rulers, and persons to whom influence is given; and when such topsy-turvydom as the rule of the worst is in fashion, "the wicked walk on every side." Impunity breeds arrogance; and they swagger and swell, knowing that they are protected. Impunity multiplies the number; and on every side they swarm like vermin in a dirty house. But even when such an outlook saddens, the soul that has been in the secret place of the Most High and has heard the words of His mouth will not fall into pessimistic despondency, nor think that the faithful fail, because the wicked strut. When tempted to wail, "I, even I only, am left," such a soul will listen to the still small voice that tells of seven thousands of God’s hidden ones, and will be of good cheer, as knowing that God’s men can never cease so long as God continues. Psalms 13:1-6 THIS little psalm begins in agitation, and ends in calm. The waves run high at first, but swiftly sink to rest, and at last lie peacefully glinting in sunshine. It falls into three strophes, of which the first (Psalms 13:1-2) is the complaint of endurance strained almost to giving way; the second (Psalms 13:3-4) is prayer which feeds fainting faith; and the third (Psalms 13:5-6, which are one in the Hebrew) is the voice of confidence, which in the midst, of trouble, makes future deliverance and praise a present experience. However true it is that sorrow is "but for a moment," it seems to last for an eternity. Sad hours are leaden-footed, and joyful ones winged. If sorrows passed to our consciousness as quickly as joys, or joys lingered as long as sorrows, life would be less weary. That reiterated "How long?" betrays how weary it was to the psalmist. Very significant is the progress of thought in the fourfold questioning plaint, which turns first to God, then to himself, then to the enemy. The root of his sorrow is that God seems to have forgotten him; therefore his soul is full of plans for relief, and the enemy seems to be lifted above him. The "sorrow of the world" begins with the visible evil, and stops with the inward pain; the sorrow which betakes itself first to God, and thinks last of the foe, has trust embedded in its depths, and may unblamed use words which sound like impatience. If the psalmist had not held fast by his confidence, he would not have appealed to God. So the "illogical" combination in his first cry of "How long?" and "forever" is not to be smoothed away, but represents vividly, because unconsciously, the conflict in his soul from the mingling of the assurance that God’s seeming forgetfulness must have an end and the dread that it might have none. Luther, who had trodden the dark places, understood the meaning of the cry, and puts it beautifully when he says that here "hope itself despairs, and despair yet hopes, and only that unspeakable groaning is audible with which the Holy Spirit, who moves over the waters covered with darkness, intercedes for us." The psalmist is tempted to forget the confidence expressed in Psalms 9:18 and to sink to the denial animating the wicked in Psalms 10:11. The heart wrung by troubles finds little consolation in the mere intellectual belief in a Divine omniscience. An idle remembrance which does not lead to actual help is a poor stay for such a time. No doubt the psalmist knew that forgetfulness was impossible to God; but a God who, though He remembered, did nothing for, His servant, was not enough for him, nor is He for any of us. Heart and flesh cry out for active remembrance; and however clear the creed, the tendency of long-continued misery will be to tempt to the feeling that the sufferer is forgotten. It takes much grate to cling fast to the belief that He thinks of the poor suppliant whose cry for deliverance is unanswered. The natural inference is one or other of the psalmist’s two here: God has forgotten or has hidden His face in indifference or displeasure. The Evangelist’s profound "therefore" is the corrective of the psalmist’s temptation: "Jesus loved" the three sad ones at Bethany; "when therefore He heard that he was sick, He abode still two days in the place where He was." Left alone, without God’s help, what can a man do but think and think, plan and scheme to weariness all night and carry a heavy heart as he sees by daylight how futile his plans are? Probably "by night" should be supplied in Psalms 13:2 a; -and the picture of the gnawing cares and busy thoughts which banish sleep and of the fresh burst of sorrow on each new morning appeals only too well to all sad souls. A brother laments across the centuries, and his long-silent wail is as the voice of our own griefs. The immediate visible occasion of trouble appears only in the last of the fourfold cries. God’s apparent forgetfulness and the psalmist’s own subjective agitations are more prominent than the "enemy" who "lifts himself above him." His arrogant airs and oppression would soon vanish if God would arise. The insight which places him last in order is taught by faith. The soul stands between God and the external world, with all its possible calamities; and if the relation with God is right, and help is flowing unbrokenly from Him, the relation to the world will quickly come right, and the soul be lifted high above the foe, however lofty he be or think himself. The agitation of the first strophe is somewhat stilled in the second, in which the stream of prayer runs clear without such foam, as the impatient questions of the first part. It falls into four clauses, which have an approximate correspondence to those of strophe 1. "Look hither, answer me, Jehovah, my God." The first petition corresponds to the hiding of God’s face, and perhaps the second, by the law of inverted parallelism, may correspond to the forgetting, but in any case the noticeable thing is the swift decisiveness of spring with which the psalmist’s faith reaches firm ground here. Mark the implied belief that God’s look is not an otiose gaze, but brings immediate act answering the prayer; mark the absence of copula between the verbs giving force to the prayer and swiftness to the sequence of Divine acts; mark the outgoing of the psalmist’s faith in the addition to the name "Jehovah" (as in Psalms 13:1). "of the personal my God," with all the sweet and reverent appeal hived in the address. The third petition, "Lighten mine eyes," is not for illumination of vision, but for renewed strength. Dying eyes are glazed: a sick man’s are heavy and dull. Returning health brightens them. So here the figure of sickness threatening to become death stands for trouble or possibly the "enemy" is a real foe seeking the life. as will be the most natural interpretation if the Davidic origin is maintained. To "sleep death" is a forcible compressed expression, which is only attenuated by being completed. The prayer rests upon the profound conviction that Jehovah is the fountain of life, and that only by His continual pouring of fresh vitality into a man can any eyes be kept from death. The brightest must be replenished from His hand, or they fail and become dim; the dimmest can be brightened by His gift of vigorous health. As in the first strophe the psalmist passed from God to self, and thence to enemies, so he does in the second. His prayer addresses God: its pleas, regard, first, himself, and, second, his foe. How is the preventing of the enemy’s triumph in his being, stronger than the psalmist and of his malicious joy over the latter’s misfortune an argument with God to help? It is the plea, so familiar in the Psalter and to devout hearts, that God’s honour is identified with His servant’s deliverance, a true thought, and one that may reverently be entertained by the humblest lover of God, but which needs to be carefully guarded. We must make very sure that God’s cause is ours before we can be sure that ours is His: we must be very completely living for His honour before we dare assume that His honour is involved in our continuing to live. As Calvin says, "Cum eo nobis communis erit haec precatio, si sub Dei imperio et auspiciis militamus." The storm has all rolled away in the third strophe, in which faith has triumphed over doubt: and anticipates the fulfilment of its prayer. It begins with an emphatic opposition of the psalmist’s personality to the foe: "But as for me"-however they may rage-"I have trusted in Thy mercy." Because he has thus trusted, therefore he is sure that that mercy will work for him salvation or deliverance from his present peril. Anything is possible rather than that the appeal of faith to God’s heart of love should not be answered. Whoever can say, I have trusted, has the right to say, I shall rejoice. It was but a moment ago that this man had asked, How long shall I have sorrow in my heart? and now the sad heart is flooded with sudden gladness. Such is the magic of faith, which can see an unrisen light in the thickest darkness, and hear the birds singing amongst the branches even while the trees are bare and the air silent. How significant the contrast of the two rejoicings set side by side: the adversaries’ when the good man is "moved": the good man’s when God’s salvation establishes him in his place! The closing strain reaches forward to deliverance not yet accomplished, and, by the prerogative of trust, calls things that are not as though they were. "He has dealt bountifully with me"; so says the psalmist who had begun with "How long?" No external change has taken place; but his complaint and prayer have helped him to tighten his grasp of God, and have transported him into the certain future of deliverance and praise. He who can thus say, "I will sing," when the hoped for mercy has wrought salvation, is not far off singing even while it tarries. The sure anticipation of triumph is triumph. The sad minor of "How long?" if coming from faithful lips, passes into a jubilant key, which heralds the full gladness of the yet future songs of deliverance. Psalms 14:1-7 THIS psalm springs from the same situation as Psalms 10:1-18; Psalms 12:1-8. It has several points of likeness to both. It resembles the former in its attribution to "the fool" of the heart speech, "There is no God," and the latter in its use of the phrases "sons of men" and "generation" as ethical terms and in its thought of a Divine interference as the source of safety for the righteous. We have thus three psalms closely connected, but separated from each other by Psalms 11:1-7; Psalms 13:1-6. Now it is observable that these three have no personal references, and that the two which part them have. It would appear that the five are arranged on the principle of alternating a general complaint of the evil of the times with a more personal pleading of an individual sufferer. It is also noticeable that these five psalms-a little group of wailing and sighs-are marked off from the cognate Psalms 3:1-8; Psalms 4:1-8; Psalms 5:1-12; Psalms 6:1-10; Psalms 7:1-17; Psalms 16:1-11; Psalms 17:1-15, by two (Psalms 8:1-9; Psalms 15:1-5) in an entirely different tone. A second recast of this psalm appears in the Elohistic Book, (Psalms 53:1-6) the characteristics of which will be dealt with there. This is probably the original. The structure of the psalm is simple, but is not carried out completely. It should consist of seven verses each having three clauses, and so having stamped on it the sacred Numbers 3:1-51; Numbers 7:1-89, but Psalms 14:5 and Psalms 14:6 each want a clause, and are the more vehement from their brevity. The heavy fact of widespread corruption presses on the psalmist, and starts a train of thought which begins with a sad picture of the deluge of evil, rises to a vision of God’s judgment of and on it, triumphs in the prospect of the sudden panic which shall shake the souls of the "workers of iniquity" when they see that God is with the righteous, and ends with a sigh for the coming of that time. The staple of the poem is but the familiar contrast of a corrupt world and a righteous God who judges, but it is cast into very dramatic and vivid form here. We listen first (Psalms 14:1) to the psalmist’s judgment of his generation. Probably it was very unlike the rosy hues in which a heart less in contact with God and the unseen would have painted the condition of things. Eras of great culture and material prosperity may have a very seamy side, which eyes accustomed to the light of God cannot fail to see. The root of the evil lay, as the psalmist believed, in a practical denial of God; and whoever thus denied Him was "a fool." It does not need formulated atheism in order to say in one’s heart, "There is no God." Practical denial or neglect of His working in the world, rather than a creed of negation, is in the psalmist’s mind. In effect, we say that there is no God when we shut Him up in a far-off heaven, and never think of Him as concerned in our affairs. To strip Him of His justice and rob Him of His control is the part of a fool. For the Biblical conception of folly is moral perversity rather than intellectual feebleness, and whoever is morally and religiously wrong cannot be in reality intellectually right. The practical denial of God lies at the root of two forms of evil. Positively, "they have made their doings corrupt and abominable"-rotten in themselves and sickening and loathsome to pure hearts and to God. Negatively, they do no good things. That is the dreary estimate of his contemporaries forced on this sad-hearted singer, because he himself had so thrillingly felt God’s touch and had therefore been smitten with loathing of men’s low ways and with a passion for goodness. "Sursum corda" is the only consolation for such hearts. So the next wave of thought (Psalms 14:2) brings into his consciousness the solemn contrast between the godless noise and activity of earth and the silent gaze of God, that marks it all. The strong anthropomorphism of the vivid picture recalls the stories of the Deluge, of Babel, and of Sodom, and casts an emotional hue over the abstract thought of the Divine omniscience and observance. The purpose of the Divine quest is set forth with deep insight, as being the finding of even one good, devout man. It is the anticipation of Christ’s tender word to the Samaritan that "the Father seeketh such to worship Him." God’s heart yearns to find hearts that turn to Him; He seeks those who seek Him; they who seek Him, and only they, are "wise." Other Scriptures present other reasons for that gaze of God from heaven, but this one in the midst of its solemnity is gracious with revelation of Divine desires. What is to be the issue of the strongly contrasted situation in these two verses: beneath, a world full of godless lawlessness; above, a fixed eye piercing to the discernment of the inmost nature of actions and characters? Psalms 14:3 answers. We may almost venture to say that it shows a disappointed God, so sharply does it put the difference between what He desired to see and what He did see. The psalmist’s sad estimate is repeated as the result of the Divine search. But it is also increased in emphasis and in compass. For "the whole" (race) is the subject. Universality is insisted on in each clause; "all," "together," "not one," and strong metaphors are used to describe the condition of humanity. It is "turned aside," i.e., from the way of Jehovah; it is become putrid, like a rotting carcase, is rank, and smells to heaven. There is a sad cadence in that "no, not one," as of a hope long cherished and reluctantly abandoned, not without some tinge of wonder at the barren results of such a search. This stern indictment is quoted by St. Paul in Romans as confirmation of his thesis of universal sinfulness; and, however the psalmist had the wickedness of Israel in the foreground of his consciousness, his language is studiously wide and meant to include all "the sons of men." But this baffled quest cannot be the end. If Jehovah seeks in vain for goodness on earth, earth cannot go on forever in godless riot. Therefore, with eloquent abruptness, the voice from heaven crashes in upon the "fools" in the full career of their folly. The thunder rolls from a clear sky. God speaks in Psalms 14:4. The three clauses of the Divine rebuke roughly correspond with those of Psa 14:1 in so far as the first points to ignorance as the root of wrong doing, the second charges positive sin, and the third refers to negative evil. "Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge?" The question has almost a tone of surprise, as if even Omniscience found matter of wonder in men’s mysterious love of evil. Jesus "marvelled" at some men’s "unbelief"; and certainly sin is the most inexplicable thing in the world, and might almost astonish God as well as heaven and earth. The meaning of the word "know" here is best learned from Psalms 14:1. "Not to know" is the same thing as to be "a fool." That ignorance, which is moral perversity as well as intellectual blindness, needs not to have a special object stated. Its thick veil hides all real knowledge of God, duty, and consequences from men. It makes evil doing possible. If the evildoer could have flashed before him the realities of things, his hand would stay its crime. It is not true that all sin can be resolved into ignorance, but it is true that criminal ignorance is necessary to make sin possible. A bull shuts its eyes when it charges. Men who do wrong are blind in one eye at least, for, if they saw at the moment what they probably know well enough, sin would be impossible. This explanation of the words seems more congruous with Psalms 14:1 than that of others, "made to know," i.e. by experience to rue. Psalms 14:4 b is obscure from its compressed brevity. "Eating my people, they eat bread." The A.V and R.V take their introduction of the "as" of comparison from the old translations. The Hebrew has no term of comparison, but it is not unusual to omit the formal term in rapid and emotional speech, and the picture of the appetite with which a hungry man devours his food may well stand for the relish with which the oppressors swallowed up the innocent. There seems no need for the ingenuities which have been applied to the interpretation of the clause, nor for departing, with Cheyne, from the division of the verse according to the accents. The positive sins of the oppressors, of which we have heard so much in the connected psalms, are here concentrated in their cruel plundering of "my people," by which the whole strain of the psalm leads us to understand the devout kernel of Israel, in contrast with the mass of "men of the earth" in the nation, and not the nation as a whole in contrast with heathen enemies. The Divine indictment is completed by "They call not on Jehovah." Practical atheism is, of course, prayerless. That negation makes a dreary silence in the noisiest life, and is in one aspect the crown, and in another the foundation, of all evil doing. The thunder peal of the Divine voice strikes a sudden panic into the hosts of evil. "There they feared a fear." The psalmist conceives the scene and its locality. He does not say, "there" when he means "then," but he pictures the terror seizing the oppressors where they stood when the Divine thunder rolled above their heads; and with him, as with us, "on the spot" implies "at the moment." The epoch of such panic is left vague. Whensoever in any man’s experience that solemn voice sounds, conscience wakes fear. The revelation by any means of a God who sees evil and judges it makes cowards of us all. Probably the psalmist thought of some speedily impending act of judgment; but his juxtaposition of the two facts, the audible voice of God and the swift terror that shakes the heart, contains an eternal truth, which men who whisper in their hearts, "There is no God," need to ponder. This verse (Psalms 14:5) is the first of the two shorter verses of our psalm, containing only two clauses instead of the regular three; but it does not therefore follow that anything has dropped out. Rather the framework is sufficiently elastic to allow of such variation according to the contents, and the shorter verse is not without a certain increase of vigour, derived from the sharp opposition of its two clauses. On the one hand is the terror of the sinner occasioned by and contrasted with the discovery which stands on the other that God is in the righteous generation. The psalmist sets before himself and us the two camps: the panic stricken and confused mass of enemies ready to break into flight and the little flock of the "righteous generation" at peace in the midst of trouble and foes because God is in the midst of them. No added clause could heighten the effect of that contrast, which is like that of a host of Israel walking in light and safety on one side of the fiery pillar and the army of Pharaoh groping in darkness and dread on the other. The permanent relations of God to the two sorts of men who are found in every generation and community are set forth in that strongly marked contrast. In Psalms 14:6 the psalmist himself addresses the oppressors, with triumphant confidence born of his previous contemplations. The first clause might be a question, but is more probably a taunting affirmation: "You would frustrate the plans of the afflicted"-and you could not-"for Jehovah is his refuge." Here again the briefer sentence brings out the eloquent contrast. The malicious foe seeking to thwart the poor man’s plans is thwarted. His desire is unaccomplished; and there is but one explanation of the impotence of the mighty and the powerfulness of the weak, namely that Jehovah is the stronghold of His saints. Not by reason of his own wit or power does the afflicted baffle the oppressor, but by reason of the strength and inaccessibleness of his hiding place. "The conies are a feeble folk, but they make their houses in the rocks," where nothing that has wings can get at them. So, finally, the whole course of thought gathers itself up in the prayer that the salvation of Israel-the true Israel apparently-were come out of Zion, God’s dwelling, from which He comes forth in His delivering power. The salvation longed for is that just described. The voice of the oppressed handful of good men in an evil generation is heard in this closing prayer. It is encouraged by the visions which have passed before the psalmist. The assurance that God will intervene is the very life breath of the cry to Him that he would. Because we know that He will deliver, therefore we find it in our hearts to pray that He would deliver. The revelation of His gracious purposes animates the longings for their realisation. Such a sigh of desire has no sadness in its longing and no doubt in its expectation. It basks in the light of an unrisen sun, and feels beforehand the gladness of the future joys "when the Lord shall bring again the captivity of His people." This last verse is by some regarded as a liturgical addition to the psalm; but Psalms 14:6 cannot be the original close, and it is scarcely probable that some other ending has been put aside to make room for this. Besides, the prayer of Psa 14:7 coheres very naturally with the rest of the psalm, if only we take that phrase "turns the captivity" in the sense which it admittedly bears in Job 42:10 and Ezekiel 16:53, namely that of deliverance from misfortune. Thus almost all modern interpreters understand the words, and even those who most strongly hold the late date of the psalm do not find here any reference to the historical bondage. The devout kernel of the nation is suffering from oppressors, and that may well be called a captivity. For a good man the present condition of society is bondage, as many a devout soul has felt since the psalmist did. But there is a dawning hope of a better day of freedom, the liberty of the glory of the children of God; and the gladness of the ransomed captives may be in some degree anticipated even now. The psalmist was thinking only of some intervention oil the field of history, and we are not to read loftier hopes into his song. But it is as impossible for Christians not to entertain, as it was for him to grasp firmly, the last, mightiest hope of a last, utter deliverance from all evil and of an eternal and perfect joy. Psalms 15:1-5 THE ideal worshipper of Jehovah is painted in this psalm in a few broad outlines. Zion is holy because God’s "tent" is there. This is the only hint of date given by the psalm; and all that can be said is that if that consecration of Thy hill was recent, the poet would naturally ponder all the more deeply the question of who were fit to dwell in the new solemnities of the abode of Jehovah. The tone of the psalm, then, accords with the circumstances of the time when David brought the ark to Jerusalem; but more than this cannot be affirmed. Much more important are its two maim points: the conception of the guests of Jehovah and the statement of the ethical qualifications of these. As to structure, the psalm is simple. It has first, the general question and answer in two verses of two clauses each (Psalms 15:1-2). Then the general description of the guest of God is expanded in three verses of three clauses each, the last of which closes with an assurance of stability, which varies and heightens the idea of dwelling in the tent of Jehovah. It is no mere poetic apostrophe with which the psalmist’s question is prefaced. He does thereby consult the Master of the house as to the terms on which He extends hospitality, which terms it is His right to prescribe. He brings to his own view and to his readers all that lies in the name of Jehovah, the covenant name, and all that is meant by "holiness," and thence draws the answer to his question, which is none the less Jehovah’s answer because it springs in the psalmist’s heart and is spoken by his lips. The character of the God determines the character of the worshipper. The roots of ethics are in religion. The Old Testament ideal of the righteous man flows from its revelation of the righteous God. Not men’s own fancies, but insight gained by communion with God and docile inquiry of Him, will reliably tell what manner of men they are who can abide in His light. The thought, expressed so forcibly in the question of the psalm, that men may be God’s guests, is a very deep and tender one, common to a considerable number of psalms. (Psalms 15:5, Psalms 27:4; Psalms 84:5, etc.) The word translated "abide" in the A.V and "sojourn" in the R.V originally implied a transient residence as a stranger, but when applied to men’s relations to God, it does not always preserve the idea of transiency (see, for instance, Psalms 61:4: "I will dwell in Thy tent forever"); and the idea of protection is the most prominent. The stranger who took refuge in the tent of the wild Beduin was safe, much more the happy man who crept under the folds of the tent of Jehovah. If the holy hill of Zion were not immediately mentioned, one might be tempted to think that the tent here was only used as a metaphor; but the juxtaposition of the two things seems to set the allusion to the dwelling place of the Ark on its hill beyond question. In the gracious hospitality of the antique world, a guest was sheltered from all harm; his person was inviolable, his wants all met. So the guest of Jehovah is safe, can claim asylum from every foe and a share in all the bountiful provision of His abode. Taken accurately, the two verbs in Psalms 15:1 differ in that the first implies transient and the second permanent abode, but that difference is not in the psalmist’s mind, and the two phrases mean the same thing, with only the difference that the former brings out his conception of the rights of the guest. Clearly, then, the psalmist’s question by no means refers only to an outward approach to an outward tabernacle; but we see here the symbol in the very act of melting into the deep spiritual reality signified. The singer has been educated by the husks of ritual to pass beyond these, and has learned that there is a better dwelling place for Jehovah and therefore for himself, than that pitched on Zion and frequented by impure and pure alike. Psalms 15:2 sums the qualifications of Jehovah’s guest in one comprehensive demand, that he should walk uprightly, and then analyses that requirement into the two of righteous deeds and truthful speech. The verbs are in the participial form, which emphasises the notion of habitual action. The general answer is expanded in the three following verses, which each contain three clauses, and take up the two points of Psa 15:2 in inverted order, although perhaps not with absolute accuracy of arrangement. The participial construction is in them changed for finite verbs. Psalms 15:2 sketches the figure in outline, and the rest of the psalm adds clause on clause of description as if the man stood before the psalmist’s vision. Habits are described as acts. The first outstanding characteristic of this ideal is that it deals entirely with duties to men, and the second is that it is almost wholly negative. Moral qualities of the most obvious kind and such as can be tested in daily life and are cultivated by rigid abstinence from prevailing evils and not any recondite and impalpable refinements of conduct, still less any peculiar emotions of souls raised high above the dusty levels of common life are the qualifications for dwelling, a guarded guest, in that great pavilion. Such a stress laid on homely duties, which the universal conscience recognises, is characteristic of the ethics of the Old Testament as a whole and of the Psalter in particular, and is exemplified in the lives of its saints and heroes. They "come eating and drinking," sharing in domestic joys and civic duties; and however high their aspirations and vows may soar, they have always their feet firmly planted on the ground and, laying the smallest duties on themselves, "tread life’s common road in cheerful godliness." The Christian answer to the psalmist’s question goes deeper than his, but is fatally incomplete unless it include his and lay the same stress on duties to men which all acknowledge, as that does. Lofty emotions, raptures of communion, aspirations which bring their own fulfilment, and all the experiences of the devout soul, which are sometimes apt to be divorced from plain morality, need the ballast of the psalmist’s homely answer to the great question. There is something in a religion of emotion not wholly favourable to the practice of ordinary duties; and many men, good after a fashion, seem to have their spiritual nature divided into watertight and uncommunicating compartments, in one of which they keep their religion, and in the other their morality. The stringent assertion that these two are inseparable was the great peculiarity of Judaism as compared with the old world religions, from which, as from the heathenism of today, the conception that religion had anything to do with conduct was absent. But it is not only heathenism that needs the reminder. True, the ideal drawn here is not the full Christian one. It is too merely negative for that, and too entirely concerned with acts. Therein it reproduces the limitations of the earlier revelation. It scarcely touches at all the deeper forms of "love to our neighbour"; and above all, it has no answer to the question which instinctively rises in the heart when the psalm has answered its own question. How can I attain to these qualifications? is a second interrogation, raised by the response to the first, and for its answer we have to turn to Jesus. The Psalm, like the law which inspired it, is mainly negative, deals mainly with acts, and has no light to show how its requirements may be won. But it yet stands as an unantiquated statement of what a man must be who dwells in the secret place of the Most High. How he may become such a one we must learn from Him who both teaches us the way, and gives us the power, to become such as God will shelter in the safe recesses of His pavilion. The details of the qualifications as described in the psalm are simple and homely. They relate first to right speech, which holds so prominent a place in the ethics of the Psalter. The triplets of Psa 15:3 probably all refer to sins of the tongue. The good man has no slander on his tongue: he does not harm his companion (by word) nor heap reproach on his neighbour. These things are the staple of much common talk. What a quantity of brilliant wit and polished sarcasm would perish if this rule were observed! How dull many sparkling circles would become, and how many columns of newspapers and pages of books would be obliterated, if the censor’s pencil struck out all that infringed it! Psalms 15:4 adds as characteristic of a righteous man that in his estimate of character he gives each his own, and judges men by no other standard than their moral worth. The reprobate may be a millionaire or a prince, but his due is contempt; the devout man may be a pauper or one of narrow culture, but his due is respect, and he gets it. "A terrible sagacity informs" the good man’s heart; and he who is, in his own in most desires, walking uprightly will not be seduced into adulation of a popular idol who is a bad man, nor turned from reverence for lowly goodness. The world will be a paradise when the churl is no more called bountiful. Apparently the utterance of these estimates is in the psalmist’s mind, and he is still thinking of speech. Neither calumny (Psalms 15:3) nor the equally ignoble flattery of evil-doers (Psalms 15:4) pollutes the lips of his ideal good man. If this reference to spoken estimates is allowed, the last clause of Psa 15:4 completes the references to the right use of speech. The obligation of speaking "truth with his heart" is pursued into a third region: that Of vows or promises. These must be conceived as not religious vows, but, in accordance with the reference of the whole psalm to duties to neighbours, as oaths made to men. They must be kept, whatever consequences may ensue. The law prohibited the substitution of another animal sacrifice for that which had been vowed; (Leviticus 27:10) and the psalm uses the same word for "changeth," with evident allusion to the prohibition, which must therefore have been known to the psalmist. Usury and bribery were common sins, as they still are in communities on the same industrial and judicial level as that mirrored in the psalm. Capitalists who "bite" the poor (for that is the literal meaning of the words for usurious taking of interest) and judges who condemn the innocent for gain are the blood suckers of such societies. The avoidance of such gross sin is a most elementary illustration of walking uprightly, and could only have been chosen to stand in lieu of all other neighbourly virtues in an age when these sins were deplorably common. This draft of a God-pleasing character is by no means complete even from the Old Testament ethical point of view. There are two variations of it, which add important elements: that in Psalms 24:1-10, which seems to have been occasioned by the same circumstances; and the noble, adaptation in Isaiah 33:13-16, which is probably moulded on a reminiscence of both psalms. Add to these Micah’s answer to the question what God requires of man, (Micah 6:8) and we have an interesting series exhibiting the effects of the Law on the moral judgments of devout men in Israel. The psalmist’s last word goes beyond his question in the clear recognition that such a character as he has outlined not only, dwells in Jehovah’s tent, but will stand unmoved, though all the world should rock. He does not see how far onward that "forever" may stretch, but of this he is sure: that righteousness is the one stable thing in the universe, and there may have shone before him the hope that it was possible to travel on beyond the horizon that bounds this life. "I shall be a guest in Jehovah’s tent forever," says the other psalm already quoted: "He shall never be moved," says this one. Both find their fulfilment in the great words of the Apostle who taught a completer ideal of love to men, because he had dwelt close by the perfect revelation of God’s love: "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." Psalms 16:1-11 THE progress of thought in this psalm is striking. The singer is first a bold confessor in the face of idolatry and apostasy (Psalms 16:1-4). Then the inward sweetness of his faith fills his soul, as is ever the reward of brave avowal, and he buries himself, bee-like, in the pure delights of communion with Jehovah (Psalms 16:5-8). Finally, on the ground of such experience, he rises to the assurance that "its very sweetness yieldeth proof" that he and it are born for undying life (Psalms 16:9-11). The conviction of immortality is then most vividly felt, when it results from the consciousness of a present full of God. The outpourings of a pure and wholesome mystic religion in the psalm are so entirely independent of the personality and environment of the singer that there is no need to encumber the study of it with questions of date. If we accept the opinion that the conception of resurrection was the result of intercourse with Persia, we shall have to give a post-exilic date to the psalm. But even if the general adoption of that belief was historically so motived, that does not forbid our believing that select souls, living in touch with God, rose to it long before. The peaks caught the glow while the valleys were filled with mists. The tone of the last section sounds liker that of a devout soul in the very act of grasping a wonderful new thought, which God was then and there revealing to him through his present experience, than of one who was simply repeating a theological truth become familiar to all. The first turn of thought (Psalms 16:1-4) is clear in its general purport. It is a profession of personal adherence to Jehovah and of attachment to His lovers, in the face of idol worship which had drawn away some. The brief cry for preservation at the beginning does not necessarily imply actual danger, but refers to the possible antagonism of the idol worshippers provoked by the psalmist’s bold testimony. The two meanings of Martyr, a witness and a sufferer, are closely, intertwined in fact. He needs to be preserved, and he has a claim to be so, for his profession of faith has brought the peril. The remarkable expression in Psalms 16:2 b is best understood as unfolding the depth of what lies in saying, My God. It means the cleaving to Him of the whole nature as the all-comprehending supply of every desire and capacity. "Good for me is none besides Thee." This is the same high strain as in the cognate Psalms 73:25, where, as here, the joy of communion is seen in the very act of creating the confidence of immortality. The purest expression of the loftiest devotion lies in these few words. The soul that speaks thus to Jehovah turns next to Jehovah’s friends and then to His foes. To the former it speaks, in Psalms 16:3, of the gnarled obscurity of which the simplest clearing up is that adopted by the R.V. This requires a very small correction of the text, the omission of one letter (Waw = and) before "excellent," and the transference to the second clause of "these," which the accents append clumsily to the first. If we regard the to at the beginning, as the R.V. does, as marking simply reference ("as for"), the verse is an independent sentence: but it is possible to regard the influence of "I have said" as still continuing, and in that case we should have what the psalmist said to the saints, following on what he said to Jehovah, which gives unity to the whole context, and is probably best. Cheyne would expunge the first clause as a gloss crept in from the margin; and that clears the sense, though the remedy, is somewhat drastic, and a fine touch is lost, "I said to Thy loved ones, -these (and not the braggarts who strut as great men) are the truly excellent, in whom is all my delight." When temptations to forsake Jehovah are many, the true worshipper has to choose his company, and his devotion to his only Good will lead to penetrating insight into the unreality of many shining reputations and the modest beauty of humble lives of godliness. Eyes which have been purged to see God, by seeing Him will see through much. Hearts that have learned to love Jehovah will be quick to discern kindred hearts, and, if they have found all good in Him, will surely find purest delight in them. The solitary confessor clasps the hands of his unknown fellows. With dramatic abruptness he points to the unnamed recreants from Jehovah. "Their griefs are many-they exchange (Jehovah) for another." Apparently, then, there was some tendency in Israel to idolatry, which gives energy to the psalmist’s vehement vow that he will not offer their libations of blood, nor take the abhorred names of the gods they pronounced into his lips. This state of things would suit but too much of Israel’s history, during which temptations to idol worship were continually present, and the bloody libations would point to such abominations of human sacrifice as we know characterised the worship of Moloch and Chemosh. Cheyne sees in the reference to these a sign of the post-exilic date of the psalm; but was there any period after the exile in which there was danger of relapse to idolatry, and was not rather a rigid monotheism the great treasure which the exiles brought back? The trait seems rather to favour an earlier date. In the second section (Psalms 16:5-8) the devout soul suns itself in the light of God, and tells itself how rich it is. "The portion of mine inheritance" might mean an allotted share of either food or land, but Psalms 16:6 favours the latter interpretation. "Cup" here is not so much an image for that which satisfies thirst, though that would be beautiful, as for that which is appointed for one to experience. Such a use of the figure is familiar, and brings it into line with the other of inheritance, which is plainly the principal, as that of the cup is dropped in the following words. Every godly man has the same possession and the same prohibitions as the priests had. Like them he is landless, and instead of estates has Jehovah. They presented in mere outward fashion what is the very law of the devout life. Because God is the only true Good, the soul must have none other, and if it have forsaken all other by reason of the greater wealth of even partial possession of Him, it will be growingly rich in Him. He who has said unto the Lord, "Thou art my Lord," will with ever increasing decisiveness of choice and consciousness of sufficiency say, "The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance." The same figure is continued in Psalms 16:5 b. "My lot" is the same idea as "my portion," and the natural flow of thought would lead us to expect that Jehovah is both. That consideration combines with the very anomalous grammatical form of the word rendered "maintainest" to recommend the slight alteration adopted by Cheyne following Dyserinck and Bickell, by which "continually" is read, for it. What God is rather than what He does is filling the psalmist’s happy thoughts, and the depth of his blessedness already kindles that confidence in its perpetuity which shoots up to so bright a flame in the dosing verses (cf. Psalms 73:1-28). The consciousness of perfect rest in perfect satisfaction of need and desires ever follows possession of God. So the calm rapture of Psa 16:6 is the true utterance of the heart acquainted with God, and of it alone. One possession only bears reflection. Whatever else a man has, if he has not Jehovah for his portion, some part of himself will stand stiffly out, dissentient and unsatisfied, and hinder him from saying "My inheritance is fair to me." That verdict of experience implies, as it stands in the Hebrew, subjective delight in the portion and not merely the objective worth of it. This is the peculiar preeminence of a God-filled life, that the Infinitely good is wholly Good to it, through all the extent of capacities and cravings. Who else can say the same? Blessed they whose delights are in God! He will ever delight them. No wonder that the psalmist breaks into blessing; but it is deeply significant of the freedom from mere sentimental religion which characterises the highest flights of his devotion, that his special ground of blessing Jehovah is not inward peace of communion, but the wise guidance given thereby for daily difficulties. A God whose sweet sufficiency gives satisfaction for all desires and balm for every wound is much, but a God who by these very gifts makes duty plain, is more. The test of inward devotion is its bearing on common tasks. True wisdom is found in fellowship with God. Eyes which look on Him see many things more clearly. The "reins" are conceived of as the seat of the Divine voice. In Old Testament psychology they seem to stand for feelings rather than reason or conscience, and it is no mistake of the psalmist’s when he thinks that through them God’s counsel comes. He means much the same as we do when we say that devout instincts are of God. He will purify, ennoble and instruct even the lower propensities and emotions, so that they may be trusted to guide, when the heart is at rest in Him. "Prayer is better than sleep," says the Mohammedan call to devotion. "In the night seasons," says the psalmist, when things are more clearly seen in the dark than by day, many a whisper from Jehovah steals into his ears. The upshot of all is a firm resolve to make really his what is his. "I set Jehovah always before me"-since He is "always my lot." That effort of faith is the very life of devotion. We have any possession only while it is present to our thoughts. It is all one not to have a great estate and never to see it or think about it. True love is an intense desire for the presence of its object. God is only ours in reality when we are conscious of His nearness, and that is strange love of Him which is content to pass days without ever setting Him before itself. The effort of faith brings an ally and champion for faith, for "He is at my right hand," in so far as I set Him before me. "At my right hand,"-then I am at His left, and the left arm wears the shield, and the shield covers my head. Then He is close by my working hand, to direct its activity and to lay His own great hand on my feeble one, as the prophet did his on the wasted fingers of the sick king to give strength to draw the bow. The ally of faith secures the stability of faith. "I shall not be moved," either by the agitations of passions or by the shocks of fortune. A calm heart, which is not the same thing as a stagnant heart, is the heritage of him who has God at his side; and he who is fixed on that rock stands foursquare to all the winds that blow. Foolhardy self-reliance says, I shall never be moved, (Psalms 10:6) and the end of that boast is destruction. A good man, seduced by prosperity, may forget himself so far as to say it, (Psalms 30:6) and the end of that has to be fatherly discipline, to bring him right. But to say "Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved" is but to claim the blessings belonging to the possession of the only satisfying inheritance, even Jehovah Himself. The heart that expands with such blessed consciousness of possessing God can chant its triumphant song even in front of the grave. So, in his closing strain the psalmist pours out his rapturous faith that his fellowship with God abolishes death. No worthy climax to the profound consciousness of communion already expressed, nor any satisfactory progress of thought justifying the "therefore" of Psalms 16:9, can be made out with any explanation of the final verses, which eliminates the assurance of immortal life from them. The experiences of the devout life here are prophecies. These aspirations and enjoyments are to their possessor, not only authentic proofs "that God is and that He is the rewarder of the heart that seeks Him," but also witnesses of immortality not to be silenced. They "were not born for death," but, in their sweetness and incompleteness alike, point onwards to their own perpetuity and perfecting. If a man has been able to say and has said "My God," nothing will seem more impossible to him than that such a trifle as death should have power to choke his voice or still the outgoings of his heart towards, and its rest in, his God. Whatever may have been the current beliefs of the psalmist’s time in regard to a future life, and whether his sunny confidence here abode with him in less blessed hours of less "high communion with the living God," or ebbed away, leaving him to the gloomier thoughts of other psalms, we need not try to determine. Here, at all events, we see his faith in the act of embracing the great thought, which may have been like the rising of a new sun in his sky-namely, the conviction that this his joy was joy forever. A like depth of personal experience of the sweetness of communion with God will always issue in like far-seeing assurance of its duration as unaffected by anything that touches only the physical husk of the true self. If we would be sure of immortal life, we must make the mortal a God-filled life. The psalmist feels the glad certainty in all his complex nature, heart, soul, and flesh. All three have their portion in the joy which it brings. The foundation of the exultation of heart and soul and of the quiet rest of flesh is not so much the assurance that after death there will be life, and after the grave a resurrection, as the confidence that there will be no death at all. To "see the pit" is a synonym for experiencing death, and what is hoped for is exemption from it altogether, and a Divine hand leading him, as Enoch was led, along the high levels on a "path of life" which leads to God’s right hand, without any grim descent to the dark valley below. Such an expectation may be called vain, but we must distinguish between the form and the substance of the psalmist’s hope. Its essence was unbroken and perfected communion with God, uninterrupted sense of possessing Him, and therein all delights and satisfactions. To secure these he dared to hope that for him death would be abolished. But he died, and assuredly he found that the unbroken communion for which he longed was persistent through death, and that in dying his hope that he should not die was fulfilled beyond his hope. The correspondence between his effort of faith in Psalms 16:8 and his final position in Psalms 16:11 is striking. He who sets Jehovah continually before himself will in due time, come where there are fulness of joys before God’s face; and he who here, amid distractions and sorrows, has kept Jehovah at his right hand as his counsellor, defender and companion, will one day stand at Jehovah’s right hand, and be satisfied forever more with the uncloying and inexhaustible pleasures that there abide. The singer, whose clear notes thus rang above the grave, died and saw corruption. But, as the apostolic use of this psalm as a prophecy of Christ’s resurrection has taught us, the apparent contradiction of his triumphal chant by the fact of his death did not prove it to be a vain dream. If there ever should be a life of absolutely unbroken communion, that would be a life in which death would be abolished. Jesus Christ is God’s "Beloved" as no other is. He has conquered death as no other has. The psalm sets forth the ideal relation of the perfectly devout man to death and the future, and that ideal is a reality in Him, from whom the blessed continuity, which the psalmist was sure must belong to fellowship so close as was his with God, flows to all who unite themselves with Him. He has trodden the path of life which He shows to us, and it is life, at every step even when it dips into the darkness of what men call death, whence it rises into the light of the Face which it is joy to see, and close to the loving strong Hand which holds and gives pleasures forever more. Psalms 17:1-15 THE investigations as to authorship and date yield the usual conflicting results. Davidic, say one school; undoubtedly post-exilic, say another, without venturing on closer definition; late in the Persian period, says Cheyne. Perhaps we may content ourselves with the modest judgment of Baethgen in his last book ("Handcommentar," 1892, p. 45): "The date of composition cannot be decided by internal indications." The background is the familiar one of causeless foes round an innocent sufferer, who flings himself into God’s arms for safety, and in prayer enters into peace and hope. He is, no doubt, a representative of the Ecclesia pressa; but he is so just because his cry is intensely personal. The experience of one is the type for all, and a poet’s prerogative is to cast his most thoroughly individual emotions into words that fit the universal heart. The psalm is called a "prayer," a title given to only four other psalms, none of which are in the First Book. It has three movements, marked by the repetition of the name of God, which does not appear elsewhere, except in the doubtful Psalms 17:14. These three are Psalms 17:1-5, in which the cry for help is founded on a strong profession of innocence; Psalms 17:6-12, in which it is based on a vivid description of the enemies; and Psalms 17:13-15, in which it soars into the pure air of mystic devotion, and thence looks down on the transient prosperity of the foe and upwards, in a rapture of hope, to the face of God. The petition proper, in Psalms 17:1-2, and its ground, are both strongly marked by conscious innocence, and therefore sound strange to our ears, trained as we have been by the New Testament to deeper insight into sin, This sufferer asks God to "hear righteousness," i.e., his righteous cause. He pleads the bona fides of his prayer, the fervour of which is marked by its designation as "my cry," the high-pitched note usually the expression of joy, but here of sore need and strong desire. Boldly he asks for his "sentence from Thy face," and the ground of, that petition is that "Thine eyes behold rightly." Was there, then, no inner baseness that should have toned down such confidence? Was this prayer not much the same as the Pharisee’s in Christ’s parable? The answer is partly found in the considerations that the innocence professed is specially in regard to the occasions of the psalmist’s present distress, and that the acquittal by deliverance which he asks is God’s testimony that as to these he was slandered and clear. But, further, the strong professions of heart cleanness and outward obedience which follow are not so much denials of any sin as avowals of sincere devotion and honest submission of life to God’s law. They are "the answer of a good conscience towards God," expressed, indeed, more absolutely than befits Christian consciousness, but having noticing in common with Pharisaic self-complacency. The modern type of religion which recoils from such professions, and contents itself with always confessing sins which it has given up hope of overcoming, would be all the better for listening to the psalmist and aiming a little more vigorously and hopefully at being able to say, "I know nothing against myself." There is no danger in such a saying, if it be accompanied by "Yet am I not hereby justified" and by "Who can understand his errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults." The general drift of Psa 17:3-5 is clear, but the precise meaning and connection are extremely obscure. Probably the text is faulty. It has been twisted in all sorts of ways, the Masoretic accents have been disregarded, the division of verses set aside, and still no proposed rendering of parts of Psa 17:3-4 is wholly satisfactory. The psalmist deals with heart, lips, feet-that is, thoughts, words, and deeds-and declares the innocence of all. But difficulties begin when we look closer. The first question is as to the meaning and connection of the word rendered in the A.V. and R.V., "I am purposed." It may be a first person singular or an infinitive used as a noun or even a noun, meaning, in both the latter cases, substantially the same, i.e. my thinking or my thoughts. It is connected by the accents with what follows; but in that case the preceding verb "find" is left without an object, and hence many renderings attach the word to the preceding clause, and so get "Thou shalt find no [evil] thoughts in me." This division of the clauses leaves the words rendered, by A.V. and R.V., "My mouth shall not transgress," standing alone. There is no other instance of the verb standing by itself with that meaning, nor is "mouth" clearly the subject. It may as well be the object, and the clause be, "[It] shall not pass my mouth." If that is the meaning, we have to look to the preceding word as defining what it is that is thus to be kept unuttered, and so detach it from the verb "find," as the accents do. The knot has been untied in two ways: "My [evil] purpose shall not pass," etc., or, taking the word as a verb and regarding the clause as hypothetical, Should I think evil, it shall not pass, etc. Either of these renderings has the advantage of retaining the recognised meaning of the verb and of avoiding neglect of the accent. Such a rendering has been objected to as inconsistent with the previous clause, but the psalmist may be looking back to it, feeling that his partial self-knowledge makes it a bold statement, and thus far limiting it, that if any evil thought is found in his heart, it is sternly repressed in silence. Obscurity continues in Psalms 17:4. The usual rendering, "As for [or, During] the works of men, by the word of Thy mouth I have kept me," etc., is against the accents, which make the principal division of the verse fall after "lips"; but no satisfactory sense results if the accentuation is followed unless we suppose a verb implied, such as e.g., stand fast or the like, so getting the profession of steadfastness in the words of God’s lips, in face of men’s self-willed doings. But this is precarious, and probably the ordinary way of cutting the knot by neglecting the accents is best. In any case the avowal of innocence passes here from thoughts and words to acts. The contrast of the psalmist’s closed mouth and God’s lips is significant, even if unintended. Only he who silences much that rises in his heart can hear God speaking. "I kept me from," is a very unusual meaning for the word employed, which generally signifies to guard or watch, but here seems to mean to take heed so as to avoid. Possibly the preposition from, denoted by a single letter, has fallen out before "paths." This negative avoidance precedes positive walking in God’s ways, since the poet’s position is amidst evil men. Goodness has to learn to say No to men, if it is ever to say Yes to God. The foot has to be forcibly plucked and vigilantly kept from foul ways before it can be planted firmly in "Thy paths." By holding fast to courses appointed by God stability is ensured. Thus the closing clause of this first part is rather an acknowledgment of the happy result of devoted cleaving to God than an assertion of self-secured steadfastness. "My feet do not slip," not so much because they are strong as because the road is good, and the Guide’s word and hand ready. The second part repeats the prayer for help, but bases it on the double ground of God’s character and acts and of the suppliant’s desperate straits; and of these two the former comes first in the prayer, though the latter has impelled to the prayer. Faith may be helped to self-consciousness by the sense of danger, but when awakened it grasps God’s hand first and then faces its foes. In this part of the psalm the petitions, the aspects of the Divine character and working, and the grim picture of dangers are all noteworthy. The petitions by their number and variety reveal the pressure of trouble, each new prick of fear or pain forcing a new cry and each cry recording a fresh act of faith tightening its grasp. The "I" in Psalms 17:6 is emphatic, and may be taken as gathering up the psalmist’s preceding declarations and humbly laying them before God as a plea: "I, who thus cleave to Thy ways, call upon Thee. and my prayer is that of faith, which is sure of answer." But that confidence does not make petition superfluous, but rather encourages it. The assurance that "Thou wilt answer" is the reason for the prayer, "Incline Thine ear." Naturally at such a moment the name of God springs to the psalmist’s lips, but significantly it is not the name found in the other two parts of the psalm. There He is invoked as "Jehovah," here as "God." The variation is not merely rhetorical, but the name which connotes power is appropriate in a prayer for deliverance from peril so extreme. "Magnify [or make wonderful] Thy lovingkindnesses" is a petition containing at once a glimpse of the psalmist’s danger, for escape from which nothing short of a wonder of power will avail, and an appeal to God’s delight in magnifying His name by the display of His mercy. The prayer sounds arrogant, as if the petitioner thought himself important enough to have miracles wrought for him; but it is really most humble, for the very wonder of the lovingkindness besought is that it should be exercised for such a one. God wins honour by saving a poor man who cries to Him; and it is with deep insight into the heart of God that this man presents himself as offering an occasion, in which God must delight, to flash the glory of His loving power before dull eyes. The petitions grow in boldness as they go on, and culminate in two which occur in similar contiguity in the great Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32:1-52: "Keep me as the pupil of Thy eye." What closeness of union with God that lovely figure implies, and what sedulous guardianship it implores! "In the shadow of Thy wings hide me." What tenderness of fostering protection that ascribes to God, and what warmth and security it asks for man! The combination and order of these two petitions may teach us that, if we are to be "kept," we must be hidden; that if these frail lives of ours are to be dear to God as the apple of His eye, they must be passed nestling close by His side. Deep, secret communion with Him is the condition of His protection of us, as another psalm, using the same image, has it: "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." The aspects of the Divine character, which the psalmist employs to move God’s heart and to encourage his own, are contained first in the name "God," and next in the reference to His habitual dealings with trusting souls, in Psalms 17:7. From of old it has been His way to be the Saviour of such as take refuge in Him from their enemies, and His right hand has shielded them. That past is a prophecy which the psalmist grasps in faith. He has in view instances enough to warrant an induction absolutely certain. He knows the law of the Divine dealings, and is sure that anything may happen rather than that it shall fail. Was he wrong in thus characterising God? Much in his experience and in ours looks as if he were; but they who most truly understand what help or salvation truly is will most joyously dwell in the sunny clearness of this confidence, which will not be clouded for them, though their own and others’ trust is not answered by what sense calls deliverance. The eye which steadily looks on God can look calmly at dangers. It is with no failure of faith that the poet’s thoughts turn to his enemies. Fears that have become prayers are already more than half conquered. The psalmist would move God to help, not himself to despair, by recounting his perils. The enemy "spoil" him or lay him waste, the word used for the ravages of invaders. They are "enemies in soul"-i.e., deadly-or perhaps "against [my] soul" or life. They are pitiless and proud, closing their hearts, which prosperity has made "fat" or arrogant, against the entrance of compassion, and indulging in gasconading boasts of their own power and contemptuous, scoffs at his weakness. They ring him round, watching his steps. The text has a sudden change here from singular to plural, and back again to singular, reading "our steps," and "They have compassed me, " which the Hebrew margin alters to "us." The wavering between the singular and plural is accounted for by the upholders of the Davidic authorship by a reference to him and his followers, and by the advocates of the theory that the speaker is the personified Israel by supposing that the mask falls for a moment, and the "me," which always means "us," gives place to the collective. Psalms 17:11 b is ambiguous in consequence of the absence of an object to the second verb. To "set the eyes" is to watch fixedly and eagerly; and the purpose of the gaze is in the next clause stated by an infinitive with a preposition, not by a participle, as in the A.V. The verb is sometimes transitive and sometimes intransitive, but the former is the better meaning here, and the omitted object is most naturally "us" or "me." The sense, then, will be that the enemies eagerly watch for an opportunity to cast down the psalmist, so as to lay him low on the earth. The intransitive meaning "to bow down" is taken by some commentators. If that is adopted (as it is by Hupfeld and others), the reference is to "our steps" in the previous clause, and the sense of the whole is that eager eyes watch for these "bowing to the ground," that is stumbling. But such a rendering is harsh, since steps are always on the ground. Baethgen ("Handcommentar"), on the strength of Num 21:22, the only place where the verb occurs with the same preposition as here, and which he takes as meaning "to turn aside to field or vineyard-i.e., to plunder them"-would translate. "They direct their eves to burst into the land," and supposes the reference to be to some impending invasion. A similar variation in number to that in Psalms 17:11 occurs in Psalms 17:12, where the enemies are concentrated into one. The allusion is supposed to be to some one conspicuous leader-e.g., Saul-but probably the change is merely an illustration of the carelessness as to such grammatical accuracy characteristic of emotional Hebrew poetry. The familiar metaphor of the lurking lion may have been led up to in the poet’s imagination by the preceding picture of the steadfast gaze of the enemy, like the glare of the green eyeballs flashing from the covert of a jungle. The third part (Psalms 17:13-15) renews the cry for deliverance, and unites the points of view of the preceding parts in inverted order, describing first the enemies and then the psalmist, but with these significant differences, the fruits of his communion with God, that now the former are painted, not in their fierceness, but in their transitory, attachments and low delights, and that the latter does not bemoan his own helplessness nor build on his own integrity, but feeds his soul on his confidence of the vision of God and the satisfaction which it will bring. The smoke clouds that rolled in the former parts have caught fire and one clear shoot of flame aspires heavenward. He who makes his needs known to God gains for immediate answer "the peace of God which passeth understanding," and can wait God’s time for the rest. The crouching lion is still ready to spring; but the psalmist hides himself behind God, whom he asks to face the brute and make him grovel at his feet "Make him bow down," the same word used for a lion couchant in Genesis 49:9 and Numbers 24:9. The rendering of Psa 17:13 b, "the wicked, who is Thy sword," introduces an irrelevant thought; and it is better to regard the sword as God’s weapon that slays the crouching wild beast. The excessive length of Psa 17:14 and the entirely pleonastic "from men (by) Thy hand, O Lord," suggest textual corruption. The thought runs more smoothly, though not altogether clearly, if these words are omitted. There remains a penetrating characterisation of the enemy in the sensuous limitations and mistaken aims of his godless being, which may be satiated with low delights, but never satisfied, and has to leave them all at last. He is no longer dreaded, but pitied. His prayer has cleared the psalmist’s eyes and lifted him high enough to see his foes as they are. They are "men of the world," belonging, by the set of their lives, to a transitory order of things - an anticipation of New Testament language about "the children of this world." "Their portion is in [this] life," while the psalmist’s is God. (Psalms 16:5) They have chosen to have their good things in their lifetime. Hopes, desires, aims, tastes, are all confined within the narrow bounds of time and sense, than which there can be no greater folly. Such limitation will often seem to succeed, for low aims are easily reached; and God sometimes lets men have their fill of the goods at which their perverted choice clutches. But even so the choice is madness and misery, for the man, gorged with worldly good, has yet to leave it, however unwilling to loosen his hold. He cannot use his goods; and it is no comfort to him, sent away naked into darkness of death, that his descendants revel in what was his. How different the contrasted conditions of the hunted psalmist and his enemies look when the light of such thoughts streams on them! The helpless victim towers above his persecutors, for his desires go up to Him who abides and saturates with His blessed fulness the heart that aspires to Him. Terrors vanish; foes are forgotten; every other wish is swallowed up in one, which is a confidence as well as a desire. The psalmist neither grudges, nor is perplexed by, the prosperity of the wicked. The mysteries of men’s earthly lot puzzle those who stand at a lower elevation; but they do not disturb the soul on these supreme heights of mystic devotion, where God is seen to be the only good, and the hungry heart is filled with Him. Assuredly the psalmist’s closing expectation embodies the one contrast worth notice: that between the present gross and partial satisfactions of sense-bound lives and the calm, permanent, full delights of communion with God. But does he limit his hopes to such "hours of high communion with the living God" as may be ours, even while the foe rings us round and earth holds us down? Possibly so, but it is difficult to find a worthy meaning for "when I awake" unless it be from the sleep of death. Possibly, too, the allusion to the men of the world as "leaving their substance" makes the reference to a future beatific vision more likely. Death is to them the stripping off of their chosen portion; it is to him whose portion is God the fuller possession of all that he loves and desires. Cheyne ("Orig. of Psalt.," p. 407) regards the awaking as that from the sleep of the intermediate state by "the passing of the soul into a resurrection body." He is led to the recognition of the doctrine of the resurrection here by his theory of the late date of the psalm and the influence of Zoroastrianism on it. But it is not necessary to suppose an allusion to the resurrection. Rather the psalmist’s confidence is the offspring of his profound consciousness of present communion, and we see here the very process by which a devout man, in the absence of a clear revelation of the future, reached up to a conclusion to which he was led by his experience of the inmost reality of friendship with God. The impotence of death on the relation of the devout soul to God is a postulate of faith, whether formulated as an article of faith or not. Probably the psalmist had no clear conception of a future life; but certainly he had a distinct assurance of it, because he felt that the very "sweetness" of present fellowship with God "yielded proof that it was born for immortality." Psalms 18:1-50 THE description of the theophany (Psalms 18:7-19) and that of the psalmist’s God-won victories (Psalms 18:32-46) appear to refer to the same facts, transfigured in the former case by devout imagination and presented in the latter in their actual form. These two portions make the two central masses round which the psalm is built up. They are connected by a transitional section, of which the main theme is the power of character to determine God’s aspect to a man as exemplified in the singer’s experience; and they are preceded, and followed by an introduction and a conclusion, throbbing with gratitude and love to Jehovah, the Deliverer. The Davidic authorship of this psalm has been admitted even by critics who are slow to recognise it. Cheyne asks, as if sure of a negative answer, "What is there in it that suggests the history of David?" ("Orig. of Psalter," p. 205). Baethgen, who "suspects" that a Davidic psalm has been "worked over" for use in public worship, may answer the question: "The following points speak for the Davidic authorship. The poet is a military commander and king, who wages successful wars, and subdues peoples whom he hitherto did not know. There is no Israelite king to whom the expressions in question in the psalm apply so closely as is the case with David." To these points may be added the allusions to earlier trials and perils, and the distinct correspondence, in a certain warmth and inwardness of personal relation to Jehovah, with the other psalms attributed to David, as well as the pregnant use of the word to flee to a refuge, applied to the soul’s flight to God, which we find here (Psalms 18:2) and in the psalms ascribed to him. If the clear notes of the psalm be the voice of personal experience, there is but one author possible-namely, David-and the glow and intensity of the whole make the personification theory singularly inadequate. It is much easier to believe that David used the word "temple" or "palace" for Jehovah’s heavenly dwelling, than that the "I" of the psalm, with his clinging sense of possession in Jehovah, his vivid remembrance of sorrows, his protestations of integrity, his wonder at his own victories, and his triumphant praise, is not a man, but a frosty personification of the nation. The preluding invocation in Psalms 18:1-3 at once touches the highwater mark of Old Testament devotion, and is conspicuous among its noblest utterances. Nowhere else in Scripture is the form of the word employed which is here used for "love." It has special depth and tenderness. How far into the centre this man had penetrated, who could thus isolate and unite Jehovah and himself, and could feel that they two were alone and knit together by love! The true estimate of Jehovah’s ways with a man will always lead to that resolve to love, based on the consciousness of God’s love to him. Happy they who learn that lesson by retrospect; happier still if they gather it from their sorrows while these press! Love delights in addressing the beloved and heaping tender names on its object, each made more tender and blessed by that appropriating "my." It seems more accordant with the fervent tone of the psalm to regard the reiterated designations in Psalms 18:2 as vocatives, than to take "Jehovah" and "God" as subjects and the other names as predicates. Rather the whole is one long, loving accumulation of dear names, a series of invocations, in which the restful heart murmurs to itself how rich it is and is never wearied of saying, "my delight and defence." As in Psalms 17:1-15, the name of Jehovah occurs twice, and that of God once. Each of these is expanded, as it were, by the following epithets, and the expansion becomes more extended as it advances, beginning with one member in Psalms 18:1, having three in Psalms 18:2 a-and four in Psalms 18:2 b. Leaving out the Divine names proper, there are seven in Psalms 18:2, separated into two groups by the name of God. It may be observed there is a general correspondence between the two sets, each beginning with "rock" (though the word is different in the two clauses), each having the metaphor of a fortress, and "shield and horn of salvation," roughly answering to "Deliverer." The first word for rock is more properly crag or cliff, thus suggesting inaccessibility, and the second a rock mass, thus giving the notion of firmness or solidity. The shade of difference need not be pressed, but the general idea is that of safety, or by elevation above the enemy and by reason of the unchangeable strength of Jehovah. In that lofty eyrie, a man may look down on all the armies of earth, idly active on the plain. That great Rock towers unchangeable above fleeting things. The river at its base runs past, the woods nestling at its feet bud and shed their leaves, but it stands the same. David had many a time found shelter among the hills and caves of Judah and the South land, and it may not be fancy that sees reminiscences of these experiences in his song. The beautiful figure for trust embodied in the word in Psalms 18:2 b belongs to the metaphor of the rock: It is found with singular appropriateness in Psalms 57:1-11, which the title ascribes to David "in the cave," the sides of which bent above him and sheltered him, like a great pair of wings, and possibly suggested the image, "In the shadow of Thy wings will I take refuge." The difference between "fortress" and "high tower" is slight, but the former gives more prominence to the idea of strength, and the latter to that of elevation, both concurring in the same thought as was expressed by "rock," but with the additional suggestion of Jehovah as the home of the soul. Safety, then, comes through communion. Abiding in God is seclusion from danger. "Deliverer" stands last in the first set, saying in plain words what the preceding had put in figures. "My shield and the horn of my salvation" come in the centre of the second set, in obedience to the law of variety in reiteration which the poet’s artistic instincts impose. They shift the figure to that of a warrior in actual conflict. The others picture a fugitive from enemies, these a fighter. The shield is a defensive weapon; horns are offensive ones, and the combination suggests that in conflict we are safe by the interposition of God’s covering power, and are armed by the same power for striking at the foe. That power ensures salvation whether in the narrower or wider sense. Thus Jehovah is all the armour and all the refuge of His servant. To trust Him is to have His protection cast around and His power infused for conflict and victory. The end of all life’s experience is to reveal Him in these characters, and they have rightly learned its lessons whose song of retrospect begins with "I will love Thee, Jehovah," and pours out at His feet all happy names expressive of His sufficiency and of the singer’s rest in possessing Him. Psalms 18:3 is not a resolution for the future-"I will call; so shall I be saved"-but the summing up of experience in a great truth: "I call, and I am saved." It unfolds the meaning of the previous names of God, and strikes the keynote for the magnificent sequel. The superb idealisation of past deliverances under the figure of a theophany is prepared for by a retrospect of dangers, which still palpitates with the memory of former fears. "A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things," and a joy’s crown of joy is remembering past perils. No better description of David’s early life could have been given than that contained in the two vivid figures of Psa 18:4-5. If we adopt the more congruous reading of the other recension of the psalm in 2 Samuel 22:1-51, we have in both members of Psa 18:4 a parallel metaphor. Instead of "sorrows" or "cords" (both of which renderings are possible for the text of the psalm here), it reads "breakers," corresponding with "floods" in the second clause. "Destruction" is better than ungodly men as the rendering of the unusual word "Belial." Thus the psalmist pictures himself as standing on a diminishing bit of solid ground, round which a rising flood runs strong, breaking on its crumbling narrowness. Islanded thus, he is all but lost. With swift transition he casts the picture of his distress into another metaphor. Now he is a hunted creature, surrounded and confronted by cords and snares. Sheol and Death have marked him for their prey, and are drawing their nets round him. What is left for him? One thing only. He has a voice, and he has a God. In his despair one piercing cry breaks from him; and, wonder of wonders, that thin shoot of prayer rises right into the heavenly palace temple and the ears of God. The repetition of "I called upon the Lord" connects this with Psalms 18:3 as the experience on which the generalisation there is based. His extremity of peril had not paralysed the psalmist’s grasp of God as still "my God," and his confidence is vindicated. There is an eloquent contrast between the insignificance of the cause and the stupendous grandeur of the effect: one poor man’s shrill cry and a shaking earth and all the dread pomp attending an interposing God. A cupful of water poured into a hydraulic ram sets in motion power that lifts tons; the prayer of faith brings the dread magnificence of Jehovah into the field. The reading of 2 Samuel is preferable in the last clause of Psa 18:6, omitting the superfluous "before Him." The phenomena of a thunderstorm are the substratum of the grand description of Jehovah’s delivering self-manifestation. The garb is lofty poetry; but a definite fact lies beneath, namely some deliverance in which the psalmist saw Jehovah’s coming in storm and lightning flash to destroy, and therefore to save. Faith sees more truly because more deeply than sense. What would have appeared to an ordinary looker on as merely a remarkable escape was to its subject the manifestation of a present God. Which eye sees the "things that are,"-that which is cognisant only of a concatenation of events, or that which discerns a Person directing these? The cry of this hunted man has for first effect the kindling of the Divine "wrath," which is represented as flaming into action in the tremendous imagery of Psa 18:7-8. The description of the storm in which God comes to help the suppliant does not begin with these verses, as is commonly understood. The Divine power is not in motion yet, but is, as it were, gathering itself up for action. The complaining prayer is boldly treated as bringing to God’s knowledge His servant’s straits, and the knowledge as moving Him to wrath towards the enemies of one who takes shelter beneath His wings. "What have I here that my"-servant is thus bestead? saith the Lord. The poet can venture to paint a picture with the pen, which the painter dare not attempt with the pencil. The anger of Jehovah is described in words of singular daring, as rising like smoke from His nostrils and pouring in fire from His lips, from which blazing brands issue. No wonder that the earth reels even to the roots of the mountains, as unable to endure that wrath! The frank anthropomorphism of the picture, of which the features are taken from the hard breathing of an angry man or animal, (compare Job’s crocodile in Job 41:10-13) and the underlying conception are equally offensive to many; but as for the former, the more "gross" the humanising of the picture, the less likely is it to be mistaken for prose fact, and the more easy to apprehend as symbol: and as for the latter, the New Testament endorses the conception of the "wrath of God," and bids us take heed lest, if we cast it away, we maim his love. This same psalm hymns Jehovah’s "gentleness"; and the more deeply His love is apprehended, the more surely will His wrath be discerned as its necessary accompaniment. The dark orb and its radiant sister move round a common centre. Thus kindled, God’s wrath flashes into action, as is wonderfully painted in that great storm piece in Psalms 18:9-15. The stages of a violent thunder tempest are painted with unsurpassable force and brevity. First we see the low clouds: far nearer the trembling earth than the hidden blue was, and seeming to press down with leaden weight, their boding blackness is above us; but "Whose foot shall we see emerge, Whose from the straining topmost dark?" Their low gathering is followed by the sudden rush of wind, which breaks the awful calm. In its "sound," the psalmist hears the winnowing of mighty wings: those of the cherub on whom, as a living chariot, Jehovah sits throned. This is called "mythology." Is it not rather a poetic personification of elemental powers, which gives emphasis to their being God’s instruments? The cherubim are in Scripture represented in varying forms and with different attributes. In Ezekiel they assume a composite form due apparently to Babylonian influences; but here there is no trace of that, and the absence of such strongly supports a pre-exilic date. Blacker grows the gloom, in which awed hearts are conscious of a present Deity shrouded behind the livid folds of the thunderclouds, as in a tent. Down rushes the rain; the darkness is "a darkness of waters," and also "thick clouds of the skies," or "cloud masses," a mingled chaos of rain and cloud. Then lightning tears a way through the blackness, and the language becomes abrupt, like the flash. In Psalms 18:12-13 the fury of the storm rages. Blinding brightness and deafening thunder-claps gleam and rattle through the broken words. Probably Psalms 18:12 should be rendered, "From the brightness before Him there came through His clouds hail and brands of fire." Hidden in the cloudy tent is the light of Jehovah’s presence, sparkles from which, flung forth by Him, pierce the solid gloom; and men call them lightnings. Then thunder rolls, the voice of the Most High. The repetition in Psalms 18:13 of "hail and brands of fire" gives much abrupt force and one is unwilling to part with it. The reason for omitting it from the text is the want of grammatical connection, but that is rather a reason for retaining it, as the isolated clause breaks in on the continuity of the sentence, just as the flash shoots suddenly out of the cloud. These lightnings are God’s arrows; and, as they are showered down in flights, the psalmist’s enemies, unnamed since Psalms 18:3, scatter in panic. The ideal character of the whole representation is plain from the last element in it-the description in Psalms 18:15 of laying bare the sea’s depths, as the waters were parted at the Exodus. That voice and the fierce blast from these fire-breathing nostrils have dried the streams, and the oozy bed is seen. God’s "rebuke" has power to produce physical changes. The earthquake at the beginning and the empty ocean bed at the end are both somewhat outside the picture of the storm, and complete the representation of all nature as moved by the theophany. Then comes the purpose of all the dread magnificence, strangely small except to the psalmist. Heaven and earth have been shaken, and lightnings set leaping through the sky, for nothing greater than to drag one half-drowned man from the floods. But the result of the theophany is small only in the same fashion as its cause was small. This same poor man cried, and the cry set Jehovah’s activity in motion. The deliverance of a single soul may seem a small thing, but if the single soul has prayed it is no longer small, for God’s good name is involved. A nation is disgraced if its meanest subject is left to die in the hands of foreign enemies, and blood and treasure are not wasted if poured out lavishly for his rescue. God cannot let a suppliant who has taken shelter in His tent be dragged thence. Therefore there is no disproportion between the theophany and the individual deliverance which is its sole result. The psalmist lays aside the figure in Psalms 18:17-18, and comes to the bare fact of his deliverance from enemies, and perhaps from one especially, formidable ("my enemy," Psalms 18:17). The prose of the whole would have been that he was in great danger and without means of averting it, but had a hair-breadth escape. But the outside of a fact is not all of it; and in this mystical life of ours poetry gets nearer the heart of things than does prose, and religion nearer than either. It is no miracle, in the narrow meaning of that word, which the psalmist sings; but his eye has seen the unseen force which moves all visible events. We may see the same apocalypse of a present Jehovah, if our eyes are purged, and our hearts pure. It is always true that the cry of a trustful soul pierces heaven and moves God; it is always true that He comes to His servant sinking and crying, "Lord, save me; I perish." The scene on the Galilean lake when Christ’s strong grasp held Peter up, because his fear struck out a spark of faith, though his faith was darkened with fear, is ever being repeated. The note slightly touched at the close of the description of the deliverance dominates the second part of the psalm (Psalms 18:20-31), of which the main theme is the correspondence of God’s dealings with character, as illustrated in the singer’s experience, and thence generalised into a law of the Divine administration. It begins with startling protestations of innocence. These are rounded into a whole by the repetition, at the beginning and end, of the same statement that God dealt with the psalmist according to his righteousness and clean-handedness. If the author is David, this voice of a good conscience must have been uttered before his great fall, after which he could, indeed, sing of forgiveness and restoring grace, but never again of integrity. Unlike as the tone of these verses is to that deeper consciousness of sin which is not the least of Christ’s gifts, the truth which they embody is as much a part of the Christian as of the earlier revelation. True, penitence must now mingle with conscious rectitude more abundantly than it does in this psalm; but it is still and forever true that God deals with His servants according to their righteousness. Cherished sin separates from Him, and forces His love to leave cries for help many times unanswered, in order that, filled with the fruit of their doings, His people may have a wholesome fear of again straying from the narrow way. Unless a Christian can say, "I keep myself from mine iniquity," he has no right to look for the sunshine of God’s face to gladden his eyes, nor for the strength of God’s hand to pluck his feet from the net. In noble and daring words, the psalmist proclaims as a law of God’s dealings his own experience generalised (Psalms 18:25-27). It is a bold reversal of the ordinary point of view to regard man as taking the initiative and God as following his lead. And yet is not life full of solemn facts confirmatory of the truth that God is to a man what the man is to God? That is so both subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, our conceptions of God vary with our moral nature, and objectively the dealings of God are moulded according to that nature. There is such a thing as colour blindness in regard to the Divine character, whereby some men cannot see the green of faithful love or the red of wrath, but each beholds that in God which his vision fits him to see; and the many-sided dealings of God are different in their incidence upon different characters, so that the same heat melts wax and hardens clay; and further the actual dealings are accurately adapted to the state of their objects, so that each gets what he needs most: the loving heart, sweet love tokens from the Divine Lover; the perverse, thwartings which come from a God "contrary" to them who are contrary to Him. "The history of the world is the judgment of the world." But the first of the designations of character in Psalms 18:25 hints that before man’s initiative had been God’s: for "merciful" is the pregnant word occurring so often in the Psalter, and so impossible to translate by any one word. It means, as we have already had occasion to point out, one who is the subject of the Divine lovingkindness, and who therefore loves God in return. Here it seems rather to be taken in the sense of loving than of beloved. He who exercises this lovingkindness, whether towards God or man, shall find in God One who exercises it to him. But the word itself regards man’s lovingkindness towards God as being the echo of God’s, and so the very first step in determining the mutual relations is God’s, and but for it there would never have been that in man which God could answer by showing Himself as loving. The contrasted dealings and characters are summed up in the familiar antithesis of Psa 18:27. The "afflicted" or humble are the type of God-pleasing character, since humility, such as befits dependent creatures, is the mother of all goodness, and "high looks" the master sin, and the whole drift of Providence is to lift the lowly and abase the proud. The psalmist’s swift thought vibrates throughout this part of the song between his own experience and the general truths exemplified in it. He is too full of his own deliverance to be long silent about it, and, on the other hand, is continually reminded by it of the wide sweep of the beneficent laws which have been so fruitful of good to him. The most precious result of individual mercy is the vision obtained through it of the universal Lover of souls. "My God" will be widened into "our God," and "our God" will rest upon "my God," if either is spoken from the heart’s depths. So in Psalms 18:27-29 the personal element comes again to the front. The individualising name "My God" occurs in each verse, and the deliverance underlying the theophany is described in terms which prepare for the fuller celebration of victory in the last part of the psalm. God lights the psalmist’s lamp, by which is meant not the continuance of his family (as the expression elsewhere means), but the preservation of his own life, with the added idea, especially in Psalms 18:28 b, of prosperity. Psalms 18:29 tells how the lamp was kept alight, namely by the singer’s victory in actual battle, in which his swift rush had overtaken the enemy, and his agile limbs had scaled their walls. The parallelism of the clauses is made more complete by the emendation adopted by Lagarde, Cheyne, Baethgert, etc., who read Psalms 18:29 a, -" I [can] break down a fence," but this is unnecessary. The same combination of running and climbing occurs in Joe 2:7, and the two clauses of Psa 18:33 seem to repeat those of Psa 18:29. The swift, agile warrior, then, traces these physical powers to God, as he does more at large in later verses. Once more, the song passes, in Psalms 18:30, to the wider truths taught by the personal deliverance. "Our God" takes the place of "my God"; and "all who take refuge in Him" are discerned as gathering, a shadowy crowd, round the solitary psalmist, and as sharing in his blessings. The large truths of these verses are the precious fruit of distress and deliverance. Both have cleared the singer’s eyes to see, and tuned his lips to sing, a God whose doings are without a flaw whose word is like pure gold without alloy or falsehood, whose ample protection shields all who flee to its shelter, who alone is God, the fountain of strength, who stands firm forever, the inexpugnable defence and dwelling place of men. This burst of pure adoration echoes the tones of the glorious beginning of the psalm. Happy they who, as the result of life’s experience, solve "the riddle of this painful earth," with these firm and jubilant convictions as the very foundation of their being. The remainder of the psalm (Psalms 18:32-50) describes the victorious campaign of the psalmist and the establishment of his kingdom. There is difficulty in determining the tenses of the verbs in some verses, and interpreters vary between pasts and futures. The inclination of the greater number of recent commentators is to carry the historical retrospect uninterruptedly through the whole context, which, as Hupfeld acknowledges, "allerdings das bequemste ist," and those who suppose occasional futures interspersed (as the R.V. and Hupfeld) differ in the places of their introduction. "Everything here is retrospective," says Delitzsch, and certainly that view is simplest: and gives unity to the whole. The name of God is never mentioned in the entire section, except as vainly invoked by the flying foe. Not till the closing doxologies does it appear again, with the frequency which marks the middle part of the psalm. A similar sparse use of it characterises the description of the theophany. In both cases there is a peculiar force given by the stream of verbs without expressed nominatives. The hurrying clauses here vividly reproduce the haste of battle, and each falls like the blow of a battle mace wielded by a strong arm. The equipment of the king for the fight (Psalms 18:32-36). the fierce assault, flight of the foe and their utter annihilation (Psalms 18:37-42), the extension by conquest of the singer’s kingdom (Psalms 18:43-44), successively pass before us as we listen to the panting words with the heat of battle in them; and all rises at last into exuberant praise, which re-echoes some strains of the introductory burst of thanksgiving. Many mythologies have told how the gods arm their champions, but the psalmist reaches a loftier height than these. He ventures to think of God as doing the humble office of bracing on his girdle, but the girdle is itself strength. God, whose own "way is perfect" (Psalms 18:30) makes His servant’s "way" in some measure like His own; and though, no doubt, the figure must be interpreted in a manner congruous with its context, as chiefly implying "perfection" in regard to the purpose in hand-namely, warfare - we need not miss the deeper truth that God’s soldiers are fitted for conflict by their "ways" being conformed to God’s. This man’s "strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure." Strength and swiftness are the two characteristics of antique heroes, and God’s gift bestowed both on the psalmist. Light of foot as a deer and able to climb to the robber forts perched on crags, as a chamois would, his hands deft, and his muscular arms strong to bend the bow which others could not use, he is the ideal of a warrior of old; and all these natural powers he again ascribes to God’s gift. A goddess gave Achilles his wondrous shield, but what was it to that which God binds upon this warrior’s arm? As his girdle was strength, and not merely a means of strength, his shield is salvation, and not merely a means of safety. The fact that God purposes to save and does act for saving is the defence against all dangers and enemies. It is the same deep truth as the prophet expresses by making "salvation" the walls and bulwarks of the strong city where the righteous nation dwells in peace. God does not thus arm His servant and then send him out alone to fight as he can, but "Thy right hand holds me up." What assailant can beat him down, if that hand is under his armpit to support him? The beautiful rendering of the A.V., "Thy gentleness," scarcely conveys the meaning, and weakens the antithesis with the psalmist’s "greatness," which is brought out by translating "Thy lowliness," or even more boldly "Thy humility." There is that in God which answers to the peculiarly human virtue of lowliness; and unless there were, man would remain small and unclothed with God-given strength. The devout soul thrills with wonder at God’s stooping love, which it discerns to be the foundation of all His gifts and therefore of its blessedness. This singer saw deep into the heart of God, and anticipated the great word of the one Revealer, "I am meek and lowly in heart." But God’s care for him does not merely fit him for the fight: it also orders circumstances so as to give him a free course. Having made his "feet like hinds’ feet," God then prepares paths that he should walk in them. The work is only half done when the man is endowed for service or conflict; a field for his powers must be forthcoming, and God will take care that no strength given by Him lies idle for want of a wrestling ground. Sooner or later feet find the road. Then follow six verses (Psalms 18:37-42) full of the stir and tumult of battle. There is no necessity for the change to futures in the verbs of Psa 18:37-38, which the R.V. adopts. The whole is a picture of past conflict, for which the psalmist had been equipped by God. It is a literal fight, the triumph of which still glows in the singer’s heart and flames in his vivid words. We see him in swift pursuit, pressing hard on the enemy, crushing them with his fierce onset, trampling them under foot. They break and flee, shrieking out prayers, which the pursuer has a stern joy in knowing to be fruitless. His blows fall like those of a great pestle, and crush the fleeing wretches, who are scattered by his irresistible charge, like dust whirled by the storm. The last clause of the picture of the routed foe is better given by the various reading in 2 Samuel, which requires only a very slight alteration in one letter: "I did stamp them as the mire of the streets." Such delight in the enemy’s despair and destruction, such gratification at hearing their vain cries to Jehovah, are far away from Christian sentiments; and the gulf is not wholly bridged by the consideration that the psalmist felt himself to be God’s anointed, and enmity to him to be treason against God. Most natural as his feelings were, perfectly consistent with the level of religion proper to the then stage of revelation, capable of being purified into that triumph in the victory of good and ruin of evil without which there is no vigorous sympathy with Christ’s battle, and kindling as they do by their splendid energy and condensed rapidity an answering glow in even readers so far away from their scene as we are, they are still of "another spirit" from that which Christ has breathed into the Church, and nothing but confusion and mischief can come of slurring over the difference. The light of battle which blazes in them is not the fire which Jesus longed to kindle upon earth. Thus far the enemies seem to have been native foes rebelling against God’s anointed or, if the reference to the Sauline persecution is held by. seeking to prevent his reaching his throne. But, in the concluding verses of this part (Psalms 18:43-45), a transition is made to victory over "strangers," i.e. foreign nations. "The strivings of the people" seems to point back to the war described already, while "Thou hast made me the head of the nations" refers to external conquests. In 2 Samuel the reading is "my people," which would bring out the domestic reference more strongly; but the suffix for "my" may be a defective form of writing the plural; if so, the peoples in Psalms 18:43 a are the "nations" of Psalms 18:43 b. In any case the royal singer celebrates the extension of his dominion. The tenses in Psalms 18:44-45, which the R.V. again gives as futures (as does Hupfeld), are better regarded, like all the others, as pasts. The wider dominion is not inconsistent with Davidic origin, as his conquests were extended beyond the territory of Israel. The picture of the hasty surrender of the enemy at the very sound of the conqueror’s name is graphic. "They lied unto me," as the words in Psalms 18:44 b are literally, gives forcibly the feigned submission covering bitter hate. "They fade away," as if withered by the simoom, the hot blast of the psalmist’s conquering power. "They come trembling [or, as 2 Samuel reads, come limping] from their strongholds." Psalms 18:46-50 make a noble close to a noble hymn, in which the singer’s strong wins never flags nor the rush of thought and feeling slackens. Even more absolutely than in the rest of the psalm every victory is ascribed to Jehovah. He alone acts; the psalmist is simply the recipient. To have learned by life’s struggles and deliverances that Jehovah is a living God and "my Rock" is to have gathered life’s best fruit. A morning of tempest has cleared into sunny calm, as it always will, if tempest drives to God. He who cries to Jehovah when the floods of destruction make him afraid will in due time have to set to his seal that Jehovah liveth. If we begin with "The Lord is my Rock," we shall end with "Blessed be my Rock." Thankfulness does not weary of reiterating acknowledgments; and so the psalmist gathers up once more the main points of the psalm in these closing strains and lays all his mass of blessings at the feet of the Giver. His deliverance from his domestic foes and his conquests over external enemies are wholly God’s work, and therefore supply both impulse and material for praises which shall sound out beyond the limits of Israel. The vow to give thanks among the nations has been thought fatal to the Davidic origin of the psalm. Seeing, however, that some foreign peoples were conquered by him, there was opportunity for its fulfilment. His function to make known the name of Jehovah was the reason for his victories. David had learned the purpose of his elevation, and recognised in an extended kingdom a wider audience for his song. Therefore Paul penetrates to the heart of the psalm when he quotes Psalms 18:49 in Romans 15:9 as a proof that the evangelising of the Gentiles was an Old Testament hope. The plain lesson from the psalmist’s vow is that God’s mercies bind and if felt aright will joyfully impel, the receiver to spread His name as far as his voice can reach. Love is sometimes silent, but gratitude must speak. The most unmusical voice is tuned to melody by thankfulness, and they need never want a theme who can tell what the Lord has done for their soul. The last verse of the psalm is sometimes regarded as a liturgical addition, and the mention of David gratuitously supposed to be adverse to his authorship, but there is nothing unnatural in a king’s mentioning himself in such a connection nor in the reference to his dynasty, which is evidently based upon the promise of perpetual dominion given through Nathan. The Christian reader knows how much more wonderful than the singer knew was the mercy granted to the king in that great promise, fulfilled in the Son of David, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and who bears God’s name to all the nations. Psalms 19:1-14 Is this originally one psalm or bits of two, pieced together to suggest a comparison between the two sources of knowledge of God, which the authors did not dream of? The affirmative is strongly maintained, but, we may venture to say, not so strongly sustained. The two parts are said to differ in style, rhythm, and subject. Certainly they do, but the difference in style accounts for the difference in structure. It is not an unheard of phenomenon that cadence should change with theme; and if the very purpose of the song is to set forth the difference of the two witnesses to God, nothing can be more likely than such a change in measure. The two halves are said to be put together abruptly without anything to smooth the transition. So they are, and so is Psalms 19:4 put by the side of Psa 19:3; and so does the last turn of thought (Psalms 19:12-14) follow the second. Cyclopean architecture without mortar has a certain impressiveness. The abruptness is rather an argument for than against the original unity, for a compiler would have been likely to try to make some sort of glue to hold his two fragments together, while a poet, in the rush of his afflatus, would welcome the very abruptness which the manufacturer would avoid. Surely the thought that binds the whole into a unity-that Jehovah is El, and that nature and law witness to the same Divine Person, though with varying clearness-is not so strange as that we should have to find its author in some late editor unknown. Psalms 19:1-6 hymn the silent declaration by the heavens. The details of exposition must first be dealt with. "Declare" and "makes known" are participles, and thus express the continuity of the acts. The substance of the witness is set forth with distinct reference to its limitations, for "glory" has here no moral element, but simply means what Paul calls "eternal power and Godhead," while the Divine name of God ("El") is used in intended contrast to "Jehovah" in the second half, a nuance which must be obliterated if this is a conglomerate psalm. "His handiwork," in like manner, limits the revelation. The heavens by day are so marvellously unlike the heavens by night that the psalmist’s imagination conjures up two long processions, each member of which passes on the word entrusted to him to his successor-the blazing days with heaven naked but for one great light, and the still nights with all their stars. Psalms 19:3 has given commentators much trouble in attempting to smooth its paradox. Tastes are curiously different, for some critics think that the familiar interpretation gives a flat, prosaic meaning, while Cheyne takes the verse to be a gloss for dull readers, and exclaims, "How much the brilliant psalm fragment gains by its omission!" De gustibus, etc. Some of us may still feel that the psalmist’s contrast of the awful silence in the depths of the sky and of the voice that speaks to opened ears thrills us with something very like the electric touch of poetry. In Psalms 19:4 the thought of the great voices returns. Their hue is usually explained as meaning their sphere of influence, marked out, as it were, by a measuring cord. If that rendering is adopted Psalms 19:4 b would in effect say, "Their words go as far as their realm." Or the rendering "sound" may be deduced, though somewhat precariously, from that of line, since a line stretched is musical. But the word is not used as meaning the string of an instrument, and the very slight conjectural emendation which gives "voice" instead of "line" has much to recommend it. In any case the teaching of the verse is plain from the last clause, namely the universality of the revelation. It is singular that the mention of the sun should come in the close of the verse; and there may be some error in the text, though the introduction of the sun here may be explained as completing the picture of the heavens, of which it is the crowning glory. Then follows the fuller delineation of his joyous energy, of his swift strength in his course, of his penetrating beams, illuminating and warming all. Why should the glowing metaphors, so natural and vigorous, of the sun coming forth from his bridal chamber and, hero-like, running his race, be taken to be traces of ancient myths now innocently reclaimed from the service of superstition? To find in these two images a proof that the first part of the psalm belongs to the post-exilic "literary revival of Hebrew mythology" is surely to lay more on them than they can bear. The scientific contemplation of nature is wholly absent from Scripture, and the picturesque is very rare. This psalmist knew nothing about solar spectra or stellar distances, but he heard a voice from out of the else waste heavens which sounded to him as if it named God. Comte ventured to say that the heavens declare the glory of the astronomer, not of God; but, if there be an order in them, which it is a man’s glory to discover, must there not be a mind behind the order, and must not the Maker have more glory than the investigator? The psalmist is protesting against stellar worship, which some of his neighbours practised. The sun was a creature, not a god; his "race" was marked out by the same hand which in depths beyond the visible heavens had pitched a "tent" for his nightly rest. We smile at the simple astronomy; the religious depth is as deep as ever. Dull ears do not hear these voices; but whether they are stopped with the clay of earthly tastes and occupations, or stuffed with scientific wadding of the most modern kind, the ears that do not hear God’s name sounded from the abysses above, have failed to hear the only word which can make man feel at home in nature. Carlyle said that the sky was "a sad sight." The sadness and awfulness are taken away when we hear the heavens telling the glory of God. The unscientific psalmist who did hear them was nearer the very heart of the mystery than the scientist who knows everything else about them but that. With an abrupt transition which is full of poetical force, the singer turns to the praises of the better revelation of Jehovah. Nature speaks in eloquent silence of the strong God, but has no witness to His righteous will for men or His love to them which can compare with the clear utterances of His law. The rhythm changes, and in its cadence expresses the psalmist’s exuberant delight in that law. In Psalms 19:7-11 the clauses are constructed on a uniform plan, each containing a name for the law, an attribute of it, and one of its effects. The abundance of synonyms indicates familiarity and clear views of the many sides of the subject. The psalmist had often brooded on the thought of what that law was, because, loving its Giver, he must needs love the gift. So he calls it "law," or teaching, since there he found the best lessons for character and life. It was "testimony," for in it God witnessed what lie is and what we should be, and so witnessed against sin; it was a body of "precepts" (statutes, A.V.) giving rich variety of directions: it was "commandment," blessedly imperative; it was "fear of the Lord," the effect being put for the cause; it was "judgments," the decisions of infinite truth concerning duty. These synonyms have each an attribute attached, which, together, give a grand aggregate of qualities discerned by a devout heart to inhere in that law which is to so many but a restraint and a foe. It is "perfect," as containing: without flaw or defect the ideal of conduct; "sure" or reliable, as worthy of being absolutely followed and certain to be completely fulfilled; "right," as prescribing the straight road to man’s true goal; "pure" or bright, as being light like the sun, but of a higher quality than that material brilliance: "clean," as contrasted with the foulness bedaubing false faiths and making idol worship unutterably loathsome: "true" and "wholly righteous" as corresponding accurately to the mind of Jehovah and the facts of humanity and as being in full accordance with the justice which has its seat in the bosom of God. The effects are summed up in the latter clauses of these verses, which stand, as it were, a little apart, and by the slight pause are made more emphatic. The rhythm rises and falls like the up-springing and sinking of a fountain. The law "restores the soul," or rather refreshes the life, as food does; it "makes the simple wise" by its sure testimony, giving practical guidance to narrow understandings and wills open to easy beguiling by sin; it "rejoices the heart," since there is no gladness equal to that of knowing and doing the will of God; it "enlightens the eyes" with brightness beyond that of the created light which rules the day. Then the relation of clauses changes slightly in Psalms 19:9 and a second attribute takes the place of the effect. It "endures forever," and, as we have seen is "wholly righteous." The Old Testament law was relatively imperfect and destined to be done away, but the moral core of it abides. Being more valuable than all other treasures, there is wealth in the very desire after it more than in possessing these. Loved, it yields sweetness in comparison with which the delights of sense are bitter; done, it automatically rewards the doer. If obedience had no results except its inward consequences, it would be abundantly repaid. Every true servant of Jehovah will be willing to be warned by that voice, even though it rebuke and threaten. All this rapture of delight in the law contrasts with the impatience and dislike which some men entertain for it. To the disobedient that law spoils their coarse gratifications. It is as a prison in which life is wearisomely barred from delights; but they who dwell behind its fences know that these keep evils off, and that within are calm joys and pure pleasures. The contemplation of the law cannot but lead to self-examination, and that to petition. So the psalmist passes into prayer. His shortcomings appal, for "by the law is the knowledge of sin," and he feels that beyond the sin which he knows, there is a dark region in him where foul things nestle and breed fast. "Secret faults" are those hidden, not from men, but from himself. He discovers that he has hitherto undiscovered sins. Lurking evils are most dangerous because, like aphides on the underside of a rose leaf, they multiply so quickly unobserved; small deeds make up life, and small, unnoticed sins darken the soul. Mud in water, at the rate of a grain to a glassful, will make a lake opaque. "Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth." Conscience needs educating; and we have to compare ourselves with the ideal of perfect life in Jesus, if we would know our faults, as young artists go over their copies in front of the masterpiece. But the psalmist knows that, servant of God though he is, he is in danger from another class of sins, and so prays to be held back from "presumptuous sins," i.e. wilful conscious transgressions. Such deliberate contraventions of law tend to become habitual and despotic; so the prayer follows that they may not "have dominion." But even that is not the lowest depth. Deliberate sin, which has gained the upper hand. is but too apt to end in apostacy: "Great transgression" is probably a designation for casting off the very pretence of worshipping Jehovah. That is the story of many a fall. First, some unsuspected evil habit gnaws away the substance of the life, as white ants do wood, leaving the shell apparently intact; then come sins open and palpable, and these enslave the will, becoming habits, and then follows entire abandonment of the profession of religion. It is a slippery, dark stairway, and the only safety is in not setting foot on the top step. God, and God only, can "keep us back." He will, if we cling to Him, knowing our weakness. Thus clinging, we may unblamed cherish the daring hope that we shall be "upright and innocent," since nothing less than entire deliverance from sin in all its forms and issues can correspond to the will of God concerning us and the power of God in us, nor satisfy our deepest desires. The closing aspiration is that Jehovah would accept the song and prayer. There is an allusion to the acceptance of a sacrifice, for the phrase "be acceptable" is frequent in connection with the sacrificial ritual. When the words of the mouth coincide with the meditation of the heart, we may hope that prayers for cleansing from, and defence against, sin, offered to Him whom our faith recognises as our "strength" and our "Redeemer," will be as a sacrifice of a sweet smell, well-pleasing to God. He best loves the law of Jehovah who lets it teach him his sin, and send him to his knees; he best appreciates the glories of the silent heavens who knows that their witness to God is but the prelude of the deeper music of the Scriptures’ declaration of the heart and will of Jehovah and who grasps Him as his "strength and his Redeemer" from all evil, whether evil of sin or evil of sorrow. Psalms 20:1-9 THIS is a battle song followed by a chant of victory. They are connected in subject and probably in occasion, but fight and triumph have fallen dim to us, though we can still feel how hotly the fire once glowed. The passion of loyalty and love for the king, expressed in these psalms, fits no reign in Judah so well as the bright noonday of David’s, when "whatever the king did pleased all the people." Cheyne, indeed, would bring them down to the Maccabean period, and suggests Simon Maccabaeus as the ruler referred to. He has to put a little gentle pressure on "king" to contract it to fit the man of his choice, and appeals to the "good old Semitic sense" of "consul." But would not an appeal to Hebrew usage have been more satisfactory? If "king" means "king," great or small, the psalm is not post-exilic, and the Davidic date will not seem impossible. It does not seem impossible that a poet-king should have composed a national hymn praying for his own victory, which was the nation’s also. The psalm has traces of the alternation of chorus and solo. The nation or army first pours out its united prayer for victor in Psalms 20:1-5, and is succeeded by a single voice (possibly that of the officiating priest or the king himself) in Psalms 20:6, expressing confidence that the prayer is answered, which, again, is followed by the closing chorus of many voices throbbing with the assurance of victory before a blow is struck, and sending one more long-drawn cry to God ere battle is joined. The prayer in Psalms 20:1-5 breathes self-distrust and confidence in Jehovah, the temper which brings victory, not only to Israel, but to all fighters for God. Here is no boasting of former victories, nor of man’s bravery and strength, nor of a captain’s skill. One name is invoked. It alone rouses courage and pledges triumph. "The name of the God of Jacob set thee on high." That name is almost regarded as a person, as is often the case. Attributes and acts are ascribed to it which properly belong to the Unnameable whom it names, as if with some dim inkling that the agent of revealing a person must be a person. The name is the revealed character, which is contemplated as having existence in some sense apart from Him whose character it is. Possibly there is a reference to Genesis 35:3, where Jacob speaks of "the God who answered me in the day of my distress." That ancient instance of His power to hear and help may have floated before the singer’s mind as heartening faith for this day of battle. To "set on high" is a familiar natural figure for deliverance. The earthly sanctuary is Jehovah’s throne: and all real help must come thence, of which help His dwelling there is a pledge. So in these two verses the extremity of need, the history of past revelation, and the special relation of Jehovah to Israel are woven into the people’s prayer for their king. In Psalms 20:3-4, they add the incense of their intercession to his sacrifices. The background of the psalm is probably the altar on which the accustomed offerings before a battle were being presented. (1 Samuel 13:9) The prayer for acceptance of the burnt offering is very graphic, since the word rendered "accept" is literally "esteem fat." One wish moved the sacrificing king and the praying people. Their common desire was victory, but the people are content to be obscure, and their loyal love so clings to their monarch and leader that they only wish the fulfilment of his wishes. This unit of feeling culminates in the closing petitions in Psalms 20:6, where self-oblivion wishes "May we exult in thy salvation." arrogating none of the glory of victory to themselves, but ascribing all to him, and vows "In the name of our God we will wave our standards," ascribing victory to Him. its ultimate cause. An army that prays, "Jehovah fulfil all thy petitions, will be ready to obey all its captain’s commands and to move in obedience to his impulse as if it were part of himself." The enthusiastic community of purpose with its chief and absolute reliance on Jehovah. with which this prayer throbs, would go far towards securing victory anywhere. They should find their highest exemplification in that union between Christ and us in which all human relationships find theirs, since, in the deepest sense, they are all Messianic prophecies, and point to Him who is all the good that other men and women have partially been, and satisfies all the cravings and necessities which human relationships, however blessed, but incompletely supply. The sacrifice has been offered; the choral prayer has gone up. Silence follows, the worshippers watching the curling smoke as it rises; and then a single voice breaks out into a burst of glad assurance that sacrifice and prayer are answered. Who speaks? The most natural answer is, "The king"; and the fact that he speaks of himself as Jehovah’s anointed in the third person does not present a difficulty. What is the reference in that now at the beginning of Psa 20:6. May we venture to suppose that the king’s heart swelled at the exhibition of his subjects’ devotion and hailed it as a pledge of victory? The future is brought into the present by the outstretched hand of faith, for this single speaker knows that "Jehovah has saved," though no blow has yet been struck. The prayer had asked for help from Zion; the anticipation of answer looks higher; to the holier sanctuary, where Jehovah indeed dwells. The answer now waited for in sure confidence is "the mighty deeds of salvation of His right hand," some signal forth putting of Divine power scattering the foe. A whisper may start an avalanche. The prayer of the people has set Omnipotence in motion. Such assurance that petitions are heard is wont to spring in the heart that truly prays, and comes as a forerunner of fulfilment, shedding on the soul the dawn of the yet unrisen sun. He has but half prayed who does not wait in silence, watching the flight of his arrow and not content to cease till the calm certainty that it has reached its aim fills his heart. Again the many voices take up the song, responding to the confidence of the single speaker and, like him, treating the victory as already won. Looking across the field to the masses of the enemy’s cavalry and chariots, forces forbidden to Israel, though employed by them in later days, the song grandly opposes to these "the name of Jehovah our God." There is a world of contempt and confidence in the juxtaposition. Chariots and horses are very terrible, especially to raw soldiers unaccustomed to their whirling onset: but the Name is mightier, as Pharaoh and his array proved by the Red Sea. This reference to the army of Israel as unequipped with cavalry and chariots is in favour of an early date, since the importation and use of both began as soon as Solomon’s time. The certain issue of the fight is given in Psalms 20:8 in a picturesque fashion, made more vigorous by the tenses which describe completed acts. When the brief struggle is over, this is what will be seen-the enemy prone, Israel risen from subjection and standing firm. Then comes a closing cry for help, which, according to the traditional division of the verse, has one very short clause and one long, drawn out, like the blast of the trumpet sounding the charge. The intensity of appeal is condensed in the former clause into the one word "save" and the renewed utterance of the name, thrice referred to in this short psalm as the source at once of strength and confidence. The latter clause, as in the A.V. and R.V. transfers the title of King from the earthly shadow to the true Monarch in the heavens, and thereby suggests yet another plea for help. The other division of the verse, adopted in the LXX and by some moderns, equalises the clauses by transferring "the king" to the former ("O Lord save the king, and answer us," etc.). But this involves a violent change from the second person imperfect in the first clause to the third person imperfect in the second. It would be intolerably clumsy to say, "Do Thou save; may He hear," and therefore the LXX has had recourse to inserting "and" at the beginning of the second clause, which somewhat breaks the jolt, but is not in the Hebrew. The text, as it stands, yields a striking meaning, beautifully suggesting the subordinate office of the earthly monarch and appealing to the true King to defend His own army and go forth with it to the battle which is waged for His name. When we are sure that we are serving Jehovah and fighting for Him, we may be sure that we go not a warfare at our own charges nor alone. Psalms 21:1-13 This psalm is a pendant to the preceding. There the people prayed for the king; here they give thanks for him: there they asked that his desires might be fulfilled; here they bless Jehovah, who has fulfilled them: there the battle was impending; here it has been won, though foes are still in the field: there the victory was prayed for; here it is prophesied. Who is the "king"? The superscription points to David. Conjecture has referred to Hezekiah, principally because of his miraculous recovery, which is supposed to be intended in Psalms 21:4. Cheyne thinks of Simon Maccabaeus, and sees his priestly crown in Psalms 21:3. But there are no individualising features in the royal portrait, and it is so idealised or rather spiritualised, that it is hard to suppose that any single monarch was before the singer’s mind. The remarkable greatness and majesty of the figure will appear as we read. The whole may be cast into two parts, with a closing strain of prayer. In the first part (Psalms 21:1-7), the people praise Jehovah for His gifts to the king; in the second (Psalms 21:8-12) they prophesy to the king complete victory; in Psalms 21:13 they end, as in Psalms 20:1-9, with a short petition, which, however, here is in accordance with the tone of the whole, more jubilant than the former and less shrill. The former psalm had asked for strength to be given to the king; this begins with thanks for the strength in which the king rejoices. In the former the people had anticipated triumph in the king’s salvation or victory; here they celebrate his exceeding exultation in it. It was his, since he was victor, but it was Jehovah’s, since He was Giver of victory. Loyal subjects share in the king’s triumph, and connect it with him; but he himself traces it to God. The extraordinarily lofty language in which Jehovah’s gifts are described in the subsequent verses has, no doubt. analogies in the Assyrian hymns to which Cheyne refers; but the abject reverence and partial deification which these breathe were foreign to the relations of Israel to its kings, who were not separated from their subjects by such a gulf as divided the great sovereigns of the East from theirs. The mysterious Divinity which hedges "the king" in the royal psalms is in sharp contrast with the democratic familiarity between prince and people exhibited in the history. The phenomena common to these psalms naturally suggest that "the king" whom they celebrate is rather the ideal than the real monarch. The office rather than the individual who partially fulfils its demands and possesses its endowments seems to fill the singer’s canvas. But the ideal of the office is destined to be realised in the Messiah, and the psalm is in a true sense Messianic, inasmuch as, with whatever mixture of conceptions proper to the then stage of revelation, it still ascribes to the ideal king attributes which no king of Judah exhibited. The transcendant character of the gifts of Jehovah enumerated here is obvious, however the language may be pared down. First, we have the striking picture of Jehovah coming forth to meet the conqueror with "blessings of goodness," as Melchizedek met Abraham with refreshments in his hand; and benedictions on his lips. Victory is naturally followed by repose and enjoyment, and all are Jehovah’s gift. The subsequent endowments may possibly be regarded as the details of these blessings, the fruits of the victory. Of these the first is the coronation of the conqueror, not as if he had not been king before, but as now more fully recognised as such. The supporters of the Davidic authorship refer to the crown of gold won at the capture of Rabbath of Ammon, but there is no need to seek historical basis for the representation. Then comes a signal instance of the king’s closeness of intercourse with Jehovah and of his receiving his heart’s desire in that he asked for "life" and received "length of days forever and ever." No doubt the strong expression for perpetuity may be paralleled in such phrases as "O king, live forever." and others which are obviously hyperbolical and mean not perpetual, but indefinitely protracted, duration; but the great emphasis of expression here and its repetition in Psalms 21:6 can scarcely be disposed of as mere hyperbole. If it is the ideal king who is meant, his undying life is substantially synonomous with the continuance of the dynasty which 2 Samuel 7:1-29 represents as the promise underlying the Davidic throne. The figure of the king is then brought still nearer to the light of Jehovah, and words which are consecrated to express Divine attributes are applied to him in Psalms 21:5. "Glory," "honour and majesty," are predicated of him, not as if there were an apotheosis, as would have been possible in Assyrian or Roman flattery, but the royal recipient and the Divine Giver are clearly separated, even while the lustre raying from Jehovah is conceived of as falling in brightness upon the king. These flashing emanations of the Divine glory make their recipient "blessings forever," which seems to include both the possession and the communication of good. An eternal fountain of blessing and himself blessed, he is cheered with joy which comes from Jehovah’s face, so close is his approach and so gracious to him is that countenance. Nothing higher could be thought of than such intimacy and friendliness of access. To dwell in the blaze of that face and to find only joy therein is the crown of human blessedness. (Psalms 16:11) Finally the double foundation of all the king’s gifts is laid in Psalms 21:7: he trusts and Jehovah’s lovingkindness gives, and therefore he stands firm, and his throne endures, whatever may dash against it. These daring anticipations are too exuberant to be realised in any but One, whose victory was achieved in the hour of apparent defeat; whose conquest was both His salvation and God’s; who prays knowing that He is always heard; who is King of men because He endured the cross, -and wears the crown of pure gold because He did not refuse the crown of thorns; who liveth for evermore, having been given by the Father to have life in Himself; who is the outshining of the Father’s glory, and has all power granted unto Him: who is the source of all blessing to all, who dwells in the joy to which He will welcome His servants; and who Himself lived and conquered by the life of faith, and so became the first Leader of the long line of those who have trusted and therefore have stood fast. Whomsoever the psalmist saw in his vision, he has gathered into one many traits which are realised only in Jesus Christ. The second part (Psalms 21:8-12) is, by Hupfeld and others, taken as addressed to Jehovah; and that idea has much to recommend it, but it seems to go to wreck on the separate reference to Jehovah in Psalms 21:9, on the harshness of applying "evil against thee" and "a mischievous device" (Psalms 21:11) to Him, and on the absence of a sufficient link of connection between the parts if it is adopted. If, on the other hand, we suppose that the king is addressed in these verses, there is the same dramatic structure as in Psalms 20:1-9; and the victory which has been won is now taken as a pledge of future ones. The expectation is couched in terms adapted to the horizon of the singer, and on his lips probably meant stern extermination of hostile nations. The picture is that of a fierce conqueror, and we must not seek to soften the features, nor, on the other hand, to deny the prophetic inspiration of the psalmist. The task of the ideal king was to crush and root out opposition to his monarchy, which was Jehovah’s. Very terrible are the judgments of his hand, which sound liker those of Jehovah than those inflicted by a man, as Hupfeld and others have felt. In Psalms 21:8 the construction is slightly varied in the two clauses, the verb "reach" having a preposition attached in the former, and not in the latter, which difference may be reproduced by the distinction between "reach towards" and "reach." The seeking hand is stretched out after, and then it grasps, its victims. The comparison of the "fiery oven" is inexact in form, but the very negligence helps the impression of agitation and terribleness. The enemy are not likened to a furnace, but to the fuel cast into it. But the phrase rendered in A.V. "in the time of thine anger" is very remarkable, being literally "in the time of thy face." The destructive effect of Jehovah’s countenance (Psalms 34:17) is here transferred to His king’s, into whose face has passed, as he gazed, in joy on the face of Jehovah, some of the lustre which kills where it does not gladden. Compare "everlasting destruction from the face of the Lord." (2 Thessalonians 1:9) The king is so completely representative of Jehovah that the destruction of the enemy is the work of the one fire of wrath common to both. The destruction extends to the whole generation of enemies, as in the ferocious warfare of old days, when a nation was wiped off the earth. The psalmist sees in the extremest vengeance the righteous and inevitable consequence of hostility condemned by the nature of the case to be futile, and yet criminal: "They cause evil to hang over thee: they meditate mischief; they will achieve nothing." Then, in Psalms 21:12, the dread scene is completed by the picture of the flying foe and the overtaking pursuer, who first puts them to flight, and then, getting in front of them, sends his arrows full in their faces. The ideal of the king has a side of terror; and while his chosen weapon is patient love, he has other arrows in his quiver. The pictures of the destroying conqueror are taken up and surpassed in the New Testament. They do not see the whole Christ who do not see the Warrior Christ, nor have they realised all His work who slur over the solemn expectation that one day ‘men’ shall call on rocks and hills to cover them from "the steady whole of the Judge’s face." As in Psalms 20:1-9, the close is a brief petition, which asks the fulfilment of the anticipations in Psalms 21:8-12, and traces, as in Psalms 21:1, the king’s triumph to Jehovah’s strength. The loyal love of the nation will take its monarch’s victory as its own joy and be glad in the manifestation thereby of Jehovah’s power. That is the true voice of devotion which recognises God, not man, in all victories, and answers the forth flashing of His delivering: power by the thunder of praise. Psalms 22:1-31 WHO is the sufferer whose wail is the very voice of desolation and despair, and who yet dares to believe that the tale of his sorrow will be a gospel for the world? The usual answers are given. The title ascribes the authorship to David, and is accepted by Delitzsch and others. Hengstenberg and his followers see in the picture the ideal righteous man. Others think of Hezekiah, or Jeremiah, with whose prophecies and history there are many points of connection. The most recent critics find here "the personalised Genius of Israel, or more precisely the followers of Nehemiah, including the large-hearted psalmist" (Cheyne, "Orig. of Psalt.," 264). On any theory of authorship, the startling correspondence of the details of the psalmist’s sufferings with those of the Crucifixion has to be accounted for. How startling that correspondence is, both in the number and minuteness of its points, need not be insisted on. Not only does our Lord quote the first verse on the cross, and so show that the psalm was in his heart then, but the gestures and words of mockery were verbally reproduced, as Luke significantly indicates by using the LXX’s word for "laugh to scorn" (Psalms 22:7). Christ’s thirst is regarded by John as the fulfilment of "scripture," which can scarcely be other than Psalms 22:15. The physical effects of crucifixion are described in the ghastly picture of Psa 22:14-15. Whatever difficulty exists in determining the true reading and meaning of the allusion to "my hands and my feet," some violence or indignity to them is intended. The peculiar detail of dividing the raiment was more than fulfilled, since the apparently parallel and synonymous clauses were resolved into two distinct acts. The recognition of these points in the psalm as prophecies is one thing; the determination of their relation to the psalmist’s own experience is quite another. It is taken for granted in many quarters that every such detail in prophecy must describe the writer’s own circumstances, and the supposition that they may transcend these is said to be "psychologically impossible." But it is somewhat hazardous for those who have not been subjects of prophetic inspiration to lay down canons of what is possible and impossible in it, and there are examples enough to prove that the relation of the prophets’ speech to their consciousness and circumstances was singularly complex, and not to be unravelled by any such obiter dicta as to psychological possibilities. They were recipients of messages, and did not always understand what the "Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify." Theories which neglect that aspect of the case do not front all the facts. Certainty as to the authorship of this psalm is probably unattainable. How far its words fitted the condition of the singer must therefore remain unsettled. But that these minute and numerous correspondences are more than coincidences, it seems perverse to deny. The present writer, for one, sees shining through the shadowy personality of the psalmist the figure of the Prince of Sufferers, and believes that whether the former’s plaints applied in all their particulars to him, or whether there is in them a certain "element of hyperbole" which becomes simple fact in Jesus’ sufferings, the psalm is a prophecy of Him and them. In the former case the psalmist’s experience, in the latter case his utterances, were divinely shaped so as to prefigure the sacred sorrows of the Man of Sorrows. To a reader who shares in this understanding of the psalm, it must be holy ground, to be trodden reverently and with thoughts adoringly fixed on Jesus. Cold analysis is out of place. And yet there is a distinct order even in the groans, and a manifest contrast in the two halves of the psalm (Psalms 22:1-21 and Psalms 22:22-31). "Thou answerest not" is the keynote of the former; "Thou hast answered me," of the latter. The one paints the sufferings, the other the glory that should follow. Both point to Jesus: the former by the desolation which it breathes; the latter by the world wide consequences of these solitary sufferings which it foresees. Surely opposites were never more startlingly blended in one gush of feeling than in that plaint of mingled faith and despair, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" which by its thus addressing God clings fast to Him, and by its wondering question discloses the dreary consciousness of separation from Him. The evidence to the psalmist that he was forsaken was the apparent rejection of his prayers for deliverance; and if David be the speaker, we may suppose that the pathetic fate of his predecessor hovered before his thoughts: "I am sore distressed. God is departed from me and answereth me no more. But, while lower degrees of this conflict of trust and despair belong to all deep religious life, and are experienced by saintly sufferers in all ages, the voice that rang through the darkness on Calvary was the cry of Him who experienced its force in supreme measure and in altogether unique manner. None but He can ask that question "Why?" with conscience void of offence. None but He have known the mortal agony of utter separation from God. None but He have clung to God with absolute trust even in the horror of great darkness. In Christ’s consciousness of being forsaken by God lie elements peculiar to it alone, for the separating agent was the gathered sins of the whole world, laid on Him and accepted by Him in the perfection of His loving identification of Himself with men. Unless in that dread hour He was bearing a world’s sin, there is no worthy explanation of His cry, and many a silent martyr has faced death for Him with more courage derived from Him than He manifested on His cross." After the introductory strophe of two verses, there come seven strophes, of which three contain 3 verses each (Psalms 22:3-11) followed by two of 2 verses each (Psalms 22:12-15) and these again by two with 3 verses each. Can a soul agitated as this singer’s was regulate its sobs thus? Yes, if it is a singer’s, and still more if it is a saint’s. The fetters make the limbs move less violently, and there is soothing in the ordered expression of disordered emotion. The form is artistic, not artificial; and objections to the reality of the feelings on the ground of the regularity of the form ignore the witness of the masterpieces of literature in all tongues. The desolation rising from unanswered prayer drives to the contemplation of God’s holiness and past responses to trusting men, which are in one aspect an aggravation and in another an alleviation. The psalmist partly answers his own question "Why?" and preaches to Himself that the reason cannot be in Jehovah, whose character and former deeds bind Him to answer trust by help. God’s holiness is primarily His separation from, by elevation above, the creature, both in regard of His freedom from limitations and of His perfect purity. If He is thus "holy," He will not break His promise, nor change His ways with those who trust. It takes some energy of faith to believe that a silent and apparently deaf God is "holy," and the effect of the belief may either be to crush or to lift the spirit. Its first result with this psalmist seems to have been to crush, as the next strophe shows, but the more blessed consequence is won before the end. Here it is partly a plea urged with God, as is that beautiful bold image of God enthroned "on the praises of Israel." These praises are evoked by former acts of grace answering prayers, and of them is built a yet nobler throne than the outstretched wings of the Cherubim. The daring metaphor penetrates deeply into God’s delight in men’s praise, and the power of Israel’s voice to exalt Him in the world. How could a God thus throned cease to give mercies like those which were perpetually commemorated thereby? The same half-wistful, half-confident retrospect is continued in the remaining verses of this strophe (Psalms 22:4-5), which look back to the "grey fathers" experience. Mark the plaintive reiteration of trust and "deliver," the two inseparables, as the days of old attested, which had now become so sadly parted. Not more certainly the flow of water in a pipe answers the application of thirsty lips to its opening than did God’s rescuing act respond to the father’s trust. And now!- The use of "Our" in reference to the fathers has been laid hold of as favouring the hypothesis that the speaker is the personified nation; but no individual member of a nation would speak of the common ancestors as "My fathers." That would mean his own family progenitors, whereas the psalmist means the Patriarchs and the earlier generations. No argument for the national theory, then, can be drawn from the phrase. Can the reference to Jesus be carried into this strophe? Assuredly it may, and it shows us how truly He associated Himself with His nation, and fed His faith by the records of the past. "He also is a son of Abraham." Such remembrances make the contrast of present sufferings and of a far-off God more bitter; and so a fresh wave of agony rolls over the psalmist’s soul. He feels himself crushed and as incapable of resistance as a worm bruised in all its soft length by an armed heel. The very semblance of manhood has faded. One can scarcely fail to recall "his visage was so marred more than any man," (Isaiah 52:14) and the designation of Jehovah’s servant Israel as "thou worm." (Isaiah 41:14) The taunts that wounded the psalmist so sorely have long since fallen dumb and the wounds are all healed; but the immortal words in which he wails the pain of misapprehension and rejection are engraved forever on the heart of the world. No suffering is more acute than that of a sensitive soul, brimming with love and eager ness to help, and met with scorn, rejection and ferocious mockery of its sacredest emotions. No man has ever felt that pang with the intensity with which Jesus felt it, for none has ever brought such wealth of longing love to be thrown back on itself, nor been so devoid of the callousness with which selfishness is shielded. His pure nature was tender as an infant’s hand, and felt the keen edge of the spear as none but He can have done. They are His sorrows that are painted here, so vividly and truly that the evangelist Luke takes the very word of the LXX version of the psalm to describe the rulers’ mockery. (Luke 23:35) "They draw open the lips," grinning with delight or contempt; "they nod the head" in mockery and assent to the suffering inflicted; and then the savage hate bursts into irony which defiles the sacredest emotions and comes near to blaspheming God in ridiculing trust in Him. The mockers thought it exquisite sarcasm to bid Jesus roll His troubles on Jehovah, and to bid God deliver Him since He delighted in Him. How little they knew that they were thereby proclaiming Him as the Christ of prophecy, and were giving the unimpeachable testimony of enemies to His life of devout trust and His consciousness of Divine favour! "Roll (it) on God," sneered they; and the answer was, "Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit." "Let Him deliver Him, since He delighteth in Him," they impiously cried, and they knew not that God’s delight in Him was the very reason why He did not deliver Him. Because He was His Son in whom He was well pleased, "it pleased the Lord to bruise Him." The mockery of opponents brings into clear light the deepest secrets of that cross. Another wave of feeling follows in the next strophe (Psalms 22:9-11). Backwards and forwards, from trust to complaint and from complaint to trust, rolls the troubled sea of thought, each mood evoking its opposite. Now reproach makes the psalmist tighten his grasp on God, and plead former help as a reason for present hearing. Faith turns taunts into prayers. This strophe begins with a "Yea," and, on the relationship with God which the enemies had ridiculed and which his heart knows to be true, pleads that God would not remain, as Psalms 22:1 had wailed that He was, far off from His help. It goes back to the beginning of life, and in the mystery of birth and the dependence of infancy, finds arguments with God. They are the personal application of the wide truth that God by His making us men gives us a claim on Him, that He has bound Himself by giving life to give what is needful for its development and well-being. He will not stultify Himself by making a man and then leaving him to struggle alone, as birds do with their young, as soon as they can fly’. He is "a faithful Creator." May we venture to find special reference here to the mystery of the Incarnation? It is noticeable that "my mother" is emphatically mentioned, while there is no reference to a father. No doubt the cast of the thought accounts for that, but still the special agency of Divine power in the birth of Jesus gives special force to His prayer for Divine help in the life so peculiarly the result of the Divine band. But while the plea had singular force on Christ’s lips, it is valid for all men. The closing verse of this strophe takes the complaint of Psa 22:1 and turns it into prayer. Faith does not rest with plaintively crying "Why art Thou so far?" but pleads "Be not far"; and makes the nearness of trouble and the absence of all other help its twofold pleas. So much the psalmist has already won by his communing with God. Now he can face environing sorrows and solitary defencelessness, and feel them to be reasons for God’s coming, not tokens of His distance. We now come to two strophes of two verses each (Psalms 22:12-15), of which the former describes the encircling foes and the latter the psalmist’s failure of vital power. The metaphor of raging wild animals recurs in later verses, and is common to many psalms. Bashan was a land of pastures over which herds of half wild cattle roamed. They "have surrounded me" is a picturesque touch, drawn direct from life, as anyone knows who has ever found himself in the midst of such a herd. The gaping mouth is rather characteristic of the lion than of the bull. The open jaws emit the fierce roar which precedes the fatal spring and the "ravening" on its prey. The next short strophe passes from enemies around to paint inward feebleness. All vital force has melted away; the very bones are dislocated, raging thirst has supervened. These are capable of being construed as simply strong metaphors, parallels to which may be found in other psalms; but it must not be left unnoticed that they are accurate transcripts of the physical effects of crucifixion. That torture killed by exhaustion, it stretched the body as on a rack, it was attended with agonies of thirst. It requires considerable courage to brush aside such coincidences as accidental, in obedience to a theory of interpretation. But the picture is not completed when the bodily sufferings are set forth. A mysterious attribution of them all to God closes the strophe. "Thou hast brought me to the dust of death." Then, it is God’s hand that has laid all these on him. No doubt this may be, and probably was in the psalmist’s thought, only a devout recognition of Providence working through calamities; but the words receive full force only by being regarded as parallel with those of Isa 53:10, "He hath put Him to grief." In like manner the apostolic preaching regards Christ’s murderers as God’s instruments. The next strophe returns to the three-verse arrangement, and blends the contents of the two preceding, dealing both with the assailing enemies and the enfeebled sufferer. The former metaphor of wild animals encircling him is repeated with variations. A baser order of foes than bulls and lions, namely, a troop of cowardly curs, are snarling and snapping round him. The contemptuous figure is explained in Psalms 22:16 b, as meaning a mob of evildoers, and is then resumed in the next clause, which has been the subject of so much dispute. It seems plain that the Masoretic text is corrupt. "Like a lion, my hands and my feet" can only be made into sense by violent methods. The difference between the letters which yield "like a lion "and those which give "they pierced" is only in the length of the upright stroke of the final one. LXX Vulg. Syr. translate they dug or pierced, and other ancient versions attest that they read the word as a verb. The spelling of the word is anomalous, if we take it to mean dig, but the irregularity is not without parallels, and may be smoothed away either by assuming an unusual form of a common verb or a rare root cognate with the more common one. The word would then mean "they dug" rather than pierced, but the shade of difference in meaning is not so great as to forbid the later rendering. In any case "it is the best attested reading. It is to be understood of the gaping wounds which are inflicted on the sufferer’s hands and feet, and which stare at him like holes" (Baethgen, "Hand Comment.," p. 65). "Behold my hands and my feet," said the risen Lord, and that calm word is sufficient proof that both bore the prints of nails. The words might be written over this psalm. Strange and sad that so many should look on it and not see Him! The picture of bodily sufferings has one more touch in "I can count all my bones." Emaciation would produce that effect. But so would crucifixion which extended the frame and threw the bones of the thorax into prominence. Then the sufferer turns his eyes once more to his enemies, and describes the stony gaze, protracted and unfeeling, with which they feed upon his agonies. Crucifixion was a slow process, and we recall the long hours in which the crowd sated their hatred through their eyes. It is extremely unlikely that the psalmist’s garments were literally parted among his foes, and the usual explanation of the singular details in Psalms 22:18 is that they are either a metaphor drawn from plundering the slain in battle or a proverbial expression. What reference the words had to the original speaker of them must, in our ignorance of his circumstances, remain uncertain. But they at all events depict his death as so sure that his enemies regard his dress as their perquisite. Surely this is a distinct instance of Divine guidance moulding a psalmist’s words so as to fill them with a deeper meaning than the speaker knew. He who so shaped them saw the soldiers dividing the rest of the garments and gambling for the seamless cloak; and He was "the Spirit of Christ which was in" the singer. The next strophe closes the first part with petition which, in the last words, becomes thanksgiving, and realises the answer so fervently besought. The initial complaint of God’s distance is again turned into prayer, and the former metaphors of wild beasts are gathered into one long cry for deliverance from the dangerous weapons of each, the dog’s paw, the lion’s mouth, the wild oxen’s horns. The psalmist speaks of his "soul" or life as "my only one," referring not to his isolation, but to his life as that which, once lost, could never be regained. He has but one life, therefore he clings to it, and cannot but believe that it is precious in God’s eyes. And then, all at once, up shoots a clear light of joy, and he knows that he has not been speaking to a deaf or remote God, but that his cry is answered. He had been brought to the dust of death, but even thence he is heard and brought out with no soil of it upon him. Such suddenness and completeness of deliverance from such extremity of peril may, indeed, have been experienced by many, but receives its fullest meaning in its Messianic application. "From the horns of the wild oxen," says he, as if the phrase were still dependent, like the preceding ones, on the prayer, "deliver me." But, as he thus cries, the conviction that he is heard floods his soul, and he ends, not with a cry for help, but with that one rapturous word, "Thou hast answered me." It is like a parting burst of sunshine at the end of a day of tempest. A man already transfixed by a buffalo’s horns has little hope of escape, but even thence God delivers. The psalmist did not know, but the Christian reader should not forget that the Prince of sufferers was yet more wondrously delivered from death by passing through death, and that by His victory all who cleave to Him are, in like manner, saved from the horns even while these gore them, and are then victors over death when they fall beneath its dart. The consequences of the psalmist’s deliverance are described in the last part (Psalms 22:22-31) in language so wide that it is hard to suppose that any man could think his personal experiences so important and far-reaching. The whole congregation of Israel are to share in his thanksgiving and to learn more of God’s name through him (Psalms 22:22-26). Nor does that bound his anticipations, for they traverse the whole world and embrace all lands and ages, and contemplate that the story of his sufferings and triumph will prove a true gospel, bringing every country and generation to remember and turn to Jehovah. The exuberant language becomes but one mouth. Such consequences, so widespread and age long, can follow from the story of but one life. If the sorrows of the preceding part can only be a description of the passion, the glories of the second can only be a vision of the universal and eternal kingdom of Christ. It is a gospel before the Gospels and an Apocalypse before Revelations. In the first strophe (Psalms 22:22-26) the delivered singer vows to make God’s name known to His brethren. The epistle to the Hebrews quotes the vow as not only expressive of our Lord’s true manhood, but as specifying its purpose. Jesus became man that men might learn to know God; and the knowledge of His name streams most brightly from the cross. The death and resurrection, the sufferings and glory of Christ open deeper regions in the character of God than even His gracious life disclosed. Rising from the dead and exalted to the throne, He has "a new song" in His immortal lips, and more to teach concerning God than He had before. The psalm calls Israel to praise with the singer, and tells the ground of their joyful songs (Psalms 22:23-24). Here the absence of any reference to the relation which the New Testament reveals between these sufferings and that praise is to be noted as an instance of the gradual development of prophecy. "We are not yet on the level of Isa 53:1-12." (Kirkpatrick, "Psalms," 152). The close of this part speaks of a sacrifice of which "the humble shall eat and be satisfied"-"I will pay my vows"-i.e. the thank offerings vowed when in trouble. The custom of feasting on the "sacrifices for peace offering for thanksgiving" (Leviticus 7:15) is here referred to, but the ceremonial garb covers spiritual truth. The condition of partaking in this feast is humility, that poverty of spirit which knows itself to be hungry and unable to find food for itself. The consequence of partaking is satisfaction-a deep truth reaching far beyond the ceremonial emblem. A further result is that "your heart shall live forever"-an unmeaning hyperbole, but in one application of the words. We penetrate to the core of the psalm in this part, when we read it in the light of Christ’s words, "My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed," and when we connect it with the central act of Christian worship, the Lord’s Supper. The universal and perpetual diffusion of the kingdom and knowledge of God is the theme of the closing strain (Psalms 22:27-31). That diffusion is not definitely stated as the issue of the sufferings or deliverance, but the very fact that such a universal knowledge comes into view here requires that it should be so regarded, else the unity of the psalm is shattered. While, therefore, the ground alleged in Psalms 22:28 for this universal recognition of God is only His universal dominion we must suppose that the history of the singer as told to the world is the great fact which brings home to men the truth of God’s government over and care for them. True, men know God apart from revelation and from the gospel, but He is to them a forgotten God, and the great influence which helps them to "remember and turn to Jehovah" is the message of the Cross and the Throne of Jesus. The psalm had just laid down the condition of partaking in the sacrificial meal as being lowliness, and (Psalms 22:29) it prophecies that the "fat" shall also share in it. That can only be, if they become "humble." Great and small, lofty and low must take the same place and accept the food of their souls as a meal of charity. The following words are very difficult, as the text stands. There would appear to be a contrast intended between the obese self-complacency; of the prosperous and proud, and the pauper-like misery of "those who are going down to the dust" and who "cannot keep their soul alive," that is, who are in such penury and wretchedness that they are all but dead. There is a place for ragged outcasts at the table side by side with the "fat on earth." Others take the words as referring to those already dead, and see here a hint that the dim regions of Sheol receive beams of the great light and some share in the great feast. The thought is beautiful, but too remote from anything else in the Old Testament to be adopted here. Various attempts at conjectural emendations and redivision of clauses have been made in order to lighten the difficulties of the verse. However attractive some of these are, the existing reading yields a not unworthy sense, and is best adhered to. As universality in extent, so perpetuity in duration is anticipated for the story of the psalmist’s deliverance and for the praise to God thence accruing. "A seed shall serve Him." That is one generation of obedient worshippers. "It shall be told of Jehovah unto the [next] generation." That is, a second, who shall receive from their progenitors, the seed that serves, the blessed story. "They shall declare His righteousness unto a people that shall be born." That is, a third, which in its turn receives the good news from parents’ lips. And what is the word which thus maintains itself living amid dying generations, and blesses each, and impels each to bequeath it as their best treasure to their successors? "That He hath done." Done what? With eloquent silence the psalm omits to specify. What was it that was meant by that word on the cross which, with like reticence, forbore to tell of what it spoke? "He hath done." "It is finished." No one word can express all that was accomplished in that sacrifice. Eternity will not fully supply the missing word, for the consequences of that finished work go on unfolding forever, and are forever unfinished, because forever increasing. Psalms 23:1-6 THE world could spare many a large book better than this sunny little psalm. It has dried many tears and supplied the mould into which many hearts have poured their peaceful faith. To suppose that the speaker is the personified nation chills the whole. The tone is too intense not to be the outcome of personal experience, however admissible the application to the nation may be as secondary. No doubt Jehovah is the Shepherd of Israel in several Asaphite psalms and in Jeremiah; but, notwithstanding great authorities, I cannot persuade myself that the voice which comes so straight to the heart did not come from the heart of a brother speaking across the centuries his own personal emotions, which are universal just because they are individual. It is the pure utterance of personal trust in Jehovah, darkened by no fears or complaints and so perfectly at rest that it has nothing more to ask. For the time desire is stilled in satisfaction. One tone, and that the most blessed which can sound in a life, is heard through the whole. psalm of quiet trust, undisturbed even by its Joy, which is quiet too. The fire glows, not flame or crackle. The one thought is expanded in two kindred images: that of the shepherd and that of the host. The same ideas are substantially repeated under both forms. The lovely series of vivid pictures, each but a clause long, but clear cut in that small compass, like the fine work incised on a gem, combines with the depth and simplicity of the religious emotion expressed, to lay this sweet psalm on all hearts. Psalms 23:1-4 present the realities of the devout life under the image of the Divine Shepherd and His lamb. The comparison of rulers to shepherds is familiar to many tongues, and could scarcely fail to occur to a pastoral people hike the Jews, nor is the application to Jehovah’s relation to the people so recondite that we need to relegate the psalms in which it occurs to a late era in the national history. The psalmist lovingly, lingers on the image, and draws out the various aspects of the shepherd’s care and of the flock’s travels, with a ripeness and calmness which suggests that we listen to a much-experienced man. The sequence in which the successive pictures occur is noteworthy. Guidance to refreshment comes first, and is described in Psalms 23:2, in words which fall as softly as the gentle streams of which they speak. The noontide is fierce, and the land lies baking in the sun blaze; but deep down in some wady runs a brook, and along its course the herbage is bright with perpetual moisture, and among the lush grass are cool lairs where the footsore, panting flock may couch. The shepherd’s tenderness is beautifully hinted at in the two verbs: he "leads," not drives, but in Eastern wise precedes and so draws the trustful sheep; he "makes me to lie down," taking care that the sheep shall stretch weary limbs in full enjoyment of repose. God thus guides to rest and lays to rest the soul that follows Him. Why does the psalmist begin with this aspect of life? Because it is fittest to express the shepherd’s care, and because it is, after all, the predominant aspect to the devout heart. Life is full of trial and effort, but it is an unusually rainy region where rain falls on more than half the days of the year. We live so much more vividly and fully in the moments of agony or crisis that they seem to fill more space than they really do. But they are only moments, and the periods of continued peaceful possession of blessings are measured by years. But the sweet words of the psalm are not to be confined to material good. The psalmist does not tell us whether he is thinking more of the outer or of the inner life, but both are in his mind, and while his confidence is only partially warranted by the facts of the former, it is unlimitedly true in regard to the latter. In that application of the words the significance of the priority given to the pastures of fresh springing grass and the waters of repose is plain, for there the rest of trust and the drinking of living water must precede all walking in paths of righteousness. Food and drink and rest refresh fainting powers, and this reinvigoration is meant by "restoring my soul" or life. But the midday or nightly rest is intended to fit for effort, and so a second little picture follows in Psalms 23:3, presenting another aspect of the shepherd’s care and of the sheep’s course. Out again on to the road, in spite of heat and dust, the flock goes. "Paths of righteousness," is perhaps best taken as "straight paths," as that rendering keeps within the bounds of the metaphor; but since the sheep are men, straight paths for them must needs be paths of righteousness. That guidance is "for His name’s sake." God has regard to His revealed character in shepherding His lamb, and will give direction because He is what He is, and in order that He may be known to be what He has declared himself. The psalmist had learned the purpose of repose and refreshment which, in all regions of life, are intended to prepare for tasks and marches. We are to "drink for strength, and not for drunkenness." A man may lie in a bath till strength is diminished, or may take his plunge and come from it braced for work. In the religious life it is possible to commit an analogous error, and to prize so unwisely peaceful hours of communion, as. to waive imperative duty for the sake of them; like Peter with his "Let us make here three tabernacles," while there were devil-ridden sufferers waiting to be healed down on the plain. Moments of devotion, which do not prepare for hours of practical righteousness, are very untrustworthy. But, on the other hand, the paths of righteousness will not be trodden by those who have known nothing of the green pastures and waters where the wearied can rest. But life has another aspect than these two-rest and toil; and the guidance into danger and sorrow is as tender as its other forms are. The singular word rendered "shadow of death" should probably simply be "gloomy darkness," such, for instance, as in the shaft of a mine. (Job 28:3) But even if the former rendering is retained, it is not to be interpreted as meaning actual death. No wise forward look can ignore the possibility of many sorrows and the certainty of some. Hope has ever something of dread in her eyes. The road will not be always bright and smooth, but will sometimes plunge down into grim cations, where no sunbeams reach. But even that anticipation may be calm. "Thou art with me" is enough. He who guides into the gorge will guide through it. It is not a cul de sac, shut in with precipices, at the far end; but it opens out on shining tablelands, where there is greener pasture. The rod and staff seem to be two names for one instrument, which was used both to beat off predatory animals and to direct the sheep. The two synonyms and the appended pronoun express by their redundancy the full confidence of the psalmist. He will not fear, though there are grounds enough for terror, in the dark valley; and though sense prompts him to dread, he conquers fear because he trusts. "Comfort" suggests a struggle, or, as Calvin says, "Quorsum enim consolatio ipsa, nisi quia metus eum solicitat?" The second image of the Divine Host and His guest is expanded in Psalms 23:5-6. The ideas are substantially the same as in the first part. Repose and provision, danger and change, again fill the foreground; and again there is forecast of a more remote future. But all is intensified, the need and the supply being painted in stronger colours and the hope being brighter. The devout man is God’s guest while he marches through foes, and travels towards perpetual repose in the house of Jehovah. Jehovah supplies his servants’ wants in the midst of conflict. The table spread in the sight of the enemy is a more signal token of care and power than the green pastures are. Life is not only journey and effort, but conflict; and it is possible not only to have seasons of refreshment interspersed in the weary march, but to find a sudden table spread by the same unseen hand which holds back the foes, who look on with grim eyes, powerless to intercept the sustenance or disturb the guests. This is the condition of God’s servant-always conflict, but always a spread table. Joy snatched in the face of danger is specially poignant. The flowers that bloom on the brink of a cataract are bright, and their tremulous motion adds a charm. Special experiences of God’s sufficiency are wont to come in seasons of special difficulty, as many a true heart knows. It is no scanty meal that waits God’s soldier under such circumstances, but a banquet accompanied with signs of festivity, viz., the head anointed with oil and the cup which is "fulness." God’s supplies are wont to surpass the narrow limits of need and even to transcend capacity, having a something over which as set we are unable to take in, but which is not disproportioned or wasted, since it widens desire and thereby increases receptivity. In the last verse we seem to pass to pure anticipation. Memory melts into hope, and that brighter than the forecast which closed the first part. There the psalmist’s trust simply refused to yield to fear, while keenly conscious of evil which might warrant it; but here be has risen higher. and the alchemy of his happy faith and experience has converted evil into something fairer. "Only good and mercy shall follow me." There is no evil for the heart wedded to Jehovah; there are no foes to pursue, but two bright-faced angels walk behind him as his rear guard. It is much when the retrospect of life can, like Jacob on his death bed, see "the Angel which redeemed me from all evil"; but it is perhaps more when the else fearful heart can look forward and say that not only will it fear no evil, but that nothing but blessings, the outcome of God’s mercy, will ever reach it. The closing hope of dwelling in the house of Jehovah to length of days rises above even the former verse. The singer knew himself a guest of God’s at the table spread before the foe, but that was, as it were, refreshment on the march, while this is continual abiding in the home. Such an unbroken continuity of abode in the house of Jehovah is a familiar aspiration in other psalms, and is always regarded as possible even while hands are engaged in ordinary duties and cares. The psalms which conceive of the religious life under this image are marked by a peculiar depth and inwardness. They are wholesomely mystical. The hope of this guest of God’s is that, by the might of fixed faith and continual communion, he may have his life so hid in God that wherever he goes he may still be in His house, and whatever he does he may still be "inquiring in His temple." The hope is here confined to the earthly present, but the Christian reading of the psalm can scarcely fail to transfer the words to a future. God will bring those whom He has fed and guided in journeying and conflict to an unchanging mansion in a home beyond the stars. Here we eat at a table spread with pilgrim’s food, manna from heaven and water from the rock. We eat in haste and with an eye on the foe, but we may hope to sit down at another table in the perfected kingdom. The end of the fray is the beginning of the feast. "We shall go no more out." Psalms 24:1-10 EWALD’S widely accepted view that this psalm is a composite of two fragments rests on a somewhat exaggerated estimate of the differences in tone and structure of the parts. These are obvious, but do not demand the hypothesis of compilation; and the original author has as good a right to be credited with the uniting thought as the supposed editor has. The usually alleged occasion of the psalm fits its tone so well and gives such appropriateness to some of its phrases that stronger reasons than are forthcoming are required to negative it. The account in 2 Samuel 6:1-23 tells of exuberant enthusiasm and joy of which some echo sounds in the psalm. It is a processional hymn, celebrating Jehovah’s entrance to His house; and that one event, apprehended on its two sides, informs the whole. Hence the two halves have the same interchange of question and answer, and the two questions correspond, the one inquiring the character of the men who dare dwell with God. the other the name of the God who dwells with men. The procession is climbing the steep to the gates of the ancient Jebusite fortress, recently won by David. As it climbs, the song proclaims Jehovah as the universal Lord, basing the truth of His special dwelling in Zion upon that of His world wide rule. The question, so fitting the lips of the climbers, is asked, possibly, in solo, and the answer describing the qualifications of true worshippers, and possibly choral (Psalms 24:3-6), is followed by a long-drawn musical interlude. Now the barred gates are reached. A voice summons them to open. The guards within, or possibly the gates themselves, endowed by the poet with consciousness and speech, ask who thus demands entrance. The answer is a triumphant shout from the procession. But the question is repeated, as if to allow of the still fuller reiteration of Jehovah’s name, which shakes the grey walls; and then, with clang of trumpets and clash of cymbals, the ancient portals creak open, and Jehovah "enters into His rest, He and the ark of His strength." Jehovah’s dwelling on Zion did not mean His desertion of the rest of the world, nor did His choice of Israel imply His abdication of rule over, or withdrawal of blessings from, the nations. The light which glorified the bare hilltop, where the Ark rested, was reflected thence over all the world. "The glory" was there concentrated, not confined. This psalm guards against all superstitious misconceptions, and protests against national narrowness, in exactly the same way as Exodus 19:5 bases Israel’s selection from among all peoples on the fact that "all the earth is Mine." "Who may ascend?" was a picturesquely appropriate question for singers toiling upwards, and "who may stand?" for those who hoped presently to enter the sacred presence. The Ark which they bore had brought disaster to Dagon’s temple, so that the Philistine lords had asked in terror, "Who is able to stand before this holy Lord God?" and at Beth-shemesh its presence had been so fatal that David had abandoned the design of bringing it up and said, "How shall the ark of the Lord come to me?" The answer, which lays down the qualifications of true dwellers in Jehovah’s house, may be compared with the similar outlines of ideal character in Psalms 15:1-5 and Isaiah 33:14. The one requirement is purity. Here that requirement is deduced from the majesty of Jehovah, as set forth in Psalms 24:1-2 and from the designation of His dwelling as "holy." This is the postulate of the whole Psalter. In it the approach to Jehovah is purely spiritual, even while the outward access is used as a symbol; and the conditions are of the same nature as the approach. The general truth implied is that the character of the God determines the character of the worshippers. Worship is supreme admiration, culminating in imitation. Its law is always "They that make them are like unto them; so is everyone that trusteth in them." A god of war will have warriors, and a god of lust sensualists, for his devotees. The worshippers in Jehovah’s holy place must be holy. The details of the answer are but the echoes of a conscience enlightened by the perception of His character. In Psalms 24:4 it may be noted that of the four aspects of purity enumerated the two central refer to the inward life (pure heart; lifts not his desire unto vanity), and these are embedded, as it were, in the outward life of deeds and words. Purity of act is expressed by "clean hands"-neither red with blood, nor foul with grubbing in dunghills for gold and other so called good. Purity of speech is condensed into the one virtue of truthfulness (swears not to a falsehood). But the outward will only be right if the inward disposition is pure, and that inward purity will only be realised when desires are carefully curbed and directed. As is the desire, so is the man. Therefore the prime requisite for a pure heart is the withdrawal of affection, esteem, and longing from the solid-seeming illusions of sense. "Vanity!" has, indeed, the special meaning of idols, but the notion of earthly good apart from God is more relevant here. In Psalms 24:5 the possessor of such purity is represented as receiving "a blessing, even righteousness," from God, which is by many taken to mean beneficence on the part of God, "inasmuch as, according to the Hebrew religious view of the world, all good is regarded as reward from God’s retributive righteousness, and consequently as that of man’s own righteousness or right conduct" (Hupfeld). The expression is thus equivalent to "salvation" in the next clause. But while the word has this meaning in some places, it does not seem necessary to adopt it here, where the ordinary meaning is quite appropriate. Such a man as is described in Psalms 24:4 will have God’s blessing on his efforts after purity, and a Divine gift will furnish him with that which he strives after. The hope is not lit by the full sunshine of New Testament truth, but it approximates thereto. It dimly anticipates "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness"; and it feels after the great thought that the highest righteousness is not to be won, but to be accepted, even while it only asserts that man’s effort after must precede his possession of righteousness. We can give the words a deeper meaning, and see in them the dawn of the later teaching that righteousness must be "received" from "the God of salvation." Psalms 24:6 seems to carry the adumbration of truth not yet disclosed a step further. A great planet is trembling into visibility, and is divined before it is seen. The emphasis in Psalms 24:6 is on "seek," and the implication is that the men who seek find. If we seek God’s face, we shall receive purity. There the psalm touches the foundation. The Divine heart so earnestly desires to give righteousness that to seek is to find. In that region a wish brings an answer, and no outstretched hand remains empty. Things of less worth have to be toiled and fought for; but the most precious of all is a gift, to be had for the asking. That thought did not stand clearly before the Old Testament worshippers, but it struggles towards expression in many a psalm, as it could not but do whenever a devout heart pondered the problems of conduct. We have abundant warnings against the anachronism of thrusting New Testament doctrine into the Psalms, but it is no less one sided to ignore anticipations which could not but spring up where there was earnest wrestling with the thoughts of sift and of the need of purity. Are we to adopt the supplement, "O God of," before the abrupt "Jacob"? The clause is harsh in any construction. The preceding "thy" seems to require the addition, as God is not directly addressed elsewhere in the psalm. On the other hand, the declaration that such seekers are the true people of God is a worthy close of the whole description, and the reference to the "face" of God verbally, recalls Peniel and that wonderful incident when Jacob became Israel. The seeker after God will have that scene repeated, and be able to say, "I have seen God." The abrupt introduction of "Jacob" is made more emphatic by the musical interlude which closes the first part. There is a pause, while the procession ascends the hill of the Lord, revolving the stringent qualifications for entrance. It stands before the barred gates, while possibly part of the choir is within. The advancing singers summon the doors to open and receive the incoming Jehovah. Their portals are too low for Him to enter, and therefore they are called upon to lift their lintels. They are grey with age, and round them cluster long memories; therefore they are addressed as "gates of ancient time." The question from within expresses ignorance and hesitation, and dramatically represents the ancient gates as sharing the relation of the former inhabitants to the God of Israel, whose name they did not know, and whose authority they did not own. It heightens the force of the triumphant shout proclaiming His mighty name. He is Jehovah, the self-existent God, who has made a covenant with Israel, and fights for His people, as these grey walls bear witness. His warrior might had wrested them from their former possessors. and the gates must open for their Conqueror. The repeated question is pertinacious and animated: "Who then is He, the King of Glory?" as if recognition and surrender were reluctant. The answer is sharp and authoritative, being at once briefer and fuller. It peals forth the great name "Jehovah of hosts." There may be reference in the name to God’s command of the armies of Israel, thereby expressing the religious character of their wars; but the "hosts" includes the angels. "His ministers who do His pleasure," and the stars, of which He brings forth the hosts by number. In fact, the conception underlying the name is that of the universe as an ordered whole, a disciplined army, a cosmos obedient to His voice. It is the same conception which the centurion had learned from his legion, where the utterance of one will moved all the stern, shining ranks. That mighty name, like a charge of explosives, bursts the gates of brass asunder, and the procession sweeps through them amid yet another burst of triumphant music. Psalms 25:1-22 THE recurrence of the phrase "lift up the soul" may have determined the place of this psalm next to Psalms 24:1-10. It is acrostic, but with irregularities. As the text now stands, the second, not the first, word in Psalms 25:2 begins with Beth; Vav is omitted or represented in the "and teach me" of the He verse (Psalms 25:5); Qoph is also omitted, and its place taken by a supernumerary Resh, which letter has thus two verses (Psalms 25:18-19); and Psalms 25:22 begins with Pe, and is outside the scheme of the psalm, both as regards alphabetic structure and subject. The same peculiarities of deficient Vav and superfluous Pe verses reappear in another acrostic psalm (Psalms 34:1-22), in which the initial word of the last verse is, as here, "redeem." Possibly the two psalms are connected. The fetters of the acrostic structure forbid freedom and progress of thought, and almost compel repetition. It is fitted for meditative reiteration of favourite emotions or familiar axioms, and results in a loosely twined wreath rather than in a column with base, shaft, and capital. A slight trace of consecution of parts may be noticed in the division of the verses (excluding Psalms 25:22) into three sevens, of which the first is prayer, the second meditation on the Divine character and the blessings secured by covenant to them who fear Him, and the third is bent round, wreath-like, to meet the first, and is again prayer. Such alternation of petition and contemplation is like the heart’s beat of the religious life, now expanding in desire, now closing in possession. The psalm has no marks of occasion or period. It deals with the permanent elements in a devout man’s relation to God. The first prayer section embraces the three standing needs: protection, guidance, and forgiveness. With these are intertwined their pleas according to the logic of faith-The suppliant’s uplifted desires and God’s eternal tenderness and manifested mercy. The order of mention of the needs proceeds from without inwards, for protection from enemies is superficial as compared with illumination as to duty, and deeper than even that, as well as prior in order of time (and therefore last in order of enumeration), is pardon. Similarly the pleas go deeper as they succeed each other; for the psalmist’s trust and waiting is superficial as compared with the plea breathed in the name of "the God of my salvation"; and that general designation leads to the gaze upon the ancient and changeless mercies, which constitute the measure and pattern of God’s working (according to, Psalms 25:7), and upon the self-originated motive, which is the deepest and strongest of all arguments with Him (for Thy goodness’ sake, Psalms 25:7). A qualification of the guest in God’s house was in Psalms 24:1-10, the negative one that he did not lift up his soul-i.e., set his desires-on the emptinesses of time and sense. Here the psalmist begins with the plea that he has set his on Jehovah, and, as the position of "Unto Thee, Jehovah," at the beginning shows, on Him alone. The very nature of such aspiration after God demands that it shall be exclusive. All in all or not at all is the requirement of true devotion, and such completeness is not attained without continual withdrawal of desire from created good. The tendrils of the heart must be untwined from other props before they can be wreathed round their true stay. The irregularity in Psalms 25:2, where the second, not the first, word of the verse begins with Beth, may be attenuated by treating the Divine name as outside the acrostic order. An acute conjecture, however, that the last clause of Psa 25:5 really belongs to Psalms 25:1 and should include "my God" now in Psalms 25:2, has much in its favour. Its transposition restores to both verses the two-claused structure which runs through the psalm, gets rid of the acrostical anomaly, and emphasises the subsequent reference to those who wait on Jehovah in Psalms 25:3. In that case Psalms 25:2 begins with the requisite letter. It passes from plea to petition: "Let me not be shamed." Trust that was not vindicated by deliverance would cover the face with confusion. "Hopes that breed not shame" are the treasure of him whose hope is in Jehovah. Foes unnamed threaten; but the stress of the petitions in the first section of the psalm is less on enemies than on sins. One cry for protection from the former is all that the psalmist utters, and then his prayer swiftly, turns to deeper needs. In the last section the petitions are more exclusively for deliverance from enemies. Needful as such escape is, it is less needful than the knowledge of God’s ways, and the man in extremest peril orders his desires rightly, if he asks holiness first and safety second. The cry in Psalms 25:2 rests upon the confidence nobly, expressed in Psalms 25:3, in which the verbs are not optatives, but futures, declaring a truth certain to be realised in the psalmist’s experience, because it is true for all who, like him, wait on Jehovah. True prayer is the individual’s sheltering himself under the broad folds of the mantle that covers all who pray. The double confidence as to the waiters on Jehovah and the "treacherous without cause" is the summary of human experience as read by faith. Sense has much to adduce in contradiction, but the dictum is nevertheless true, only its truth does not always appear in the small arc of the circle which lies between cradle and grave. The prayer for deliverance glides into that for guidance, since the latter is the deeper need, and the former will scarcely be answered unless the suppliant’s will docilely offers the latter. The soul lifted to Jehovah will long to know His will and submit itself to His manifold teachings. "Thy ways" and "Thy paths" necessarily mean here the ways in which Jehovah desires that the psalmist should go. "In Thy truth" is ambiguous, both as to the preposition and the noun. The clause may either present God’s truth (i.e., faithfulness) as His motive for answering the prayer, or His truth (i.e., the objective revelation) as the path for men. Predominant usage inclines to the former signification of the noun, but the possibility still remains of regarding God’s faithfulness as the path in which the psalmist desires to be led, i.e., to experience it. The cry for forgiveness strikes a deeper note of pathos, and, as asking a more wondrous blessing, grasps still more firmly the thought of what Jehovah is and always has been. The appeal is made to "Thy compassions and lovingkindnesses," as belonging to His nature, and to their past exercise as having been "from of old." Emboldened thus, the psalmist can look back on his own past, both on his outbursts of youthful passion and levity, which he calls "failures," as missing the mark, and on the darker evils of later manhood, which he calls "rebellions," and can trust that Jehovah will think upon him according to His mercy, and for the sake of His goodness or love. The vivid realisation of that Eternal Mercy as the very mainspring of God’s actions, and as setting forth, in many an ancient deed, the eternal pattern or His dealings, enables a man to bear the thought of his own sins. The contemplation of the Divine character prepares the way for the transition to the second group of seven verses, which are mainly meditation on that character and on God’s dealings and the blessedness of those who fear Him (Psalms 25:8-14). The thought of God beautifully draws the singer from himself. How deeply and lovingly he had pondered on the name of the Lord before he attained to the grand truth that His goodness and very uprightness pledged Him to show sinners where they should walk! Since there is at the heart of things an infinitely pure and equally loving Being, nothing is more impossible than that He should wrap Himself in thick darkness and leave men to grope after duty. Revelation of the path of life in some fashion is the only conduct consistent with His character. All presumptions are in favor of such Divine teaching: and the fact of sin makes it only the more certain. That fact may separate men from God, but not God from men, and if they transgress, the more need both in their characters and in God’s. is there that He should speak. But while their being sinners does not prevent His utterance, their disposition determines their actual reception of His teaching, and "the meek" or lowly of heart are His true scholars. His instruction is not wasted on them, and, being welcomed, is increased. A fuller communication of His will rewards the humble acceptance of it. Sinners are led in the way; the meek are taught His way. Here the conception of God’s way is in transition from its meaning in Psalms 25:4 to that in Psalms 25:10, where it distinctly must mean His manner of dealing with men. They who accept His teaching, and order their paths as He would have them do, will learn that the impulse and meaning of all which He does to them are "mercy and truth," the two great attributes to which the former petitions appealed, and which the humble of heart, who observe the conditions of God’s covenant which is witness of His own character and of their duty, will see gleaming with lambent light even in calamities. The participators, then, in this blessed knowledge have a threefold character: sinners humble: keepers of the covenant and testimonies. The thought of these requirements drives the psalmist back on himself, as it will do all devout souls, and forces from him a short ejaculation of prayer, which breaks with much pathos and beauty the calm flow of contemplation. The pleas for forgiveness of the "iniquity" which makes him feel unworthy of Jehovah’s guidance are remarkable. "For Thy name’s sake" appeals to the revealed character of God, as concerned in the suppliant’s pardon, inasmuch as it will be honoured thereby, and God will be true to Himself in forgiving. "For it is great" speaks the boldness of helplessness. The magnitude of sin demands a Divine intervention. None else than God can deal with it. Faith makes the very greatness of sin and extremity of need a reason for God’s act of pardon. Passing from self, the singer again recurs to his theme, reiterating in vivid language and with some amplification the former thoughts. In Psalms 25:8-10 the character of Jehovah was the main subject, and the men whom He blessed were in the background. In Psalms 25:12-14 they stand forward. Their designation now is the wide one of "those who fear Jehovah," and the blessings they receive are, first, that of being taught the way, which has been prominent thus far, but here has a new phase, as being "the way that he should choose"; i.e., God’s teaching illuminates the path, and tells a man what he ought to do, while his freedom of choice is uninfringed. Next, outward blessings of settled prosperity shall be his, and his children shall have the promises to Israel fulfilled in their possession of the land. These outward blessings belong to the Old Testament epoch, and can only partially be applied to the present stage of Providence. But the final element of the good man’s blessedness (Psalms 25:14) is eternally true. Whether we translate the first word "secret" or "friendship," the sense is substantially the same. Obedience and the true fear of Jehovah directly tend to discernment of His purposes, and will besides be rewarded by whispers from heaven. God would not hide from Abraham what he would do, and still His friend will know His mind better than the disobedient. The last clause of Psa 25:14 is capable of various renderings. "His covenant" may be in the accusative, and the verb a periphrastic future, as the A.V. takes it, or the former word may be nominative, and the clause be rendered, "And His covenant [is] to make them to know." But the absolute use of the verb without a specification of the object taught is somewhat harsh, and probably the former rendering is to be preferred. The deeper teaching of the covenant which follows on the fear of the Lord includes both its obligations and blessings, and the knowledge is not mere intellectual perception, but vital experience. In this region life is knowledge, and knowledge life. Whoso "keeps His covenant" (Psalms 25:10) will ever grow in appropriation of its blessings and apprehension of its obligations by his submissive will. The third heptad of verses returns to simple petition, and that, with one exception (Psalms 25:18 b), for deliverance from enemies. This recurrence, in increased intensity, of the consciousness of hostility is not usual, for the psalms which begin with it generally pray themselves out of it. "The peace which passeth understanding," which is the best answer to prayer, has not fully settled on the heaving sea. A heavy ground swell runs in these last short petitions, which all mean substantially the same thing. But there is a beginning of calm; and the renewed petitions are a pattern of that continual knocking of which such great things are said and recorded in Scripture. The section begins with a declaration of patient expectance: "Mine eyes are ever towards Jehovah," with wistful fixedness which does not doubt though it has long to look. Nets are wrapped round his feet, inextricably but for one hand. We can bear to feel our limbs entangled and fettered, if our eyes are free to gaze, and fixed in gazing, upwards. The desired deliverance is thrice presented (Psalms 25:16, "turn unto"; Psalms 25:18, "look upon"; Psalms 25:19, "consider," lit. look upon) as the result of Jehovah’s face being directed towards the psalmist. When Jehovah turns to a man, the light streaming from His face makes darkness day. The pains on which He "looks" are soothed; the enemies whom He beholds shrivel beneath His eye. The psalmist believes that God’s presence, in the deeper sense of that phrase, as manifested partly through delivering acts and partly through inward consciousness, is his one need, in which all deliverances and gladnesses are enwrapped. He plaintively pleads, "For I am alone and afflicted." The soul that has awakened to the sense of the awful solitude of personal being, and stretched out yearning desires to the only God, and felt that with Him it would know no pain in loneliness, will not cry in vain. In Psalms 25:17 a slight alteration in the text, the transference of the final Vav of one word to the beginning of the next, gets rid of the incongruous phrase "are enlarged" as applied to troubles (lit. straits), and gives a prayer which is in keeping with the familiar use of the verb in reference to afflictions: "The troubles of my heart do Thou enlarge, (cf. Psalms 18:36) and from my distresses," etc. Psalms 25:18 should begin with Qoph, but has Resh, which is repeated in the following verse, to which it rightly belongs. It is at least noteworthy that the anomaly makes the petition for Jehovah’s "look" more emphatic, and brings into prominence the twofold direction of it. The "look" on the psalmist’s affliction and pain will be tender and sympathetic, as a mother eagle’s on her sick eaglet; that on his foes will be stern and destructive, many though they be. In Psalms 25:11 the prayer for pardon was sustained by the plea that the sin was "great"; in Psalms 25:19 that for deliverance from foes rests on the fact that "they are many," for which the verb cognate with the adjective of Psa 25:11 is used. Thus both dangers without and evils within are regarded as crying out by their multitude, for God’s intervention. The wreath is twined so that its end is brought round to its beginning. "Let me not be ashamed, for I trust in Thee," is the second petition of the first part repeated; and "I wait on Thee," which is the last word of the psalm, omitting the superfluous verse, echoes the clause which it is proposed to transfer to Psalms 25:1. Thus the two final verses correspond to the two initial, the last but one to the first but one, and the last to the first. The final prayer is that "integrity (probably complete devotion of heart to God) and uprightness" (in relation to men) may preserve him, as guardian angels; but this does not assert the possession of these, but is a petition for the gift of them quite as much as for their preserving action. The implication of that petition is that no harm can imperil or destroy him whom these characteristics guard. That is true in the whole sweep of human life, however often contradicted in the judgment of sense. Like Psalms 34:1-22, this concludes with a supplementary verse beginning with Pe, a letter already represented in the acrostic scheme. This may be a later addition for liturgical purposes. Psalms 26:1-12 THE image of "the way" which is characteristic of Psa 25:1-22 reappears in a modified form in this psalm, which speaks of "walking in integrity" and truth and of "feet standing in an even place." Other resemblances to the preceding psalm are the use of "redeem," "be merciful"; the references to God’s lovingkindness and truth, in which the psalmist walks, and to his own integrity. These similarities may or may not indicate common authorship, but probably guided the compilers in placing the psalm here. It has not clear marks of date or of the writer’s circumstances. Its two ground tones are profession of integrity and of revulsion from the society of the wicked and prayer for vindication of innocence by the fact of deliverance. The verses are usually grouped in couples, but with some irregularity. The two keynotes are both struck in the first group of three verses, in which Psalms 26:2 and Psalms 26:3 are substantially an expansion of Psa 26:1. The prayer, "Judge me," asks for a Divine act of deliverance based upon a Divine recognition of the psalmist’s sincerity and unwavering trust. Both the prayer and its ground are startling. It grates upon ears accustomed to the tone of the New Testament that a suppliant should allege his single eyed simplicity and steadfast faith as pleas with God, and the strange tone sounds on through the whole psalm. The threefold prayer in Psalms 26:2 courts Divine scrutiny, as conscious of innocence, and bares, the inmost recesses of affection and impulse for testing, proving by circumstances, and smelting by any fire. The psalmist is ready for the ordeal, because he has kept God’s "lovingkindness" steadily in sight through all the glamour of earthly brightnesses, and his outward life has been all, as it were, transacted in the sphere of God’s truthfulness; i.e., the inward contemplation of His mercy and faithfulness has been the active principle of his life. Such self-consciousness is strange enough to us, but, strange as it is, it cannot fairly be stigmatised as Pharisaic self-righteousness. The psalmist knows that all goodness comes from God, and he clings to God in childlike trust. The humblest Christian heart might venture in similar language to declare its recoil from evil-doers and its deepest spring of action as being trust. Such professions are not inconsistent with consciousness of sin, which is, in fact, often associated with them in other psalms (Psalms 25:20-21; Psalms 7:11; Psalms 7:18). They do indicate a lower stage of religious development, a less keen sense of sinfulness and of sins. a less clear recognition of the worthlessness before God of all man’s goodness, than belong to Christian feeling. The same language when spoken at one stage of revelation may be childlike and lowly, and be swelling arrogance and self-righteous self-ignorance, if spoken at another. Such high and sweet communion cannot but breed profound distaste for the society of evildoers. The eyes which have God’s lovingkindness ever before them are endowed with penetrative clearness of vision into the true hollowness of most of the objects pursued by men, and with a terrible sagacity which detects hypocrisy and shams. Association with such men is necessary, else we must needs go out of the world, and leaven must be in contact with dough in order to do its transforming work; but it is impossible for a man whose heart is truly in touch with God not to feel ill at ease when brought into contact with those who have no share in his deepest convictions and emotions. "Men of vanity" is a general designation for the ungodly, pronouncing on every such life the sentence that it is devoted to empty unrealities and partakes of the nature of that to which it is given up. One who has Jehovah’s lovingkindness before his eyes cannot "sit" with such men in friendly association, as if sharing their ways of thinking, nor "go" with them in their course of conduct. "Those who mask themselves" are another class, namely hypocrites who conceal their pursuit of vanity under the show of religion. The psalmist’s revulsion is intensified in Psalms 26:5 into "hate," because the evil-doers and sinners spoken of there are of a deeper tint of blackness, and are banded together in a "congregation," the opposite and parody of the assemblies of the righteous, whom he feels to be his kindred. No doubt separateness from evil-doers is but part of a godly man’s duty, and has often been exaggerated into selfish withdrawal, from a world which needs good men’s presence all the more the worse it is; but it is a part of his duty, and "Come out from among them and be separate" is not yet an abrogated command. No man will ever mingle with "men of vanity," so as to draw them from the shadows of earth to the substance in God, unless his loving association with them rests on profound revulsion from their principles of action. None comes so near to sinful men as the sinless Christ; and if He had not been ever "separate from sinners," He would never have been near enough to redeem them. We may safely imitate His free companionship, which earned Him His glorious name of their Friend, if we imitate His remoteness from their evil. From the uncongenial companionship of the wicked the psalmist’s yearnings instinctively turn to his heart’s home, the sanctuary. The more a man feels out of sympathy with a godless world, the more longingly he presses into the depths of communion with God; and, conversely, the more he feels at home in still communion, the more does the tumult of sense-bound crowds grate on his soul. The psalmist, then, in the next group of verses (Psalms 26:6-7), opposes access to the house of God and the solemn joy of thankful praises sounding there to the loathed consorting with evil. He will not sit with men of vanity because he will enter the sanctuary. Outward participation in its worship may be included in his vows and wishes, but the tone of the verses rather points to a symbolical use of the externalities of ritual. Cleansing the hands alludes to priestly lustration; compassing the altar is not known to have been a Jewish practice, and probably is to be taken as simply a picturesque way of describing himself as one of the joyous circle of worshippers; the sacrifice is praise. The psalmist rises to the height of the true Israelite’s priestly vocation, and ritual has become transparent to him. None the less may he have clung to the outwardnesses of ceremonial worship, because he apprehended them in their highest significance and had learned that the qualification of the worshipper was purity, and the best offering praise. Well for those who, like him, are driven to the sanctuary by the revulsion from vanities and from those who pursue them! Psalms 26:8 is closely connected with the two preceding, but is perhaps best united with the following verse, as being the ground of the prayer there. Hate of the congregation of evil-doers has love to God’s house for its complement or foundation. The measure of attachment is that of detachment. The designations of the sanctuary in Psalms 26:8 show the aspects in which it drew the psalmist’s love. It was "the shelter of Thy house," where he could hide himself from the strife of tongues and escape the pain of herding with evil-doers: it was "the place of the dwelling of Thy glory." the abode of that symbol of Divine presence which flamed between the cherubim and lit the darkness of the innermost shrine. Because the sinner felt his true home to be there, he prayed that his soul might not be gathered with sinners, i.e., that he might not be involved in their fate. He has had no fellowship with them in their evil, and therefore he asks that he may be separate from them in their punishment. To "gather the soul" is equivalent to taking away the life. God’s judgments sort out characters and bring like to like, as the tares are bound in bundles or as, with so different a purpose, Christ made the multitudes sit down by companies on the green sward. General judgments are not indiscriminate. The prayer of the psalmist may not have looked beyond exemption from calamities or from death, but the essence of the faith which it expresses is eternally true: that distinction of attitude towards God and goodness must secure distinction of lot, even though external circumstances are identical. The same things are not the same to men so profoundly different. The picture of the evil-doers from whom the psalmist recoils is darker in these last verses than before. It is evidently a portrait and points to a state of society in winch violence, outrage, and corruption were rampant. The psalmist washed his hands in innocency, but these men had violence and bribes in theirs. They were therefore persons in authority, prostituting justice. The description fits too many periods too well to give a clue to the date of the psalm. Once more the consciousness of difference and the resolve not to be like such men break forth in the closing couple of verses. The psalm began with the profession that he had walked in his integrity; it ends with the vow that he will. It had begun with the prayer "Judge me"; it ends with the expansion of it into "Redeem me"-i.e., from existing dangers, from evildoers, or from their fate-and "Be gracious unto me," the positive side of the same petition. He who purposes to walk uprightly has the right to expect God’s delivering and giving hand to be extended to him. The resolve to walk uprightly unaccompanied with the prayer for that hand to hold up is as rash as the prayer without the resolve is vain. But if these two go together, quiet confidence will steal into the heart; and though there be no change in circumstances, the mood of mind will be so soothed and lightened that the suppliant will feel that he has suddenly emerged from the steep gorge where he had been struggling and shut up, and stands on the level ground of the "shining table lands, whereof our God Himself is sun and moon." Such peaceful foretaste of coming security is the forerunner which visits the faithful heart. Gladdened by it, the psalmist is sure that his desire of compassing God’s altar with praise will be fulfilled, and that, instead of compulsory association with the "congregation of evil-doers," he will bless Jehovah "in the congregations" where His name is loved and find himself among those who, like himself, delight in His praise. Psalms 27:1-14 THE hypothesis that two originally distinct psalms or fragments are here blended has much in its favour. The rhythm and style of the latter half (Psalms 27:7-14) are strikingly unlike those of the former part, and the contrast of feeling is equally marked, and is in the opposite direction from that which is usual, since it drops from exultant faith to at least plaintive, if not anxious petition. But while the phenomena are plain and remarkable, they do not seem to demand the separation suggested. Form and rhythm are elastic in the poet’s hands, and change in correspondence with his change of mood. The flowing melody of the earlier part is the natural expression of its sunny confidence, and the harsher strains of the later verses fit no less well their contents. Why may not the key change to a minor, and yet the voice be the same? The fall from jubilant to suppliant faith is not unexampled in other psalms (cf. Psalms 9:1-20 and Psalms 25:1-22), nor in itself unnatural. Dangers, which for a moment cease to press, do recur, however real the victory over fear has been, and in this recrudescence of the consciousness of peril, which yet does not loosen, but tighten, the grasp of faith, this ancient singer speaks the universal experience; and his song becomes more precious and more fitted for all lips than if it had been unmingled triumph. One can better understand the original author passing in swift transition from the one to the other tone, than a later editor deliberately appending to a pure burst of joyous faith and aspiration a tag which flattened it. The more unlike the two halves are, the less probable is it that their union is owing to any but the author of both. The fire of the original inspiration could fuse them into homogeneousness; it is scarcely possible that a mechanical patcher should have done so. If, then, we take the psalm as a whole, it gives a picture of the transitions of a trustful soul surrounded by dangers, in which all such souls may recognise their own likeness. The first half (Psalms 27:1-6) is the exultant song of soaring faith. But even in it there sounds an undertone. The very refusal to be afraid glances sideways at outstanding causes for fear. The very names of Jehovah as "Light, Salvation," "the Stronghold of my life," imply darkness, danger, and besetting foes. The resolve to keep alight the fire of courage and confidence in the face of encamping foes and rising wars is much too energetic to be mere hypothetical courage. The hopes of safety in Jehovah’s tent, of a firm standing on a rock, and of the head being lifted above surrounding foes are not the hopes of a man at ease, but of one threatened on all sides, and triumphant only because he clasps Jehovah’s hand. The first words of the psalm carry it all in germ. By a noble dead lift of confidence, the singer turns from foes and fears to stay himself on Jehovah, his light and salvation, and then, in the strength of that assurance, bids back his rising fears to their dens. "I will trust, and not be afraid," confesses the presence of fear, and, like our psalm, unveils the only reasonable counteraction of it in the contemplation of what God is. There is much to fear unless He is our light, and they who will not begin with the psalmist’s confidence have no right to repeat his courage. To a devout man the past is eloquent with reasons for confidence, and in Psalms 27:2 the psalm points to a past fact. The stumbling and falling of former foes, who came open mouthed at him, is not a hypothetical case, but a bit of autobiography, which lives to nourish present confidence. It is worth notice that the language employed has remarkable correspondence with that used in the story of David’s fight with Goliath. There the same word as here is twice employed to describe the Philistine’s advance. (1 Samuel 17:41; 1 Samuel 17:48) Goliath’s vaunt, "I will give thy flesh to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field," may have supplied the mould for the expression here, and the fall of the giant, with his face to the earth and the smooth stone in his brain, is narrated with the same word as occurs in the psalm. It might well be that when David was a fugitive before Saul the remembrance of his victory over Goliath should have cheered him, just as that of his earlier prowess against bear and lion heartened him to face the Philistine bully; and such recollections would be all the more natural since jealousy of the fame that came to him from that feat had set the first light to Saul’s hatred. Psalms 27:3 is not to be left swinging in vacuo, a cheap vow of courage in hypothetical danger. The supposed case is actual fact, and the expressions of trust are not only assertions for the future, but statements of the present temper of the psalmist: "I do not fear; I am confident." The confidence of Psa 27:3 is rested not only on Jehovah’s past acts, but on the psalmist’s past and present set of soul towards Him. That seems to be the connecting link between Psalms 27:1-3 and Psalms 27:4-6. Such desire, the psalmist is sure, cannot but be answered, and in the answer all safety is included. The purest longing after God as the deepest, most fixed yearning of a heart, was never more nobly expressed. Clearly the terms forbid the limitation of meaning to mere external presence in a material sanctuary. "All the days of my life" points to a continuance inward and capable of accomplishment, wherever the body may be. The exclusiveness and continuity of the longing, as well as the gaze on God which is its true object, are incapable of the lower meaning, while, no doubt, the externals of worship supply the mould into which these longings are poured. But what the psalmist wants is what the devout soul in all ages and stages has wanted: the abiding consciousness of the Divine presence; and the prime good which makes that presence so infinitely and exclusively desirable to him is the good which draws all such souls in yearning, namely the vision of God. The lifelong persistence and exclusiveness of the desire are such as all must cherish if they are to receive its fruition. Blessed are they who are delivered from the misery of multiplied and transient aims which break life into fragments by steadfastly and continually following one great desire, which binds all the days each to each, and in its single simplicity encloses and hallows and unifies the else distracting manifoldness! That life is filled with light, however it may be ringed round with darkness, which has the perpetual vision of God, who is its light. Very beautifully does the psalm describe the occupation of God’s guest as "gazing upon the pleasantness of Jehovah." In that expression the construction of the verb with a preposition implies a steadfast and penetrating contemplation, and the word rendered "beauty" or "pleasantness" may mean "friendliness," but is perhaps better taken in a more general meaning, as equivalent to the whole gathered delightsomeness of the Divine character, the supremely fair and sweet. "To inquire" may be rendered "to consider"; but the rendering "meditate [or contemplate] in" is better, as the palace would scarcely be a worthy object of consideration; and it is natural that the gaze on the goodness of Jehovah should be followed by loving meditation on what that earnest look had seen. The two acts complete the joyful employment of a soul communing with God: first perceiving and then reflecting upon His uncreated beauty of goodness. Such intimacy of communion brings security from external dangers. The guest has a claim for protection. And that is a subsidiary reason for the psalmist’s desire as well as a ground of his confidence. Therefore the assurance of Psa 27:5 follows the longing of Psa 27:4. "A pavilion," as the Hebrew text reads, has been needlessly corrected in the margin into "His pavilion" (A.V.). "It is not God’s dwelling, as the following ‘tent’ is, but a boothas an image of protection from heat and inclemency of weather" (Isaiah 4:6) (Hupfeld). God’s dwelling is a "tent," where he will shelter His guests. The privilege of asylum is theirs. Then, with a swift change of figure, the psalmist expresses the same idea of security by elevation on a rock, possibly conceiving the tent as pitched there. The reality of all is that communion with God secures from perils and enemies, an eternal truth, if the true meaning of security is grasped. Borne up by such thoughts, the singer feels himself lifted clear above the reach of surrounding foes and with the triumphant "now" of Psalms 27:6, stretches out his hand to bring future deliverance into the midst of present distress. Faith can blend the seasons, and transport June and its roses into December’s snows. Deliverance suggests thankfulness to a true heart, and its anticipation calls out prophetic "songs in the night." But the very brightness of the prospect recalls the stern reality of present need, and the firmest faith cannot keep on the wing continually. In the first part of the psalm it sings and soars; in the second the note is less jubilant, and it sings and sinks; but in both it is faith. Prayer for deliverance is as really the voice of faith as triumph in the assurance of deliverance is, and he who sees his foes and yet "believes to see the goodness of Jehovah" is not far below him who gazes only on the beauty of the Lord. There is a parallelism between the two halves of the psalm worth nothing. In the former part the psalmist’s confidence reposed on the two facts of past deliverance and of his past and continuous "seeking after" the one good; in the second his prayers repose on the same two grounds, which occur in inverted order. "That will I seek after" (Psalms 27:4), is echoed by "Thy face will I seek" (Psalms 27:8). To seek the face is the same substantially ‘as to desire to,’ gaze on the pleasantness of Jehovah." The past experience of the fall of foes (Psalms 27:2) is repeated in "Thou hast been my help." On these two pleas the prayer in which faith speaks itself founds. The former is urged in Psalms 27:8-9 with some harshness of construction, which is smoothed over, rightly as regards meaning, in the A.V. and R.V. But the very brokenness of the sentence adds to the earnestness of the prayer: "To Thee my heart has said, Seek ye my face; Thy face, Jehovah, will I seek." The answering heart repeats the invitation which gave it courage to seek before it responds with its resolve. The insertion of some such phrase as "in answer to Thy word" before "seek ye" helps the sense in a translation, but mars the vigour of the original. The invitation is not quoted from any Scripture, but is the summary of the meaning of all God’s self-revelation. He is ever saying, "Seek ye my face." Therefore He cannot but show it to a man who takes Him at His word and pleads that word as I have never said the warrant for his petition "to the seed of Jacob, Seek ye my face in vain." the consistency of the Divine character ensures His satisfying the desires which He has implanted. He will neither stultify Himself nor tantalise men by setting them on quests which end in disappointment. In a similar manner, the psalm urges the familiar argument from God’s past, which reposes on the confidence of unalterable grace and inexhaustible resources. The psalmist bad no cold abstract doctrine of immutability as a Divine attribute. His conception was intensely practical. Since God has helped in the past, He will help in the future, because He is God, and because He is "the God of my salvation." He cannot reverse His action nor stay His hand until His dealings with His servants have vindicated that name by completing the process to which it binds Him. The prayer "Forsake me not" is based upon a remarkable ground in Psalms 27:10: "For my father and my mother have forsaken me." That seems singular plea for a mature man, who has a considerably varied experience of life behind him, to urge. It is generally explained as a proverbial expression, meaning no more than the frequent complaints in the Psalter of desertion by friends and lovers. Cheyne (Commentary in loc.) sees in it a clear indication that the speaker is the afflicted nation, comparing itself to a sobbing child deserted by its parents. But it is at least noteworthy that, when David was hard pressed at Adullam, he bestowed his father and mother for safety with the king of Moab. (1 Samuel 21:3-4) It is objected that this was not their "forsaking" him, but it was, at least, their "leaving" him and might well add an imaginative pang as well as a real loss to the fugitive. So specific a statement as that of the psalm can scarcely be weakened down into proverb or metaphor. The allusion may be undiscoverable, but the words sound uncommonly like the assertion of a fact, and the fact referred to is the only known one which in any degree fits them. The general petitions of Psa 27:7-10 become more specific as the song nears its close. As in Psalms 25:1-22, guidance and protection are the psalmist’s needs now. The analogy of other psalms suggests an ethical meaning for "the plain path" of Psalms 27:11; and that signification, rather than that safe road, is to be preferred, for the sake of preserving a difference between this and the following prayer for deliverance. The figures of his enemies stand out more threateningly than before (Psalms 27:12). Is that all his gain from his prayer? Is it not a faint-hearted descent from Psalms 27:6, where, from the height of his Divine security, he looked down on them far below, and unable to reach him? Now they have "risen up," and he has dropped down among them. But such changes of mood are not inconsistent with unchanged faith, if only the gaze which discerns the precipice at either side is not turned away from the goal ahead and above, nor from Him who holds up His servant. The effect of that clearer sight of the enemies is very beautifully given in the abrupt half-sentence of Psa 27:13: "If I had not believed to see the goodness of Jehovah in the land of the living!" As he thinks of his foes he breaks into an exclamation, which he leaves unfinished. The omission is easy to supply. He would have been their victim but for his faith. The broken words tell of his recoil from the terrible possibility forced on him by the sight of the formidable enemies. Well for us if we are but driven the closer to God, in conscious helplessness, by the sight of dangers and antagonisms! Faith does not falter, though it is keenly conscious of difficulties. It is not preserved by ignoring facts, but should be by them impelled to clasp God more firmly as its only safety. So the psalm goes back to the major key at last, and in the closing verse prayer passes into self-encouragement. The heart that spoke to God now speaks to itself. Faith exhorts sense and soul to "wait on Jehovah." The self-communing of the psalmist, beginning with exultant confidence and merging into prayer thrilled with consciousness of need and of weakness, closes with bracing him up to courage, which is not presumption, because it is the fruit of waiting on the Lord. He who thus keeps his heart in touch with God will be able to obey the ancient command, which had rung so long before in the ears of Joshua in the plains of Jericho and is never out of date, "Be strong and of a good courage"; and none but those who wait on the Lord will be at once conscious of weakness and filled with strength, aware of the foes and bold to meet them. Psalms 28:1-9 THE unquestionable resemblances to Psalms 26:1-12 scarcely require that this should be considered its companion. The differences are as obvious as the likenesses. While the prayer "Draw me not away with the wicked" and the characterisation of these are alike in both, the further emphatic prayer for retribution here and the closing half of this psalm have nothing corresponding to them in the other. This psalm is built on the familiar plan of groups of two verses each, with the exception that the prayer, which is its centre, runs over into three. The course of thought is as familiar as the structure. Invocation is followed by petition, and that by exultant anticipation of the answer as already given; and all closes with wider petitions for the whole people. Psalms 28:1-2 are a prelude to the prayer proper, bespeaking the Divine acceptance of it, on the double ground of the psalmist’s helplessness apart from God’s help and of his outstretched hands appealing to God enthroned above the mercy seat. He is in such straits that, unless his prayer brings an answer in act, he must sink into the pit of Sheol, and be made like those that lie huddled there in its darkness. On the edge of the slippery slope, he stretches out his hands toward the innermost sanctuary (for so the word rendered, by a mistaken etymology, "oracle" means). He beseeches God to hear, and blends the two figures of deafness and silence as both meaning the withholding of help. Jehovah seems deaf when prayer is unanswered, and is silent when He does not speak in deliverance. This prelude of invocation throbs with earnestness, and sets the pattern for suppliants, teaching them bow to quicken their own desires as well as how to appeal to God by breathing to Him their consciousness that only His hand can keep them from sliding down into death. The prayer itself (Psalms 28:3-5) touches lightly on the petition that the psalmist may be delivered from the fate of the wicked, and then launches out into indignant description of their practices and solemn invocation of retribution upon them. "Drag away" is parallel with, but stronger than, "Gather not" in Psalms 26:9. Commentators quote Job 24:22, where the word is used of God’s dragging the mighty out of life by His power, as a struggling criminal is haled to the scaffold. The shuddering recoil from the fate of the wicked is accompanied with vehement loathing of their practices. A man who keeps his heart in touch with God cannot but shrink, as from a pestilence, from complicity with evil. and the depth of his hearty hatred of it is the measure of his right to ask that he may not share in the ruin it must bring, since God is righteous. One type of evildoers is the object of the psalmist’s special abhorrence: false friends with smooth tongues and daggers in their sleeves, the "dissemblers" of Psalms 26:1-12; but he passes to the more general characterisation of the class, in his terrible prayer for retribution, in Psalms 28:4-5. The sin of sins, from which all specific acts of evil flow, is blindness to God’s "deeds" and to "the work of His hands," His acts both of mercy and of judgment. Practical atheism, the indifference which looks upon nature, history, and self, and sees no signs of a mighty hand tender, pure, and strong, ever active in them all, will surely lead the purblind "Agnostics" to do "works of their hands" which, for lack of reference to Him, fail to conform to the highest ideal and draw down righteous judgment. But the blindness to God’s work here meant is that of an averted will rather than that of mistaken understanding, and from the stem of such a thorn the grapes of holy living cannot be gathered. Therefore the psalmist is but putting into words the necessary result of such lives when from suppliant he becomes prophet, and declares that "He shall cast them down, and not build them up." The stern tone of this prayer marks it as belonging to the older type of religion, and its dissimilarity to the New Testament teaching is not to be slurred over. No doubt the element of personal enmity is all but absent, but it is not the prayer which those who have heard "Father, forgive them," are to copy. Yet, on the other hand, the wholesome abhorrence of evil, the solemn certitude that sin is death, the desire that it may cease from the world, and the lowly petition that it may not drag us into fatal associations are all to be preserved in Christian feeling, while softened by the light that falls from Calvary. As in many psalms, the faith which prays passes at once into the faith which possesses. This man, when he "stood praying, believed that he had what he asked," and, so believing, had it. There was no change in circumstances, but he was changed. There is no fear of going down into the pit now, and the rabble of evil-doers have disappeared. This is the blessing which every true suppliant may bear away from the throne, the peace which passeth understanding, the sure pledge of the Divine act which answers prayer. It is the first gentle ripple of the incoming tide; high water is sure to come at the due hour. So the psalmist is exuberant and happily tautological in telling how his trusting heart has become a leaping heart, and help has been flashed back from heaven as swiftly as his prayer had travelled thither. The closing strophe (Psalms 28:8-9) is but loosely connected with the body of the psalm except on one supposition. What if the singer were king over Israel, and if the dangers threatening him were public perils? That would explain the else singular attachment of intercession for Israel to so intensely personal a supplication. It is most natural that God’s "anointed" who has been asking deliverance for himself, should widen his petitions to take in that flock of which he was but the under-shepherd, and should devolve the shepherding and carrying of it on the Divine Shepherd King, of whom he was the shadowy representative. The addition of one letter changes "their" in Psalms 28:8 into "to His people" a reading which has the support of the LXX and of some manuscripts and versions and is recommended by its congruity with the context. Cheyne’s suggestion that "His anointed" is the high priest is only conjecture. The reference of the expression to the king who is also the psalmist preserves the unity of the psalm. The Christian reader cannot but think of the true King and Intercessor, whose great prayer before His passion began, like our psalm, with petitions for Himself, but passed into supplication for His little flock and for all the unnumbered millions "who should believe on" Him "through their word." Psalms 29:1-11 THE core of this psalm is the magnificent description of the thunderstorm rolling over the whole length of the land. That picture is framed by two verses of introduction and two of conclusion, which are connected, inasmuch as the one deals with the "glory to God in the highest" which is the echo of the tempest in angels’ praises, and the other with the "peace on earth" in which its thunders die away. The invocation in Psalms 29:1-2 is addressed to angels, whatever may be the exact rendering of the remarkable title by which they are summoned in Psalms 29:1. It is all but unique, and the only other instance of its use (Psalms 89:6) establishes its meaning, since "holy ones" is there given as synonymous in the verses preceding and following. The most probable explanation of the peculiar phrase (B’ne Elim) is that of Gesenius, Ewald, Delitzsch, and Riehm in his edition of Hupfeld’s Commentary: that it is a double plural, both members of the compound phrase being inflected. Similarly "mighty men of valour" (1 Chronicles 7:5) has the second noun in the plural. This seems more probable than the rendering "sons of the gods." The psalmist summons these lofty beings to "give" glory and strength to Jehovah; that is, to ascribe to Him the attributes manifested in His acts, or, as Psalms 29:2 puts it, "the glory of His name," i.e., belonging to His character as thus revealed. The worship of earth is regarded as a type of that of heaven, and as here, so there, they who bow before Him are to be clothed in "holy attire." The thought underlying this ringing summons is that even angels learn the character of God from the exhibitions of His power in the Creation, and as they sang together for joy at first, still attend its manifestations with adoration. The contrast of their praise with the tumult and terror on earth, while the thunder growls in the sky, is surely not unintended. It suggests the different aspects of God’s dread deeds as seen by them and by men, and carries a tacit lesson true of all calamities and convulsions. The thundercloud hangs boding in its piled blue blackness to those who from beneath watch the slow crumbling away of its torn edges and the ominous movements in its sullen heart or hear the crashes from its depths, but, seen from above, it is transfigured by the light that falls on its upper surface; and it stretches placid before the throne, like the sea of glass mingled with fire. Whatever may be earth’s terror, heaven’s echo of God’s thunders is praise. Then the storm bursts. We can hear it rolling in the short periods, mostly uniform in structure and grouped in verses of two clauses each, the second of which echoes the first, like the long-drawn roll that pauses, slackens, and yet persists. Seven times "the voice of Jehovah" is heard, like the apocalyptic "seven thunders before the throne." The poet’s eye travels with the swift tempest, and his picture is full of motion, sweeping from the waters above the firmament to earth and from the northern boundary of the land to the far south. First we hear the mutterings in the sky (Psalms 29:3). If we understood "the waters" as meaning the Mediterranean, we should have the picture of the storm working up from the sea; but it is better to take the expression as referring to the super-terrestrial reservoirs or the rain flood stored in the thunderclouds. Up there the peals roll before their fury shakes the earth. It was not enough in the poet’s mind to call the thunder the voice of Jehovah, but it must be brought into still closer connection with Him by the plain statement that it is He who "thunders" and who rides on the storm clouds as they hurry across the sky. To catch tones of a Divine voice, full of power and majesty’, in a noise so entirely explicable as a thunderclap, is, no doubt, unscientific; but the Hebrew contemplation of nature is occupied with another set of ideas than scientific, and is entirely unaffected by these. The psalmist had no notion of the physical cause of thunder, but there is no reason why a man who can make as much electricity as he wants by the grinding of a dynamo and then use it to carry his trivial messages should not repeat the psalmist’s devout assertion. We can assimilate all that physicists can tell us, and then, passing into another region, can hear Jehovah speaking in thunder. The psalm begins where science leaves off. While the psalmist speaks the swift tempest has come down with a roar and a crash on the northern mountains, and Lebanon and "Sirion" (a Sidonian name for Hermon) reel, and the firm-boled, stately cedars are shivered. The structure of the verses already noticed, in which the second clause reduplicates, with some specialising, the thought of the first, makes it probable that in Psalms 29:6 a the mountains, and not the cedars, are meant by "them." The trees are broken; the mountains shake. An emendation has been proposed, by which "Lebanon" should be transferred from Psalms 29:5 to Psalms 29:6 and substituted for "them" so as to bring out this meaning more smoothly, but the roughness of putting the pronoun in the first clause and the nouns to which it refers in the second is not so considerable as to require the change. The image of the mountains "skipping" sounds exaggerated to Western ears, but is not infrequent in Scripture, and in the present instance is simply a strong way of expressing the violence of the storm, which seems even to shake the steadfast mountains that keep guard over the furthest borders of the land. Nor are we to forget that here there may be some hint of a parable in nature. The heights are thunder smitten; the valleys are safe. "The day of the Lord shall be upon all the cedars of Lebanon that are high and lifted up, and upon all the high mountains." (Isaiah 2:13-14) The two-claused verses are interrupted by one of a single clause (Psalms 29:7), the brevity of which vividly suggests the suddenness and speed of the flash: "The voice of Jehovah cleaves [or, hews out] fire flames." The thunder is conceived of as the principal phenomenon and as creating the lightning, as if it hewed out the flash from the dark mass of cloud. A corrected accentuation of this short verse divides it into three parts, per haps representing the triple zigzag; but in any case the one solitary, sudden fork, blazing fiercely for a moment and then swallowed up in the gloom, is marvellously given. It is further to be noted that this single lightning gleam parts the description of the storm into two, the former part painting it as in the north, the latter as in the extreme south. It has swept over the whole length of the land, while we have been watching the flash. Now it is rolling over the wide plain of the southern desert. The precise position of Kadesh is keenly debated, but it was certainly in the eastern part of the desert region on the southern border. It, too, shakes, low lying as it is; and far and wide over its uninhabited levels the tempest rages, its effects there are variously understood. The parallelism of clauses and the fact that nowhere else in the picture is animal life introduced give great probability to the very slight alteration required in Psalms 29:9 a, - in order to yield the rendering "pierces the oaks" (Cheyne), in stead of "makes the hinds calve" which harmonises admirably with the next clause: but, on the other hand, the premature dropping of the young of wild animals from fear is said to be an authentic fact, and gives a defensible trait to the picture, which is perhaps none the less striking for the introduction of one small piece of animated nature. In any case the next clause paints the dishevelled forest trees, with scarred bark, broken boughs, and strewn leaves, after the fierce roar and flash, wind and rain, have swept over them. The southern border must have been very unlike its present self, or the poet’s thoughts must have travelled eastwards, among the oaks on the other side of the Arabah, if the local colouring of Psa 29:9 is correct. While tumult of storm and crash of thunder have been raging and rolling below, the singer hears "a deeper voice across the storm," the songs of the "sons of God" in the temple palace above, chanting the praise to which he had summoned them. "In His temple everyone is saying, Glory!" That is the issue of all storms. The clear eyes of the angels see, and their "loud uplifted trumpets" celebrate, the lustrous self-manifestation of Jehovah, who rides upon the storm, and makes the rush of the thunder minister to the fruitfulness of earth. But what of the effects down here? The concluding strophe (Psalms 29:10-11) tells. Its general sense is clear, though the first clause of Psa 29:10 is ambiguous. The source of the difficulty in rendering is twofold. The preposition may mean "for"-i.e., in order to bring about-or, according to some, "on," or "above," or "at." The word rendered "flood" is only used elsewhere in reference to the Noachic deluge, and here has the definite article, which is most naturally explained as fixing the reference to that event; but it has been objected that the allusion would be farfetched and out of place, and therefore the rendering "rain storm" has been suggested. In the absence of any instance of the word’s being used for anything but the Deluge, it is safest to retain that meaning here. There must, however, be combined with that rendering an allusion to the torrents of thunder rain, which closed the thunderstorm. These could scarcely be omitted. They remind the singer of the downpour that drowned the world, and his thought is that just as Jehovah "sat"-i.e., solemnly took His place as King and Judge-in order to execute that act of retribution, so, in all subsequent smaller acts of an analogous nature, He "will sit enthroned forever." The supremacy of Jehovah over all transient tempests and the judicial punitive nature of these are the thoughts which the storm has left with him. It has rolled away; God, who sent it, remains throned above nature and floods: they are His ministers. And all ends with a sweet, calm word, assuring Jehovah’s people of a share in the "strength" which spoke in the thunder, and, better still, of peace. That close is like the brightness of the glistening earth, with freshened air, and birds venturing to sing once more, and a sky of deeper blue, and the spent clouds low and harmless on the horizon. Beethoven has given the same contrast between storm and after calm in the music of the Pastoral Symphony. Faith can listen to the wildest crashing thunder in quiet confidence that angels are saying, "Glory!" as each peal rolls, and that when the last, low mutterings are hushed, earth will smile the brighter, and deeper peace will fall on trusting hearts. Psalms 30:1-12 THE title of this psalm is apparently a composite, the usual "Psalm of David" having been enlarged by the awkward insertion of "A Song at the Dedication of the House," which probably indicates its later liturgical use and not its first destination. Its occasion was evidently a deliverance from grave peril; and, whilst its tone is strikingly inappropriate if it had been composed for the inauguration of temple, tabernacle, or palace, one can understand how the venerable words, which praised Jehovah for swift deliverance from impending destruction, would be felt to fit the circumstances and emotions of the time when the Temple, profaned by the mad acts of Antiochus Epiphanes, was purified and the ceremonial worship restored. Never had Israel seemed nearer going down to the pit; never had deliverance come more suddenly and completely. The intrusive title is best explained as dating from that time and indicating the use then found for the song. It is an outpouring of thankfulness, and mainly a leaf from the psalmist’s autobiography, interrupted only by a call to all who share Jehovah’s favour to help the single voice to praise Him (Psalms 30:4-5). The familiar arrangement in pairs of verses is slightly broken twice, Psalms 30:1-3 being linked together as a kind of prelude and Psalms 30:8-10 as a repetition of the singer’s prayer. His praise breaks the barrier of silence and rushes out in a flood. The very first word tells of his exuberant thankfulness, and stands in striking relation to God’s act which evokes it. Jehovah has raised him from the very sides of the pit, and therefore what shall he do but exalt Jehovah by praise and commemoration of His deeds? The song runs over in varying expressions for the one deliverance, which is designated as lifting up, disappointment of the malignant joy of enemies, healing, rescue from Sheol and the company who descend thither, by restoration to life. Possibly the prose fact was recovery from sickness, but the metaphor of healing is so frequent that the literal use of the word here is questionable. As Calvin remarks, sackcloth (Psalms 30:11) is not a sick man’s garb. These glad repetitions of the one thought in various forms indicate how deeply moved the singer was, and how lovingly he brooded over his deliverance. A heart truly penetrated with thankfulness delights to turn its blessings round and round, and see how prismatic lights play on their facets. as on revolving diamonds. The same warmth of feeling, which glows in the reiterated celebration of deliverance, impels to the frequent direct mention of Jehovah. Each verse has that name set on it as a seal, and the central one of the three (Psalms 30:2), not content with it only, grasps Him as "my God," manifested as such with renewed and deepened tenderness by the recent fact that "I cried loudly, unto Thee, and Thou healedst me." The best result of God’s goodness is a firmer assurance of a personal relation to Him. "This is an enclosure of a common without damage: to make God mine own, to find that all that God says is spoken to me" (Donne). The stress of these three verses lies on the reiterated contemplation of God’s fresh act of mercy and on the reiterated. invocation of His name, which is not vain repetition, but represents distinct acts of consciousness, drawing near to delight the soul in thoughts of Him. The psalmist’s vow of praise and former cry for help could not be left out of view, since the one was the condition and the other the issue of deliverance, but they are slightly touched. Such claiming of God for one’s own and such absorbing gaze on Him are the intended results of His deeds, the crown of devotion, and the repose of the soul. True thankfulness is expansive, and joy craves for sympathy. So the psalmist invites other voices to join his song, since he is sure that others there are who have shared his experience. It has been but one instance of a universal law. He is not the only one whom Jehovah has treated with lovingkindness, and he would fain hear a chorus supporting his solo. Therefore he calls upon "the favoured of God" to swell the praise with harp and voice and to give thanks to His "holy memorial," i.e., the name by which His deeds of grace are commemorated. The ground of their praise is the psalmist’s own case generalised. A tiny mirror may reflect the sun, and the humblest person’s history, devoutly pondered, will yield insight into. God’s widest dealings. This, then, is what the psalmist had learned in suffering, and wishes to teach in song: that sorrow is transient and joy perennial. A cheerful optimism should be the fruit of experience, and especially of sorrowful experience. The antitheses in Psalms 30:5 are obvious. In the first part of the verse "anger" and "favour" are plainly, contrasted, and it is natural to suppose that "a moment" and "life" are so too. The rendering, then, is, "A moment passes: in His anger, a life [i.e., a lifetime] in His favour." Sorrow is brief; blessings are long. Thunderstorms occupy but a small part of summer. There is usually less sickness than health in a life. But memory and anticipation beat out sorrow thin, so as to cover a great space. A little solid matter, diffused by currents, will discolour miles of a stream. Unfortunately we have better memories for trouble than for blessing, and the smart of the rose’s prickles lasts longer in the flesh than its fragrance in the nostril or its hue in the eye. But the relation of ideas here is not merely that of contrast. May we not say that just as the "moment" is included in the "life," so the "anger" is in the "favour"? Probably that application of the thought was not present to the psalmist, but it is an Old Testament belief that "whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth," and God’s anger is the aversion of holy love to its moral opposite. Hence comes the truth that varying and sometimes opposite Divine methods have one motive and one purpose, as the same motion of the earth brings summer and winter in turn. Since the desire of God is to make men partakers of His holiness, the root of chastisement is love, and hours of sorrow are not interruptions of the continuous favour which fills the life. A like double antithesis moulds the beautiful image of the last clause. Night and morning are contrasted, as are weeping and joy; and the latter contrast is more striking, if it be observed that "joy" is literally a "joyful shout," raised by the voice that had been breaking into audible weeping. The verb used means to lodge for a night, and thus the whole is a picture of two guests, the one coming, sombre-robed, in the hour befitting her, the other, bright-garmented, taking the place of the former, when all things are dewy and sunny, in the morning. The thought may either be that of the substitution of joy for sorrow, or of the transformation of sorrow into joy. No grief lasts in its first bitterness. Recuperative forces begin to tell by slow degrees. "The low beginnings of content" appear. The sharpest cutting edge is partially blunted by time and what it brings. Tender green drapes every ruin. Sorrow is transformed into something not undeserving of the name of joy. Griefs accepted change their nature. "Your sorrow shall be turned into joy." The man who in the darkness took in the dark guest to sit by his fireside finds in the morning that she is transfigured, and her name is Gladness. Rich vintages are gathered on the crumbling lava of the quiescent volcano. Even for irremediable losses and immedicable griefs, the psalmist’s prophecy is true, only that for these "the morning" is beyond earth’s dim dawns, and breaks when this night which we call life, and which is wearing thin, is past. In the level light of that sunrise, every raindrop becomes a rainbow, and every sorrow rightly-that is. submissively-borne shall be represented by a special and particular joy. But the thrilling sense of recent deliverance runs in too strong a current to be long turned aside, even by the thought of others’ praise; and the personal element recurs in Psalms 30:6, and persists till the close. This latter part falls into three well-marked minor divisions: the confession of self-confidence, bred of ease and shattered by chastisement, in Psalms 30:6-7; the prayer of the man startled into renewed dependence in Psalms 30:8-10; and the closing reiterated commemoration of mercies received and vow of thankful praise, which echoes the first part, in Psalms 30:11-12. In Psalms 30:6 the psalmist’s foolish confidence is emphatically contrasted with the truth won by experience and stated in Psalms 30:5. "The law of God’s dealings is so, but I-I thought so and so." The word rendered "prosperity" may be taken as meaning also security. The passage from the one idea to the other is easy, inasmuch as calm days lull men to sleep, and make it hard to believe that "tomorrow shall" not "be as this day." Even devout hearts are apt to count upon the continuance of present good. "Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God." The bottom of the crater of Vesuvius had once great trees growing, the produce of centuries of quiescence. It would be difficult to think, when looking at them, that they would ever be torn up and whirled aloft in flame by a new outburst. While continual peril and change may not foster remembrance of God, continuous peace is but too apt to lull to forgetfulness of Him. The psalmist was beguiled by comfort into saying precisely what "the wicked said in his heart". (Psalms 10:6) How different may be the meaning of the same words on different lips! The mad arrogance of the godless man’s confidence, the error of the good man rocked to sleep by prosperity and the warranted confidence of a trustful soul are all expressed by the same words; but the last has an addition which changes the whole: "Because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved." The end of the first man’s boast can only be destruction; that of the third’s faith will certainly be "pleasures for evermore"; that of the second’s lapse from dependence is recorded in Psalms 30:7. The sudden crash of his false security is graphically reproduced by the abrupt clauses without connecting particles. It was the "favour" already celebrated which gave the stability which had been abused. Its effect is described in terms of which, the general meaning is clear, though the exact rendering is doubtful. "Thou hast [or hadst] established strength to my mountain is harsh, and the proposed emendation (Hupfeld, Cheyne, etc.), "hast set me on strong mountains," requires the addition to the text of the pronoun. In either case, we have a natural metaphor for prosperity. The emphasis ties on the recognition that it was God’s work, a truth which the psalmist had forgotten and had to be taught by the sudden withdrawal of God’s countenance, on which followed his own immediate passage from careless security to agitation and alarm. The word "troubled" is that used for Saul’s conflicting emotions and despair in the witch’s house at Endor, and for the agitation of Joseph’s brethren when they heard that the man who had their lives in his hand was their wronged brother. Thus alarmed and filled with distracting thoughts was the psalmist. "Thou didst hide Thy face," describes his calamities in their source. When the sun goes in, an immediate gloom wraps the land, and the birds cease to sing. But the "trouble" was preferable to "security," for it drove to God. Any tempest which does that is better than calm which beguiles from Him; and, since all His storms are meant to "drive us to His breast," they come from His "favour." The approach to God is told in Psalms 30:8-10, of which the two latter are a quotation of the prayer then wrung from the psalmist. The ground of this appeal for deliverance from a danger threatening life is as in Hezekiah’s prayer, (Isaiah 38:18-19) and reflects the same conception of the state of the dead as Psalms 6:5. If the suppliant dies, his voice will be missed from the chorus which sings God’s praise on earth. "The dust" (i.e., the grave) is a region of silence. Here, where life yielded daily proofs of God’s "truth" (i.e., faithfulness), it could be extolled, but there dumb tongues could bring Him no "profit" of praise. The boldness of the thought that God is in some sense advantaged by men’s magnifying of His faithfulness, the cheerless gaze into the dark realm, and the implication that to live is desired not only for the sake of life’s joys, but in order to show forth God’s dealings, are all remarkable. The tone of the prayer indicates the imperfect view of the future life which shadows many psalms, and could only be completed by the historical facts of the Resurrection and Ascension. Concern for the honour of the Old Testament revelation may, in this matter, be stretched to invalidate the distinctive glory of the New, which has "brought life and immortality to light": With quick transition, corresponding to the swiftness of the answer to prayer, the closing pair of verses tells of the instantaneous change which that answer wrought. As in the earlier metaphor weeping was transformed into joy, here mourning is turned into dancing, and God’s hand unties the cord which loosely bound the sackcloth robe, and arrays the mourner in festival attire. The same conception of the sweetness of grateful praise to the ear of God which was presented in the prayer recurs here, where the purpose of God’s gifts is regarded as being man’s praise. The thought may be construed so as to be repulsive, but its true force is to present God as desiring hearts’ love and trust, and as "seeking such to worship Him," because therein they will find supreme and abiding bliss. "My glory," that wonderful personal being, which in its lowest debasement retains glimmering reflections caught from God, is never so truly glory as when it "sings praise to Thee," and never so blessed as when, through a longer "forever" than the psalmist saw stretching before him, it "gives thanks unto Thee." Psalms 31:1-24 THE swift transitions of feeling in this psalm may seem strange to colder natures whose lives run smoothly, but reveal a brother-soul to those who have known what it is to ride on the top of the wave and then to go down into its trough. What is peculiar to the psalm is not only the inclusion of the whole gamut of feeling, but the force with which each key is struck and the persistence through all of the one ground tone of cleaving to Jehovah. The poetic temperament passes quickly from hope to fear. The devout man in sorrow can sometimes look away from a darkened earth to a bright sky, but the stern realities of pain and loss again force themselves in upon him. The psalm is like an April day, in which sunshine and rain chase, each other across the plain. "The beautiful uncertain weather, Where gloom and glory meet together" makes the landscape live, and is the precursor of fruitfulness." The stream of the psalmist’s thoughts now runs in shadow of grim cliffs and vexed by opposing rocks, and now opens out in sunny stretches of smoothness; but its source is "In Thee, Jehovah, do I take refuge" (Psalms 31:1): and its end is "Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all ye that wait for Jehovah" (Psalms 31:24). The first turn of the stream is in Psalms 31:1-4, which consist of petitions and their grounds. The prayers reveal the suppliant’s state. They are the familiar cries of an afflicted soul common to many psalms, and presenting no special features. The needs of the human heart are uniform, and the cry of distress is much alike on all lips. This sufferer asks, as his fellows have done and will do, for deliverance, a swift answer, shelter and defence, guidance and leading, escape from the net spread for him. These are the commonplaces of prayer, which God is not wearied of hearing, and which fit us all. The last place to look for originality is in the "sighing of such as be sorrowful." The pleas on which the petitions rest are also familiar. The man who trusts in Jehovah has a right to expect that his trust will not be put to shame, since God is faithful. Therefore the first plea is the psalmist’s faith, expressed in Psalms 31:1 by the word which literally means to flee to a refuge. The fact that he has done so makes his deliverance a work of God’s "righteousness." The metaphor latent in "flee for refuge" comes into full sight in that beautiful plea in Psalms 31:3, which unsympathetic critics would call illogical, "Be for me a refuge rock, for Thou art my rock." Be what Thou art; manifest Thyself in act to be what Thou art in nature: be what I, Thy poor servant, have taken Thee to be. My heart has clasped Thy revelation of Thyself and fled to this strong tower. Let me not be deceived and find it incapable of sheltering me from my foes. "Therefore for Thy name’s sake," or because of that revelation and for its glory as true in men’s sight, deliver me. God’s nature as revealed is the strongest plea with Him, and surely that cannot but be potent and acceptable prayer which says; Be what Thou art, and what Thou hast taught me to believe Thee. Psalms 31:5-8 prolong the tone of the preceding, with some difference, inasmuch as God’s past acts are more specifically dwelt on as the ground of confidence. In this turn of the stream, faith does not so much supplicate as meditate, plucking the flower of confidence from the nettle of past dangers and deliverances, and renewing its acts of surrender. The sacred words which Jesus made His own on the cross, and which have been the last utterance of so many saints, were meant by the psalmist to apply to life, not to death. He laid his spirit as a precious deposit in God’s hand, assured that He was able to keep that which was committed to Him. Often had he done this before, and now he does it once more. Petitions pass into surrender. Resignation as well as confidence speaks. To lay one’s life in God’s hand is to leave the disposal of it to Him, and such absolute submission must come as the calm close and incipient reward of every cry for deliverance. Trust should not be hard to those who can remember. So Jehovah’s past redemptions-i.e., deliverances from temporal dangers-are its ground here; and these avail as pledges for the future, since He is "the God of truth," who can never falsify His past. The more nestlingly a soul clings to God, the more vehemently will it recoil from other trust. Attraction and repulsion are equal and contrary: The more clearly it sees God’s faithfulness and living power as a reality operating in its life, the more penetrating will be its detection of the falseness of other helpers. "Nothingnesses of emptiness" are they all to one who has felt the clasp of that great, tender hand; and unless the soul feels them to be such, it will never strongly clutch or firmly hold its true stay. Such trust has its crown in joyful experience of God’s mercy even before the actual deliverance comes to pass, as wind-borne fragrance meets the traveller before he sees the spice gardens from which it comes. The cohortative verbs in Psalms 31:7 may be petition ("Let me exult"), or they may be anticipation of future gladness, but in either case some waft of joy has already reached the singer, as how could it fail to do, when his faith was thus renewing itself, and his eyes gazing on God’s deeds of old? The past tenses in Psalms 31:7-8 refer to former experiences. God’s sight of the psalmist’s affliction was not idle contemplation, but implied active intervention. To "take note of the distresses of my soul" (or possibly, "of my soul in distresses") is the same as to care for it. It is enough to know that God sees the secret sorrows, the obscure trials which can be told to none. He loves as well as knows, and looks on no griefs which He will not comfort nor on any wounds which He is not ready to bind up. The psalmist was sure that God had seen, because he had experienced His delivering power, as he goes on joyfully to tell. The figure in Psalms 31:8 a points back to the act of trust in Psalms 31:5. How should God let the hand of the enemy close round and crush the spirit which had been entrusted to His own hand? One sees the greedy fingers of the foe drawing themselves together on their prey as on a fly, but they close on nothing. Instead of suffering constraint the delivered spirit walks at liberty. They who are enclosed in God’s hand have ample room there; and unhindered activity, with the ennobling consciousness of freedom, is the reward of trust. Is it inconceivable that such sunny confidence should be suddenly clouded and followed, as in the third turn of thought (Psalms 31:9-13), by plaintive absorption in the sad realities of present distress? The very remembrance of a brighter past may have sharpened the sense of present trouble. But it is to be noted that these complaints are prayer, not aimless, self-pitying wailing. The enumeration of miseries which begins with "Have mercy upon me, for-," has a hidden hope tinging its darkness, like the faint flush of sunrise on clouds. There is no such violent change of tone as is sometimes conceived; but the pleas of the former parts are continued in this section, which adds the psalmist’s sore need to God’s past and the suppliant’s faith, as another reason for Jehovah’s help. He begins with the effects of his trouble on himself in body and soul; thence he passes to its consequences on those around him, and finally he spreads before God its cause: plots against his life. The resemblances to Psalms 6:1-10 and to several parts of Jeremiah are unmistakable. In Psalms 31:9-10 the physical and mental effects of anxiety are graphically described. Sunken eyes, enfeebled soul, wasted body, are gaunt witnesses of his distress. Cares seem to him to have gnawed his very bones, so weak is he. All that he can do is to sigh. And worse than all, conscience tells him that his own sin underlies his trouble, and so he is without inward stay. The picture seems exaggerated to easy-going, prosperous people; but many a sufferer has since recognised himself in it as in a mirror, and been thankful for words which gave voice to his pained heart and cheered him with the sense of companionship in the gloom. Psalms 31:11-12 are mainly the description of the often-repeated experience of friends forsaking the troubled. "Because of all my adversaries" somewhat anticipates Psalms 31:13 in assigning the reason for the cowardly desertion. The three phrases "neighbours," "acquaintance," and "those who see me without" indicate concentric circles of increasing diameter. The psalmist is in the middle; and round him are, first, neighbours, who pour reproach on him, because of his enemies, then the wider range of "acquaintances," afraid to have anything to do with one who has such strong and numerous foes, and remotest of all, the chance people met on the way who fly from Him, as infected and dangerous. "They all forsook Him and fled." That bitter ingredient mingles in every cup of sorrow. The meanness of human nature and the selfishness of much apparent friendship are commonplaces, but the experience of them is always as painful and astonishing, as if nobody besides had ever suffered therefrom. The roughness of structure in Psalms 31:11 b, "and unto my neighbours exceedingly," seems to fit the psalmist’s emotion, and does not need the emendation of "exceedingly" into "burden" (Delitzsch) or "shaking of the head" (Cheyne). In Psalms 31:12 the desertion is bitterly summed up, as like the oblivion that waits for the dead. The unsympathising world goes on its way, and friends find new interests and forget the broken man, who used to be so much to them, as completely as if he were in his grave, or as they do the damaged cup, flung on the rubbish heap. Psalms 31:13 discloses the nature of the calamity which has had these effects. Whispering slanders buzz round him; he is ringed about with causes for fear, since enemies are plotting his death. The use of the first part of the verse by Jeremiah does not require the hypothesis of his authorship of the psalm, nor of the prophet’s priority to the psalmist. It is always a difficult problem to settle which of two cases of the employment of the same phrase is original and which quotation. The criteria are elastic, and the conclusion is very often arrived at in deference to preconceived ideas. But Jeremiah uses the phrase as if it were a proverb or familiar expression, and the psalmist as if it were the freshly struck coinage of his own experience. Again the key changes, and the minor is modulated into confident petition. It is the test of true trust that it is deepened by the fullest recognition of dangers and enemies. The same facts may feed despair and be the fuel of faith. This man’s eyes took in all surrounding evils, and these drove him to avert his gaze from them and fix it on Jehovah. That is the best thing that troubles can do for us. If they, on the contrary, monopolise our sight, they turn our hearts to stone; but if we can wrench our stare from them, they clear our vision to see our Helper. In Psalms 31:14-18 we have the recoil of the devout soul to God, occasioned by its recognition of need and helplessness. This turn of the psalm begins with a strong emphatic adversative: "But I-I trust in Jehovah." We see the man flinging himself into the arms of God. The word for "trust" is the same as in Psalms 31:6, and means to hang or lean upon, or, as we say, to depend on. He utters his trust in his prayer, which occupies the rest of this part of the psalm. A prayer, which is the voice of trust, does not begin with petition, but with renewed adherence to God and happy consciousness of the soul’s relation to Him, and thence melts into supplication for the blessings which are consequences of that relation. To feel, on occasion of the very dreariness of circumstances, that God is mine, makes miraculous sunrise at midnight. Built on that act of trust claiming its portion in God, is the recognition of God’s all-regulating hand, as shaping the psalmist’s "times," the changing periods, each of which has its definite character, responsibilities, and opportunities. Every man’s life is a series of crises, in each of which there is some special work to be done or lesson to be learned, some particular virtue to be cultivated or sacrifice made. The opportunity does not return. "It might have been once; and we missed it, lost it forever." But the psalmist is thinking rather of the varying complexion of his days as bright or dark; and looking beyond circumstances, he sees God. The "hand of mine enemies" seems shrivelled into impotence when contrasted with that great hand, to which he has committed his spirit, and in which are his "times"; and the psalmist’s recognition that it holds his destiny is the ground of his prayer for deliverance from the foes’ paralysed grasp. They who feel the tender clasp of an almighty hand need not doubt their security from hostile assaults. The petitions proper are three in number: for deliverance, for the light of God’s face, and for "salvation." The central petition recalls the priestly blessing. (Numbers 6:25) It asks for consciousness of God’s friendship and for the manifestation thereof in safety from present dangers. That face, turned in love to a man, can "make a sunshine in a shady place," and brings healing on its beams. It seems best to take the verbs in Psalms 31:17-18, as futures and not optatives. The prayer passes into assurance of its answer, and what was petition in Psalms 31:1 is now trustful prediction: "I shall not be ashamed, for I cry to Thee." With like elevation of faith, the psalmist foresees the end of the whispering defamers round him: shame for their vain plots and their silent descent to the silent land. The loudest outcry against God’s lovers will be hushed some day, and the hands that threatened them will be laid motionless and stiff across motionless breasts. He who stands by God and looks forward, can, by the light of that face, see the end of much transient bluster, "with pride and contempt," against the righteous. Lying lips fall dumb; praying lips, like the psalmist’s, are opened to show forth God’s praise. His prayer is audible still across the centuries; the mutterings of his enemies only live in his mention of them. That assurance prepares the way for the noble burst of thanksgiving, as for accomplished deliverance, which ends the psalm, springing up in a joyous outpouring of melody, like a lark from a bare furrow. But there is no such change of tone as to warrant the supposition that these last verses (Psalms 31:19-24) are either the psalmist’s later addition or the work of another, nor do they oblige us to suppose that the whole psalm was written after the Peril which it commemorates had passed. Rather the same voice which triumphantly rings out in these last verses has been sounding in the preceding, even in their saddest strains. The ear catches a twitter hushed again and renewed more than once before the full song breaks out. The psalmist has been absorbed with his own troubles till now. but thankfulness expands his vision, and suddenly there is with him a multitude of fellow dependants on God’s goodness. He hungers alone, but he feasts in company. The abundance of God’s "goodness" is conceived of as a treasure stored, and in part openly displayed, before the sons of men. The antithesis suggests manifold applications of the contrast, such as the inexhaustibleness of the mercy which, after all revelation, remains unrevealed, and after all expenditure, has not perceptibly diminished in its shining mass, as of bullion in some vault; or the varying dealings of God, who sometimes, while sorrow is allowed to have its scope, seems to keep his riches of help under lock and key, and then again flashes them forth in deeds of deliverance; or the difference between the partial unfolding of these on earth and the full endowment of His servants with "riches in glory" hereafter. All these carry the one lesson that there is more in God than any creature or all creatures have ever drawn from Him or can ever draw. The repetition of the idea of hiding in Psalms 31:20 is a true touch of devout poetry. The same word is used for laying up the treasure and for sheltering in a pavilion from the jangle of tongues. The wealth and the poor men who need it are stored together, as it were; and the place where they both lie safe is God Himself. How can they be poor who are dwelling close beside infinite riches? The psalmist has just prayed that God would make His face to shine upon him; and now he rejoices in the assurance of the answer, and knows himself and all like-minded men to be hidden in that "glorious privacy of light," where evil things cannot live. As if caught up to and "clothed with the sun," he and they are beyond the reach of hostile conspiracies, and have "outsoared the shadow of" earth’s antagonisms. The great thought of security in God has never been more nobly expressed than by that magnificent metaphor of the light inaccessible streaming from God’s face to be the bulwark of a poor man. The personal tone recurs for a moment in Psalms 31:21-22, in which it is doubtful whether we hear thankfulness for deliverance anticipated as certain and so spoken of as past, since it is as good as done, or for some recently experienced marvel of lovingkindness, which heartens the psalmist in present trouble. If this psalm is David’s, the reference may be to his finding a city of refuge, at the time when his fortunes were very low, in Ziklag, a strange place for a Jewish fugitive to be sheltered. One can scarcely help feeling that the allusion is so specific as to suggest historical fact as its basis. At the same time it must be admitted that the expression may be the carrying on of the metaphor of the hiding in a pavilion. The "strong city" is worthily interpreted as being God Himself, though the historical explanation is tempting. God’s mercy makes a true man ashamed of his doubts, and therefore the thanksgiving of Psa 31:21 leads to the confession of Psa 31:22. Agitated into despair, the psalmist had thought that he was "cut off from God’s eyes"-i.e., hidden so as not to be helped-but the event has showed that God both heard and saw him. If alarm does not so make us think that God is blind to our need and deaf to our cry as to make us dumb, we shall be taught the folly of our fears by His answers to our prayers. These will have a voice of gentle rebuke, and ask us, "O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" He delivers first, and lets the deliverance stand in place of chiding. The whole closes with a summons to all whom Jehovah loves to love Him for His mercy’s sake. The joyful singer longs for a chorus to join his single voice, as all devout hearts do. He generalises his own experience, as all who have for themselves experienced deliverance are entitled and bound to do, and discerns that in his single case the broad law is attested that the faithful are guarded whatever dangers assail, and "the proud doer" abundantly repaid for all his contempt and hatred of the just. Therefore the last result of contemplating God’s ways with His servants is an incentive to courage, strength, and patient waiting for the Lord. Psalms 32:1-11 ONE must have a dull ear not to hear the voice of personal experience in this psalm. It throbs with emotion, and is a burst of rapture from a heart tasting the sweetness of the new joy of forgiveness. It is hard to believe that the speaker is but a personification of the nation, and the difficulty is recognised by Cheese’s concession that we have here "principally, though not exclusively, a national psalm." The old opinion that it records David’s experience in the dark time when, for a whole year, he lived impenitent after his great sin of sense, and was then broken down by Nathan’s message and restored to peace through pardon following swiftly on penitence, is still defensible, and gives a fit setting for this gem. Whoever was the singer, his song goes deep down to permanent realities in conscience and in men’s relations to God, and therefore is not for an age, but for all time. Across the dim waste of years, we hear this man speaking our sins, our penitence, our joy; and the antique words are as fresh, and fit as close to our experiences, as if they had been welled up from a living heart today. The theme is the way of forgiveness and its blessedness; and this is set forth in two parts; the first (Psalms 32:1-5) a leaf from the psalmist’s autobiography, the second (Psalms 32:6-11) the generalisation of individual experience and its application to others. In each part the prevailing division of verses is into strophes of two, each containing two members, but with some irregularity. The page from the psalmist’s confessions (Psalms 32:1-5) begins with a burst of rapturous thankfulness for the joy of forgiveness (Psalms 32:1-2), passes to paint in dark colours the misery of sullen impenitence (Psalms 32:3-4), and then, in one longer verse, tells with glad wonder how sudden and complete was the transition to the joy of forgiveness by the way of penitence. It is a chart of one man’s path from the depths to the heights, and avails to guide all. The psalmist begins abruptly with an exclamation (Oh, the blessedness, etc.). His new joy wells up irrepressibly. To think that he who had gone so far down in the mire, and had locked his lips in silence for so long, should find himself so blessed! Joy so exuberant cannot content itself with one statement of its grounds. It runs over in synonyms for sin and its forgiveness, which are not feeble tautology. The heart is too full to be emptied at one outpouring, and though all the clauses describe the same things, they do so with differences. This is true with regard to the words both for sin and for pardon. The three designations of the former present three aspects of its hideousness. The first, rendered ("transgression,") conceives of it as rebellion against rightful authority, not merely breach of an impersonal law, but breaking away from a rightful king. The second ("sin") describes it as missing a mark. What is in regard to God rebellion is in regard to myself missing the aim, whether that aim be considered as that which a man is, by his very make and relations, intended to be and do, or as that which he proposes to himself by his act. All sin tragically fails to hit the mark in both these senses. It, is a failure as to reaching the ideal of conduct, "the chief end of man," and not less so as to winning the satisfaction sought by the deed. It keeps the word of promise to the ear, and breaks it to the hope, ever luring by lying offers; and if it gives the poor delights which it holds out, it ever adds something that embitters them like spirits of wine methylated and made undrinkable. It is always a blunder to do wrong. The last synonym ("iniquity") means crookedness or distortion, and seems to embody the same idea as our words "right" and "wrong," namely the contrast between the straight line of duty and the contorted lines drawn by sinful hands. What runs parallel with law is right; what diverges is wrong. The three expressions for pardon are also eloquent in their variety. The first word means taken away or lifted off, as a burden from aching shoulders. It implies more than holding back penal consequences; it is the removal of sin itself, and that not merely in the multitudinousness of its manifestations in act, but in the depth of its inward source. This is the metaphor which Bunyan has made so familiar by his picture of the pilgrim losing his load at the cross. The second ("covered") paints pardon as God’s shrouding the foul thing from His pure eyes, so that His action is no longer determined by its existence. The third describes forgiveness as God’s not reckoning a man’s sin to him, in which expression hovers some allusion to cancelling a debt. The clause "in whose spirit is no guile" is best taken as a conditional one, pointing to sincerity which confesses guilt as a condition of pardon. But the alternative construction as a continuation of the description of the forgiven man is quite possible; and if thus understood, the crowning blessing of pardon is set forth as being the liberation of the forgiven spirit from all "guile" or evil. God’s kiss of forgiveness sucks the poison from the wound. Retrospect of the dismal depth from which it has climbed is natural to a soul sunning itself on high. Therefore on the overflowing description of present blessedness follows a shuddering glance downwards to past unrest. Sullen silence caused the one; frank acknowledgment brought the other. He who will not speak his sin to God has to groan. A dumb conscience often makes a loud-voiced pain. This man’s sin had indeed missed its aim; for it had brought about three things: rotting bones (which may be but a strong metaphor or may be a physical fact), the consciousness of God’s displeasure dimly felt as if a great hand were pressing him down, and the drying up of the sap of his life, as if the fierce heat of summer had burned the marrow in his bones. These were the fruits of pleasant sin, and by reason of them many a moan broke from his locked lips. Stolid indifference may delay remorse, but its serpent fang strikes soon or later, and then strength and joy die. The Selah indicates a swell or prolongation of the accompaniment, to emphasise this terrible picture of a soul gnawing itself. The abrupt turn to description of the opposite disposition in Psalms 32:5 suggests a sudden gush of penitence. As at a bound, the soul passes from dreary remorse. The break with the former self is complete, and effected in one wrench. Some things are best done by degrees; and some. of which forsaking sin is one, are best done quickly. And as swift as the resolve to crave pardon, so swift is the answer giving it, We are reminded of that gospel compressed into a verse, "David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, The Lord also hath put away thy sin." Again the three designations of sin are employed, though in different order; and the act of confession is thrice mentioned, as that of forgiveness was. The fulness and immediateness of pardon are emphatically given by the double epithet "the iniquity of thy sin" and by the representation that it follows the resolve to confess, and does not wait for the act. The Divine love is so eager to forgive that it tarries not for actual confession, but anticipates it, as the father interrupts the prodigal’s acknowledgment with gifts and welcome. The Selah at the end of Psa 32:5 is as triumphant as that at the close of Psa 32:4 had been sad. It parts the autobiographical section from the more general one which follows. In the second part the solitary soul translates its experience into exhortations for all, and wooes men to follow on the same path, by setting forth in rich variety the joys of pardon. The exhortation first dwells on the positive blessings associated with penitence (Psalms 32:6-7), and next on the degradation and sorrow involved in obstinate hardheartedness (Psalms 32:8-10). The natural impulse of him who has known both is to beseech others to share his happy experience, and the psalmist’s course of thought obeys that impulse, for the future "shall pray" (R.V.) is better regarded as hortatory "let pray because of this" does not express the contents of the petitions, but their reason. The manifestation of God as infinitely ready to forgive should hearten to prayer; and since God’s beloved need forgiveness day by day, even though they may not have fallen into such gross sin as this psalmist, there is no incongruity in the exhortation being addressed to them. "He that is washed" still needs that feet fouled in muddy ways should be cleansed. Every time of seeking by such prayer is a "time of finding"; but the phrase implies that there is a time of not finding, and, in its very graciousness, is heavy with warning against delay. With forgiveness comes security. The penitent, praying, pardoned man is set as on a rock islet in the midst of floods, whether these be conceived of as temptation to sin or as calamities. The hortatory tone is broken in Psalms 32:7 by the recurrence of the personal element, since the singer’s heart was too full for silence; but there is no real interruption, for the joyous utterance of one’s own faith is often the most winning persuasive, and a devout man can scarcely hold out to others the sweetness of finding God without at the same time tasting what he offers. Unless he does, his words will ring unreal. "Thou art a shelter for me" (same word as in Psalms 27:5; Psalms 31:20), is the utterance of trust; and the emphasis is on "my." To hide in God is to be "preserved from trouble," not in the sense of being exempt, but in that of not being overwhelmed, as the beautiful last clause of Psa 32:7 shows, in which "shouts of deliverance" from trouble which had pressed are represented by a bold. but not harsh, metaphor as ringing the psalmist round. The air is filled with jubilant voices, the echoes of his own. The word rendered "songs" or preferably "shouts" is unusual, and its consonants repeat the last three of the preceding word ("shalt preserve me"). These peculiarities have led to the suggestion that we have in it a "dittograph." If so, the remaining words of the last clause would read, "Thou wilt compass me about with deliverance," which would be a perfectly appropriate expression. But probably the similarity of letters is a play upon words, of which we have another example in the preceding clause where the consonants of the word for "trouble," reappear in their order in the verb "wilt preserve." The shout of joy is caught up by the Selah. But now the tone changes into solemn warning against obstinate disregard of God’s leading. It is usual to suppose that the psalmist still speaks, but surely "I will counsel thee, with mine eye upon thee," does not fit human lips. It is to be observed, too, that in Psalms 32:8 a single person is addressed, who is most naturally taken to be the same as he who spoke his individual faith in Psalms 32:7. In other words, the psalmist’s confidence evokes a Divine response, and that brief interchange of clinging trust and answering promise stands in the midst of the appeal to men, which it scarcely interrupts. Psalms 32:9 may either be regarded as the continuance of the Divine voice, or perhaps better, as the resumption by the psalmist of his hortatory address. God’s direction as to duty and protection in peril are both included in the promise of Psa 32:8. With His eye upon His servant, He will show him the way, and will keep him ever in sight as he travels on it. The beautiful meaning of the A.V., that God guides with a glance those who dwell near enough to Him to see His look, is scarcely contained in the words, though it is true that the sense of pardon binds men to Him in such sweet bonds that they are eager to catch the faintest indications of His will. and "His looks command, His lightest words are spells." Psalms 32:9-10, are a warning against brutish obstinacy. The former verse has difficulties in de tail, but its drift is plain. It contrasts the gracious guidance which avails for those made docile by forgiveness and trust with the harsh constraint which must curb and coerce mulish natures. The only things which such understand are bits and bridles. They will not come near to God without such rough outward constraint, any more than an unbroken horse will approach a man unless dragged by a halter. That untamableness except by force is the reason why "many sorrows" must strike "the wicked." If these are here compared to "bit" and "bridle," they are meant to drive to God, and are therefore regarded as being such mercies as the obstinate are capable of receiving. Obedience extorted by force is no obedience, but approach to God compelled by sorrows that restrain unbridled license of tempers and of sense is accepted as a real approach and then is purged into access with confidence. They who are at first driven are afterwards drawn, and taught to know no delight so great as that of coming and keeping near God. The antithesis of "wicked" and "he that trusteth in Jehovah" is significant as teaching that faith is the true opposite of sinfulness. Not less full of meaning is the sequence of trust, righteousness, and uprightness of heart in Psalms 32:10-11. Faith leads to righteousness, and they are upright, not who have never fallen, but who have been raised from their fall by pardon. The psalmist had thought of himself as compassed with shouts of deliverance. Another circle is cast round him and all who, with him, trust Jehovah. A ring of mercies, like a fiery wall, surrounds the pardoned, faithful soul, without a break through which a real evil can creep. Therefore the encompassing songs of deliverance are continuous as the mercies which they hymn, and in the centre of that double circle the soul sits secure and thankful. The psalm ends with a joyful summons to general joy. All share in the solitary soul’s exultation. The depth of penitence measures the height of gladness. The breath that was spent in "roaring all the day long" is used for shouts of deliverance. Every tear sparkles like a diamond in the sunshine of pardon, and he who begins with the lowly cry for forgiveness will end with lofty songs of joy and be made, by God’s guidance and Spirit, righteous and upright in heart. Psalms 33:1-22 This is the last of the four psalms in Book 1 which have no title, the others being Psalms 1:1-6; Psalms 2:1-12, which are introductory, and 10 which is closely connected with 9. Some have endeavoured to establish a similar connection between 32, and 33; but, while the closing summons to the righteous in the former is substantially repeated in the opening words of the latter, there is little other trace of connection, except the references in both to "the eye of Jehovah"; (Psalms 32:8; Psalms 33:18) and no two psalms could be more different in subject and tone than these. The one is full of profound, personal emotion, and deals with the depths of experience; the other is devoid of personal reference, and is a devout, calm contemplation of the creative power and providential government of God. It is kindred with the later type of psalms, and has many verbal allusions connecting it with them. It has probably been placed here simply because of the similiarity just noticed between its beginning and the end of the preceding. The reasons for the arrangement of the psalter were, so far as they can be traced, usually such merely verbal coincidences. To one who has been travelling through the heights and depths, the storms and sunny gleams of the previous psalms, this impersonal didactic meditation, with its historical allusions and entire ignoring of sins and sorrows, is indeed "a new song." It is apparently meant for liturgical use, and falls into three unequal parts; the first three verses and the last three being prelude and conclusion, the former summoning the "righteous" to praise Jehovah, the, latter putting words of trust and triumph and prayer into their mouths. The central mass (Psalms 33:4-19) celebrates the creative and providential work of God, in two parts, of which the first extends these Divine acts over the world (Psalms 33:4-11) and the second concentrates them on Israel (Psalms 33:12-19). The opening summons to praise takes us far away from the solitary wrestlings and communings in former psalms. Now "The singers lift up their voice, And the trumpets make endeavour, Sounding, ‘In God rejoice! In Him rejoice forever!’" But the clear recognition of purity as the condition of access to God speaks in this invocation as distinctly as in any of the preceding. "The righteous" whose lives conform to the Divine will, and only they, can shout aloud their joy in Jehovah. Praise fits and adorns the lips of the upright" only, whose spirits are without twist of self-will and sin. The direction of character expressed in the word is horizontal rather than vertical, and is better represented by "straight" than "upright." Praise gilds the gold of purity and adds grace even to the beauty of holiness. Experts tell us that the kinnor (harp, A.V. and R.V.) and nebel (psaltery) were both stringed instruments, differing in the position of the sounding board, which was below in the former and above in the latter, and also in the covering of the strings (v. Delitzsch, Eng. transl. of latest ed. 1:7, n.). The "new song" is not necessarily the psalm itself, but may mean other thanksgivings evoked by God’s meditated on goodness. But in any case, it is noteworthy, that the occasions of the new song are very old acts, stretching back to the first creation and continued down through the ages. The psalm has no trace of special recent mercies, but to the devout soul the old deeds are never antiquated, and each new meditation on them breaks into new praise. So inexhaustible is the theme that all generations take it up in turn, and find "songs unheard" and "sweeter" with which to celebrate it. Each new rising of the old sun brings music from the lips of Memnon, as he sits fronting the east. The facts of revelation must be sung by each age and soul for itself, and the glowing strains grow cold and archaic, while the ancient mercies which they magnify live on, bright and young. There is always room for a fresh voice to praise the old gospel the old creation, the old providence. This new song is saturated with reminiscences of old ones, and deals with familiar thoughts which have come to the psalmist with fresh power. He magnifies the moral attributes manifested in God’s self-revelation, His creative Word, and His providential government. "The word of Jehovah," in Psalms 33:4 is to be taken in the wide sense of every utterance of His thought or will ("non accipi pro doctrina, sed pro mundi gubernandi ratione," Calvin). It underlies His "works," as is more largely declared in the following verses. It is "upright," the same word as in Psalms 33:1, and here equivalent to the general idea of morally perfect. The acts which flow from it are "in faithfulness," correspond to and keep His word. The perfect word and works have for source the deep heart of Jehovah, which loves "righteousness and judgment," and therefore speaks and acts in accordance with these. Therefore the outcome of all is a world full of God’s lovingkindness. The psalmist has won that "serene and blessed mood" in which the problem of life seems easy, and all harsh and gloomy thoughts have melted out of the sky. There is but one omnipotent Will at work everywhere, and that is a Will whose law for itself is the love of righteousness, and truth. The majestic simplicity and universality of the cause are answered by the simplicity and universality of the result, the flooding of the whole world with blessing. Many another psalm shows how hard it is to maintain such a faith in the face of the terrible miseries of men, and the more complex "civilisation" becomes, the harder it grows; but it is well to hear sometimes the one clear note of gladness without its chord of melancholy. The work of creation is set forth in Psalms 33:6-9 as the effect of the Divine word alone. The psalmist is fascinated not by the glories created, but by the wonder of the process of creation. The Divine will uttered itself, and the universe was. Of course the thought is parallel with that of Genesis, "God said, Let there be and there was" Nor are we to antedate the Christian teaching of a personal Word of God, the agent of creation. The old versions and interpreters, followed by Cheyne, read "as in a bottle" for "as an heap," vocalising the text differently from the present pointing; but there seems to be an allusion to the wall of waters at the passage of the Red Sea, the same word being used in Miriam’s song; with "depths" in the next clause, there as here. (Exodus 15:8) What is meant, however, here, is the separation of land and water at first, and possibly the continuance of the same power keeping them still apart, since the verbs in Psalms 33:7 are participles, which imply continued action. The image of "a heap" is probably due to the same optical delusion which has coined the expression "the high seas," since, to an eye looking seawards from the beach, the level waters seem to rise as they recede; or it may merely express the gathering together in a mass. Away out there, in that ocean of which the Hebrews knew so little, were unplumbed depths in which, as in vast storehouses, the abundance of the sea was shut up, and the ever-present Word which made them at first was to them instead of bolts and bars. Possibly the thought of the storehouses suggested that of the Flood when these were opened, and that thought, crossing the psalmist’s mind, led to the exhortation in Psalms 33:8 to fear Jehovah, which would more naturally have followed Psalms 33:9. The power displayed in creation is, however, a sufficient ground for the summons to reverent obedience, and Psalms 33:9 may be but an emphatic repetition of the substance of the foregoing description. It is eloquent in its brevity and juxtaposition of the creative word and the created world. "It stood,"-"the word includes much: first, the coming into being (Entstehen), then, the continued subsistence (Bestehen), lastly, attendance (Dastehen) in readiness for service" (Stier). From the original creation the psalmist’s mind turns over the ages between it and him, and sees the same mystical might of the Divine Will working in what we call providential government. God’s bare word has power without material means. Nay, His very thoughts unspoken are endowed with immortal vigour, and are at bottom the only real powers in history. God’s "thoughts stand," as creation does, lasting on through all men’s fleeting years. With reverent boldness the psalm parallels the processes (if we may so speak) of the Divine mind with those of the human; "counsel" and "thoughts" being attributed to both. But how different the issue of the solemn thoughts of God and those of men, in so far as they are not in accordance with His! It unduly narrows the sweep of the psalmist’s vision to suppose that he is speaking of a recent experience when some assault on Israel was repelled. He is much rather linking the hour of creation with today by one swift summary of the net result of all history. The only stable, permanent reality is the will of God and it imparts derived stability to those who ally themselves with it, yielding to its, counsels and moulding their thoughts by its. "He that doeth the will of God abideth forever," but the shore of time is littered with wreckage, the sad fragments of proud fleets which would sail in the teeth of the wind and went to pieces on the rocks. From such thoughts the transition to the second part of the main body of the psalm is natural. Psalms 33:12-19 are a joyous celebration of the blessedness of Israel as the people of so great a God. The most striking feature of these verses is the pervading reference to the passage of the Red Sea which, as we have already seen, has coloured Psalms 33:7. From Miriam’s song come the designation of the people as God’s "inheritance" and the phrase "the place of His habitation". (Exodus 15:17) The "looking upon the inhabitants of the earth," and the thought that the "eye of Jehovah is upon them that fear Him, to deliver their soul in death" (Psalms 33:14, Psalms 33:18), remind us of the Lord’s looking from the pillar on the host of Egyptians and the terrified crowd of fugitives, and of the same glance being darkness to the one and light to the other. The abrupt introduction of the king not saved by his host, and of the vanity of the horse for safety, are explained if we catch an echo of Miriam’s ringing notes, "Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath He cast into the sea. The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea." (Exodus 15:4; Exodus 15:21) If this historical allusion be not recognised, the connection of these verses is somewhat obscure, but still discernible. The people who stand in special relation to God are blessed, because that eye, which sees all men, rests on them in lovingkindness and with gracious purpose of special protection. This contrast of God’s universal knowledge and of that knowledge which is accompanied with loving care is the very nerve of these verses, as is shown by the otherwise aimless repetition of the thought of God’s looking down on men. There is a wide all-seeingness, characterised by three words in an ascending scale of closeness of observance, in Psalms 33:13-14. It is possible to God as being Creator: "He fashions their hearts individually," or "one by one" seems the best interpretation of Psa 33:15 a, -and thence is deduced His intimate knowledge of all His creatures’ doings. The sudden turn to the impotence of earthly might, as illustrated by the king and the hero and the battle horse, may be taken as intended to contrast the weakness of such strength both with the preceding picture of Divine omniscience and almightiness, and with the succeeding assurance of safety in Jehovah. The true reason for the blessedness of the chosen people is that God’s eye is on them, not merely with cold omniscience nor with critical considering of their works, but with the direct purpose of sheltering them from surrounding evil. But the stress of the characterisation of these guarded and nourished favourites of heaven is now laid not upon a Divine act of choice, but upon their meek looking to Him. His eye meets with love the upturned patient eye of humble expectance and loving fear. What should be the issue of such thoughts, but the glad profession of trust, with which the psalm fittingly ends, corresponding to the invocation to praise which began it? Once in each of these three closing verses do the speakers profess their dependence on God. The attitude of waiting with fixed hope and patient submission is the characteristic of God’s true servants in all ages. In it are blended consciousness of weakness and vulnerability, dread of assault, reliance on Divine Love, confidence of safety, patience, submission and strong aspiration. These were the tribal marks of God’s people, when this was "a new song"; they are so today, for though the Name of the Lord be more fully known by Christ, the trust in it is the same. A threefold good is possessed, expected and asked as the issue of this waiting. God is "help and shield" to those who exercise it. Its sure fruit is joy in Him, since He will answer the expectance of His people, and will make His name more fully known and more sweet to those who have clung to it, in so far as they. knew it. The measure of hope in God is the measure of experience of His lovingkindness, and the closing prayer does not allege hope as meriting the answer which it expects, but recognises that desire is a condition of possession of God’s best gifts, and knows it to be most impossible of all impossibilities that hope fixed on God should be ashamed. Hands, lifted empty to heaven in longing trust, will never drop empty back and hang listless, without a blessing in their grasp. Psalms 34:1-22 THE occasion of this psalm, according to the superscription, was that humiliating and questionable episode, when David pretended insanity to save his life from the ruler of Goliath’s city of Gath. The set of critical opinion sweeps away this tradition as unworthy of serious refutation. The psalm is acrostic, therefore of late date; there are no references to the supposed occasion; the careless scribe has blundered "blindly" (Hupfeld) in the king’s name, mixing up the stories about Abraham and Isaac in Genesis with the legend about David at Gath; the didactic, gnomical cast of the psalm speaks of a late age. But the assumption that acrostic structure is necessarily a mark of late date is not by any means self-evident, and needs more proof than is forthcoming; the absence of plain allusions to the singer’s circumstances cuts both ways, and suggests the question, how the attribution to the period stated arose, since there is nothing in the psalm to suggest it; the blunder of the king’s name is perhaps not a blunder after all, but, as the Genesis passages seem to imply, "Abimelech" (the father of the King) may be a title, like Pharaoh, common to Philistine "kings," and Achish may have been the name of the reigning Abimelech; the proverbial style and somewhat slight connection and progress of thought are necessary results of acrostic fetters. If the psalm be David’s, the contrast between the degrading expedient which saved him and the exalted sentiments here is remarkable, but not incredible. The seeming idiot scrabbling on the gate is now saint, poet, and preacher; and, looking back on the deliverance won by a trick, he thinks of it as an instance of Jehovah’s answer to prayer! It is a strange psychological study; and yet, keeping in view the then existing standard of morality as to stratagems in warfare, and the wonderful power that even good men have of ignoring flaws in their faith and faults in their conduct, we may venture to suppose that the event which evoked this song of thanksgiving and is transfigured in Psalms 34:4 is the escape by craft from Achish. To David his feigning madness did not seem inconsistent with trust and prayer. Whatever be the occasion of the psalm, its course of thought is obvious. There is first a vow of praise in which others are summoned to unite (Psalms 34:13); then follows a section in which personal experience and invocation to others are similarly blended (Psalms 34:4-10); and finally a purely didactic section, analysing the practical manifestations of "the fear of the Lord" and enforcing it by the familiar contrast of the blessedness of the righteous and the miserable fate of the ungodly. Throughout we find familiar turns of thought and expression, such as are usual in acrostic psalms. The glad vow of unbroken praise and undivided trust, which begins the psalm, sounds like the welling over of a heart for recent mercy. It seems easy and natural while the glow of fresh blessings is felt, to "rejoice in the Lord always, and again to say Rejoice." Thankfulness which looks forward to its own cessation, and takes into account the distractions of circumstance and changes of mood which will surely come, is too foreseeing. Whether the vow be kept or no, it is well that it should be made; still better is it that it should be kept, as it may be, even amid distracting circumstances and changing moods: The incense on the altar did not flame throughout the day, but, being fanned into a glow at morning and evening sacrifice it smouldered with a thread of fragrant smoke continually. It is not only the exigencies of the acrostic which determine the order in Psalms 34:2: "In Jehovah shall my soul boast,"-in Him, and not in self or worldly ground, of trust and glorying. The ideal of the devout life, which in moments of exaltation seems capable of realisation, as in clear weather Alpine summits look near enough to be reached in an hour, is unbroken praise and undivided reliance on and joy in Jehovah. But alas-how far above us the peaks are! Still to see them ennobles, and to strive to reach them secures an upward course. The solitary heart hungers for sympathy in its joy, as in its sorrow; but knows full well that such can only be given by those who have known like bitterness and have learned submission in the same way. We must be purged of self in order to be glad in another’s deliverance, and must be pupils in the same school in order to be entitled to take his experience as our encouragement, and to make a chorus to his solo of thanksgiving. The invocation is so natural an expression of the instinctive desire for companionship in praise that one needs not to look for any particular group to whom it is addressed; but if the psalm be David’s, the call is not inappropriate in the mouth of the leader of his band of devoted followers. The second section of the psalm (Psalms 34:4-10) is at first biographical, and then generalises personal experience into broad universal truth. But even in recounting what befel himself, the singer will not eat his morsel alone, but is glad to be able at every turn to feel that he has companions in his happy experience. Psalms 34:4-5 are a pair, as are Psalms 34:6-7, and in each the same fact is narrated first in reference to the single soul and then in regard to all the servants of Jehovah. "This poor man" is by most of the older expositors taken to be the psalmist, but by the majority of moderns supposed to be an individualising way of saying, "poor men." The former explanation seems to me the more natural, as preserving the parallelism between the two groups of verses. If so, the close correspondence of expression in Psalms 34:4 and Psalms 34:6 is explained, since the same event is subject of both. In both is the psalmist’s appeal to Jehovah presented; in the one as "seeking" with anxious eagerness, and in the other as "crying" with the loud call of one in urgent need of immediate rescue. In both, Divine acceptance follows close on the cry, and in both immediately, ensues succor. "He delivered me from all my fears," and "saved him out of all his troubles," correspond entirely, though not verbally. In like manner Psalms 34:5 and Psalms 34:7 are alike in extending the blessing of the unit so as to embrace the class. The absence of any expressed subject of the verb in Psalms 34:5 makes the statement more comprehensive, like the French "on," or English "they." To "look unto Him" is the same thing as is expressed in the individualising verses by the two phrases, "sought," and "cried unto," only the metaphor is changed into that of silent, wistful directing of beseeching and sad eyes to God. And its issue is beautifully told, in pursuance of the metaphor. Whoever turns his face to Jehovah will receive reflected brightness on his face; as when a mirror is directed sunwards, the dark surface will flash into sudden glory. Weary eyes will gleam. Faces turned to the sun are sure to be radiant. The hypothesis of the Davidic authorship gives special force to the great assurance of Psa 34:7. The fugitive, in his rude shelter in the cave of Adullam, thinks of Jacob, who, in his hour of defenceless need, was heartened by the vision of the angel encampment surrounding his own little band, and named the place "Mahanaim," the two camps. That fleeting vision was a temporary manifestation of abiding reality. Wherever there is a camp of them that fear God, there is another, of which the helmed and sworded angel that appeared to Joshua is Captain, and the name of every such place is Two Camps. That is the sight which brightens the eyes that look to God. That mysterious personality, "the Angel of the Lord," is only mentioned in the Psalter here and in Psalms 35:1-28. In other places, He appears as the agent of Divine communications, and especially as the guide and champion of Israel. He is "the angel of God’s face," the personal revealer of His presence and nature. His functions correspond to those of the Word in John’s Gospel, and these, conjoined with the supremacy indicated in his name, suggest that "the Angel of the Lord" is, in fact, the everlasting Son of the Father, through whom the Christology of the New Testament teaches that all Revelation has been mediated. The psalmist did not know the full force of the name, but he believed that there was a Person. in an eminent and singular sense God’s messenger, who would cast his protection round the devout, and bid inferior heavenly beings draw their impregnable ranks about them. Christians can tell more than he could of the Bearer of the name. It becomes them to be all the surer of His protection. Just as the vow of Psa 34:1 passed into invocation, so does the personal experience of Psa 34:4-7 glide into exhortation. If such be the experience of poor men, trusting in Jehovah. how should the sharers in it be able to withhold themselves from calling on others to take their part in the joy? The depth of a man’s religion may be roughly, but on the whole fairly, tested by his irrepressible impulse to bring other men to the fountain from which he has drunk. Very significantly does the psalm call on men to "taste and see," for in religion experience must precede knowledge. The way to "taste" is to "trust" or to "take refuge in" Jehovah. "Crede et manducasti," says Augustine. The psalm said it before him. Just as the act of appealing to Jehovah was described in a threefold way in Psalms 34:4-6, so a threefold designation of devout men occurs in Psalms 34:8-10. They "trust," are "saints," they "seek." Faith, consecration and aspiration are their marks. These are the essentials of the religious life, whatever be the degree of revelation. These were its essentials in the psalmist’s time, and they are so today. As abiding as they, are the blessings consequent. These may all be summed up in one-the satisfaction of every, need and desire. There are two ways of seeking for satisfaction: that of effort, violence and reliance on one’s own teeth and claws to get one’s meat; the other that of patient, submissive trust. Were there lions prowling round the camp at Adullam, and did the psalmist take their growls as typical of all vain attempts to satisfy the soul? Struggle and force and self-reliant efforts leave men gaunt and hungry. He who takes the path of trust and has his supreme desires set on God, and who looks to Him to give what he himself cannot wring out of life, will get first his deepest desires answered in possessing God, and will then find that the One great Good is an encyclopedia of separate goods. They that "seek Jehovah" shall assuredly find Him, and in Him everything. He is multiform, and His goodness takes many shapes, according to the curves of the vessels which it fills. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you." The mention of the "fear of the Lord" prepares the way for the transition to the third part of the psalm. It is purely didactic, and, in its simple moral teaching and familiar contrast of the fates of righteous and ungodly, has affinities with the Book of Proverbs: but these are not so special as to require the supposition of contemporaneousness. It is unfashionable now to incline to the Davidic authorship; but would not the supposition that the "children," who are to be taught the elements of religion, are the band of outlaws who have gathered round the fugitive, give appropriateness to the transition from the thanksgiving of the first part to the didactic tone of the second? We can see them sitting round the singer in the half-darkness of the cave, a wild group, needing much control and yet with faithful hearts, and loyal to their leader, who now tells them the laws of his camp, at the same time as he sets forth the broad principles of that morality, which is the garment and manifestation among men of the "fear of the Lord." The relations of religion and morals were never more clearly and strikingly expressed than in the simple language of this psalm, which puts the substance of many profound treatises in a nutshell, when it expounds the "fear of Jehovah" as consisting in speaking truth, doing good, abhorring evil and seeking peace even when it seems to flee from us. The primal virtues are the same for all ages and stages of revelation. The definition of good and evil may vary and become more spiritual and inward, but the dictum that it is good to love and do good shines unalterable. The psalmist’s belief that doing good was the sure way to enjoy good was a commonplace of Old Testament teaching, and under a Theocracy was more distinctly verified by outward facts than now; but even then, as many psalms show, had exceptions so stark as to stir many doubts. Unquestionably good in the sense of blessedness is inseparable from good in the sense of righteousness, as evil which is suffering is from evil which is sin, but the conception of what constitutes blessedness and sorrow must be modified so as to throw most weight on inward experiences, if such necessary coincidence is to be maintained in the face of patent facts. The psalmist closes his song with a bold statement of the general principle that goodness is blessedness and wickedness is wretchedness; but he finds his proof mainly in the contrasted relation to Jehovah involved in the two opposite moral conditions. He has no vulgar conception of blessedness as resulting from circumstances. The lovingkindness of Jehovah is, in his view, prosperity, whatever be the aspect of externals. So with bold symbols, the very grossness of the letter of which shields them from misinterpretation, he declares this as the secret of all blessedness, that Jehovah’s eyes are towards the righteous and His ears open to their cry. The individual experiences of Psa 34:5 and Psalms 34:6 are generalised. The eye of God-i.e. His loving observance-rests upon and blesses, those whose faces are turned to Him, and His ear hears the poor man’s cry. The grim antithesis, which contains in itself the seeds of all unrest, is that the "face of Jehovah"-i.e. His manifested presence, the same face in the reflected light of which the faces of the righteous are lit up with gladness and dawning glory-is against evil doers. The moral condition of the beholder determines the operation of the light of God’s countenance upon him. The same presence is light and darkness, life and death. Evil and its doers shrivel and perish in its beams, as the sunshine kills creatures whose haunt is the dark, or as Apollo’s keen light arrows slew the monsters of the slime. All else follows from this double relationship. The remainder of the psalm runs out into a detailed description of the joyful fate of the lovers of good. broken only by one tragic verse (Psalms 34:21), like a black rock in the midst of a sunny stream, telling how evil and evil-doers end. In Psalms 34:17, as in Psalms 34:5, the verb has no subject expressed, but the supplement of A.V. and R.V., "the righteous," is naturally drawn from the context and is found in the LXX, whether as part of the original text, or as supplement thereto, is unknown. The construction may, as in Psalms 34:6, indicate that whoever cries to Jehovah is heard. Hitzig and others propose to transpose Psalms 34:15 and Psalms 34:16, so as to get a nearer subject for the verb in the "righteous" of Psalms 34:15, and defend the inversion by referring to the alphabetic order in Lamentations 2:1-22; Lamentations 3:1-66; Lamentations 4:1-22 where similarly Pe precedes Ayin; but the present order of verses is better as putting the principal theme of this part of the psalm-the blessedness of the righteous-in the foreground, and the opposite thought as its foil. The main thought of Psa 34:17-20 is nothing more than the experience of Psa 34:4-7 thrown into the form of general maxims. They are the commonplaces of religion, but come with strange freshness to a man, when they have been verified in his life. Happy they who can cast their personal experience into such proverbial sayings, and, having by faith individualised the general promises, can regeneralise the individual experience! The psalmist does not promise untroubled outward good. His anticipation is of troubled lives. delivered because of crying to Jehovah. "Many are the afflictions," but more are the deliverances. Many are the blows and painful is the pressure, but they break no bones, though they rack and wrench the frame. Significant, too, is the sequence of synonyms-righteous, broken-hearted, crushed in spirit, servants, them that take refuge in Jehovah. The first of these refers mainly to conduct, the second to that submission of will and spirit which sorrow rightly borne brings about, substantially equivalent to "the humble" or "afflicted" of Psalms 34:2 and Psalms 34:6, the third again deals mostly with practice, and the last touches the foundation of all service, submission, and righteousness, as laid in the act of faith in Jehovah. The last group of Psa 34:21-22, puts the teaching of the psalm in one terrible contrast, "Evil shall slay the wicked." It were a mere platitude if by "evil" were meant misfortune. The same thought of the inseparable connection of the two senses of that word, which runs through the context, is here expressed in the most terse fashion. To do evil is to suffer evil, and all sin is suicide. Its wages is death. Every sin is a strand in the hangman’s rope, which the sinner nooses and puts round his own neck. That is so because every sin brings guilt, and guilt brings retribution. Much more than "desolate" is meant in Psalms 34:21 and Psalms 34:22. The word means to be condemned or held guilty. Jehovah is the Judge; before His bar all actions and characters are set: His unerring estimate of each brings with it, here and now, consequences of reward and punishment which prophesy a future, more perfect judgment. The redemption of the soul of God’s servants is the antithesis to that awful experience; and they only, who take refuge in Him, escape it. The full Christian significance of this final contrast is in the Apostle’s Words, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus." Psalms 35:1-28 THE psalmist’s life is in danger. He is the victim of ungrateful hatred. False accusations of crimes that he never dreamed of are brought against him. He professes innocence, and appeals to Jehovah to be his Advocate and also his Judge. The prayer in Psalms 35:1 a uses the same word and metaphor as David does in his remonstrance with Saul. (1 Samuel 24:15) The correspondence with David’s situation in the Sauline persecution is, at least, remarkable, and goes far to sustain the Davidic authorship. The distinctly individual traits in the psalm are difficulties in the way of regarding it as a national psalm. Jeremiah has several coincidences in point of expression and sentiment, which are more naturally accounted for as reminiscences by the prophet than as indications that he was the psalmist. His genius was assimilative, and liked to rest itself on earlier utterances. The psalm has three parts, all of substantially the same import, and marked off by the conclusion of each being a vow of praise and the main body of each being a cry for deliverance, a characterisation of the enemy as ungrateful and malicious, and a profession of the singer’s innocence. We do not look for melodious variations of note in a cry for help. The only variety to be expected is in its shrill intensity and prolongation. The triple division is in accordance with the natural feeling of completeness attaching to the number. If there is any difference between the three sets of petitions, it may be observed that the first (Psalms 35:1-10) alleges innocence and vows praise without reference to others; that the second (Psalms 35:11-18) rises to a profession not only of innocence, but of beneficence and affection met by hate, and ends with a vow of public praise; and that the final section (Psalms 35:19-28) has less description of the machinations of the enemy and more prolonged appeal to Jehovah for His judgment, and ends, not with a solo of the psalmist’s gratitude, but with a chorus of his friends, praising God for his "prosperity." The most striking features of the first part are the boldness of the appeal to Jehovah to fight for the psalmist and the terrible imprecations and magnificent picture in Psalms 35:5-6. The relation between the two petitions of Psa 35:1, "Plead with those who plead against me" and "Fight with them that fight against me," may be variously determined. Both may be figurative, the former drawn from legal processes, the latter from the battlefield. But more probably the psalmist was really the object of armed attack, and the "fighting" was a grim reality. The suit against him was being carried on, not in a court, but in the field. The rendering of the R.V. in Psalms 35:1, "Strive with who strive against me," obscures the metaphorof a lawsuit, which, in view of its further expansion in Psalms 35:23-24 (and in "witnesses" in Psalms 35:11?), is best retained. That is a daring flight of reverent imagination which thinks of the armed Jehovah as starting to His feet to help one poor man. The attitude anticipates Stephen’s vision of "the Son of man standing," not throned in rest, but risen in eager sympathy and intent to succour. But the panoply in which the psalmist’s faith arrays Jehovah, is purely imaginative and, of course, has nothing parallel in the martyr’s vision. The "target" was smaller than the "shield". (2 Chronicles 9:15-16) Both could not be wielded at once, but the incongruity helps to idealise the bold imagery and to emphasise the Divine completeness of protecting power. It is the psalmist, and not his heavenly Ally, who is to be sheltered. The two defensive weapons are probably matched by two offensive ones in Psalms 35:3. The word rendered in the A.V. "stop" ("the way" being a supplement) is more probably to be taken as the name of a weapon, a battle axe according to some, a dirk or dagger according to others. The ordinary translation gives a satisfactory sense, but the other is more in accordance with the following preposition, with the accents, and with the parallelism of target and shield. In either case, how beautifully the spiritual reality breaks through the warlike metaphor! This armed Jehovah, grasping shield and drawing spear, utters no battle shout, but whispers consolation to the trembling man crouching behind his shield. The outward side of the Divine activity, turned to the foe, is martial and menacing; the inner side is full of tender, secret breathings of comfort and love. The previous imagery of the battlefield and the Warrior God moulds the terrible wishes in Psalms 35:4-6, which should not be interpreted as having a wider reference than to the issue of the attacks on the psalmist. The substance of them is nothing more than the obverse of his wish for his own deliverance, which necessarily is accomplished by the defeat of his enemies. The "moral difficulty" of such wishes is not removed by restricting them to the special matter in hand, but it is unduly aggravated if they are supposed to go beyond it. However restricted, they express a stage of feeling far beneath the Christian, and the attempt to slur over the contrast is in danger of hiding the glory of midday for fear of not doing justice to the beauty of morning twilight. It is true that the "imprecations" of the Psalter are not the offspring of passion, and that the psalmists speak as identifying their cause with God’s; but when all such considerations are taken into account, these prayers against enemies remain distinctly inferior to the code of Christian ethics. The more frankly the fact is recognised, the better. But, if we turn from the moral to the poetic side of these verses, what stern beauty there is in that awful picture of the fleeing foe, with the angel of Jehovah pressing hard on their broken ranks! The hope which has been embodied in the legends of many nations, that the gods were seen fighting for their worshippers, is the psalmist’s faith, and in its essence is ever true. That angel, whom we heard of in the previous psalm as defending the defenceless encampment of them that fear Jehovah, fights with and scatters the enemies like chaff before the wind. One more touch of terror is added in that picture of flight in the dark, on a slippery path, with the celestial avenger close on the fugitive’s heels, as when the Amorite kings fled down the pass of Beth-horon, and "Jehovah cast great stones from heaven upon them." Aeschylus or Dante has nothing more concentrated or suggestive of terror and beauty than this picture. The psalmist’s consciousness of innocence is the ground of his prayer and confidence. Causeless hatred is the lot of the good in this evil world. Their goodness is cause enough; for men’s likes and dislikes follow their moral character. Virtue rebukes, and even patient endurance irritates. No hostility is so hard to turn into love as that which has its origin, not in the attitude of its object, but in instinctive consciousness of contrariety in the depths of the soul. Whoever wills to live near God and tries to shape his life accordingly may make up his mind to be the mark for many arrows of popular dislike, sometimes lightly tipped with ridicule, sometimes dipped in gall, sometimes steeped in poison, but always sharpened by hostility. The experience is too uniform to identify the poet by it, but the correspondence with David’s tone in his remonstrances with Saul is, at least, worthy of consideration. The familiar figures of the hunter’s snare and pitfall recur here, as expressing crafty plans for destruction, and pass, as in other places, into the wish that the lex talionis may fall on the would be ensnarer. The text appears to be somewhat dislocated and corrupted in Psalms 35:7-8. The word "pit" is needless in Psalms 35:7 a, since snares are not usually spread in pits, and it is wanted in the next clause, and should therefore probably be transposed. Again, the last clause of Psa 35:8, whether the translation of the A.V. or of the R.V. be adopted, is awkward and feeble from the repetition of "destruction," but if we read "pit," which involves only a slight change of letters, we avoid tautology, and preserve the reference to the two engines of craft: "Let his net which he spread catch him; in the pit-let him fall therein!" The enemy’s fall is the occasion of glad praise, not because his intended victim yields to the temptation to take malicious delight in his calamity (Schadenfreude). His own deliverance, not the other’s destruction, makes the singer joyful in Jehovah, and what he vows to celebrate is not the retributive, but the delivering, aspect of the Divine act. In such joy there is nothing unworthy of the purest forgiving love to foes. The relaxation of the tension of anxiety and fear brings the sweetest moments, in the sweetness of which soul and body seem to share, and the very bones, which were consumed and waxed old, (Psalms 6:3; Psalms 32:3) are at ease, and, in their sense of well-being, have a tongue to ascribe it to Jehovah’s delivering hand. No physical enjoyment surpasses the delight of simple freedom from long torture of pain, nor are there many experiences so poignantly blessed as that of passing out of tempest into calm. Well for those who deepen and hallow such joy by turning it into praise, and see even in the experiences of their little lives tokens of the incomparable greatness and unparalleled love of their delivering God! Once more the singer plunges into the depths, not because his faith fails to sustain him on the heights which it had won, but because it would travel the road again, in order to strengthen itself by persistent prayers which are not "vain repetitions." The second division (Psalms 35:11-18) runs parallel with the first, with some differences. The reference to "unjust witnesses" and their charges of crimes which he had never dreamed of may be but the reappearance of the image of a lawsuit, as in Psalms 35:1, but is more probably fact. We may venture to think of the slanders which poisoned Saul’s too jealous mind, just as in "They requite me evil for good" we have at least a remarkable verbal coincidence with the latter’s burst of tearful penitence: (1 Samuel 24:17) "Thou art more righteous than I, for thou hast rendered unto me good, whereas I have rendered unto thee evil." What a wail breaks the continuity of the sentence in the pathetic words of Psa 35:12 b! -" Bereavement to my soul!" The word is used again in Isaiah 48:7-8, and there is translated "loss of children." The forlorn man felt as if all whom he loved were swept away, and he left alone to face the storm. The utter loneliness of sorrow was never more vividly expressed. The interjected clause sounds like an agonised cry forced from a man on the rack. Surely we hear in it not the voice of a personified nation, but of an individual sufferer, and if we have been down into the depths ourselves, we recognise the sound. The consciousness of innocence marking the former section becomes now the assertion of active sympathy, met by ungrateful hate. The power of kindness is great, but there are ill-conditioned souls which resent it. There is too much truth in the cynical belief that the sure way to make an enemy is to do a kindness. It is all too common an experience that the more abundantly one loves, the less he is loved. The highest degree of unrequited participation in others’ sorrows is seen in Him who "Himself took our sicknesses." This psalmist so shared in those of his foes that in sackcloth and with fasting he prayed for their healing. Whether the prayer was answered to them or not, it brought reflex blessing to him, for self-forgetting sympathy is never waste, even though it does not secure returns of gratitude. "Your peace shall return to you again," though it may not bring peace to nor with a jangling household. Riehm (in Hupfeld) suggests the transposition of the verbs in Psalms 35:14 a-and b: "I bowed down as though he had been my friend or brother; I went in mourning," etc., the former clause painting the drooping head of a mourner, the latter his slow walk and sad attire, either squalid or black. The reverse of this picture of true sympathy is given in the conduct of its objects when it was the psalmist’s turn to sorrow. Gleefully they flock together to mock and triumph. His calamity was as good as a feast to the ingrates. Psalms 35:15 and Psalms 35:16 are in parts obscure, but the general sense is clear. The word rendered "abjects" is unique, and consequently its meaning is doubtful, and various conjectural emendations have been proposed-e.g., "foreigners" which, as Hupfeld says, is "as foreign to the connection as can be," "smiting," and others-but the rendering "abjects," or men of low degree, gives an intelligible meaning. The comparison in Psalms 35:16 a is extremely obscure. The existing text is harsh; "profane of mockers for a cake" needs much explanation to be intelligible. "Mockers for a cake" are usually explained to be hangers on at feasts who found wit for dull guests and were paid by a share of good things, or who crept into favour and entertainment by slandering the objects of the host’s dislike. Another explanation, suggested by Hupfeld as an alternative, connects the word rendered "mockers" with the imagery in "tear" (Psalms 35:15) and "gnash" (Psalms 35:16) and "swallow" (Psalms 35:25), and by an alteration of one letter gets the rendering "like profane cake devourers," so comparing the enemies to greedy gluttons, to whom the psalmist’s ruin is a dainty morsel eagerly devoured. The picture of his danger is followed, as in the former part, by the psalmist’s prayer. To him God’s beholding without interposing is strange, and the time seems protracted; for the moments creep when sorrow laden, and God’s help seems slow to tortured hearts. But the impatience which speaks of itself to Him is soothed, and, though the man who cries, How long? may feel that his life lies as among lions, he will swiftly change his note of petition into thanksgiving. The designation of the life as "my only one," as in Psalms 22:20, enhances the earnestness of petition by the thought that, once lost, it can never be restored. A man has but one life; therefore he holds it so dear. The mercy implored for the single soul will be occasion of praise before many people. Not now, as in Psalms 35:9-10, is the thankfulness a private soliloquy. Individual blessings should be publicly acknowledged, and the praise accruing thence may be used as a plea with God, who delivers men that they may "show forth the excellencies of Him who hath called them out of" trouble into His marvellous peace. The third division (Psalms 35:18-28) goes over nearly the same ground as before, with the difference that the prayer for deliverance is more extended, and that the resulting praise comes from the great congregation, joining in as chorus in the singer’s solo. The former references to innocence and causeless hatred, lies and plots, open-mouthed rage, are repeated. "Our eyes have seen," say the enemies, counting their plots as good as successful and snorting contempt of their victim’s helplessness; but he bethinks him of another eye, and grandly opposes God’s sight to theirs. Usually that Jehovah sees is, in the Psalter, the same as His helping; but here, as in Psalms 35:17, the two things are separated, as they so often are, in fact, for the trial of faith. God’s inaction does not disprove His knowledge, but the pleading soul presses on Him His knowledge as a plea that He would not be deaf to its cry nor far from its help. The greedy eyes of the enemy round the psalmist gloat on their prey; but he cries aloud to his God, and dares to speak to Him as if He were deaf and far off, inactive and asleep. The imagery of the lawsuit reappears in fuller form here. "My cause" in Psalms 35:23 is a noun cognate with the verb rendered "plead" or "strive" in Psalms 35:1; "Judge me" in Psalms 35:24 does not mean, Pronounce sentence on my character and conduct, but, do me right in this case of mine versus my gratuitous foes. Again recurs the prayer for their confusion, which clearly has no wider scope than concerning the matter in hand. It is no breach of Christian charity to pray that hostile devices may fail. The vivid imagination of the poet hears the triumphant exclamations of gratified hatred: "Oho! our desire!" "We have swallowed him," and sums up the character of his enemies in the two traits of malicious joy in his hurt and self-exaltation in their hostility to him. At last the prayer, which has run through so many moods of feeling, settles itself into restful contemplation of the sure results of Jehovah’s sure deliverance. One receives the blessing; many rejoice in it. In significant antithesis to the enemies’ joy is the joy of the rescued man’s lovers and favourers. Their "saying" stands over against the silenced boastings of the losers of the suit. The latter "magnified themselves," but the end of Jehovah’s deliverance will be that true hearts will "magnify" Him. The victor in the cause will give all the praise to the Judge, and he and his friends will unite in self-oblivious praise. Those who delight in his righteousness are of one mind with Jehovah, and magnify Him because He "delights in the peace of His servant." While they ring out their praises, the humble suppliant, whose cry has brought the Divine act which has waked all this surging song, "shall musingly speak in the low murmur of one entranced by a sweet thought" (Cheyne), or, if we might use a fine old word, shall "croon" over God’s righteousness all the day long. That is the right end of mercies received. Whether there be many voices to join in praise or no, one voice should not be silent, that of the receiver of the blessings, and, even when he pauses in his song, his heart should keep singing day-long and life-long praises. Psalms 36:1-12 THE supposition that the sombre picture of "the wicked" in Psalms 36:1-4 was originally unconnected with the glorious hymn in Psalms 36:5-9 fails to give weight to the difference between the sober pace of pedestrian prose and the swift flight of winged poetry. It fails also in apprehending the instinctive turning of a devout meditative spectator from the darkness of earth and its sins to the light above. The one refuge from the sad vision of evil here is in the faith that God is above it all, and that His name is Mercy. Nor can the blackness of the one picture be anywhere so plainly seen as when it is set in front of the brightness of the other. A religious man, who has laid to heart the miserable sights of which earth is full, will scarcely think that the psalmist’s quick averting of his eyes from these to steep them in the light of God is unnatural, or that the original connection of the two parts of this psalm is an artificial supposition. Besides this, the closing section of prayer is tinged with references to the first part, and derives its raison d’etre from it. The three parts form an organic whole. The gnarled obscurity of the language in which the "wicked" is described corresponds to the theme, and contrasts strikingly with the limpid flow of the second part. "The line, too, labours" as it tries to tell the dark thoughts that move to dark deeds. Psalms 36:1-2 unveil the secret beliefs of the sinner, Psalms 36:3-4 his consequent acts. As the text stands, it needs much torturing to get a tolerable meaning out of Psa 36:1, and the slight alteration, found in the LXX and in some old versions, of "his heart" instead of "my heart" smooths the difficulty. We have then a bold personification of "Transgression" as speaking in the secret heart of the wicked, as in some dark cave, such as heathen oracle-mongers haunted. There is bitter irony in using the sacred word which stamped the prophets’ utterances, and which we may translate oracle, for the godless lies muttered in the sinner’s heart. This is the account of how men come to do evil: that there is a voice within whispering falsehood. And the reason why that bitter voice has the shrine to itself is that "there is no fear of God before" the man’s "eyes." The two clauses of Psa 36:1 are simply set side by side, leaving the reader to spell out their logical relation. Possibly the absence of the fear of God may be regarded as both the occasion and the result of the oracle of Transgression, since, in fact, it is both. Still more obscure is Psalms 36:2 Who is the "flatterer"? The answers are conflicting. The "wicked," say some, but if so, "in his own eyes" is superfluous; God, say others, but that requires a doubtful meaning for "flatters"-namely, "treats gently"-and is open to the same objection as the preceding in regard to "in his own eyes." The most natural supposition is that transgression, which was represented in Psalms 36:1 as speaking, is here also meant. Clearly the person in whose eyes the flattery is real is the wicked, and therefore its speaker must be another. "Sin beguiled me," says Paul, and therein echoes this psalmist. Transgression in its oracle is one of "those juggling fiends that palter with us in a double sense," promising delights and impunity. But the closing words of Psa 36:2 are a crux. Conjectural emendations have been suggested, but do not afford much help. Probably the best way is to take the text as it stands, and make the best of it. The meaning it yields is harsh, but tolerable: "to find out his sin, to hate" (it?). Who finds out sin? God. If He is the finder, it is He who also hates; and if it is sin that is the object of the one verb, it is most natural to suppose it that of the other also. The two verbs are infinitives, with the preposition of purpose or of reference prefixed. Either meaning is allowable. If the preposition is taken as implying reference, the sense will be that the glossing whispers of sin deceive a man in regard to the discovery of his wrong doing and God’s displeasure at it. Impunity is promised, and God’s holiness is smoothed down. If, on the other hand, the idea of purpose is adopted, the solemn thought emerges that the oracle is spoken with intent to ruin the deluded listener and set his secret sins in the condemning light of God’s face. Sin is cruel, and a traitor. This profound glimpse into the depths of a soul without the fear of God is followed by the picture of the consequences of such practical atheism, as seen in conduct. It is deeply charged with blackness and unrelieved by any gleam of light. Falsehood, abandonment of all attempts to do right, insensibility to the hallowing influences of nightly solitude, when men are wont to see their evil more clearly in the dark, like phosphorous streaks on the wall, obstinate planting the feet in ways not good, a silenced conscience which has no movement of aversion to evil-these are the fruits of that oracle of Transgression when it has its perfect work. We may call such a picture the idealisation of the character described, but there have been men who realised it, and the warning is weighty that such a uniform and all-enwrapping darkness is the terrible goal towards which all listening to that bitter voice tends. No wonder that the psalmist wrenches himself swiftly away from such a sight! The two strophes of the second division (Psalms 36:5-6 and Psalms 36:7-9) present the glorious realities of the Divine name in contrast with the false oracle of Psa 36:1-2, and the blessedness of God’s guests in contrast with the gloomy picture of the "wicked" in Psalms 36:3-4. It is noteworthy that the first and last-named "attributes" are the same. "Lovingkindness" begins and ends the glowing series. That stooping, active love encloses, like a golden circlet, all else that men can know or say of the perfection whose name is God. It is the white beam into which all colours melt, and from which all are evolved. As science feels after the reduction of all forms of physical energy to one, for which there is no name but energy, all the adorable glories of God pass into one, which He has bidden us call love. "Thy lovingkindness is in the heavens," towering on high. It is like some Divine aether, filling all space. The heavens are the home of light. They arch above every head; they rim every horizon; they are filled with nightly stars; they open into abysses as the eye gazes; they bend unchanged and untroubled above a weary earth; from them fall benedictions of rain and sunshine. All these subordinate allusions may lie in the psalmist’s thought, while its main intention is to magnify the greatness of that mercy as heaven high. But mercy standing alone might seem to lack a guarantee of its duration, and therefore the strength of "faithfulness," unalterable continuance in a course begun, and adherence to every promise either spoken in words or implied in creation or providence, is added to the tenderness of mercy. The boundlessness of that faithfulness is the main thought, but the contrast of the whirling, shifting clouds with it is striking. The realm of eternal purpose and enduring act reaches to and stretches above the lower region where change rules. But a third glory has yet to be flashed before glad eyes, God’s "righteousness," which here is not merely nor mainly punitive, but delivering, or, perhaps in a still wider view, the perfect conformity of His nature with the ideal of ethical completeness. Right is the same for heaven as for earth, and "whatsoever things are just" have their home in the bosom of God. The point of comparison with "the mountains of God" is, as in the previous clauses, their loftiness, which expresses greatness and elevation above our reach; but the subsidiary ideas of permanence and sublimity are not to be overlooked. "The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but His righteousness endures forever." There is safe hiding there, in the fastnesses of that everlasting hill. From character the psalmist passes to acts. and sets all the Divine dealings forth under the one category of "judgments," the utterances in act of His judicial estimate of men. Mountains seem highest and ocean broadest when the former rise sheer from the water’s edge, as Carmel does. The immobility of the silent hills is wonderfully contrasted with the ever-moving sea, which to the Hebrew was the very home of mystery. The obscurity of the Divine judgments is a subject of praise, if we hold fast by faith in God’s lovingkindness, faithfulness, and righteousness. They are obscure by reason of their vast scale, which permits the vision of only a fragment. How little of the ocean is seen from any shore! But there is no arbitrary obscurity. The sea is "of glass mingled with fire"; and if the eye cannot pierce its depths, it is not because of any darkening impurity in the crystal clearness, but simply because not even light can travel to the bottom. The higher up on the mountains men go, the deeper down can they see into that ocean. It is a hymn, not an indictment, which says, "Thy judgments are a great deep." But however the heights tower and the abysses open, there is a strip of green, solid earth on which "man and beast" live in safe plenty. The plain blessings of an all-embracing providence should make it easier to believe in the unmingled goodness of acts which are too vast for men to judge and of that mighty name which towers above their conceptions. What they see is goodness; what they cannot see must be of a piece. The psalmist is in "that serene and blessed mood" when the terrible mysteries of creation and providence do not interfere with his "steadfast faith that all which he beholds is full of blessings." There are times when these mysteries press with agonising force on devout souls, but there should also be moments when the pure love of the perfectly good God is seen to fill all space and outstretch all dimensions of height and depth and breadth. The awful problems of pain and death will be best dealt with by those who can echo the rapture of this psalm. If God is such, what is man’s natural attitude to so great and sweet a name? Glad wonder, accepting His gift as the one precious thing, and faith sheltering beneath the great shadow of His outstretched wing. The exclamation in Psalms 36:8, "How precious is Thy lovingkindness!" expresses not only. its intrinsic value, but the devout soul’s appreciation of it. The secret of blessedness and test of true wisdom lie in a sane estimate of the worth of God’s lovingkindness as compared with all other treasures. Such an estimate leads to trust in Him, as the psalmist implies by his juxtaposition of the two clauses of Psa 36:7, though he connects them, not by an expressed "therefore," but by the simple copula. The representation of trust as taking refuge reappears here, with its usual suggestions of haste and peril. The "wing" of God suggests tenderness and security. And the reason for trust is enforced in the designation "sons of men," partakers of weakness and mortality, and therefore needing the refuge which, in the wonderfulness of His lovingkindness, they find under the pinions of so great a God. The psalm follows the refugees into their hiding place, and shows how much more than bare shelter they find there. They are God’s guests. and royally entertained as such. The joyful priestly feasts in the Temple colour the metaphor, but the idea of hospitable reception of guests is the more prominent. The psalmist speaks the language of that true and wholesome mysticism without which religion is feeble and formal. The root ideas of his delineation of the blessedness of the fugitives to God are their union with God and possession of Him. Such is the magical might of lowly trust that by it weak dying "sons of men" are so knit to the God whose glories the singer has been celebrating that they partake of Himself and are saturated with His sufficiency, drink of His delights in some deep sense, bathe in the fountain of life, and have His light for their organ and medium and object of sight. These great sentences beggar all exposition. They touch on the rim of infinite things, whereof only the nearer fringe comes within our ken in this life. The soul that lives in God is satisfied, having real possession of the only adequate object. The variety of desires, appetites, and needs requires manifoldness in their food, but the unity of our nature demands that all that manifoldness should be in One. Multiplicity in objects, aims, loves, is misery; oneness is blessedness. We need a lasting good and an ever-growing one to meet and unfold the capacity of indefinite growth. Nothing but God can satisfy the narrowest human capacity. Union with Him is the source of all delight, as of all true fruition of desires. Possibly a reference to Eden may be intended in the selection of the word for "pleasures," which is a cognate with that name. So there may be allusion to the river which watered that garden, and the thought may be that the present life of the guest of God is not all unlike the delights of that vanished paradise. We may perhaps scarcely venture on supposing that "Thy pleasures" means those which the blessed God Himself possesses; but even if we take the lower and safer meaning of those which God gives, we may bring into connection Christ’s own gift to His disciples of His own peace, and His assurance that faithful servants will "enter into the joy of their Lord." Shepherd and sheep drink of the same brook by the way and of the same living fountains above. The psalmist’s conception of religion is essentially joyful. No doubt there are sources of sadness peculiar to a religious man, and he is necessarily shut out from much of the effervescent poison of earthly joys drugged with sin. Much in his life is inevitably grave, stern, and sad. But the sources of joy opened are far deeper than those that are closed. Surface wells (many of them little better than open sewers) may be shut up, but an unfailing stream is found in the desert. Satisfaction and joy flow from God because life and light are with Him; and therefore he who is with Him has them for his. "With Thee is the fountain of life" is true in every sense of the word "life." In regard to life natural, the saying embodies a loftier conception of the Creator’s relation to the creature than the mechanical notion of creation. The fountain pours its waters into stream or basin, which it keeps full by continual flow. Stop the efflux, and these are dried up. So the great mystery of life in all its forms is as a spark from a fire, a drop from a fountain, or, as Scripture puts it in regard to man, a breath from God’s own lips. In a very real sense, wherever life is, there God is, and only by some form of union with him or by the presence of His power, which is Himself, do creatures live. But the psalm is dealing with the blessings belonging to those who trust beneath the shadow of God’s wing; therefore life here, in this verse, is no equivalent to mere existence, physical or self-conscious, but it must be taken in its highest spiritual sense. Union with God is its condition, and that union is brought to pass by taking refuge with Him. The deep words anticipated the explicit teaching of the Gospel in so far as they proclaimed these truths, but the greatest utterance still remained unspoken: that this life is "in His Son." Light and life are closely connected. Whether knowledge, purity, or joy is regarded as the dominant idea in the symbol, or whether all are united in it, the profound words of the psalm are true. In God’s light we see light. In the lowest region "the seeing eye is from the Lord." "The inspiration of the Almighty giveth understanding." Faculty and medium of vision are both of Him. But hearts in communion with God are illumined, and they who are "in the light" cannot walk in darkness. Practical wisdom is theirs. The light of God, like the star of the Magi, stoops to guide pilgrims’ steps. Clear certitude as to sovereign realities is the guerdon of the guests of God. Where other eyes see nothing but mists, they can discern solid land and the gleaming towers of the city across the sea. Nor is that light only the dry light by which we know, but it means purity and joy also; and to "see light" is to possess these too by derivation from the purity and joy of God Himself. He is the "master light of all our seeing." The fountain has become a stream, and taken to itself movement towards men; for the psalmist’s glowing picture is more than fulfilled in Jesus Christ, who has said, "I am the Light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." The closing division is prayer based both upon the contemplation of God’s attributes in Psalms 36:5-6, and of the wicked in the first part. This distinct reference to both the preceding sections is in favour of the original unity of the psalm. The belief in the immensity of Divine lovingkindness and righteousness inspires the prayer for their long, drawn out (so "continue" means literally) continuance to the psalmist and his fellows. He will not separate himself from these in his petition, but thinks of them before himself. "Those who know Thee" are those who take refuge under the shadow of the great wing. Their knowledge is intimate, vital; it is acquaintanceship, not mere intellectual apprehension. It is such as to purge the heart and make its possessors upright. Thus we have set forth in that sequence of trust, knowledge, and uprightness stages of growing God-likeness closely corresponding to the Gospel sequence of faith, love, and holiness. Such souls are capaces Dei, fit to receive the manifestations of God’s lovingkindness and righteousness; and from such these will never remove. They will stand stable as His firm attributes, and the spurning foot of proud oppressors shall not trample on them, nor violent hands be able to stir them from their steadfast, secure place. The prayer of the psalm goes deeper than any mere deprecation of earthly removal, and is but prosaically understood, if thought to refer to exile or the like. The dwelling place from which it beseeches that the suppliant may never be removed is his safe refuge beneath the wing, or in the house, of God. Christ answered it when He said, "No man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand." The one desire of the heart which has tasted the abundance, satisfaction, delights, fulness of life, and clearness of light that attend the presence of God is that nothing may draw it thence. Prayer wins prophetic certitude. From his serene shelter under the wing, the suppliant looks out on the rout of baffled foes, and sees the end which gives the lie to the oracle of transgression and its flatteries. "They are struck down," the same word as in the picture of the pursuing angel of the Lord in Psalms 35:1-28. Here the agent of their fall is unnamed, but one power only can inflict such irrevocable ruin. God, who is the shelter of the upright in heart, has at last found out the sinner’s iniquity, and His hatred of sin stands ready to "smite once, and smite no more." Psalms 37:1-40 THERE is a natural connection between acrostic structure and didactic tone, as is shown in several instances, and especially in this psalm. The structure is on the whole regular, each second verse beginning with the required letter, but here and there the period is curtailed or elongated by one member. Such irregularities do not seem to mark stages in the thought or breaks in the sequence, but are simply reliefs to the monotony of the rhythm, like the shiftings of the place of the pause in blank verse, the management of which makes the difference between a master and a bungler. The psalm grapples with the problem which tried the faith of the Old Testament saints-namely, the apparent absence of correlation of conduct with condition-and solves it by the strong assertion of the brevity of godless prosperity and the certainty that well-doing will lead to well-being. The principle is true absolutely in the long run, but there is no reference in the psalm to the future life. Visible material prosperity is its promise for the righteous, and the opposite its threatening for the godless. No doubt retribution is not wholly postponed till another life, but it does not fall so surely and visibly as this psalm would lead us to expect. The relative imperfection of the Old Testament revelation is reflected in the Psalms, faith’s answer to Heaven’s word. The clear light of New Testament revelation of the future is wanting, nor could the truest view of the meaning and blessedness of sorrow be adequately and proportionately held before Christ had taught it by His own history and by His words. The Cross was needed before the mystery of righteous suffering could be fully elucidated, and the psalmist’s solution is but provisional. His faith that infinite love ruled and that righteousness was always gain, and sin loss, is grandly and eternally true. Nor is it to be forgotten that he lived and sang in an order of things in which the Divine government had promised material blessings as the result of spiritual faithfulness, and that, with whatever anomalies, modest prosperity did, on the whole, attend the true Israelite. The Scripture books which wrestle most profoundly with the standing puzzle of prosperous evil and afflicted goodness are late books, not merely because religious reflectiveness was slowly evolved, but because decaying faith had laid Israel open to many wounds, and the condition of things which accompanied the decline of the ancient order abounded with instances of triumphant wickedness. But though this psalm does not go to the bottom of its theme, its teaching of the blessedness of absolute trust in God’s providence is ever fresh, and fits close to all stages of revelation; and its prophecies of triumph for the afflicted who trust and of confusion to the evil-doer need only to be referred to the end to be completely established. As a theodicy, or vindication of the ways of God with men, it was true for its age, but the New Testament goes beneath it. As an exhortation to patient trust and an exhibition of the sure blessings thereof, it remains what it has been to many generations: the gentle encourager of meek faith and the stay of afflicted hearts. Marked progress of thought is not to be looked for in an acrostic psalm. In the present instance the same ideas are reiterated with emphatic persistence, but little addition or variation. To the didactic poet "to write the same things is not grievous," for they are his habitual thoughts; and for his scholars "it is safe," for there is no better aid to memory than the cadenced monotony of the same ideas cast into song and slightly varied. But a possible grouping may be suggested by observing that the thought of the "cutting off" of the wicked and the inheritance of the land by the righteous occurs three times. If it is taken as a kind of refrain, we may cast the psalm into four portions, the first three of which close with that double thought. Psalms 37:1-9 will then form a group, characterised by exhortations to trust and assurances of triumph. The second section will then be Psalms 37:10-22, which, while reiterating the ground tone of the whole, does so with a difference, inasmuch as its main thought is the destruction of the wicked, in contrast with the triumph of the righteous in the preceding verses. A third division will be Psalms 37:23-29, of which the chief feature is the adduction of the psalmist’s own experience as authenticating his teaching in regard to the Divine care of the righteous, and that extended to his descendants. The last section (Psalms 37:30-40) gathers up all, reasserts the main thesis, and confirms it by again adducing the psalmist’s experience in confirmation of the other half of his assurances, namely the destruction of the wicked. But the poet does not wish to close his words with that gloomy picture, and therefore this last section bends round again to reiterate and strengthen the promises for the righteous, and its last note is one of untroubled trust and joy in experienced deliverance. The first portion (Psalms 37:1-9) consists of a series of exhortations to trust and patience, accompanied by assurance of consequent blessing. These are preceded and followed by a dehortation from yielding to the temptation of fretting against the prosperity of evil-doers, based upon the assurance of its transitoriness. Thus the positive precepts inculcating the ideal temper to be cultivated are framed in a setting of negatives, inseparable from them. The tendency to murmur at flaunting wrong must be repressed if the disposition of trust is to be cultivated; and, on the other hand, full obedience to the negative precepts is only possible when the positive ones have been obeyed with some degree of completeness. The soul’s husbandry must be busied in grubbing up weeds as well as in sowing; but the true way to take away nourishment from the baser is to throw the strength of the soil into growing the nobler crop. "Fret not thyself" (A.V.) is literally, "Heat not thyself, and be not envious" is "Do not glow," the root idea being that of becoming fiery red. The one word expresses the kindling emotion, the other its visible sign in the flushed face. Envy, anger, and any other violent and God-for-getting emotion are included. There is nothing in the matter in hand worth getting into a heat about, for the prosperity in question is short lived. This leading conviction moulds the whole psalm, and, as we have pointed out, is half of the refrain. We look for the other half to accompany it, as usual, and we find it in one rendering of Psa 37:3, which has fallen into discredit with modern commentators, and to which we shall come presently; but for the moment we may pause to suggest that the picture of the herbage withering as soon as cut, under the fierce heat of the Eastern sun, may stand in connection with the metaphors in Psalms 37:1. Why should we blaze with indignation when so much hotter a glow will dry up the cut grass? Let it wave in brief glory, unmeddled with by us. The scythe and the sunshine will soon make an end. The precept and its reason are not on the highest levels of Christian ethics, but they are unfairly dealt with if taken to mean, Do not envy the wicked man’s prosperity, nor wish it were yours, but solace yourself with the assurance of his speedy ruin. What is said is far nobler than that. It is, Do not let the prosperity of unworthy men shake your faith in God’s government, nor fling you into an unwholesome heat, for God will sweep away the anomaly in due time. In regard to the positive precepts, the question arises whether Psalms 37:3 b is command or promise, with which is associated another question as to the translation of the words rendered by the A.V., "Verily thou shalt be fed," and by the R.V., "Follow after faithfulness." The relation of the first and second parts of the subsequent verses is in favour of regarding the clause as promise, but the force of that consideration is somewhat weakened by the non-occurrence in Psalms 37:3 of the copula which introduces the promises of the other verses. Still its omission does not seem sufficient to forbid taking the clause as corresponding with these. The imperative is similarly used as substantially a future in Psalms 37:27: "and dwell for evermore." The fact that in every other place in the psalm where "dwelling in the land" is spoken of it is a promise of the sure results of trust, points to the same sense here, and the juxtaposition of the two ideas in the refrain leads us to expect to find the prediction of Psa 37:2 followed by its companion there. On the whole, then, to understand Psalms 37:3 b as promise seems best. (So LXX, Ewald, Gratz, etc.) What, then, is the meaning of its last words? If they are a continuation of the promise, they must describe some blessed effect of trust. Two renderings present themselves, one that adopted in the R.V. margin, "Feed securely," and another "Feed on faithfulness"; (i.e., of God). Hupfeld calls this an "arbitrary and forced" reference of "faithfulness"; but it worthily completes the great promise. The blessed results of trust and active goodness are stable dwelling in the land and nourishment there from a faithful God. The thoughts move within the Old Testament circle, but their substance is eternally true, for they who take God for their portion have a safe abode, and feed their souls on His unalterable adherence to His promises and on the abundance flowing thence. The subsequent precepts bear a certain relation to each other, and, taken together, make a lovely picture of the inner secret of the devout life: "Delight thyself in Jehovah; roll thy way on Him; trust in Him; be silent to Jehovah." No man will commit his way to God who does not delight in Him; and unless he has so committed his way, he cannot rest in the Lord. The heart that delights in God, finding its truest joy in Him and being well and at ease when consciously moving in Him as an all-encompassing atmosphere and reaching towards Him with the deepest of its desires, will live far above the region of disappointment. For it desire and fruition go together. Longings fixed on Him fulfil themselves. We can have as much of God as we wish. If He is our delight, we shall wish nothing contrary to nor apart from Him, and wishes which are directed to Him cannot be in vain. To delight in God is to possess our delight, and in Him to find fulfilled wishes and abiding joys. "Commit thy way unto Him," or "Roll it upon Him" in the exercise of trust; and, as the verse says with grand generality, omitting to specify an object for the verb, "He will do"-all that is wanted, or will finish the work. To roll one’s way upon Jehovah implies subordination of will and judgment to Him and quiet confidence in His guidance. If the heart delights in Him, and the will waits silent before Him, and a happy consciousness of dependence fills the soul. the desert will not be trackless, nor the travellers fail to hear the voice which says, "This is the way; walk ye in it." He who trusts is led, and God works for him, clearing away clouds and obstructions. His good may be evil spoken of, but the vindication by fact will make his righteousness shine spotless; and his cause may be apparently hopeless, but God will deliver him. He shall shine forth as the sun, not only in such earthly vindication as the psalmist prophesied, but more resplendently, as Christian faith has been gifted with long sight to anticipate, "in the kingdom of my Father." Thus delighting and trusting, a man may "be silent." Be still before Jehovah, in the silence of a submissive heart, and let not that stillness be torpor, but gather thyself together and stretch out thy hope towards Him. That patience is no mere passive endurance without murmuring, but implies tension of expectance. Only if it is thus occupied will it be possible to purge the heart of that foolish and weakening heat which does no harm to anyone but to the man himself. "Heat not thyself; it only leads to doing evil." Thus the section returns upon itself and once more ends with the unhesitating assurance, based upon the very essence of God’s covenant with the nation, that righteousness is the condition of inheritance, and sin the cause of certain destruction. The narrower application of the principle, which was all that the then stage of revelation made clear to the psalmist, melts away for us into the Christian certainty that righteousness is the condition of dwelling in the true land of promise, and that sin is always death, in germ or in full fruitage. The refrain occurs next in Psalms 37:22, and the portion thus marked off (Psalms 37:10-22) may be dealt with as a smaller whole. After a repetition (Psalms 37:10-11) of the main thesis slightly expanded, it sketches in vivid outline the fury of "the wicked "against "the just" and the grim retribution that turns their weapons into agents of their destruction. How dramatically are contrasted the two pictures of the quiet righteous in the former section and of this raging enemy, with his gnashing teeth and arsenal of murder! And with what crushing force the thought of the awful laughter of Jehovah, in foresight of the swift flight towards the blind miscreant of the day of his fall, which has already, as it were, set out on its road, smites his elaborate preparations into dust! Silently the good man sits wrapped in his faith. Without are raging, armed foes. Above, the laughter of God rolls thunderous, and from the throne the obedient "day" is winging its flight, like an eagle with lightning bolts in its claws. What can the end be but another instance of the solemn lex talionis, by which a man’s evil slays himself? Various forms of the contrast between the two classes follow, with considerable repetition and windings. One consideration which has to be taken into account in estimating the distribution of material prosperity is strongly put in Psalms 37:16-17. The good of outward blessings depends chiefly on the character of their owner. The strength of the extract from a raw material depends on the solvent applied, and there is none so powerful to draw out the last drop of most poignant and pure sweetness from earthly good as is righteousness of heart. Naboth’s vineyard will yield better wine, if Naboth is trusting in Jehovah, than all the vines of Jezreel or Samaria. "Many wicked" have not as much of the potentiality of blessedness in all their bursting coffers as a poor widow may distil out of two mites. The reasons for that are manifold, but the prevailing thought of the psalm leads to one only being named here. "For," says Psalms 37:17, "the arms of the wicked shall be broken." Little is the good of possessions which cannot defend their owners from the stroke of God’s executioners, but themselves pass away. The poor man’s little is much, because, among other reasons, he is upheld by God, and therefore needs not to cherish anxiety, which embitters the enjoyments of others. Again the familiar thought of permanent inheritance recurs, but now with a glance at the picture just drawn of the destruction coming to the wicked. There are days and days. God saw that day of ruin speeding on its errand, and He has loving sympathetic knowledge of the days of the righteous (Psalms 1:6), and holds their lives in His hand; therefore continuance and abundance are ensured. The antithetical structure of Psa 37:16-22 is skilfully varied, so as to avoid monotony. It is elastic within limits. We note that in the Teth strophe (Psalms 37:16-17) each verse contains a complete contrast, while in the Yod strophe (Psalms 37:18-19) one half only of the contrast is presented, which would require a similar expansion of the other over two verses. Instead of this, however, the latter half is compressed into one verse (Psalms 37:20), which is elongated by a clause. Then in the Lamed strophe (Psalms 37:21-22) the briefer form recurs, as in Psalms 37:16-17. Thus the longer antithesis is enclosed between two parallel shorter ones, and: a certain variety breaks up the sameness of the swing from one side to the other, and suggests a pause in the flow of the psalm. The elongated verse (Psalms 37:20) reiterates the initial metaphor of withering herbage (Psalms 37:2) with an addition for the rendering "fat of lambs" must be given up, as incongruous, and only plausible on account of the emblem of smoke in the next clause. But the two metaphors are independent. Just as in Psalms 37:2, so here, the gay "beauty of the pastures," so soon to wilt and be changed into brown barrenness, mirrors the fate of the wicked. Psalms 37:2 shows the grass fallen before the scythe: Psalms 37:20 lets us see it in its flush of loveliness, so tragically unlike what it will be-when its "day" has come. The other figure of smoke is a stereotype in all tongues for evanescence. The thick wreaths; thin away and melt. Another peculiar form of the standing antithesis appears in the Lamed strophe (Psalms 37:21-22), which sets forth the gradual impoverishment of the wicked and prosperity as well as beneficence of the righteous, and, by the "for" of Psalms 37:22, traces these up to the "curse and blessing of God, which become manifest in the final destiny of the two" (Delitzsch). Not dishonesty, but bankruptcy, is the cause of "not paying again"; while, on the other hand. the blessing of God not only enriches, but softens, making the heart which has received grace a wellspring of grace to needy ones, even if they are foes. The form of the contrast suggests its dependence, one the promises in Deuteronomy 15:6. Thus the refrain is once more reached, and a new departure taken. The third section is shorter than the preceding: (Psalms 37:23-29), and has, as its centre, the psalmist’s confirmation from his own experience of the former part of his antithesis, the fourth section similiarly confirming the second. All this third part is sunny with the Divine favour streaming upon the righteous, the only reference to the wicked being in the refrain at the close. The first strophe (Psalms 37:23-24) declares God’s care for the former under the familiar image of guidance and support to a traveller. As in Psalms 37:5, Psalms 37:7, the "way" is an emblem of active life, and is designated as "his" who treads it. The intention of the psalm, the context of the metaphor, and the parallelism with the verses just referred to, settle the reference of the ambiguous pronouns "he" and "his" in Psalms 37:23 b. God delights in the good man’s way (Psalms 1:6), and that is the reason for His establishing his goings. "Quoniam Deo grata est piorum via, gressus ipsum ad laetum finem adducit" (Calvin). That promise is not to be limited to either the material or moral region. The ground tone of the psalm is that the two regions coincide in so far as prosperity in the outer is the infallible index of rightness in the inner. The dial has two sets of hands, one within and one without, but both are, as it were, mounted on the same spindle, and move accurately alike. Steadfast treading in the path of duty and successful undertakings are both included, since they are inseparable in fact. True, even the fixed faith of the psalmist has to admit that the good man’s path is not always smooth. If facts had not often contradicted his creed, he would never have sung his song; and hence he takes into account the case of such a man’s falling, and seeks to reduce its importance by the considerations of its recoverableness and of God’s keeping hold of the man’s hand all the while. The Nun strophe brings in the psalmist’s experience to confirm his doctrine. The studiously impersonal tone of the psalm is dropped only here and in the complementary reference to the fall of the wicked (Psalms 37:35-36). Observation and reflection yield the same results. Experience seals the declarations of faith. His old eyes have seen much; and the net result is that the righteous may be troubled, but not abandoned, and that there is an entail of blessing to their children. In general, experience preaches the same truths today, for, on the whole, wrong doing lies at the root of most of the hopeless poverty and misery of modern society. Idleness, recklessness, thriftlessness, lust, drunkenness, are the potent factors of it; and if their handiwork and that of the subtler forms of respectable godlessness and evil were to be eliminated, the sum of human wretchedness would shrink to very small dimensions. The mystery of suffering is made more mysterious by ignoring its patent connection with sin, and by denying the name of sin to many of its causes. If men’s conduct were judged by God’s standard, there would be less wonder at God’s judgments manifested in men’s suffering. The solidarity of the family was more strongly felt in ancient times than in our days of individualism, but even now the children of the righteous, if they maintain the hereditary character, do largely realise the blessing which the psalmist declares is uniformly theirs. He is not to be tied down to literality in his statement of the general working of things. What he deals with is the prevailing trend, and isolated exceptions do not destroy his assertion. Of course continuance in paternal virtues is presupposed as the condition of succeeding to paternal good. In the strength of the adduced experience, a hortatory tone, dropped since Psalms 37:8, is resumed, with reminiscences of that earlier series of counsels. The secret of permanence is condensed into two antithetical precepts, to depart from evil and do good and the keynote is sounded once more in a promise, cast into the guise of a commandment (compare Psalms 37:3), of unmoved habitation, which is, however, not to be stretched to refer to a future life, of which the psalm says nothing. Such permanent abiding is sure, inasmuch as Jehovah loves judgment and watches over the objects of His lovingkindness. The acrostic sequence fails at this point, if the Masoretic text is adhered to. There is evident disorder in the division of verses, for Psalms 37:28 has four clauses instead of the normal two. If the superfluous two are detached from it and connected as one strophe with Psalms 37:29, a regular two-versed and four-claused strophe results. Its first word (L’olam =" forever") has the Ayin, due in the alphabetical sequence, in its second letter, the first being a prefixed preposition, which may be passed over, as in Psalms 37:39 the copula Vav is prefixed to the initial letter. Delitzsch takes this to be the required letter; but if so, another irregularity remains, inasmuch as the first couplet of the strophe should be occupied with the fate of the wicked as antithetical to ‘that of the righteous in Psalms 37:29. "They are preserved forever" throws the whole strophe out of order. Probably, therefore, there is textual corruption here, which the LXX helps in correcting. It has an evidently double rendering of the clause, as is not unfrequently the case where there is ambiguity or textual difficulty, and gives side by side with "They shall be preserved forever" the rendering "The lawless shall be hunted out," which can be returned into Hebrew so as to give the needed initial Ayin either in a somewhat rare word, or in one which occurs in Psalms 37:35. If this correction is adopted, the anomalies disappear, and strophe, division, acrostic, and antithetical refrain are all in order. The last section (Psalms 37:30-40), like the preceding, has the psalmist’s experience for its centre, and traces the entail of conduct to a second generation of evil-doers, as the former did to the seed of the righteous. Both sections begin with the promise of firmness for the "goings or steps" of the righteous, but the later verses expand the thought by a fuller description of the moral conditions of stability. "The law of his God is in his heart." That is the foundation on which all permanence is built. From that as centre there issue wise and just words on the one hand and stable deeds on the other. That is true in the psalmist’s view in reference to outward success and continuance, but still more profoundly in regard to steadfast progress in paths of righteousness. He who orders his footsteps by God’s known will is saved from much hesitancy, vacillation, and stumbling, and plants a firm foot even on slippery places. Once more the picture of the enmity of the wicked recurs, as in Psalms 37:12-14, with the difference that there the emphasis was laid on the destruction of the plotters and here it is put on the vindication of the righteous by acts of deliverance (Psalms 37:32-33). In Psalms 37:34 another irregularity occurs, in its being the only verse in a strophe and being prolonged to three clauses. This may be intended to give emphasis to the exhortation contained in it, which, like that in Psalms 37:27, is the only one in its section. The two key words "inherit" and "cut off" are brought together. Not only are the two fates set in contrast, but the waiters on Jehovah are promised the sight of the destruction of the wicked. Satisfaction at the sight is implied. There is nothing unworthy in solemn thankfulness when God’s judgments break the teeth of some devouring lion. Divine judgments minister occasion for praise even from pure spirits before the throne, and men relieved from the incubus of godless oppression may well draw a long breath of relief, which passes into celebration of His righteous acts. No doubt there is a higher tone, which remembers truth and pity even in that solemn joy; but Christian feeling does not destroy but modify the psalmist’s thankfulness for the sweeping away of godless antagonism to goodness. His assurance to those who wait on Jehovah has his own experience as its guarantee (Psalms 37:35), just as the complementary assurance in Psalms 37:24 had in Psalms 37:25. The earlier metaphors of the green herbage and the beauty of the pastures are heightened now. A venerable, wide-spreading giant of the forests, rooted in its native soil, is grander than those humble growths; but for lofty cedars or lowly grass the end is the same. Twice the psalmist stood at the same place; once the great tree laid its large limbs across the field, and lifted a firm bole: again he came, and a clear space revealed how great had been the bulk which shadowed it. Not even a stump was left to tell where the leafy glory had been. Psalms 37:37-38 make the Shin strophe, and simply reiterate the antithesis which has moulded the whole psalm, with the addition of that reference to a second generation which appeared in the third and fourth parts. The word rendered in the A.V. and R.V. "latter end" here means posterity. The "perfect man" is further designated as a "man of peace." The psalm might have ended with this gathering together of its contents in one final emphatic statement, but the poet will not leave the stern words of destruction as his last. Therefore he adds a sweet, long, drawn out close, like the calm, extended clouds, that lie motionless in the western sky after a day of storm in which he once more sings of the blessedness of those who wait on Jehovah. Trouble will come, notwithstanding his assurances that righteousness is blessedness; but in it Jehovah will be a fortress home, and out of it He will save them. However the teaching of the psalm may need modification in order to coincide with the highest New Testament doctrine of the relation between righteousness and prosperity, these confidences need none. Forever and absolutely they are true: in trouble a stronghold, out of trouble a Saviour, is God to all who cling to Him. Very beautifully the closing verse lingers on its theme and wreathes its thoughts together, with repetition that tells how sweet they are to the singer: "Jehovah helps them, and rescues them: He rescues them, and saves them." So the measure of the strophe is complete, but the song flows over in an additional clause, which points the path for all who seek such blessedness. Trust is peace. They who take refuge in Jehovah are safe, and their inheritance shall be forever. That is the psalmist’s inmost secret of a blessed life. Psalms 38:1-22 THIS is a long-drawn wail. passionate at first, but gradually calming itself into submission and trust, though never passing from the minor key. The name of God is invoked thrice (Psalms 38:1, Psalms 38:9, Psalms 38:15), and each time that the psalmist looks up his burden is somewhat easier to carry, and some "low beginnings of content" steal into his heart and mingle with his lament. Sorrow finds relief in repeating its plaint. It is the mistake of coldblooded readers to look for consecution of thought in the cries of a wounded soul: but it is also a mistake to be blind to the gradual sinking of the waves in this psalm, which begins with deprecating God’s wrath, and ends with quietly nestling close to Him as "my salvation." The characteristic of the first burst of feeling is its unbroken gloom. It sounds the depths of darkness, with which easy-going, superficial lives are unfamiliar, but whoever has been down into them will not think the picture overcharged with black. The occasion of the psalmist’s deep dejection cannot be gathered from his words. He, like all poets who teach in song what they learn in suffering, translates his personal sorrows into language fitting for other’s pains. The feelings are more important to him and to us than the facts. and we must be content to leave unsettled the question of his circumstances, on which, after all, little depends. Only, it is hard for the present writer, at least, to believe that such a psalm, quivering, as it seems, with agony, is not the genuine cry of a brother’s tortured soul, but an utterance invented for a personified nation. The close verbal resemblance of the introductory deprecation of chastisement in anger to Psalms 6:1 has been supposed to point to a common authorship, and Delitzsch takes both psalms, along with Psalms 32:1-11 and Psalms 51:1-19, as a series belonging to the time of David’s penitence after his great fall from purity. But the resemblance in question would rather favour the supposition of difference of authorship, since quotation is more probable than self-repetition. Jeremiah 10:23 is by some held to be the original, and either Jeremiah himself or some later singer to have been the author of the psalm. The question of which of two similar passages is source and which is copy is always ticklish. Jeremiah’s bent was assimilative, and his prophecies are full of echoes. The priority, therefore, probably lies with one or other of the psalmists, if there are two. The first part of the psalm is entirely occupied with the subjective aspect of the psalmist’s affliction. Three elements are conspicuous: God’s judgments, the singer’s consciousness of sin, and his mental and probably physical sufferings. Are the "arrows" and crushing weight of God’s "hand," which he deprecates in the first verses, the same as the sickness and wounds, whether of mind or body, which he next describes so pathetically? They are generally taken to be so, but the language of this section and the contents of the remainder of the psalm rather point to a distinction between them. It would seem that there are three stages, not two, as that interpretation would make them. Unspecified calamities, recognised by the sufferer as God’s chastisements, have roused his conscience, and its gnawing has superinduced mental and bodily pain. The terribly realistic description of the latter may, indeed, be figurative, but is more probably literal. The reiterated synonyms for God’s displeasure in Psalms 38:1, Psalms 38:3, show how all the aspects of that solemn thought are familiar. The first word regards it as an outburst, or explosion, like a charge of dynamite: the second as "glowing, igniting"; the third as effervescent, bubbling like lava in a crater. The metaphors for the effects of this anger in Psalms 38:2 deepen the impression of its terribleness. It is a fearful fate to be the target for God’s "arrows," but it is worse to be crushed under the weight of His "hand." The two forms of representation refer to the same facts, but make a climax. The verbs in Psalms 38:2 are from one root, meaning to come down, or to lie upon. In Psalms 38:2 a the word is reflexive, and represents the "arrows" as endowed with volition, hurling themselves down. They penetrate with force proportionate to the distance which they fall, as a meteoric stone buries itself in the ground. Such being the wounding, crushing power of the Divine "anger" its effects on the psalmist are spread out before God, in the remaining part of this first division, with plaintive reiteration. The connection which a quickened conscience discerns between sorrow and sin is strikingly set forth in Psalms 38:3 in which "Thine indignation" and "my sin" are the double fountainheads of bitterness. The quivering frame first felt the power of God’s anger, and then the awakened conscience turned inwards and discerned the occasion of the anger. The three elements which we have distinguished are clearly separated here; and their connection laid bare. The second of these is the sense of sin, which the psalmist feels as taking all "peace" or well-being out of his "bones" as a flood rolling its black waters over his head, as a weight beneath which he cannot stand upright, and again as foolishness, since its only effect has been to bring to him not what he hoped to win by it, but this miserable plight. Then, he pours himself out with the monotonous repetition so natural to self-pity, in a graphic accumulation of pictures of disease, which may be taken as symbolic of mental distress, but are better understood literally. With the whole, Isaiah 1:5-6, should be compared, nor should the partial resemblances of Isa 53:1-12 be overlooked. No fastidiousness keeps the psalmist from describing offensive details. His body is scourged and livid with parti-coloured, swollen weals from the lash, and these discharge foul-smelling matter. With this compare Isaiah 53:5, "His stripes" (same word). Whatever may be thought of the other physical features of suffering, this must obviously be figurative. Contorted in pain, bent down by weakness, dragging himself wearily with the slow gait of an invalid, squalid in attire, burning with inward fever, diseased in every tortured atom of flesh, he is utterly worn out and broken. (same word as "bruised," Isaiah 53:5) Inward misery, the cry of the heart, must have outward expression, and, with Eastern vehemence in utterance of emotions which Western reticence prefers to let gnaw in silence at the roots of life, he "roars" aloud because his heart groans. This vivid picture of the effects of the sense of personal sin will seem to superficial modern Christianity exaggerated and alien from experience; but the deeper a man’s godliness, the more will he listen with sympathy, with understanding and with appropriation of such piercing laments as his own. Just as few of us are dowered with sensibilities so keen as to feel what poets feel, in love or hope, or delight in nature, or with power to express the feelings, and yet can recognise in their winged words the heightened expression of our own less full emotions, so the truly devout soul will find, in the most passionate of these wailing notes, the completer expression of his own experience. We must go down into the depths and cry to God out of them, if we are to reach sunny heights of communion. Intense consciousness of sin is the obverse of ardent aspiration after righteousness, and that is but a poor type of religion which has not both. It is one of the glories of the Psalter that both are given utterance to in it in words which are as vital today as when they first came warm from the lies of these long dead men. Everything in the world has changed, but these songs of penitence and plaintive deprecation, like their twin bursts of rapturous communion, were "not born for death." Contrast the utter deadness of the religious hymns of all other nations with the fresh vitality of the Psalms. As long as hearts are penetrated with the consciousness of evil done and loved, these strains will fit themselves to men’s lips. Because the psalmist’s recounting of his pains was prayer and not soliloquy or mere cry of anguish, it calms him. We make the wound deeper by turning round the arrow in it, when we dwell upon suffering without thinking of God; but when, like the psalmist, we tell all to Him, healing begins. Thus, the second part (Psalms 38:9-14) is perceptibly calmer, and though still agitated, its thought of God is more trustful, and silent submission at the close takes the place of the "roaring," the shrill cry of agony which ended the first part. A further variation of tone is that, instead of the entirely subjective description of the psalmist’s sufferings in Psalms 38:1-8, the desertion by friends and the hostility of foes, are now the main elements of trial. There is comparative peace for a tortured heart in the thought that all its desire and sighing are known to God. That knowledge is prior to the heart’s prayer, but does not make it needless, for by the prayer the conviction of the Divine knowledge has entered the troubled soul, and brought some prelude of deliverance and hope of answer. The devout soul does not argue "Thou knowest, and I need not speak," but "Thou knowest, therefore I tell Thee"; and it is soothed in and after telling. He who begins his prayer, by submitting to chastisement and only deprecating the form of it inflicted by "wrath," will pass to the more gracious thought of God as lovingly cognisant of both his desire and his sighing, his wishes and his pains. The burst of the storm is past, when that light begins to break through clouds, though waves still run high. How high they still run is plain from the immediate recurrence of the strain of recounting the singer’s sorrows. This recrudescence of woe after the clear calm of a moment is only too well known to us all in our sorrows. The psalmist returns to speak of his sickness in Psalms 38:10, which is really a picture of syncope or fainting. The heart’s action is described by a rare word, which in its root means to go round and round, and is here in an intensive form expressive of violent motion, or possibly is to be regarded as a diminutive rather than an intensive, expressive of the thinner though quicker pulse. Then come collapse of strength and failure of sight. But this echo of the preceding part immediately gives place to the new element in the psalmist’s sorrow arising from the behaviour of friends and foes. The frequent complaint of desertion by friends has to be repeated by most sufferers in this selfish world. They keep far away from his "stroke," says the psalm, using the same word as is employed for leprosy, and as is used in the verb in Isaiah 53:4 ("stricken"). There is a tone of wonder and disappointment in the untranslatable play of language in Psalms 38:11 b. "My near relations stand far off." Kin are not always kind. Friends have deserted because foes have beset him. Probably we have here the facts which in the previous part are conceived of as the "arrows" of God. Open and secret enemies laying snares for him, as for some hunted wild creature, eagerly seeking his life, speaking "destructions" as if they would fain kill him with their words, and perpetually whispering lies about him, were recognised by him as instruments of God’s judgment, and evoked his consciousness of sin, which again led to actual disease. But the bitter schooling led to something else more blessed-namely, to silent resignation. Like David, when he let Shimei shriek his curses at him from the hillside and answered not, the psalmist is deaf and dumb to malicious tongues. He will sneak to God, but to man he is silent, in utter submission of will. Isaiah 53:7 gives the same trait in the perfect Sufferer, a faint foreshadowing of whom is seen in the psalmist; and 1 Peter 2:23 bids all who would follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, like Him open not their mouths when reviled, but commit themselves to the righteous Judge. Once more the psalmist lifts his eyes to God, and the third invocation of the Name is attended by an increase of confidence. In the first part, "Jehovah" was addressed; in the second the designation "Lord" was used; in the third, both are united and the appropriating name "my God" is added. In the closing invocation (Psalms 38:2-3) all three reappear, and each is the plea of a petition. The characteristics of these closing verses are three: humble trust, the marshalling of its reasons, and the combination of acknowledgment of sin and professions of innocence. The growth of trust is very marked, if the first part, with its synonyms for God’s wrath and its deprecation of unmeasured chastisement and its details of pain, be compared with the quiet hope and assurance that God will answer, and with that great name "my Salvation." The singer does not indeed touch the heights of triumphant faith; but he who can grasp God as his, and can be silent because he is sure that God will speak by delivering deeds for him and can call Him his Salvation, has climbed far enough to have the sunshine all round him, and to be clear of the mists among which his song began. The best reason for letting the enemy speak on unanswered is the confidence that a mightier voice will speak. "But thou wilt answer, Lord, for me" may well make us deaf and dumb to temptations and threats, calumnies and flatteries. How does this confidence spring in so troubled a heart? The fourfold "For" beginning each verse from 15 to 18 (Psalms 38:15-18) weaves them all into a chain. The first gives the reason for the submissive silence as being quiet confidence; and the succeeding three may be taken as either dependent on each other, or, as is perhaps better, as coordinate and all-assigning reasons for that confidence. Either construction yields worthy and natural meanings. If the former be adopted, trust in God’s undertaking of the silent sufferer’s cause is based upon the prayer which broke his silence. Dumb to men, he had breathed to God his petition for help, and had buttressed it with this plea, "Lest they rejoice over me," and he had feared that they would, because he knew that he was ready to fall and had ever before him his pain, and that because he felt himself forced to lament and confess his sin. But it seems to yield a richer meaning, if the "For’s" be regarded as coordinate. They then become a striking and instructive example of faith’s logic, the ingenuity of pleading which finds encouragements in discouragements. The suppliant is sure of answer because he has told God his fear, and yet again because he is so near falling and therefore needs help so much, and yet again because he has made a clean breast of his sin. Trust in God’s help, distrust of self, consciousness of weakness, and penitence make anything possible rather than that the prayer which embodies them should be flung up to an unanswering God. They are prevalent pleas with Him in regard to which He will not be "as a man that heareth not, and in whose mouth there is no reply." They are grounds of assurance to him who prays. The juxtaposition of consciousness of sin in Psalms 38:18 with the declaration that love of good was the cause of being persecuted brings out the twofold attitude, in regard to God and men, which a devout soul may permissibly and sometimes must necessarily assume. There may be the truest sense of sinfulness, along with a clear-hearted affirmation of innocence in regard to men, and a conviction that it is good and goodwill to them, not evil in the sufferer, which makes him the butt of hatred. Not less instructive is the double view of the same facts presented in the beginning and end of this psalm. They were to the psalmist first regarded as God’s chastisement in wrath, His "arrows" and heavy "hand," because of sin. Now they are men’s enmity, because of his love of good. Is there not an entire contradiction between these two views of suffering, its cause and source? Certainly not, but rather the two views differ only in the angle of vision, and may be combined, like stereoscopic pictures, into one rounded, harmonious whole. To be able so to combine them is one of the rewards of such pleading trust as breathes its plaintive music through this psalm, and wakes responsive notes in devout hearts still. Psalms 39:1-13 suffering, recognised as chastisement for sin, had wasted the psalmist’s strength. It had been borne for a while in silence, but the rush of emotion had burst the floodgates. The psalm does not repeat the words which forced themselves from the hot heart, but preserves for us the calmer flow which followed. It falls into four parts, the first three of which contain three verses each, and the fourth is expanded into four, divided into two couples. In the first part (Psalms 39:1-3) the frustrated resolve of silence is recorded. Its motive was fear of sinning in speech "while the wicked is before me." That phrase is often explained as meaning that the sight of the prosperity of the godless in contrast with his own sorrows tempted the singer to break out into arraigning God’s providence, and that he schooled himself to look at their insolent ease unmurmuringly. But the psalm has no other references to other men’s flourishing condition: and it is more in accordance with its tone to suppose that his own pains, and not their pleasures, prompted to the withheld words. The presence of "the wicked" imposed on his devout heart silence as a duty. We do not complain of a friend’s conduct in the hearing of his enemies. God’s servants have to watch their speech about Him when godless ears are listening, lest hasty words should give occasion for malicious glee or blasphemy. So, for God’s honour, the psalmist put restraint on himself. The word rendered "bridle" in Psalms 39:2 by the A.V. and R.V. is better taken as muzzle, for a muzzle closes the lips, and a bridle does not. The resolution thus energetically expressed was vigorously carried out: "I made myself dumb in still submission; I kept silence." And what came of it? "My sorrow was stirred." Grief suppressed is increased, as all the world knows. The closing words of Psa 39:2 b (lit. apart from good) are obscure, and very variously understood, some regarding them as an elliptical form of "from good and bad," and expressing completeness of silence; others taking "the good" to mean "the law, or the praise of God, or good fortune, or such words as would serve to protect the singer from slanders." "But the preposition here employed, when it follows a verb meaning silence, does not introduce that concerning which silence is kept, but a negative result of silence" (Hupfeld). The meaning, then, is best given by some such paraphrase as "joylessly" or "and I had no comfort" (R.V). The hidden sorrow gnawed beneath the cloak like a fire in a hollow tree; it burned fiercely unseen, and ate its way at last into sight. Locked lips make hearts hotter. Repression of utterance only feeds the fire, and sooner or later the "muzzle" is torn off, and pent-up feeling breaks into speech, often the wilder for the violence done to nature by the attempt to deny it its way. The psalmist’s motive was right, and in a measure his silence was so; but his resolve did not at first go deep enough. It is the heart, not the mouth, that has to be silenced. To build a dam across a torrent without diminishing the sources that supply its waters only increases weight and pressure, and ensures a muddy flood when it bursts. Does the psalm proceed to recount what its author said when he broke silence? It may appear so at first sight. On the other hand, the calm prayer which follows, beginning with Psalms 39:4, is not of the character of the wild and whirling words which were suppressed for fear of sinning, nor does the fierce fire of which the psalm has been speaking flame in it. It seems, therefore, more probable that those first utterances, in which the overcharged heart relieved itself, and which were tinged with complaint and impatience, are not preserved, and did not deserve to be, and that the pathetic, meditative petitions of the rest of the psalm succeeded them, as after the first rush of the restrained torrent comes a stiller flow. Such a prayer might well have been offered "while the wicked is before me," and might have been laid to heart by them. Its thoughts are as a cool hand laid on the singer’s hot heart. They damp the fire burning in him. There is no surer remedy for inordinate sensibility to outward sorrows than fixed convictions of life’s brevity and illusoriness; and these are the two thoughts which the prayer casts into sweet, sad music. It deals with commonplaces of thought, which poets and moralists have been singing and preaching since the world began, in different tones and with discordant applications, sometimes with fierce revolt against the inevitable, sometimes with paralysing consciousness of it, sometimes using these truths as arguments for base pleasures and aims, sometimes toying with them as occasions for cheap sentiment and artificial pathos, sometimes urging them as motives for strenuous toil. But of all the voices which have ever sung or prophesied of life’s short span and shadowy activities, none is nobler, saner, healthier, and calmer than this psalmist’s. The stately words in which he proclaimed the transiency of all earthly things are not transient. They are "nothing but a breath," but they have outlasted much that seemed solid, and their music will sound as long as man is on his march through time. Our "days" have a "measure"; they are a limited period, and the Measurer is God. But this fleeting creature man has an obstinate fancy of his permanence, which is not all bad indeed-since without it there would be little continuity of purpose or concentration of effort-but may easily run to extremes and hide the fact that there is an end. Therefore the prayer for Divine illumination is needed, that we may not be ignorant of that which we know well enough, if we would bethink ourselves. The solemn convictions of Psa 39:5 are won by the petitions of Psa 39:4. He who asks God to make him know his end has already gone far towards knowing it. If he seeks to estimate the "measure" of his days, he will soon come to the clear conviction that it is only the narrow space that may be covered by one or two breadths of a hand. So do noisy years shrink when heaven’s chronology is applied to them. A lifetime looks long, but set against God’s eternal years, it shrivels to an all but imperceptible point, having position, but not magnitude. The thought of brevity naturally draws after it that of illusoriness. Just because life is so frail does it assume the appearance of being futile. Both ideas are blended in the metaphors of "a breath" and "a shadow." There is a solemn earnestness in the three-fold "surely," confirming each clause of the seer’s insight into earth’s hollowness. How emphatically he puts it in the almost pleonastic language, "Surely nothing but a breath is every man, stand he ever so firm." The truth proclaimed is undeniably certain. It covers the whole ground of earthly life, and it includes the most prosperous and firmly established. "A breath" is the very emblem of transiency and of unsubstantiality. Every solid body can be melted and made gaseous vapour, if heat enough is applied. They who habitually bring human life "before Thee" dissolve into vapour the solid-seeming illusions which cheat others, and save their own lives from being but a breath by clearly recognising that they are. The Selah at the end of Psa 39:4 does not here seem to mark a logical pause in thought nor to coincide with the strophe division, but emphasises by some long, drawn, sad notes the teaching of the words. The thought runs on unbroken, and Psalms 39:6 is closely linked to Psalms 39:5 by the repeated "surely" and "breath" as well as in subject. The figure changes from breath to "shadow," literally "image," meaning not a sculptured likeness, but an eidolon, or unsubstantial apparition. "The glories of our birth and state Are shadows, not substantial things"; and all the movements of men coming and going in the world are but like a dance of shadows. As they are a breath, so are their aims. All their hubbub and activity is but like the bustle of ants on their hill-immense energy and toil, and nothing coming of it all. If any doubt remained as to the correctness of this judgment of the aimlessness of man’s toil, one fact would confirm the psalmist’s sentence, viz., that the most successful man labours to amass, and has to leave his piles for another whom he does not know, to gather into his storehouses and to scatter by his prodigality. There may be an allusion in the words to harvesting work. The sheaves are piled up, but in whose barn are they. to be housed? Surely, if the grower and reaper is not the ultimate owner, his toil has been for a breath. All this is no fantastic pessimism. Still less is it an account of what life must be. If any man’s is nothing but toiling for a breath, and if he himself is nothing but a breath, it is his own fault. They who are joined to God have "in their embers something that doth live"; and if they labour for Him, they do not labour for vanity, nor do they leave their possessions when they die. The psalmist has no reference to a future life, but the immediately following strophe shows that, though he knew that his days were few, he knew, too, that if his hope were set on God he was freed from the curse of illusoriness and grasped no shadow, but the Living Substance, who would make his life blessedly real and pour into it substantial good. The effect of such convictions of life’s brevity and emptiness should be to throw the heart back on God. In the third part of the psalm (Psalms 39:7-9) a higher strain sounds. The singer turns from his dreary thoughts, which might so easily become bitter ones, to lay hold on God. What should earth’s vanity teach but God’s sufficiency? It does not need the light of a future life to be flashed upon this mean, swiftly vanishing present in order to see it "apparelled in celestial light." Without that transforming conception, it is still possible to make it great and real by bringing it into conscious connection with God; and if hope and effort are set on Him amid all the smallnesses and perishablenesses of the outer world, hope will not chase a shadow, nor effort toil for very vanity. The psalmist sought to calm his hot heart by the contemplation of his end, but that is a poor remedy for perturbation, and grief unless it leads to actual contact with the one enduring Substance. It did so with him, and therefore "grief grew calm," just because "hope was" not "dead." To preach the vanity, of all earthly things to heavy hearts is but pouring vinegar on nitre, unless it is accompanied with the great antidote to all sad and depreciating views of life: the thought that in it men may reach their hands beyond the time film that enmeshes them and grasp the unchanging God. This psalm has no reference to life beyond the grave; but it finds in present communion by waiting and hope, emancipation from the curse of fleeting triviality which haunts every life separated from Him, like that which the Christian hope of immortality gives. God is the significant figure which gives value to the row of ciphers of which every life is without Him made up. Blessed are they who are driven by earth’s vanity and drawn by God’s fulness of love and power to fling themselves into His arms and nestle there! The strong recoil of the devout soul from a world which it has profoundly felt to be shadowy, and its great venture of faith, which is not a venture after all, were never more nobly or simply expressed than in that quiet "And now"-things being so-"what wait I for? My hope"-in contrast with the false directions which other men’s takes-"to Thee it turns." The burden is still on the psalmist’s shoulders. His sufferings are not ended, though his trust has taken the poison out of them. Therefore his renewed grasp of God leads at once to prayer for deliverance from his "transgressions," in which cry may be included both sins and their chastisement. The fool is the name of a class, not of an individual, and, as always in Scripture, denotes moral and religious obliquity, not intellectual feebleness. The expression is substantially equivalent to "the wicked" of Psalms 39:1, and a similar motive to that which there induced the psalmist to be silent is here urged as a plea with God for the sufferer’s deliverance. Taunts launched at a good man suffering will glance off him and appear to reach his God. Psalms 39:9 pleads as a reason for God’s deliverance the psalmist’s silence under what he recognised as God’s chastisement. The question arises whether this is the same silence as is referred to in Psalms 39:1-2, and many authorities take that view. But that silence was broken by a rush of words from a hot heart, and, if the account of the connection in the psalm given above is correct, by a subsequent more placid meditation and prayer. It would be irrelevant to recur to it here, especially as a plea with God. But there are two kinds of silence under His chastisements: one which may have for its motive regard to His honour, but is none the less tinged with rebellious thoughts, and brings no good to the sufferer, and another which is silence of heart and will, not of lips only, and soothes sorrow which the other only aggravated. and puts out the fire which the other fanned. Submission to God’s hand discerned behind all visible causes is the blessed silence. "To lie still, let Him strike home, and bless the rod," is best. And when that is attained, the uses of chastisement are accomplished; and we may venture to ask God to burn the rod. The desire to be freed from its blow is not inconsistent with such submission. This prayer does not break the silence, though it may seem to do so, for this is the privilege of hearts that love God: that they can breathe desires to Him without His holding them unsubmissive to His supreme will. The last part (Psalms 39:10-13) is somewhat abnormally long, and falls into two parts separated by "Selah," which musical note does not here coincide with the greater divisions. The two pairs of verses are both petitions for removal of sickness, either real or figurative. Their pleading persistence presents substantially the same prayer and supports it by the same considerations of man’s transiency. The Pattern of perfect resignation thrice "prayed, saying the same words"; and His suffering followers may do the same, and yet neither sin by impatience, nor weary the Judge by their continual coming. The psalmist sees in his pains God’s "stroke," and pleads the effects already produced on him as a reason for cessation. He is already "wasted by the assault of God’s hand." One more buffet, and he feels that he must die. It is bold for a sufferer to say to God, "Hold! enough!" but all depends on the tone in which it is said. It may be presumption, or it may be a child’s free speech, not in the least trenching on a Father’s authority. The sufferer underrates his capacity of endurance, and often thinks, "I can bear no straw more"; but yet he has to bear it. Yet the psalmist’s cry rests upon a deep truth: that God cannot mean to crush; therefore he goes on to a deeper insight into the meaning of that "stroke." It is not the attack of an enemy, but the "correction" of a friend. If men regarded sorrows and sicknesses as rebukes for iniquity, they would better understand why sinful life, separated from God, is so fleeting. The characteristic ground tone of the Old Testament echoes here, according to which "the wages of sin is death." The commonplace of man’s frailty receives a still more tragic colouring when thus regarded as a consequence of his sin. The psalmist has learned it in relation to his own sufferings, and, because he sees it so clearly, he pleads that these may cease. He looks on his own wasted form; and God’s hand seems to him to have taken away all that made it or life desirable and fair, as a moth would gnaw a garment. What a daring figure to compare the mightiest with the feeblest, the Eternal with the very type of evanescence! The second subdivision of this part (Psalms 39:12-13) reiterates the former with some difference of tone. There is a beautiful climax of earnestness in the psalmist’s appeal to God. His prayer swells into crying, and that again melts into tears, which go straight to the great Father’s heart. Weeping eyes are never turned to heaven in vain; the gates of mercy open wide when the hot drops touch them. But his fervour of desire is not this suppliant’s chief argument with God. His meditation has won for him deeper insight into that transiency which at first he had only laid like ice on his heart, to cool its feverish heat. He sees now more clearly, by reason of his effort to turn away his hope from earth and fix it on God, that his brief life has an aspect in which its brevity is not only calming, but exalting, and gives him a claim on God. whose guest he is while here, and with whom he has guest rights, whether his stay is longer or shorter. "The land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me". (Leviticus 25:23) That which was true in a special way of Israel’s tenure of the soil is true for the individual, and true forever. All men are God’s guests; and if we betake ourselves behind the curtains of His tent, we have rights of shelter and sustenance. All the bitterness of the thought of the brevity of life is sucked out of it by such a confidence. If a man dwells with God, his Host will care for the needs, and not be indifferent to the tears, of His guest. The long generations which have come and gone like shadows are not a melancholy procession out of nothing through vanity into nothing again, nor "disquieted in vain," if they are conceived as each in turn lodging for a little while in that same ancestral home which the present generation inhabits. It has seen many sons succeeding their fathers as its tenants, but its stately strength grows not old, and its gates are open today as they have been in all generations. The closing prayer in Psalms 39:13 has a strange sound. "Look away from me" is surely a singular petition, and the effect of God’s averting His face is not less singular. The psalmist thinks that it will be his regaining cheerfulness and brightness, for he uses a word which means to clear up or to brighten, as the sky becomes blue again after storm. The light of God’s face makes men’s faces bright. "They cried unto God, and were lightened," not because He looked away from them, but because He regarded them. But the intended paradox gives the more emphatic expression to the thought that the psalmist’s pains came from God’s angry look, and it is that which he asks may be turned from him. That mere negative withdrawal, however, would have no cheering power, and is not conceivable as unaccompanied by the turning to the suppliant of God’s loving regard. The devout psalmist had no notion of a neutral God, nor could he ever be contented with simple cessation of the tokens of Divine displeasure. The ever-outflowing Divine activity must reach every man. It may come in one or other of the two forms of favour or of displeasure, bur come it will; and each man can determine which side of that pillar of fire and cloud is turned to him. On one side is the red glare of anger, on the other the white lustre of love. If the one is turned from, the other is turned to us. Not less remarkable is the prospect of going away into non-being which the last words of the psalm present as a piteous reason for a little gleam of brightness being vouchsafed in this span-long life. There is no vision here of life beyond the grave; but, though there is not, the singer "throws himself into the arms of God." He does not seek to solve the problem of life by bringing the future in to redress the balance of good and evil. To him the solution lies in present communion with a present God, in whose house he is a guest now, and whose face will make his life bright, however short it may be. Psalms 40:1-17 THE closing verses of this psalm reappear with slight changes as an independent whole in Psalms 70:1-5. The question arises whether that is a fragment or this a conglomerate. Modern opinion inclines to the latter alternative, and points in support to the obvious change of tone in the second part. But that change does not coincide with the supposed line of junction, since Psalms 70:1-5 begins with our Psalms 40:13, and the change begins with Psalms 40:12. Cheyne and others are therefore obliged to suppose that Psalms 40:12 is the work of a third poet or compiler, who effected a junction thereby. The cumbrousness of the hypothesis of fusion is plain, and its necessity is not apparent, for it is resorted to in order to explain how a psalm which keeps so lofty a level of confidence at first should drop to such keen consciousness of innumerable evils and such faint-heartedness. But surely, such resurrection of apparently dead fears is not uncommon in devout, sensitive souls. They live beneath April skies, not unbroken blue. However many the wonderful works which God has done and however full of thankfulness the singer’s heart, his deliverance is not complete. The contrast in the two parts of the psalm is true to facts and to the varying aspects of feeling and of faith. Though the latter half gives greater prominence to encompassing evils, they appear but for a moment; and the prayer for deliverance which they force from the psalmist is as triumphant in faith as were the thanksgivings of the former part. In both the ground tone is that of victorious grasp of God’s help, which in the one is regarded in its mighty past acts, and in the other is implored and trusted in for present and future needs. The change of tone is not such as to demand the hypothesis of fusion: The unity is further supported by verbal links between the parts: e.g., the innumerable evils of Psa 40:12 pathetically correspond to the innumerable mercies of Psa 40:5, and the same word for "surpass" occurs in both verses; "be pleased" in Psalms 40:13 echoes "Thy pleasure" (will, A.V.) in Psalms 40:8; "cares" or thinks (A.V.) in Psalms 40:17 is the verb from which the noun rendered purposes (thoughts, A.V.) in Psalms 40:5 is derived. The attribution of the psalm to David rests solely on the superscription. The contents have no discernible points of connection with known circumstances in his or any other life. Jeremiah has been thought of as the author, on the strength of giving a prosaic literal meaning to the obviously poetical phrase "the pit of destruction" (Psalms 40:2). If it is to be taken literally, what is to be made of the "rock" in the next clause? Baethgen and others see the return from Babylon in the glowing metaphors of Psa 40:2, and, in accordance with their conceptions of the evolution of spiritual religion, take the subordination of sacrifice to obedience as a clear token of late date. We may, however, recall 1 Samuel 15:22, and venture to doubt whether the alleged process of spiritualising has been so clearly established, and its stages dated, as to afford a criterion of the age of a psalm. In the first part, the current of thought starts from thankfulness for individual deliverances (Psalms 40:1-3); widens into contemplation of the blessedness of trust and the riches of Divine mercies (Psalms 40:4-5); moved by these and taught what is acceptable to God, it rises to self-consecration as a living sacrifice (Psalms 40:6-8); and, finally, pleads for experience of God’s grace in all its forms on the ground of past faithful stewardship in celebrating these (Psalms 40:9-11). The second part is one long-drawn cry for help, which admits of no such analysis, though its notes are various. The first outpouring of the song is one long sentence, of which the clauses follow one another like sunlit ripples, and tell the whole process of the psalmist’s deliverance. It began with patient waiting; it ended with a new song. The voice first raised in a cry, shrill and yet submissive enough to be heard above, is at last tuned into new forms of uttering the old praise. The two clauses of Psa 40:1 ("I" and "He") set over against each other, as separated by the distance between heaven and earth, the psalmist and his God. He does not begin with his troubles, but with his faith. "Waiting, he waited" for Jehovah; and wherever there is that attitude of tense and continuous but submissive expectance, God’s attitude will be that of bending to meet it. The meek, upturned eye has power to draw His towards itself. That is an axiom of the devout life confirmed by all experience, even if the tokens of deliverance delay their coming. Such expectance, however patient, is not inconsistent with loud crying, but rather finds voice in it. Silent patience and impatient prayer, in too great a hurry to let God take His own time, are equally imperfect. But the cry, "Haste to my help" (Psalms 40:13), and the final petition, "My God, delay not," are consistent with true waiting. The suppliant and God have come closer together in Psalms 40:2, which should not be regarded as beginning a new sentence. As in Psalms 18:1-50, prayer brings God down to help. His hand reaches to the man prisoned in a pit or struggling in a swamp; he is dragged out, set on a rock, and feels firm ground beneath his feet. Obviously the whole representation is purely figurative, and it is hopelessly flat and prosaic to refer it to Jeremiah’s experience. The "many waters" of Psalms 18:1-50 are a parallel metaphor. The dangers that threatened the psalmist are described as "a pit of destruction," as if they were a dungeon into which whosoever was thrown would come out no more, or in which, like a wild beast, he has been trapped. They are also likened to a bog or quagmire, in which struggles only sink a man deeper. But the edge of the bog touches rock, and there is firm footing and unhindered walking (here, if only some great lifting power can drag the sinking man out. God’s hand can, and does, because the lips, almost choked with mire, could yet cry. The psalmist’s extremity of danger was probably much more desperate than is usual in such conditions as ours, so that his cries seem too piercing for us to make our own; but the terrors and conflicts of humanity are nearly constant quantities, though the occasions calling them forth are widely different. If we look deeper into life than its surface, we shall learn that it is not violent "spiritualising" to make these utterances the expression of redeeming grace, since in truth there is but one or other of these two possibilities open for us. Either we flounder in a bottomless bog, or we have our feet on the Rock. God’s deliverance gives occasion for fresh praise. The psalmist has to add his voice to the great chorus, and this sense of being but one of a multitude, who have been blessed alike and therefore should bless alike, occasions the significant interchange in Psalms 40:3 of "my" and "our," which needs no theory of the speaker being the nation to explain it. It is ever a joy to the heart swelling with the sense of God’s mercies to be aware of the many who share the mercies and gratitude. The cry for deliverance is a solo: the song of praise is choral. The psalmist did not need to be hidden to praise; a new song welled from his lips as by inspiration. Silence was more impossible to his glad heart than even to his sorrow. To shriek for help from the bottom of the pit and to be dumb when lifted to the surface is a churl’s part. Though the song was new in this singer’s mouth, as befitted a recipient of deliverances fresh from heaven, the theme was old; but each new voice individualises the commonplaces of religious experience, and repeats them as fresh. And the result of one man’s convinced and jubilant voice, giving novelty to old truths because he has verified them in new experiences, will be that "many shall see," as though they behold the deliverance of which they hear, "and shall fear" Jehovah and trust themselves to Him. It was not the psalmist’s deliverance, but his song, that was to be the agent in this extension of the fear of Jehovah. All great poets have felt that their words would win audience and live. Thus, even apart from consciousness of inspiration, this lofty anticipation of the effect of his words is intelligible, without supposing that their meaning is that the signal deliverance of the nation from captivity would spread among heathens and draw them to Israel’s faith. The transition from purely personal experience to more general thoughts is completed in Psalms 40:4-5. Just as the psalmist began with telling of his own patient expectance and thence passed on to speak of God’s help, so in these two verses he sets forth the same sequence in terms studiously cast into the most comprehensive form. Happy indeed are they who can translate their own experience into these two truths for all men: that trust is blessedness and that God’s mercies are one long sequence, made up of numberless constituent parts. To have these for one’s inmost convictions and to ring them out so clearly and melodiously that many shall be drawn to listen, and then to verify them by their own "seeing," is one reward of patient waiting for Jehovah. That trust must be maintained by resolute resistance to temptations to its opposite. Hence the negative aspect of trust is made prominent in Psalms 40:4 b, in which the verb should be rendered "turns not" instead of "respecteth not," as in the A.V. and R.V. The same motion, looked at from opposite sides, may be described in turning to and turning from. Forsaking other confidences is part of the process of making God one’s trust. But it is significant that the antithesis is not completely carried out, for those to whom the trustful heart does not turn are not here, as might have been expected, rival objects of trust, but those who put their own trust in false refuges. "The proud" are the class of arrogantly self-reliant people who feel no need of anything but their own strength to lean on. "Deserters to a lie" are those who tail away from Jehovah to put their trust in any creature, since all refuges but Himself will fail. Idols may be included in this thought of a lie, but it is unduly limited if confined to them. Much rather it takes in all false grounds of security. The antithesis fails in accuracy, for the sake of putting emphasis on the prevalence of such mistaken trust, which makes it so much the harder to keep aloof from the multitudes and stand alone in reliance on Jehovah. Psalms 40:5 corresponds with Psalms 40:4, in that it sets forth in similar generality the great deeds with which God is wont to answer man’s trust. But the personality of the poet breaks very beautifully through the impersonal utterances at two points: once when he names Jehovah as "my God," thus claiming his separate share in the general mercies and his special bond of connection with the Lover of all; and once when he speaks of his own praises, thus recognising the obligation of individual gratitude for general blessings. Each particle of finely comminuted moisture in the rainbow has to flash back the broad sunbeam at its own angle. God’s "wonders and designs" are "realised Divine thoughts and Divine thoughts which are gradually being realised" (Delitzsch). These are wrought and being wrought in multitudes innumerable, and as the psalmist sees the bright, unbroken beams pouring forth from their inexhaustible source, he breaks into an exclamation of adoring wonder at the incomparable greatness of the ever-giving God. "There is none to set beside Thee" is far loftier and more accordant with the tone of the verse than the comparatively flat and incongruous remark that God’s mercies cannot be told to him (A.V. and R.V). A precisely similar exclamation occurs in Psalms 71:19, in which God’s incomparable greatness is deduced from the great things which He has done. Happy the singer who has an inexhaustible theme! He is not silenced by the consciousness of the inadequacy of his songs, but rather inspired to the never-ending, ever-beginning, joyful task of uttering some new fragment of that transcendent perfection. Innumerable wonders wrought should be met-by ever-new songs. If they cannot be counted, the more reason for open-eyed observance of them as they come, and for a stream of praise as unbroken as is their bright continuance. If God’s mercies thus baffle enumeration and beggar praise, the question naturally rises, "What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits?" Therefore the next turn of thought shows the psalmist as reaching the lofty spiritual conception that heartfelt delight in God’s will is the true response to God’s wonders of love. He soars far above external rites as well as servile obedience to unloved authority, and proclaims the eternal and ultimate truth that what God delights in is man’s delight in His will. The great words which rang the knell of Saul’s kingship may well have sounded in his successor’s spirit. Whether they are the source of the language of our psalm or not, they are remarkably similar. "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams," (1 Samuel 15:23) teaches precisely the same lesson as Psalms 40:6-8 of this psalm. The strong negation in Psalms 40:6 does not deny the Divine institution of the sacrificial law, but affirms that something much deeper than external sacrifices is the real object of God’s desire. The negation is made emphatic by enumerating the chief kinds of sacrifice. Whether they are bloody or bloodless, whether meant to express consecration or to effect reconciliation, they are none of them the true sacrifices of God. In Psalms 40:6 the psalmist is entirely occupied with God’s declarations of His requirements; and he presents these in a remarkable fashion, intercalating the clause, "Ears hast Thou pierced for me," between the two parallel clauses in regard to sacrifice. Why should the connection be thus broken? The fact that God has endowed the psalmist with capacity to apprehend the Divine speech reveals God’s desire concerning him. Just because he has ears to hear, it is clear that God wishes him to hear, and therefore that outward acts of worship cannot be the acknowledgment of mercies in which God delights. The central clause of the verse is embedded in the others, because it deals with a Divine act which, pondered, will be seen to establish their teaching. The whole puts in simple, concrete form a wide principle namely that the possession of capacity for receiving communications of God’s will imposes the duty of loving reception and obedience, and points to inward joyful acceptance of that will as the purest kind of worship. Psalms 40:7 and Psalms 40:8 are occupied with the response to God’s requirements thus manifested by His gift of capacity to hear His voice. "Then said I" As soon as he had learned the meaning of his ears he found the right use of his tongue. The thankful heart was moved to swift acceptance of the known will of God. The clearest recognition of His requirements may coexist with resistance to them, and needs the impulse of loving contemplation of God’s unnumbered wonders to vivify it into glad service. "Behold, I am come," is the language of a servant entering his master’s presence in obedience to his call. In Psalms 40:7 the second clause interrupts just as in Psalms 40:6. There the interruption spoke of the organ of receiving Divine messages as to duty; here it speaks of the messages themselves: "In the roll of the book is my duty prescribed for me." The promise implied in giving ears is fulfilled by giving a permanent written law. This man, having ears to hear, has heard, and has not only heard, but welcomed into the inmost recesses of his heart and will, the declared will of God. The word rendered "delight" in Psalms 40:8 is the same as is rendered "desire" in Psalms 40:6 (A.V); and that rendered by the A.V. and R.V. in Psalms 40:8 "will" is properly "good pleasure." Thus God’s delight and man’s coincide. Thankful love assimilates the creature’s will with the Divine, and so changes tastes and impulses that desire and duty are fused into one. The prescriptions of the book become the delight of the heart. An inward voice directs "Love, and do what Thou wilt"; for a will determined by love cannot but choose to please its Beloved. Liberty consists in freely willing and victoriously doing what we ought, and such liberty belongs to hearts whose supreme delight is to please the God whose numberless wonders have won their love and made their thanksgivings poor. The law written in the heart was the ideal even when a law was written on tables of stone. It was the prophetic promise for the Messianic age. It is fulfilled in the Christian life in the measure of its genuineness. Unless the heart delights in the law, acts of obedience count for very little. The quotation of Psa 40:7-8, in Hebrews 10:5-7, is mainly, from the LXX, which has the remarkable rendering of Psa 40:6 b, "A body hast Thou prepared for me." Probably this is meant as paraphrase rather than as translation; and it does represent substantially the idea of the original, since the body is the instrument for fulfilling, just as the ear is the organ for apprehending, the uttered will of God. The value of the psalm for the writer of Hebrews does not depend on that clause, but on the whole representation which it gives of the ideal of the perfectly righteous servant’s true worship, as involving the setting aside of sacrifice and the decisive pre-eminence of willing obedience. That ideal is fulfilled in Jesus, and really pointed onwards to Him. This use of the quotation does not imply the directly Messianic character of the psalm. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," and thus the passage is easy from inward delight in God’s will to public declaration of His character. Every true lover of God is a witness of His sweetness to the world. Since the psalmist had His law hidden in the depths of his being, be could not "hide" His righteousness within his heart, but must magnify it with his tongue. That is a feeble and doubtful love which knows no necessity of utterance. To "love and be silent" is sometimes imperative, but always burdensome; and a heart happy in its love cannot choose but ripple out in music of speech. The psalmist describes himself as a messenger of glad tidings, a true evangelist. The multiplicity of names for the various aspects of God’s character and acts which he heaps together in these verses serves to indicate their manifoldness which he delighted to contemplate, and his long, loving familiarity with them. He sets his treasure in all lights, and views it from all points, as a man will turn a jewel in his hand and get a fresh flash from every facet. "Righteousness," the good news that the Ruler of all is inflexibly just, with a justice which scrupulously meets all creatures’ needs and becomes penal and awful only to the rejectors of its tender aspect; "faithfulness," the inviolable adherence to every promise; "salvation," the actual fulness of deliverance and well-being flowing from these attributes; "lovingkindness" and "troth," often linked together as expressing at once the warmth and the unchangeableness of the Divine heart-these have been the psalmist’s themes. Therefore they are his hope; and he is sure that, as he has been their singer, they will be his preservers. Psalms 40:11 is not prayer, but bold confidence. It echoes the preceding verse, since "I did not restrain" (Psalms 40:9) corresponds with "Thou wilt not restrain," and "Thy lovingkindness and Thy troth" with the mention of the same attributes in Psalms 40:10. The psalmist is not so much asserting his claims as giving voice to his faith. He does not so much think that his utterance is deserving of remuneration as that God’s character makes impossible the supposition that he, who had so loved and sung His great name in its manifold glories, should find that name unavailing in his hour of need. There is an undertone of such felt need even in the confidence of Psa 40:11; and it becomes dominant from Psalms 40:12-17, but not so as to overpower the clear note of trust. The difference between the two parts of the psalm is great, but is not to be exaggerated as if it were contrariety. In the former part thanksgiving for deliverance from dangers recently past predominates: in the latter, petition for deliverance from dangers still threatening: but in both the psalmist is exercising the same confidence; and if in the beginning he hymns the praises of God who brought him out of the pit of destruction, in the end he keeps firm hold of Him as His "Help and Deliverer." Similarly, while in the first portion he celebrates the "purposes which are to usward," in the latter he is certain that, needy as he is, Jehovah has "purposes" of kindness to him. The change of tone is not so complete as to negative the original unity, and surely it is not difficult to imagine a situation in which both halves of the psalm should be appropriate. Are there any deliverances in this perilous and incomplete life so entire and permanent that they leave no room for future perils? Must not prevision of coming dangers accompany thankfulness for past escapes? Our Pharaohs are seldom drowned in the Red Sea, and we do not often see their corpses stretched on the sand. The change of tone, of which so much use is made as against the original unity of the psalm, begins with Psalms 40:12: but that verse has a very strong and beautiful link of connection with the previous part, in the description of besetting evils as innumerable. Both words of Psa 40:5 are repeated, that for "surpass" or "are more than" in Psalms 40:12 c, that for "number" in a. The heart that has felt how innumerable are God’s thoughts and deeds of love is not utterly reduced to despair, even while it beholds a sea of troubles rolling its white-crested billows shoreward as far as the horizon. The sky stretches beyond them, and the true numberlessness of God’s mercies outdoes the great yet really limited range of apparently numberless sins or sorrows, the consequences of sin. "Mine iniquities have overtaken me" like pursuing foes, and every calamity that held him in its grip was a child of a sin of his. Such consciousness of transgression is not inconsistent with "delight in the law of God after the inward man," as Paul found out, (Romans 7:22-23) but it sets aside the attempt to make this a directly Messianic psalm. "I am not able to see." Such is the only possible rendering, for there is no justification for translating the simple word by "look up." Either the crowd of surrounding calamities prevent the psalmist from seeing anything but themselves, or, more probably, the failure of vital power accompanying his sorrow dims his vision. (Psalms 38:10) From Psalms 40:13 onward Psalms 70:1-5 repeats this psalm, with unimportant verbal differences. The first of these is the omission of "Be pleased" in Psalms 40:13, which binds this second part to the first, and points back to "Thy pleasure" (Psalms 40:8). The prayer for the confusion of enemies closely resembles that in Psalms 35:1-28, Psalms 40:14 being almost identical with Psalms 40:4 and Psalms 35:26 there, and Psalms 40:15 recalling Psalms 35:21 of that psalm. The prayer that enemies may fail in their designs is consistent with the most Christlike spirit, and nothing more is asked by the psalmist, but the tinge of satisfaction with which he dwells on their discomfiture, however natural, belongs to the less lofty moral standard of his stage of revelation. He uses extraordinarily forcible words to paint their bewilderment and mortification-may they blush, turn pale, be driven back, be as if paralysed with shame at their baffled malice! The prayer for the gladness of God’s servants and seekers is like Psalms 35:27. It asks that fruition as complete as the disappointment of the foesmay be the lot of those whose desires set towards God, and it is prophecy as well as prayer. Seekers after God ever find Him, and are more joyful in possession than they hoped to be while seeking. He alone never eludes search, nor ever disappoints attainment. They who long for His salvation will receive it; and their reception will fill their hearts so full of blessedness that their lips will not be able to refrain from ever-new outbursts of the old praise, "The Lord be magnified." Very plaintively and touchingly does the low sigh of personal need follow this triumphant intercession for the company of the saints. Its triple elements blend in one believing aspiration, which is not impatience, though it pleads for swift help. "I am afflicted and needy"; there the psalmist turns his eye on his own sore necessity. "Jehovah has purposes for me"; there he turns to God, and links his final petitions with his earlier trust by the repetition of the word by which he described (Psalms 40:5) the many gracious designs of God. "My God, delay not"; there he embraces both in one act of faithful longing. His need calls for, and God’s loving counsels ensure, swift response. He who delights when an afflicted and poor man calls Him "my God" will not be slack to vindicate His servant’s confidence, and magnify His own name. That appeal goes straight to the heart of God. Psalms 41:1-13 THE central mass of this psalm describes the singer as suffering from two evils: sickness and treacherous friends. This situation naturally leads up to the prayer and confidence of the closing strophe (Psalms 41:10-12). But its connection with the introductory verses (Psalms 41:1-5) is less plain. A statement of the blessings ensured to the compassionate seems a singular introduction to the psalmist’s pathetic exhibition of his sorrows. Cheyne thinks that the opening verses were added by the framer of the collection to adapt the poem to the use of the Church of his own time, and that "the original opening must have been different" ("Orig. of Psalt.," 246, n.). It is to be observed, however, that the two points of the psalmist’s affliction are the two from which escape is assured to the compassionate, who shall not be "delivered to the desire of his enemies," and shall be supported and healed in sickness. Probably, therefore, the general promises of Psa 41:1-3 are silently applied by the psalmist to himself; and he is comforting his own sorrow with the assurance which in his humility he casts into impersonal form. He has been merciful, and believes, though things look dark, that he will obtain mercy. There is probably also an intentional contrast with the cruel exacerbation of his sufferings by uncompassionate companions, which has rubbed salt into his wounds. He has a double consciousness in these opening verses, inasmuch as he partly thinks of himself as the compassionate man and partly as the "weak" one who is compassionated. The combination of sickness and treachery is remarkable, especially if the former is taken literally, as the strongly marked details seem to require. The sick man is visited by an insincere sympathiser, who is all eyes to note symptoms of increasing weakness, and all tongue, as soon as he gets out of the sickroom, to give the result, which is to his malice the better the worse it is. Such a picture looks as if drawn from life, and the sketch of the traitor friend seems to be a portrait of a real person. The supporters of the post-exilic date and national interpretation of the psalm have not succeeded in pointing out who the false friends of Israel were, who seemed to condole with, and really rejoiced over, its weakness, or who were the treacherous allies who failed it. The theory of the Davidic origin has in its favour the correspondence of Ahithophel’s treason with the treachery of the trusted friend in the psalm; and, while it must be admitted that there is no mention of sickness in the narrative in 2 Samuel, the supposition that trouble of conscience had brought illness gains some countenance from Psalms 32:1-11, if it is Davidic, and would naturally explain David’s singular passiveness whilst Absalom was hatching his plot. The psalm may be divided into four strophes, of which, however, the two middle ones cohere very closely. Psalms 41:1-3 give the mercy requited to the merciful; Psalms 41:4-6, after a brief prayer and confession begin the picture of the psalmist’s sufferings, which is carried on through the next strophe (Psalms 41:7-9), with the difference that in the former the scene is mainly the sick man’s chamber, and in the latter the meeting place of the secret conspirators. Psalms 41:10-12 build on this picture of distress a prayer for deliverance and rise to serene confidence in its certain answer. The closing doxology is not part of the psalm, but is appended as the conclusion of the first book of the Psalter. The principle that God’s dealings with us correspond to our dealings with men, as clouds are moulded after the curves of the mountains which they touch, is no less characteristic of the New Testament than of the Old. The merciful obtain mercy; God forgives those who forgive their brethren. The absoluteness of statement in this psalm is, of course, open to misunderstanding; but the singer had not such a superficial view of his relations to God as to suppose that kindly sympathy was the sole condition of Divine compassion. That virtue, the absence of which added pangs to his pains, might well seem to a sufferer writhing under the bitterness of its opposite the Divinest of all excellences, and worthiest of recompense. That its requital should be mainly considered as consisting in temporal deliverance and physical health is partly due to the characteristics of the Old Testament promises of blessedness, and partly to the psalmist’s momentary needs. We have noted that these are reflected in the blessings promised in Psalms 41:1-3. The "happy" of Psalms 41:1 is caught up in the abruptly introduced "He shall be counted happy" of Psalms 41:2 which may carry tacit reference to the malicious slanders that aggravated the psalmist’s sufferings, and anticipates deliverance so perfect that all who see him shall think him fortunate. The next clause rises into direct address of Jehovah, and is shown by the form of the negative in the Hebrew to be petition, not assertion, thus strongly confirming the view that "me" lurks below "him" in this context. A similar transition from the third to the second person occurs in Psalms 41:3, as if the psalmist drew closer to his God. There is also a change of tense in the verbs there: "Jehovah will sustain"; "Thou hast turned," the latter tense converting the general truth expressed in the former clause into a fact of experience. The precise meaning of this verse is questioned, some regarding both clauses as descriptive of tender nursing, which sustains the drooping head and smoothes the crumpled bedding, while others, noting that the word rendered "bed" (A.V. and R.V.) in the second clause means properly "lying down," take that clause as descriptive of turning, sickness into convalescence. The latter meaning gives a more appropriate ending to the strophe, as it leaves the sick man healed, not tossing on a disordered bed, as the other explanation does. Jehovah does not half cure. The second and third strophes (Psalms 41:4-9) are closely connected. In them the psalmist recounts his sorrows and pains, but first breathes a prayer for mercy, and bases it no longer on his mercifulness, but on his sin. Only a shallow experience will find contradiction here to either the former words, or to the later profession of "integrity" (Psalms 41:12). The petition for soul healing does not prove that sickness in the following verses is figurative, but results from the belief that sorrow is the effect of sin, a view which belongs to the psalmist’s stage of revelation, and is not to be held by Christians in the same absolute fashion. If the Davidic origin of the psalm is recognised, the connection of the king’s great sin with all his after sorrows is patent. However he had been merciful and compassionate in general, his own verdict on the man in Nathan’s parable was that he "showed no pity," and that sin bore bitter fruit in all his life. It was the parent of all the sensual outrages in his own house; it underlay Ahithophel’s treachery; it had much to do in making his reign abhorred; it brought the fuel which Absalom fired, and if our supposition is right as to the origin of the sickness spoken of in this psalm, that sin and the remorse that followed it gnawed at the roots of bodily health. So the psalmist, if he is indeed the royal sinner, had need to pray for soul healing first, even though he was conscious of much compassion and hoped for its recompense. While he speaks thus to Jehovah, his enemies speak in a different tone. The "evil" which they utter is not calumny, but malediction. Their hatred is impatient for his death. The time seems long till they can hear of it. One of them comes on a hypocritical visit of solicitude ("see" is used for visiting the sick in 2 Kings 8:29, and speaks lying condolence, while he greedily collects encouraging symptoms that the disease is hopeless. Then he hurries back to tell how much worse he had found the patient; and that ignoble crew delight in the good news, and send it flying. This very special detail goes strongly in favour of the view that we have in this whole description a transcript of literal, personal experience. There were plenty of concealed enemies round David in the early stages of Absalom’s conspiracy, who would look eagerly for signs of his approaching death, which might save the need of open revolt and plunge the kingdom into welcome confusion. The second strophe ends with the exit of the false friend. The third (Psalms 41:7-9) carries him to the meeting place of the plotters, who eagerly receive and retain the good news that the sick man is worse. They feed their ignoble hate by picturing further ill as laying hold of him. Their wish is parent to their thought, which is confirmed by the report of their emissary. "A thing of Belial is poured out on him," or "is fastened upon him," say they. That unusual expression may refer either to moral or physical evil. In the former sense it would here mean the sufferer’s sin, in the latter a fatal disease. The connection makes the physical reference the more likely. This incurable disease is conceived of as "poured out," or perhaps as "molten on him," so that it cannot be separated from him. Therefore he will never rise from his sick bed. But even this murderous glee is not the psalmist’s sharpest pang. "The man of my peace," trusted, honoured, admitted to the privileges, and therefore bound by the obligations, of hospitality so sacred in the old world, has kicked the prostrate sufferer, as the ass in the fable did the sick lion. The treachery of Ahithophel at once occurs to mind. No doubt many treacherous friends have wounded many trustful hearts, but the correspondence of David’s history with this detail is not to be got rid of by the observation that treachery is common. Still less is it sufficient to quote Obadiah 1:7 where substantially the same language is employed in reference to the enemies of Edom, as supporting the national reference of the present passage. No one denies that false allies may be described by such a figure, or that nations may be personified; but is there any event in the post-exilic history which shows Israel deceived and spurned by trusted allies? The Davidic authorship and the personal reference of the psalm are separable. But if the latter is adopted, it will be hard to find any circumstances answering so fully to the details of the psalm as the Absalomic rebellion and Ahithophel’s treason. Our Lord’s quotation of part of Psa 41:9, with the significant omission of "in whom I trusted," does not imply the Messianic character of the psalm, but is an instance of an event and a saying which were not meant as prophetic, finding fuller realisation in the life of the perfect type of suffering godliness than in the original sufferer. The last strophe (Psalms 41:10-12) recurs to prayer, and soars to confidence born of communion. A hand stretched out in need and trust soon comes back filled with blessings. Therefore here the moment of true petition is the moment of realised answer. The prayer traverses the malicious hopes of enemies. They had said, "He will rise no more"; it prays, "Raise me up." It touches a note which sounds discordant in the desire "that I may requite them"; and it is far more truly reverential and appreciative of the progress of revelation to recognise the relative inferiority of the psalmist’s wish to render quid pro quo than to put violence on his words in order to harmonise them with Christian ethics, or to slur over the distinction between the Law, of which the keynote was retribution, and the Gospel, of which it is forgiveness. But the last words of the psalm are sunny with the assurance of present favour and with boundless hope. The man is still lying on his sick bed, ringed by whispering foes. There is no change without, but this change has passed: that he has tightened his hold of God, and therefore can feel that his enemies’ whispers will never rise or swell into a shout of victory over him. He can speak of the future deliverance as if present; and he can look ahead over an indefinite stretch of sunlit country, scarcely knowing whether the furthest point is earth or no. His integrity is not sinless, nor does he plead it as a reason for Jehovah’s upholding, but hopes for it as the consequence of His sustaining hand. He knows that he will have close approach to Jehovah; and though, no doubt, "forever" on his lips meant less than it does on ours, his assurance of continuous communion with God reached, if not to actual, clear consciousness of immortality, at all events to assurance of a future so indefinitely extended, and so brightened by the sunlight of God’s face, that it wanted but little additional extension or brightening to be the full assurance of life immortal. Psalms 42:1-11, Psalms 43:1-5 THE second book of the Psalter is characterised by the use of the Divine name "Elohim" instead of "Jehovah." It begins with a cluster of seven psalms (reckoning Psalms 42:1-11; Psalms 43:1-5, as one) of which the superscription is most probably regarded as ascribing their authorship to "the sons of Korach." These were Levites, and (according to 1 Chronicles 9:19 seq.) the office of keepers of the door of the sanctuary had been hereditary in their family from the time of Moses. Some of them were among the faithful adherents of David at Ziklag, (1 Chronicles 12:6) and in the new model of worship inaugurated by him the Korachites were doorkeepers and musicians. They retained the former office in the second Temple. (Nehemiah 11:19) The ascription of authorship to a group is remarkable, and has led to the suggestion that the superscription does not specify the authors, but the persons for whose use the psalms in question were composed. The Hebrew would bear either meaning; but if the latter is adopted, all these psalms are anonymous. The same construction is found in Book 1 in Psalms 25:1-22; Psalms 26:1-12; Psalms 27:1-14; Psalms 28:1-9; Psalms 35:1-28; Psalms 37:1-40 where it is obviously the designation of authorship, and it is naturally taken to have the same force in these Korachite psalms. It has been ingeniously conjectured by Delitzsch that the Korachite psalms originally formed a separate collection entitled "Songs of the Sons of Korach," and that this title afterwards passed over into the superscriptions when they were incorporated in the Psalter. It may have been so, but the supposition is unnecessary. It was not exactly literary fame which psalmists hungered for. The actual author, as one of a band of kinsmen who worked and sang together, would, not unnaturally, be content to sink his individuality and let his song go forth as that of the band. Clearly the superscriptions rested upon some tradition or knowledge, else defective information would not have been acknowledged as it is in this one; but some name would have been coined to fill the gap. The two psalms (Psalms 42:1-11, Psalms 43:1-5) are plainly one. The absence of a title for the second, the identity of tone throughout, the recurrence of several phrases, and especially of the refrain, put this beyond doubt. The separation, however, is old, since it is found in the LXX. It is useless to speculate on its origin. There is much in the psalms which favours the hypothesis that the author was a Korachite companion of David’s in his flight before Absalom; but the locality, described as that of the singer, does not entirely correspond to that of the king’s retreat, and the description of the enemies is not easily capable of application in all points to his foes. The house of God is still standing, the poet has been there recently, and hopes soon to return and render praise. Therefore the psalm must be pre-exilic; and while there is no certainty attainable as to date, it may at least be said that the circumstances of the singer present more points of contact with those of the supposed Korachite follower of David’s fortunes on the uplands across Jordan than with those of any other of the imaginary persons to whom modern criticism has assigned the poem. Whoever wrote it has given immortal form to the longings of the soul after God. He has fixed forever and made melodious a sigh. The psalm falls into three parts, each closing with the same refrain. Longings and tears, remembrances of festal hours passed in the sanctuary melt the singer’s soul, while taunting enemies hiss continual sarcasms at him as forsaken by his God. But his truer self silences these lamentations, and cheers the feebler "soul" with clear notes of trust and hope, blown in the refrain, like some trumpet clang rallying dispirited fugitives to the fight. The stimulus serves for a moment; but once more courage fails, and once more, at yet greater length and with yet sadder tones, plaints and longings are wailed forth. Once more, too, the higher self repeats its half-rebuke, half-encouragement. So ends the first of the psalms; but obviously it is no real ending, for the victory over fear is not won, and longing has not become blessed. So once more the wave of emotion rolls over the psalmist, but with a new aspect which makes all the difference. He prays now; he had only remembered and complained and said that he would pray before. Therefore now he triumphs, and though he still is keenly conscious of his enemies, they appear but for a moment, and though he still feels that he is far from the sanctuary, his heart goes out in hopeful visions of the gladness of his return thither, and he already tastes the rapture of the joy that will then flood his heart. Therefore the refrain comes for a third time; and this time the longing, trembling soul continues at the height to which the better self has lifted it, and silently acknowledges that it need not have been cast down. Thus the whole song is a picture of a soul climbing, not without backward slips, from the depths to the heights, or, in another aspect, of the transformation of longing into certainty of fruition, which is itself fruition after a kind. Perhaps the singer had seen, during his exile on the eastern side of Jordan, some gentle creature, with open mouth and heaving flanks, eagerly seeking in dry wadies for a drop of water to cool her outstretched tongue; and the sight had struck on his heart as an image of himself longing for the presence of God in the sanctuary. A similar bit of local colour is generally recognised in Psalms 42:7. Nature reflects the poet’s moods, and overmastering emotion sees its own analogues everywhere. That lovely metaphor has touched the common heart as few have done, and the solitary singer’s plaint has fitted all devout lips. Injustice is done it, if it is regarded merely as the longing of a Levite for approach to the sanctuary. No doubt the psalmist connected communion with God and presence in the Temple more closely together than they should do who have heard the great charter, "neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem"; but, however the two things were coupled in his mind, they were sufficiently separate to allow of approach by longing and prayer while distant in body, and the true object of yearning was not access to the Temple, but communion with the God of the Temple. The "soul" is feminine in Hebrew, and is here compared to the female deer, for "pants" is the feminine form of the verb, though its noun is masculine. It is better therefore to translate "hind" than "hart." The "soul" is the seat of emotions and desires. It "pants" and "thirsts," is "cast down" and disquieted; it is "poured out"; it can be bidden to "hope." Thus tremulous, timid, mobile, it is beautifully compared to a hind. The true object of its longings is always God, however little it knows for what it is thirsting. But they are happy in their very yearnings who are conscious of the true direction of these, and can say that it is God for whom they are athirst. All unrest of longing, all fever of thirst, all outgoings of desire, are feelers put out blindly, and are only stilled when they clasp Him. The correspondence between man’s needs and their true object is involved in that name "the living God"; for a heart can rest only in one all-sufficient Person, and must have a heart to throb against. Neither abstractions nor dead things can still its cravings. That which does must be living. But no finite being can still them; and after all sweetnesses of human loves and helps of human strengths the soul’s thirst remains unslaked, and the Person who is enough must be the living God. The difference between the devout and the worldly man is just that the one can only say, "My soul pants and thirsts," and the other can add "after Thee, O God." This man’s longing was intensified by his unwilling exile from the sanctuary, a special privation to a door keeper of the Temple. His situation and mood closely resemble those in another Korachite psalm (Psalms 84:1-12), in which, as here, the soul "faints for the courts of the Lord," and as here the panting hind, so there the glancing swallows flitting about the eaves are woven into the song. Unnamed foes taunt the psalmist with the question, "Where is thy God?" There is no necessity to conclude that these were heathens, though the taunt is usually put into heathen lips (Psalms 79:10; Psalms 52:2) but it would be quite as natural from co-religionists, flouting his fervour and personal grasp of God and taking his sorrows as tokens of God’s abandonment of him. That is the world’s way with the calamities of a devout man, whose humble cry, "My God," it resents as presumption or hypocrisy. But even these bitter sarcasms are less bitter than the remembrance of "happier things," which is his "sorrow’s crown of sorrow." Yet, with the strange but universal love of summoning up remembrance of departed joys, the psalmist finds a certain pleasure in the pain of recalling how he. a Levite, led the festal march to the Temple, and in listening in fancy again to the shrill cries of joy which broke from the tumultuous crowd. The form of the verbs "remember" and "pour out" in Psalms 42:4 indicates set purpose. The higher self arrests this flow of self-pity and lamentation. The feminine soul has to give account of her moods to calmer judgment, and to be lifted and steadied by the strong spirit. The preceding verses have given ample reason why she has been dejected, but now she is summoned to repeat them to a judicial ear. The insufficiency of the circumstances described to warrant the vehement emotions expressed is implied in the summons. Feeling has to vindicate its rationality or to suppress itself, and its grounds have often only to be stated to the better self, to be found altogether disproportioned to the storm they have raised. It is a very elementary but necessary lesson for the conduct of life that emotion of all sorts, sad or glad, religious or other, needs rigid scrutiny and firm control, sometimes stimulating and sometimes chilling. The true counterpoise to its excess lies in directing it to God and in making Him the object of hope and patient waiting. Emotion varies, but God is the same. The facts on which faith feeds abide while faith fluctuates. The secret of calm is to dwell in that inner chamber of the secret place of the Most High, which whoso inhabits "heareth not the loud winds when they call," and is neither dejected nor uplifted, neither disturbed by excessive joys nor torn by anxieties. Psalms 42:5 has the refrain in a form slightly different from that of the other two instances of its occurrence. (Psalms 42:11 and Psalms 43:5) But probably the text is faulty. The shifting of the initial word of Psa 42:6 to the end of Psa 42:5, and the substitution of My for His, bring the three refrains into line, and avoid the harsh expression "help of His countenance." Since no reason for the variation is discernible, and the proposed slight change of text improves construction and restores uniformity, it is probably to be adopted. If it is, the second part of the psalm is also conformed to the other two in regard to its not beginning with the Divine name. The break in the clouds is but momentary, and the grey wrack fills the sky once more. The second part of the psalm takes up the question of the refrain, and first reiterates with bitter emphasis that the soul is bowed down, and then pours out once more the stream of reasons for dejection. But the curb has not been applied quite in vain, for throughout the succeeding verses there is a striking alternation of despondency and hope. Streaks of brightness flash through the gloom. Sorrow is shot with trust. This conflict of opposite emotions is the characteristic of the second part of the psalm, while that of the first part is an all but unrelieved predominance of gloom, and that of the third an all but undisputed victory of sunshine. Naturally this transition strophe is marked by the mingling of both. In the former part, memory was the handmaid of sorrow, and came involuntarily, and increased the singer’s pain; but in this part he makes an effort of will to remember, and in remembrance finds an antidote to sorrow. To recall past joys adds stings to present grief, but to remember God brings an anodyne for the smart. The psalmist is far from the sanctuary, but distance does not hinder thought. This man’s faith was not so dependent on externals that it could not come close to God while distant from His temple. It had been so far strengthened by the encouragement of the refrain that the reflux of sadness at once rouses it to action. "My soul is cast down; therefore let me remember Thee." With wise resolve he finds in dejection a reason for nestling closer to God. In reference to the description of the psalmist’s locality, Cheyne beautifully says, "The preposition ‘from’ is chosen (rather than ‘in’) with a subtle purpose. It suggests that the psalmist’s faith will bridge over the interval between himself and the sanctuary: ‘I can send my thoughts to Thee from the distant frontier"’ (in loc.). The region intended seems to be "the northeastern corner of Palestine, near the lower slopes of Hermons" (Cheyne. u.s.). The plural "Hermons" is probably used in reference to the group of crests. "Mizar" is probably the name of a hill otherwise unknown, and specifies the singer’s locality more minutely, though not helpfully to us. Many ingenious attempts have been made to explain the name either as symbolical or as a common noun, and not a proper name, but these need not be dealt with here. The locality thus designated is too far north for the scene of David’s retreat before Absalom, unless we give an unusual southward extension to the names; and this makes a difficulty in the way of accepting the hypothesis of the author’s having been in his retinue. The twofold emotions of Psa 42:6 recur in Psalms 42:7-8, where we have first renewed despondency and then reaction into hope. The imagery of floods lifting up their voices, and cataracts sounding as they fall, and breaking waves rolling over the half-drowned psalmist has been supposed to be suggested by the scenery in which he was; but the rushing noise of Jordan in its rocky bed seems scarcely enough to deserve being described as "flood calling to flood," and "breakers and rollers" is an exaggeration if applied to any commotion possible on such a stream. The imagery is so usual that it needs no assumption of having been occasioned by the poet’s locality. The psalmist paints his calamities as storming on him in dismal continuity, each "flood" seeming to summon its successor. They rush upon him, multitudinous and close following; they pour down on him as with the thunder of descending cataracts; they overwhelm him like the breakers and rollers of an angry ocean. The bold metaphors are more striking when contrasted with the opposite ones of the first part. The dry and thirsty land there and the rush of waters here mean the same thing, so flexible is nature in a poet’s hands. Then follows a gleam of hope, like a rainbow spanning the waterfall. With the alternation of mood already noticed as characteristic, the singer looks forward, even from the midst of overwhelming seas of trouble, to a future day when God will give His angel, Mercy or Lovingkindness, charge concerning him and draw him out of many waters. That day of extrication will surely be followed by a night of music and of thankful prayer (for supplication is not the only element in prayer) to Him who by His deliverance has shown Himself to be the "God of" the rescued man’s "life." The epithet answers to that of the former part, "the living God," from which it differs by but one additional letter. He who has life in Himself is the Giver and Rescuer of our lives, and to Him they are to be rendered in thankful sacrifice. Once more the contending currents meet in Psalms 42:9 and Psalms 42:10, in the former of which confidence and hope utter themselves in the resolve to appeal to God and in the name given to Him as "my Rock"; while another surge of despondency breaks, in the question in which the soul interrogates God, as the better self had interrogated her, and contrasts almost reproachfully God’s apparent forgetfulness, manifested by His delay in deliverance with her remembrance of Him. It is not a question asked for enlightenment’s sake but is an exclamation of impatience, if not of rebuke. Psalms 42:10 repeats the enemies’ taunt, which is there represented as like crushing blows which broke the bones. And then once more above this conflict of emotion soars the clear note of the refrain, summoning to self-command, calmness, and unfaltering hope. But the victory is not quite won, and therefore Psalms 43:1-5, follows. It is sufficiently distinct in tone to explain its separation from the preceding, inasmuch as it is prayer throughout, and the note of joy is dominant, even while an undertone of sadness links it with the previous parts. The unity is vouched by the considerations already noticed, and by the incompleteness of Psa 42:1-11 without such triumphant close and of Psa 43:1-5 without such despondent beginning. The prayer of Psa 43:1-2, blends the two elements, which were at war in the second part; and for the moment the darker is the more prominent. The situation is described as in the preceding parts. The enemy is called a "loveless nation." The word rendered "loveless" is compounded of the negative prefix and the word which is usually found with the meaning of "one whom God favours," or visits with lovingkindness. It has been much disputed whether its proper signification is active (one who shows lovingkindness) or passive (one who receives it). But, considering that lovingkindness is in the Psalter mainly a Divine attribute, and that, when a human excellence, it is regarded as derived from and being the echo of experienced Divine mercy, it is best to take the passive meaning as the principal, though sometimes, as unmistakably here, the active is more suitable. These loveless people are not further defined, and may either have been Israelites or aliens. Perhaps there was one "man" of special mischief prominent among them, but it is not safe to treat that expression as anything but a collective. Psalms 43:2 looks back to Psalms 42:9, the former clause in each verse being practically equivalent, and the second in 43 (Psalms 43:2), being a quotation of the second in Psalms 42:9, with a variation in the form of the verb to suggest more vividly the picture of weary, slow, dragging gait, fit for a man clad in mourning garb. But the gloomier mood has shot its last bolt. Grief which finds no fresh words is beginning to dry up. The stage of mechanical repetition of complaints is not far from that of cessation of them. So the higher mood conquers at last, and breaks into a burst of joyous petition, which passes swiftly into realisation of the future joys whose coming shines thus far off. Hope and trust hold the field. The certainty of return to the Temple overbears the pain of absence from it, and the vivid realisation of the gladness of worshipping again at the altar takes the place of the vivid remembrance of former festal approach thither. It is the prerogative of faith to make pictures drawn by memory pale beside those painted by hope. Light and Troth-i.e., Lovingkindness and Faithfulness in fulfilling promises-are like two angels, despatched from the presence-chamber of God, to guide with gentleness the exile’s steps. That is to say, because God is mercy and faithfulness, the return of the psalmist to the home of his heart is sure. God being what He is, no longing soul can ever remain unsatisfied. The actual return to the Temple is desired because thereby new praise will be occasioned. Not mere bodily presence there, but that joyful outpouring of triumph and gladness, is the object of the psalmist’s longing. He began with yearning after the living God. In his sorrow he could still think of Him at intervals as the help of his countenance and call Him "my God." He ends with naming Him "the gladness of my joy." Whoever begins as he did will finish where he climbed. The refrain is repeated for a third time, and is followed by no relapse into sadness. The effort of faith should be persistent, even if old bitternesses begin again and "break the low beginnings of content"; for, even if the wild waters burst through the dam once and again, they do not utterly wash it away, and there remains a foundation on which it may be built up anew. Each swing of the gymnast lifts him higher until he is on a level with a firm platform on which he can spring and stand secure. Faith may have a long struggle with fear, but it will have the last word, and that word will be "the help of my countenance and my God." 1 Psalms 42:1-11, Psalms 43:1-5 THE second book of the Psalter is characterised by the use of the Divine name "Elohim" instead of "Jehovah." It begins with a cluster of seven psalms (reckoning Psalms 42:1-11; Psalms 43:1-5, as one) of which the superscription is most probably regarded as ascribing their authorship to "the sons of Korach." These were Levites, and (according to 1 Chronicles 9:19 seq.) the office of keepers of the door of the sanctuary had been hereditary in their family from the time of Moses. Some of them were among the faithful adherents of David at Ziklag, (1 Chronicles 12:6) and in the new model of worship inaugurated by him the Korachites were doorkeepers and musicians. They retained the former office in the second Temple. (Nehemiah 11:19) The ascription of authorship to a group is remarkable, and has led to the suggestion that the superscription does not specify the authors, but the persons for whose use the psalms in question were composed. The Hebrew would bear either meaning; but if the latter is adopted, all these psalms are anonymous. The same construction is found in Book 1 in Psalms 25:1-22; Psalms 26:1-12; Psalms 27:1-14; Psalms 28:1-9; Psalms 35:1-28; Psalms 37:1-40 where it is obviously the designation of authorship, and it is naturally taken to have the same force in these Korachite psalms. It has been ingeniously conjectured by Delitzsch that the Korachite psalms originally formed a separate collection entitled "Songs of the Sons of Korach," and that this title afterwards passed over into the superscriptions when they were incorporated in the Psalter. It may have been so, but the supposition is unnecessary. It was not exactly literary fame which psalmists hungered for. The actual author, as one of a band of kinsmen who worked and sang together, would, not unnaturally, be content to sink his individuality and let his song go forth as that of the band. Clearly the superscriptions rested upon some tradition or knowledge, else defective information would not have been acknowledged as it is in this one; but some name would have been coined to fill the gap. The two psalms (Psalms 42:1-11, Psalms 43:1-5) are plainly one. The absence of a title for the second, the identity of tone throughout, the recurrence of several phrases, and especially of the refrain, put this beyond doubt. The separation, however, is old, since it is found in the LXX. It is useless to speculate on its origin. There is much in the psalms which favours the hypothesis that the author was a Korachite companion of David’s in his flight before Absalom; but the locality, described as that of the singer, does not entirely correspond to that of the king’s retreat, and the description of the enemies is not easily capable of application in all points to his foes. The house of God is still standing, the poet has been there recently, and hopes soon to return and render praise. Therefore the psalm must be pre-exilic; and while there is no certainty attainable as to date, it may at least be said that the circumstances of the singer present more points of contact with those of the supposed Korachite follower of David’s fortunes on the uplands across Jordan than with those of any other of the imaginary persons to whom modern criticism has assigned the poem. Whoever wrote it has given immortal form to the longings of the soul after God. He has fixed forever and made melodious a sigh. The psalm falls into three parts, each closing with the same refrain. Longings and tears, remembrances of festal hours passed in the sanctuary melt the singer’s soul, while taunting enemies hiss continual sarcasms at him as forsaken by his God. But his truer self silences these lamentations, and cheers the feebler "soul" with clear notes of trust and hope, blown in the refrain, like some trumpet clang rallying dispirited fugitives to the fight. The stimulus serves for a moment; but once more courage fails, and once more, at yet greater length and with yet sadder tones, plaints and longings are wailed forth. Once more, too, the higher self repeats its half-rebuke, half-encouragement. So ends the first of the psalms; but obviously it is no real ending, for the victory over fear is not won, and longing has not become blessed. So once more the wave of emotion rolls over the psalmist, but with a new aspect which makes all the difference. He prays now; he had only remembered and complained and said that he would pray before. Therefore now he triumphs, and though he still is keenly conscious of his enemies, they appear but for a moment, and though he still feels that he is far from the sanctuary, his heart goes out in hopeful visions of the gladness of his return thither, and he already tastes the rapture of the joy that will then flood his heart. Therefore the refrain comes for a third time; and this time the longing, trembling soul continues at the height to which the better self has lifted it, and silently acknowledges that it need not have been cast down. Thus the whole song is a picture of a soul climbing, not without backward slips, from the depths to the heights, or, in another aspect, of the transformation of longing into certainty of fruition, which is itself fruition after a kind. Perhaps the singer had seen, during his exile on the eastern side of Jordan, some gentle creature, with open mouth and heaving flanks, eagerly seeking in dry wadies for a drop of water to cool her outstretched tongue; and the sight had struck on his heart as an image of himself longing for the presence of God in the sanctuary. A similar bit of local colour is generally recognised in Psalms 42:7. Nature reflects the poet’s moods, and overmastering emotion sees its own analogues everywhere. That lovely metaphor has touched the common heart as few have done, and the solitary singer’s plaint has fitted all devout lips. Injustice is done it, if it is regarded merely as the longing of a Levite for approach to the sanctuary. No doubt the psalmist connected communion with God and presence in the Temple more closely together than they should do who have heard the great charter, "neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem"; but, however the two things were coupled in his mind, they were sufficiently separate to allow of approach by longing and prayer while distant in body, and the true object of yearning was not access to the Temple, but communion with the God of the Temple. The "soul" is feminine in Hebrew, and is here compared to the female deer, for "pants" is the feminine form of the verb, though its noun is masculine. It is better therefore to translate "hind" than "hart." The "soul" is the seat of emotions and desires. It "pants" and "thirsts," is "cast down" and disquieted; it is "poured out"; it can be bidden to "hope." Thus tremulous, timid, mobile, it is beautifully compared to a hind. The true object of its longings is always God, however little it knows for what it is thirsting. But they are happy in their very yearnings who are conscious of the true direction of these, and can say that it is God for whom they are athirst. All unrest of longing, all fever of thirst, all outgoings of desire, are feelers put out blindly, and are only stilled when they clasp Him. The correspondence between man’s needs and their true object is involved in that name "the living God"; for a heart can rest only in one all-sufficient Person, and must have a heart to throb against. Neither abstractions nor dead things can still its cravings. That which does must be living. But no finite being can still them; and after all sweetnesses of human loves and helps of human strengths the soul’s thirst remains unslaked, and the Person who is enough must be the living God. The difference between the devout and the worldly man is just that the one can only say, "My soul pants and thirsts," and the other can add "after Thee, O God." This man’s longing was intensified by his unwilling exile from the sanctuary, a special privation to a door keeper of the Temple. His situation and mood closely resemble those in another Korachite psalm (Psalms 84:1-12), in which, as here, the soul "faints for the courts of the Lord," and as here the panting hind, so there the glancing swallows flitting about the eaves are woven into the song. Unnamed foes taunt the psalmist with the question, "Where is thy God?" There is no necessity to conclude that these were heathens, though the taunt is usually put into heathen lips (Psalms 79:10; Psalms 52:2) but it would be quite as natural from co-religionists, flouting his fervour and personal grasp of God and taking his sorrows as tokens of God’s abandonment of him. That is the world’s way with the calamities of a devout man, whose humble cry, "My God," it resents as presumption or hypocrisy. But even these bitter sarcasms are less bitter than the remembrance of "happier things," which is his "sorrow’s crown of sorrow." Yet, with the strange but universal love of summoning up remembrance of departed joys, the psalmist finds a certain pleasure in the pain of recalling how he. a Levite, led the festal march to the Temple, and in listening in fancy again to the shrill cries of joy which broke from the tumultuous crowd. The form of the verbs "remember" and "pour out" in Psalms 42:4 indicates set purpose. The higher self arrests this flow of self-pity and lamentation. The feminine soul has to give account of her moods to calmer judgment, and to be lifted and steadied by the strong spirit. The preceding verses have given ample reason why she has been dejected, but now she is summoned to repeat them to a judicial ear. The insufficiency of the circumstances described to warrant the vehement emotions expressed is implied in the summons. Feeling has to vindicate its rationality or to suppress itself, and its grounds have often only to be stated to the better self, to be found altogether disproportioned to the storm they have raised. It is a very elementary but necessary lesson for the conduct of life that emotion of all sorts, sad or glad, religious or other, needs rigid scrutiny and firm control, sometimes stimulating and sometimes chilling. The true counterpoise to its excess lies in directing it to God and in making Him the object of hope and patient waiting. Emotion varies, but God is the same. The facts on which faith feeds abide while faith fluctuates. The secret of calm is to dwell in that inner chamber of the secret place of the Most High, which whoso inhabits "heareth not the loud winds when they call," and is neither dejected nor uplifted, neither disturbed by excessive joys nor torn by anxieties. Psalms 42:5 has the refrain in a form slightly different from that of the other two instances of its occurrence. (Psalms 42:11 and Psalms 43:5) But probably the text is faulty. The shifting of the initial word of Psa 42:6 to the end of Psa 42:5, and the substitution of My for His, bring the three refrains into line, and avoid the harsh expression "help of His countenance." Since no reason for the variation is discernible, and the proposed slight change of text improves construction and restores uniformity, it is probably to be adopted. If it is, the second part of the psalm is also conformed to the other two in regard to its not beginning with the Divine name. The break in the clouds is but momentary, and the grey wrack fills the sky once more. The second part of the psalm takes up the question of the refrain, and first reiterates with bitter emphasis that the soul is bowed down, and then pours out once more the stream of reasons for dejection. But the curb has not been applied quite in vain, for throughout the succeeding verses there is a striking alternation of despondency and hope. Streaks of brightness flash through the gloom. Sorrow is shot with trust. This conflict of opposite emotions is the characteristic of the second part of the psalm, while that of the first part is an all but unrelieved predominance of gloom, and that of the third an all but undisputed victory of sunshine. Naturally this transition strophe is marked by the mingling of both. In the former part, memory was the handmaid of sorrow, and came involuntarily, and increased the singer’s pain; but in this part he makes an effort of will to remember, and in remembrance finds an antidote to sorrow. To recall past joys adds stings to present grief, but to remember God brings an anodyne for the smart. The psalmist is far from the sanctuary, but distance does not hinder thought. This man’s faith was not so dependent on externals that it could not come close to God while distant from His temple. It had been so far strengthened by the encouragement of the refrain that the reflux of sadness at once rouses it to action. "My soul is cast down; therefore let me remember Thee." With wise resolve he finds in dejection a reason for nestling closer to God. In reference to the description of the psalmist’s locality, Cheyne beautifully says, "The preposition ‘from’ is chosen (rather than ‘in’) with a subtle purpose. It suggests that the psalmist’s faith will bridge over the interval between himself and the sanctuary: ‘I can send my thoughts to Thee from the distant frontier"’ (in loc.). The region intended seems to be "the northeastern corner of Palestine, near the lower slopes of Hermons" (Cheyne. u.s.). The plural "Hermons" is probably used in reference to the group of crests. "Mizar" is probably the name of a hill otherwise unknown, and specifies the singer’s locality more minutely, though not helpfully to us. Many ingenious attempts have been made to explain the name either as symbolical or as a common noun, and not a proper name, but these need not be dealt with here. The locality thus designated is too far north for the scene of David’s retreat before Absalom, unless we give an unusual southward extension to the names; and this makes a difficulty in the way of accepting the hypothesis of the author’s having been in his retinue. The twofold emotions of Psa 42:6 recur in Psalms 42:7-8, where we have first renewed despondency and then reaction into hope. The imagery of floods lifting up their voices, and cataracts sounding as they fall, and breaking waves rolling over the half-drowned psalmist has been supposed to be suggested by the scenery in which he was; but the rushing noise of Jordan in its rocky bed seems scarcely enough to deserve being described as "flood calling to flood," and "breakers and rollers" is an exaggeration if applied to any commotion possible on such a stream. The imagery is so usual that it needs no assumption of having been occasioned by the poet’s locality. The psalmist paints his calamities as storming on him in dismal continuity, each "flood" seeming to summon its successor. They rush upon him, multitudinous and close following; they pour down on him as with the thunder of descending cataracts; they overwhelm him like the breakers and rollers of an angry ocean. The bold metaphors are more striking when contrasted with the opposite ones of the first part. The dry and thirsty land there and the rush of waters here mean the same thing, so flexible is nature in a poet’s hands. Then follows a gleam of hope, like a rainbow spanning the waterfall. With the alternation of mood already noticed as characteristic, the singer looks forward, even from the midst of overwhelming seas of trouble, to a future day when God will give His angel, Mercy or Lovingkindness, charge concerning him and draw him out of many waters. That day of extrication will surely be followed by a night of music and of thankful prayer (for supplication is not the only element in prayer) to Him who by His deliverance has shown Himself to be the "God of" the rescued man’s "life." The epithet answers to that of the former part, "the living God," from which it differs by but one additional letter. He who has life in Himself is the Giver and Rescuer of our lives, and to Him they are to be rendered in thankful sacrifice. Once more the contending currents meet in Psalms 42:9 and Psalms 42:10, in the former of which confidence and hope utter themselves in the resolve to appeal to God and in the name given to Him as "my Rock"; while another surge of despondency breaks, in the question in which the soul interrogates God, as the better self had interrogated her, and contrasts almost reproachfully God’s apparent forgetfulness, manifested by His delay in deliverance with her remembrance of Him. It is not a question asked for enlightenment’s sake but is an exclamation of impatience, if not of rebuke. Psalms 42:10 repeats the enemies’ taunt, which is there represented as like crushing blows which broke the bones. And then once more above this conflict of emotion soars the clear note of the refrain, summoning to self-command, calmness, and unfaltering hope. But the victory is not quite won, and therefore Psalms 43:1-5, follows. It is sufficiently distinct in tone to explain its separation from the preceding, inasmuch as it is prayer throughout, and the note of joy is dominant, even while an undertone of sadness links it with the previous parts. The unity is vouched by the considerations already noticed, and by the incompleteness of Psa 42:1-11 without such triumphant close and of Psa 43:1-5 without such despondent beginning. The prayer of Psa 43:1-2, blends the two elements, which were at war in the second part; and for the moment the darker is the more prominent. The situation is described as in the preceding parts. The enemy is called a "loveless nation." The word rendered "loveless" is compounded of the negative prefix and the word which is usually found with the meaning of "one whom God favours," or visits with lovingkindness. It has been much disputed whether its proper signification is active (one who shows lovingkindness) or passive (one who receives it). But, considering that lovingkindness is in the Psalter mainly a Divine attribute, and that, when a human excellence, it is regarded as derived from and being the echo of experienced Divine mercy, it is best to take the passive meaning as the principal, though sometimes, as unmistakably here, the active is more suitable. These loveless people are not further defined, and may either have been Israelites or aliens. Perhaps there was one "man" of special mischief prominent among them, but it is not safe to treat that expression as anything but a collective. Psalms 43:2 looks back to Psalms 42:9, the former clause in each verse being practically equivalent, and the second in 43 (Psalms 43:2), being a quotation of the second in Psalms 42:9, with a variation in the form of the verb to suggest more vividly the picture of weary, slow, dragging gait, fit for a man clad in mourning garb. But the gloomier mood has shot its last bolt. Grief which finds no fresh words is beginning to dry up. The stage of mechanical repetition of complaints is not far from that of cessation of them. So the higher mood conquers at last, and breaks into a burst of joyous petition, which passes swiftly into realisation of the future joys whose coming shines thus far off. Hope and trust hold the field. The certainty of return to the Temple overbears the pain of absence from it, and the vivid realisation of the gladness of worshipping again at the altar takes the place of the vivid remembrance of former festal approach thither. It is the prerogative of faith to make pictures drawn by memory pale beside those painted by hope. Light and Troth-i.e., Lovingkindness and Faithfulness in fulfilling promises-are like two angels, despatched from the presence-chamber of God, to guide with gentleness the exile’s steps. That is to say, because God is mercy and faithfulness, the return of the psalmist to the home of his heart is sure. God being what He is, no longing soul can ever remain unsatisfied. The actual return to the Temple is desired because thereby new praise will be occasioned. Not mere bodily presence there, but that joyful outpouring of triumph and gladness, is the object of the psalmist’s longing. He began with yearning after the living God. In his sorrow he could still think of Him at intervals as the help of his countenance and call Him "my God." He ends with naming Him "the gladness of my joy." Whoever begins as he did will finish where he climbed. The refrain is repeated for a third time, and is followed by no relapse into sadness. The effort of faith should be persistent, even if old bitternesses begin again and "break the low beginnings of content"; for, even if the wild waters burst through the dam once and again, they do not utterly wash it away, and there remains a foundation on which it may be built up anew. Each swing of the gymnast lifts him higher until he is on a level with a firm platform on which he can spring and stand secure. Faith may have a long struggle with fear, but it will have the last word, and that word will be "the help of my countenance and my God." Psalms 44:1-26 CALVIN says that the authorship of this psalm is uncertain, but that it is abundantly clear that it was composed by anyone rather than David, and that its plaintive contents suit best the time when the savage tyranny of Antiochus raged. No period corresponds to the situation which makes the background of the psalm so completely as the Maccabean, for only then could it be truly said that national calamities fell because of the nation’s rigid monotheism. Other epochs have been thought of, so as to avoid the necessity of recognising Maccabean psalms, but none of them can be said to meet the conditions described in the psalm. The choice lies between accepting the Maccabean date and giving up the attempt to fix one at all. Objections to that late date based upon the history of the completion of the canon take for granted more accurate and complete knowledge of a very obscure subject than is possessed, and do not seem strong enough to negative the indications arising from the very unique fact, asserted in the psalm, that the nation was persecuted for its faith and engaged in a religious war. The psalm falls into four parts: a wistful look backwards to days already "old," when God fought for them (Psalms 44:1-8); a sad contrast in present oppression (Psalms 44:9-16); a profession of unfaltering national adherence to the covenant notwithstanding all these ills (Psalms 44:17-22); and a fervent cry to a God who seems asleep to awake and rescue His martyred people (Psalms 44:23-26). The first part (Psalms 44:1-8) recalls the fact that shone so brightly in all the past, the continual exercise of Divine power giving victory to their weakness, and builds thereon a prayer that the same law of His providence might be fulfilled now. The bitter side of the retrospect forces itself in, to consciousness in the next part, but here Memory is the handmaid of Faith. The whole process of the Exodus and conquest of Canaan is gathered up as one great "work" of God’s hand. The former inhabitants of the land were uprooted like old trees, to give room for planting the "vine out of Egypt." Two stages in the settlement are distinguished in Psalms 44:2: first came the "planting" and next the growth; for the phrase "didst spread them forth" carries on the metaphor of the tree, and expresses the extension of its roots and branches. The ascription of victory to God is made more emphatic by the negatives in Psalms 44:3, which take away all credit of it from the people’s own weapons or strength. The consciousness of our own impotence must accompany adequate recognition of God’s agency in our deliverances. The conceit of our own power blinds our vision of His working hand. But what moved His power? No merit of man’s, but the infinite free grace of God’s heart. "The light of Thy face" is the symbol of God’s loving regard, and the deepest truth as to His acts of favour is that they are the outcome of His own merciful nature. He is His own motive. "Thou hadst delight in them" is the ultimate word, leading us into sacred abysses of self-existent and self-originated Deity. The spirit, then, of Israel’s history is contained in these three thoughts: the positive assertion of God’s power as the reason for their victories; the confirmatory negative, putting aside their own prowess; and the tracing of all God’s work for them solely to His unmerited grace. On this grand generalisation of the meaning of past centuries a prayer is built for their repetition in the prosaic present. The psalmist did not think that God was nearer in some majestic past than now. His unchangeableness had for consequence, as he thought, continuous manifestation of Himself in the same character and relation to His people. Today is as full of God as any yesterday. Therefore Psalms 44:4 begins with an emphatic recognition of the constancy of the Divine nature in that strong expression "Thou Thyself," and with an individualising transition for a moment to the singular in "my King," in order to give most forcible utterance to the thought that He was the same to each man of that generation as He had been to the fathers. On that unchanging relation rests the prayer, "Command salvations for (lit. of) Jacob, as if a multitude of several acts of deliverance stood before God, as servants waiting to be sent on His errands. Just as God (Elohim) takes the place of Jehovah in this second book of the Psalter, so in it Jacob frequently stands for Israel. The prayer is no sooner spoken than the confidence in its fulfilment lifts the suppliant’s heart buoyantly above present defeat, which will in the next turn of thought insist on being felt. Such is the magic of every act of true appeal to God. However dark the horizon, there is light if a man looks straight up. Thus this psalmist breaks into anticipatory paeans of victory. The vivid image of Psa 44:5 is taken from the manner of fighting common to wild horned animals, buffaloes and the like, who first prostrate their foe by their fierce charge and then trample him. The individualising "my" reappears in Psalms 44:6, where the negation that had been true of the ancestors is made his own by the descendant. Each man must, as his own act, appropriate the universal relation of God to men and make God his God and must also disown for himself reliance on himself. So he will enter into participation in God’s victories. Remembrance of the victorious past and confidence in a like victorious future blend in the closing burst of praise and vow for its continuance which vow takes for granted the future continued manifestation of deliverances as occasions for uninterrupted thanksgivings. Well might some long-drawn, triumphant notes from the instruments prolong the impression of the jubilant words. The song drops in the second part (Psalms 44:9-16) from these clear heights with lyric suddenness. The grim facts of defeat and consequent exposure to mocking laughter from enemies force themselves into sight, and seem utterly to contradict the preceding verses. But the first part speaks with the voice of faith and the second with that of sense, and these two may sound in very close sequence or even simultaneously. In Psalms 44:9 the two verbs are united by the absence of "us" with the first; and the difference of tense in the Hebrew brings out the dependence of the second on the first, as effect and cause. God’s rejection is the reason for the nation’s disgrace by defeat. In the subsequent verses the thoughts of rejection and disgrace are expanded, the former in Psalms 44:9 b to Psalms 44:12, and the latter in Psalms 44:13-16. The poet paints with few strokes the whole disastrous rout. We see the fated band going out to battle, with no Pillar of Cloud or Ark of the Covenant at their head. They have but their own weapons and sinews to depend on-not, as of old, a Divine Captain. No description of a fight under such conditions is needed, for it can have only one issue; and so the next clause shows panic-struck flight. Whoever goes into battle without God comes out of it without victory. Next follows plundering, as was the savage wont of these times, and there is no force to oppose the spoilers. The routed fugitives are defenceless and unresisting as sheep, and their fate is to be devoured, or possibly the expression "sheep for food" may be substantially equivalent to "sheep for the slaughter" (Psalms 44:22), and may refer to the usual butchery of a defeated army. Some of them are slain and others carried off as slaves. The precise rendering of Psa 44:12 b is doubtful. Calvin, and among the moderns, Hitzig, Ewald, Delitzsch, Cheyne, take it to mean ‘Thou didst not set their prices high.’ Others, such as Hupfeld, Baethgen, etc., adhere to the rendering, "Thou didst not increase [Thy wealth] by their price." The general sense is clear, and as bold as clear. It is almost sarcasm, directed against the Divine dealings: little has He gained by letting His flock be devoured and scattered. Hupfeld attaches to the bitter saying a deep meaning: namely, that the "sale" did not take place "for the sake of profit or other external worldly ends, as is the case with men, but from higher disciplinary grounds of the Divine government-namely, simply as punishment for their sins for their improvement." Rather it may indicate the dishonour accruing to the God, according to the ideas of the old world, when His votaries were defeated; or it may be the bitter reflection, "We can be of little worth in our Shepherd’s eyes when He parts with us so easily." If there is any hint of tarnish adhering to the name of God by His people’s defeat, the passage to the second main idea of this part is the easier. Defeat brings dishonour. The nearer nations, such as Edomites, Ammonites, and other ancestral foes, are ready with their gibes. The more distant peoples make a proverb out of the tragedy, and nod their heads in triumph and scorn. The cowering creature, in the middle of this ring of mockers, is covered with shame as he hears the babel of heartless jests at his expense, and steals a glance at the fierce faces round him. It is difficult to find historical facts corresponding with this picture. Even if the feature of selling into captivity is treated as metaphor, the rest of the picture needs some pressure to be made to fit the conditions of the Maccabean struggle, to which alone the subsequent avowals of faithfulness to God as the cause of calamity answer. For there were no such periods of disgraceful defeat and utter devastation when once that heroic revolt had begun. The third part of the psalm is in full accord with the religious consciousness of that Indian summer of national glories; but it must be acknowledged that the state of things described in this second part does not fit quite smoothly into the hypothesis of a Maccabean date. The third part (Psalms 44:17-22) brings closely together professions of righteousness, which sound strangely in Christian ears, and complaints of suffering, and closes with the assertion that these two are cause and effect. The sufferers are a nation of martyrs, and know themselves to be so. This tone is remarkable when the nation is the speaker; for though we find individuals asserting innocence and complaining of undeserved afflictions in many psalms, a declaration of national conformity with the Law is in sharp contradiction both to history and to the uniform tone of prophets. This psalmist asserts not only national freedom from idolatry, but adherence in heart and act to the Covenant. No period before the exile was clear of the taint of idol worship and yet darkened by calamity. We have no record of any events before the persecutions that roused the Maccabean struggle which answer to the martyr cry of Psa 44:22: "For Thy sake we are killed all the day." It may, indeed, be questioned what is the relation in time of the two facts spoken of in Psalms 44:17-19. Which comes first, the calamity or the steadfastness? Does the psalmist mean, "We are afflicted, and yet we are in affliction true to God," or "We were true to God, and yet are afflicted"? Probably the latter, as in the remainder of this part. "The place of jackals" is apparently the field of defeat referred to in the second part, where obscene creatures would gather to feast on the plundered corpses. The Christian consciousness cannot appropriate the psalmist’s asseverations of innocence, and the difference between them, and it should not be slurred over. But, on the other hand, his words should not be exaggerated into charges of injustice against God. nor claims of absolute sinlessness. He does feel that present national distresses have not the same origin as past ones had had. There has been no such falling away as to account for them. But he does not arraign God’s government. He knows why the miseries have come, and that he and his fellows are martyrs. He does not fling that fact down as an accusation of Providence, but as the foundation of a prayer and as a plea for God’s help. The words may sound daring; still they are not blasphemy, but supplication. The fourth part is importunate prayer. Its frank anthropomorphisms of a sleeping God, forgetting His people, surely need little defence. Sleep withdraws from knowledge of and action on the external world, and hence is attributed to God, when He allows evils to run unchecked. He is said to "awake," or, with another figure, to "arise," as if starting from His throned calm, when by some great act of judgment He smites flourishing evil into nothingness. Injustice is surely done to these cries of the Ecclesia pressa when they are supposed to be in opposition to the other psalmist’s word: "He that keepeth Israel slumbers not, nor sleeps." Some commentators call these closing petitions commonplace; and so they are. Extreme need and agony of supplication have other things to think of than originality, and so long as sorrows are so commonplace and like each other, the cries of the sorrowful will be very much alike. God is pleased with well-worn prayers, which have fitted many lips, and is not so fastidious as some critics. Psalms 45:1-17 THIS is an epithalamion or ode on a king’s marriage. The usual bewildering variety of conjectures as to his identity meets us in commentaries. The older opinion points to Solomon’s marriage to an Egyptian princess, to which it is objected that he was not a warrior king, as the monarch of the psalm is. Hitzig regards "daughter of Tyre," in Psalms 45:12 as a vocative, and therefore looks for a king who married a Tyrian woman. He is obliged to go to the northern kingdom to find one, and pitches on Ahab because Jezebel was the daughter of "a king of the Zidonians," and Ahab had an "ivory house". (1 Kings 22:39) It is hard to believe that that wedded pair of evil memory are the originals of the lovely portraits in the psalm, or that a psalmist would recognise the kingdom of Israel as divinely established and to be eternally upheld. Besides, the construction of Psa 45:12 on which this theory pivots, is doubtful, and the daughter of Tyre there mentioned is more probably one of the bringers of gifts to the bride. The attributes of the king and the promises for his descendants cannot be extended, without incongruity, beyond the Davidic line. Hence Delitzsch has selected Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat principally because his wife, Athaliah, was of Tyrian descent, being Jezebel’s daughter, and partly because his father had been a trader, which accounts for the allusions to gold of Ophir and ivory. These are slender grounds of identification, to say nothing of the miserable contrast which Jehoram’s reign-a dreary record of apostasy and defeat, culminating in a tragic death and a dishonoured grave (2 Chronicles 21:1-20) -would present to the psalm. Some commentators have thought of the marriage of a Persian king, mainly because the peculiar word for consort in Psalms 45:9 is employed for Persian queens, (Nehemiah 2:6) and also because the Tyrians were tributary to Persia, and because the sons of the king are to be "called princes in all lands," which reminds us of Persian satraps. Ewald finally fixed on Jeroboam II of Israel. Cheyne ("Orig. of Psalt.") finds the king of the psalm in Ptolemy Philadelphus, the inspirer, as was believed, of the LXX translation, whom Josephus and Philo extol. Its author puts this identification only as "tentative." Notwithstanding his anticipatory protest against making Philadelphus’ moral character an objection, he feels that it is an objection; for he urges that its darker shades had not yet disclosed themselves, and confesses that "a haze of illusion encompassed our poet," who "overrated this Ptolemy, from taking too external a view of the Messianic promise, and being flattered by a Hellenic king’s partiality for his people" (u.s., 172). Philadelphus afterwards married his sister. His hands were red with blood. Was a Jewish psalmist likely to take "up the singing robes of a court poet" (u.s.) in honour of a Ptolemy, or to transfer the promises to the Davidic line to, and to speak of God as the God of, a foreign king? Or how, if he did, came his song to find and keep a place in the Psalter? All these conjectures show the hopelessness of identifying the person intended addressed in the psalm. It is said that a knowledge of the historical allusions in the Psalter is indispensable to enjoying it. They would often be helpful if they could be settled, but that is no reason for elevating conjecture to the place of knowledge. One reason for the failure of attempts at identification is that the language is a world too wide for the best and greatest of Jewish kings. Much in the psalm applies to a historical occasion, the marriage of some monarch; but there is much that as obviously goes beyond it. Either, then, the psalm is hyperbole, outstripping even poetical licence, or there appear in it characteristics of the ideal monarch whom the psalmist knew to be promised to Israel. Every king of Judah by descent and office was a living prophecy. The singer sees the Messiah shining, as it were, through the shadowy form of the earthly king, whose limitations and defects, no less than his excellences and glories, pointed onwards to a greater than Solomon. in whom the "sure mercies" promised to David should be facts at last. The psalm has two main divisions, prefaced by a prelude (Psalms 45:1), and followed by prediction of happy issue of the marriage and enduring and wide dominion. The two main parts are respectively addressed to the royal bridegroom (Psalms 45:2-9) and to the bride (Psalms 45:10-15). The singer lays claim to at least poetic inspiration. His heart is seething or boiling over with goodly words, or perhaps with the joyful matter which occasions his song-namely, the royal nuptials. He dedicates his "work" (like the original meaning of "poem"-a thing made) to "a king," the absence of the definite article suggesting that the office is more prominent than the person. He sings to a king; therefore his strains must be lofty. So full is his heart that the swift words pour out as the stylus of a rapid writer races over the parchment. The previous musing has been long, the fire has burned slowly; but at last all is molten, and rushes out, fluent because fervent. The picture of the king begins with two features on which the old-world ideal of a monarch laid stress-personal beauty and gracious speech. This monarch is fairer than the sons of men. The note of superhuman excellence is struck at the outset; and though the surface reference is only to physical beauty, that is conceived of as the indication of a fair nature which moulds the fair form. "For of the soul the body form doth take; For soul is form, and doth the body make." The highest truth of this opening word is realised only in Him of whom it was also said, in apparent contradiction, but real harmony with it. "His visage was so marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men." The craving for "whatsoever things are lovely," like all other desires, has for its object Jesus Christ. Another kingly excellence is sweet courtesy of speech. Possibly, indeed, the "grace poured on the lips" may mean the gracious smile which moulds their curves, but more likely it refers to the kindly speech that so well becomes a mouth that can command. The sweetest examples of such words are poor beside "the gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth." The psalmist’s ideal is that of a gentle king. Where else than in the King whose sceptre was a reed, not an iron rod, has it been fulfilled? "Nor know we anything more fair Than is the smile upon Thy face." From such characteristics the psalmist draws an inference-"therefore God hath blessed thee forever"; for that "therefore" does not introduce the result of the preceding excellences, but the cause of them. The psalmist knows that God has blessed the king because he sees these beauties. They are the visible signs and tokens of the Divine benediction. In its reference to Christ, the thought expressed is that His superhuman beauty is to all men the proof of a unique operation of God. Abiding divinity is witnessed by perfect humanity. The scene changes with startling suddenness to the fury of battle. In a burst of lyric enthusiasm, forgetting for a moment nuptials and wedding marches, the singer calls on the king to array himself for war and to rush on the foe. Very striking is this combination of gentleness and warrior strength-a union which has been often realised in heroic figures, which is needful for the highest type of either, and which is fulfilled in the Lamb of God, who is the Lion of the tribe of Judah. The king is to gird on his sword, and to array himself, as in glittering armour, in his splendour and majesty, and, thus arrayed, to mount his chariot, or, less probably, to bestride his warhorse, and hurl himself on the yielding ranks of the enemy. "Press forward, drive (or ride) on," crushing obstacles and forcing a path. But Israel’s king could be no vulgar conqueror, impelled by lust of dominion or "glory." His sword is to be girt on for the help or "on behalf of truth, meekness, and righteousness." These abstracts may be used for concretes-namely, the possessors of the qualities named. But the limitation is not necessary. The monarch’s warfare is for the spread of these. The Hebrew binds the two latter closely together by an anomalous construction, which may be represented by connecting the two words with a hyphen. They are regarded as a double star. Then follows a verse of hurry: "Thy right hand shall teach thee awe-striking deeds." He has no allies. The canvas has no room for soldiers. The picture is like the Assyrian sculptures, in which the king stands erect and alone in his chariot, a giant in comparison with the tiny figures beneath him. Like Rameses in Pentaur’s great battle song, "he pierced the line of the foe; he was all alone, no other with him." Then follow three abrupt clauses, reflecting in their fragmentary character the stress of battle: "Thine arrows are sharp-The peoples fall under thee-In the heart of the enemies of the king." The bright arrow is on the string; it whizzes; the plain is strewed with prostrate forms, the king’s shaft in the heart of each. It is no mere fanciful spiritualising which sees in this picture an adumbration of the merciful warfare of Christ all through the ages. We get to the kernel of the history of Israel when we regard it as the preparation for Christ. We understand the raison d’etre of its monarchy when we see in these poor shadows the types of the King of men, who was to be all that they should have been and were not. The world wide conflict for truth and meekness and righteousness is His conflict, and the help which is done on earth He doeth it all Himself. The psalm waits for its completion still, and will wait until the day when the marriage supper of the Lamb is preceded by the last battle and crowning victory of Him who "in righteousness doth judge and make war." All the older versions take "God," in Psalms 45:6 a, - as a vocative, while most moderns seek another construction or text. "The sum of the matter is that the only natural rendering of the received text is that of the Versions. ‘Thy throne, O God" (Cheyne, in loc.). Three renderings have been proposed, all of which are harsh. "Thy throne is the throne of God," etc., is Ewald’s suggestion, revived from a Jewish expositor, and adopted widely by many recent commentators, and in the margin of the R.V. It is clumsy, and leaves it doubtful whether the stress of the assertion lies on the Divine appointment or on the eternal duration of the throne. "Thy God’s throne is," etc., is very questionable grammatically, and extremely harsh. The only other suggested rendering, "Thy throne is God," etc., may fairly be pronounced impossible. If the vocative construction is retained, are we shut up to Cheyne’s further opinion, that "the only natural interpretation [is] that of the Targum, Thy throne, O Jehovah"? If so, we shall be obliged to admit textual corruption; for a reference to the eternal duration of Jehovah’s dominion is quite out of place here, where the parallelism of the next clause demands some characteristic of the king’s throne corresponding to that of his sceptre, there stated. But in Exodus 21:6; Exodus 22:8, and Psalms 82:6 the name God (Elohim) is applied to rulers and judges, on the ground, as our Lord puts it, in John 10:35, that "unto them the word of God came"-i.e., that they were theocratic officers. The designation, therefore, of the king as Elohim is not contrary to the Hebrew line of thought. It does not predicate divinity, but Divine preparation for and appointment to office. The recurrence of Elohim (God) in its full Divine signification in the next verse is felt by many to be an insuperable objection to recognising the lower sense here. But the emphatic "thy God," which is appended to the name in Psalms 45:7, seems expressly intended to distinguish between the uses of the word in the two verses. August, then, as the title is, it proves nothing as to the divinity of the person addressed. We recognise the prophetic character of the psalm, and strongly believe that it points onwards to Christ the King. But we cannot take the ascription of the title "O God" as having reference to His Divine nature. Such a thought lay far beyond the prophetic horizon. The Old Testament usage, which is appealed to in order to justify the translation of the word "God" as a vocative, must govern its meaning. The careful distinction drawn by the expressions of Psa 45:7, between the lower and higher senses of the name, forbid the attempt to find here a premature and anomalous statement of deep truth, for which the ages were not ripe. While we, who know the full truth, may permissibly apply the psalmist’s words as its expression, we must not forget that in so doing we are going beyond their real meaning. The controversies waged over the construction of this verse have sometimes been embittered by the supposition that it was a buttress for the truth of Christ’s Divine nature. But that is a mistake. The psalm goes no further than to declare that the king is divinely endowed and appointed. It does outline a character fairer than the sons of men, which requires indwelling Deity for its realisation in humanity. But it does not speak the decisive word, which alone could solve the mystery of its requirement, by proclaiming the fact of incarnation. The perpetuity of the king’s throne is guaranteed, not only by his theocratic appointment by God, but by the righteousness of his rule. His sceptre is not a rod of iron, but "a sceptre of uprightness." He is righteous in character as well as in official acts. He "loves righteousness," and therefore cannot but "hate iniquity." His broad shield shelters all who love and seek after righteousness, and he wars against evil wherever it shows itself. Therefore his throne stands firm, and is the world’s hope. A singer who had grasped the truth that power divorced from justice could not endure was far in advance of his time. The nations have not yet learned his lesson. The vast robber kingdoms which seemed to give the lie to his faith have confirmed it by their evanescence. The king’s love of righteousness leads to his being "anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows." This anointing is not that of a coronation, but that of a feast. His "fellows" may either be other kings or his attendant companions at his marriage. The psalmist looks as deep into individual life as he has just done into politics, and ascribes to righteousness lofty powers in that region too. The heart which loves it will be joyful, whatever befalls. Conformity to the highest ideal known to a man, or, at all events, hearty love thereof, leading to efforts after it, is the surest foundation for lasting and deep joy. Since Christ is the fulfilment of the psalmist’s picture, and perfectly realised the perfection of manhood, the psalmst’s words here are most fully applicable to Him. True, He was "a man of sorrows," but beneath His sorrow had abiding and central joy, which He bequeathed to us, with the assurance that to possess it would make our joy full. His pure manhood was ever in touch with God, and lived in conscious righteousness, and therefore there was ever light within, though there was darkness around. He, the saddest, was likewise the gladdest of men, and "anointed with the oil of joy above His fellows." In Psalms 45:8 the psalm reaches its main theme-the marriage of the king. The previous verses have painted his grace of person, his heroic deeds in battle, and his righteous rule. Now he stands ready to pass into the palace to meet his bride. His festival robes are so redolent of perfumes that they seem to be composed of nothing but woven fragrance. There are difficulties in the rendering of Psa 45:8 a, but that adopted above is generally accepted as the most probable. The clause then describes the burst of jubilant music which welcomed and rejoiced the king as he approached the "palaces of ivory," where his bride waited his coming. Psalms 45:9 carries the king into his harem. The inferior wives are of royal blood, but nearest him and superior to these is the queen-consort glittering with golden ornaments. This feature of the psalmist’s description can only have reference to the actual historical occasion of the psalm, and warns against overlooking that in seeking a prophetic reference to the Christ in every particular. The second half of the psalm is an address to the bride and a description of her beauty and state. The singer assumes a fatherly tone, speaking to her as "daughter." She is a foreigner by birth, and is called upon to give up all her former associations, with whole-hearted consecration to her new duties. It is difficult to imagine Jezebel or Athaliah as the recipient of these counsels, nor does it seem to the present writer to add anything to the enjoyment of the psalm that the person to whom they were addressed should be identified. The exhortation to give up all for love’s sake goes to the heart of the sacred relation of husband and wife, and witnesses to the lofty ideal of that relation which prevailed in Israel, even though polygamy was not forbidden. The sweet necessity of wedded love subordinates all other love, as a deeper well, when sunk, draws the surface waters and shallower springs into itself. "The rich, golden shaft Hath killed the flock of all affections else That live in her." The king sung of in the psalm was a type of Christ. Every true marriage is in the same fashion a type of the union of the soul with Jesus, the lover of all, the bridegroom of humanity. So it is not arbitrary spiritualising, but recognition of the nobleness of the lower love and of its essential similarity with the highest, when the counsel to this bride is regarded as shadowing the duties of the soul wedded to Christ. If a heart is really influenced by love to Him, that love will make self-surrender blessed. A child gladly drops toys when it stretches out its little hand for better gifts. If we are joined to Jesus, we shall not be unwilling to "count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge" of Him. Have the terms of wedded life changed since this psalm was written? Have the terms of Christian living altered since it was said, "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple"? The law still remains, "Daughter, forget thine own people and Thy father’s house." The exhortation is followed by a promise: "So shall the king desire thy beauty." The application of these words to the relations of Christ and His people carries with it a striking thought that He is affected by the completeness of our self-surrender and dependence. He pours love on the unworthy, but that is a different thing from the love with which He responds to such abandonment of self and other loves. Holy, noble living will bring a smile into His face and draw Him nearer to us. But whilst there is all this sweet commerce of love and giving, the bride is reminded that the king is her lord, and is to be reverenced as welt as loved. There is here, no doubt, the influence of an archaic mode of regarding marriage and the wife’s position. But it still is true that no woman finds all that her heart needs in her husband, unless she can bring her reverence where she has brought her love; and that love will not long remain if reverence departs. Nor is the warning less needed in, the higher region of the wedlock of the soul with the Saviour. Some types of emotional religion have more to say about love than about obedience. They are full of half-wholesome apostrophes to a "dear Lord," and are apt to forget the last word in the emphasis which they put on the first. The beggar maid married to a king was full of reverence as well as love; and the souls whom Jesus stoops to love and wash and wed are never to forget to blend adoration with approach and obedience with love. A picture of the reflected honour and influence of the bride follows in Psalms 45:12. When she stands by the king’s side, those around recognise her dignity, and seek to secure her favour. Hupfeld, Hitzig, and others take "daughter of Tyre" to be a vocative, addressed to the bride, who is, according to their view, a Tyrian princess. But there is a strong grammatical objection to that construction in the copula ("and") prefixed to "daughter," which is never so prefixed to a vocative unless preceded by another vocative. Delitzsch, Baethgen, Perowne, and Cheyne agree in recognising the force of that consideration, and the three former regard the phrase not as a vocative, but as a nominative. It is a personification of the Tyrians according to a familiar idiom. The clause is elliptical, and has to be supplemented by supposing that the same verb, which appears in the next clause in the plural, is to be supplied in thought, just as that clause requires the supplement of "with a gift" from this one. There appears to be some flaw in the text, as the clauses are unsymmetrical, and possibly the punctuators have marked a hiatus by the sign (Pasek) after the word "daughter of Tyre." To "seek thy favour" is literally to "smooth thy face"-a graphic representation. In the highest region, which we regard the psalm as adumbrating, the words have fulfilment. The bride standing by her bridegroom, and showing her love and devotion by self-abandonment and reverence, will be glorious in the eyes of those around. They who manifestly live in loving communion with their Lord will be recognised for what they are, and, though sometimes hated therefor, will also be honoured. When the Church has cast all but Christ out of its heart, it will conquer the world. "The sons of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee." In Psalms 45:13-15 the bride’s apparel and nuptial procession are described. She is "all glorious within,"-by which is not meant, as ordinarily supposed, that she possesses a tuner beauty of soul, but that the poet conceives of her as standing in the inner chamber, where she has been arrayed in her splendour. Krochmal, followed by Graetz and Cheyne, changes the text so as to read corals, or, as Cheyne renders, pearls (Heb. p’ninim), for within (p’ninah), and thus preserves unity of subject in the verse by removing the local designation. But the existing reading is intelligible. In Psalms 45:14 the marriage procession is described. The words rendered "embroidered robes" are by some taken to mean "tapestry of divers colours" (Perowne), or richly woven carpets spread for the bride to walk on, and by others (Hitzig, Riehm) gay-coloured cushions, to which she is led in order to sit beside the bridegroom. But the word means apparel elsewhere, and either of the other meanings introduces an irrelevant detail of another kind into the picture. The analogy of other Scripture metaphors leads at once to interpreting the bride’s attire as symbolic of the purity of character belonging to the Church. The Apocalypse dresses "the Lamb’s wife" in "fine linen, clean and white." The psalm arrays her in garments gleaming with gold, which symbolise splendour and glory, and in embroidered robes, which suggest the patient use of the slow needle, and the variegated harmony of colour attained at last. There is no marriage between Christ and the soul, unless it is robed in the beauty of righteousness and manifold graces of character. In ether places we read that the bride "made herself ready," and also that "to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white," in which sayings are set forth the double sources of such a garment of the soul. It is a gift from above. It is "put on" by continual effort, based on faith. The picture of the homecoming of the bride follows. She is attended by her maidens, and with them she passes into the palace amid joys and exultation. The psalm stops at the threshold. It is not for the singer to draw back the curtains and let in the day. "The door was shut." The presence of virgin companions waiting on the bride no more interferes with the application of the psalm to Christ and His Church than the similar representation brings confusion into our Lord’s parable of the Ten Virgins. Parables and symbols are elastic, and often duplicate their representations of the same thing; and such is the case here. The closing verses are addressed, not to the bride, but to the king, and can only in a very modified way and partially be supposed to pass beyond the Jewish monarch and refer to the true King. Hopes that he might be blessed with fortunate issue of the marriage were quite in place in an epithalamion, and the delicacy of the light touch with which this closing note is struck is noteworthy, especially in contrast with the tone of many famous secular songs of similar import. But much straining is needed to extract a spiritual sense from the words. Perowne truly says that it is "wiser to acknowledge at once the mixed character" of the psalm, and he quotes a sagacious saying of Calvin’s to the effect that it is not necessary that every detail should be carefully fitted to Christ. The psalm had a historical basis; and it has also a prophetic meaning, because the king of Israel was himself a type, and Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of the ideal never realised by its successive occupants. Both views of its nature must be kept in view in its interpretation; and it need cause no surprise if, at some points, the rind of prose fact is, so to speak, thicker than at others, or if certain features absolutely refuse to lend themselves to the spiritual interpretation. Psalms 46:1-11 THERE are two events, one or other of which probably supplies the historical basis of this and the two following psalms. One is Jehoshaphat’s deliverance from the combined forces of the bordering nations. (2 Chronicles 20:1-37) Delitzsch adopts this as the occasion of the psalm. But the other more usually accepted reference to the destruction of Sennacherib’s army is more probable. Psalms 46:1-11; Psalms 48:1-14 have remarkable parallelisms with Isaiah. The noble contrast of the quiet river which makes glad the city of God with a tossing, earth-shaking sea resembles the prophet’s threatening that the effect of refusing the "waters of Shiloah which go softly" would be inundation by the strong and mighty river, the Assyrian power. And the emblem is expanded in the striking language of Isa 33:21: "The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars." Encircled by the flashing links of that broad moat, Jerusalem sits secure. Again, the central thought of the refrain in the psalm, "The Lord of hosts is with us," is closely allied to the symbolic name which Isaiah gave as a pledge of deliverance, "Immanuel, God with us." The structure is simple. The three strophes into which the psalm falls set forth substantially the same thought, that God’s presence is safety and peace, whatever storms may roar. This general theme is exhibited in the first strophe (Psalms 46:1-3) in reference to natural convulsions; in the second (Psalms 46:4-7) in reference to the rage of hostile kingdoms; and in the third (Psalms 46:8-11) men are summoned to behold a recent example of God’s delivering might, which establishes the truth of the preceding utterances and has occasioned the psalm. The grand refrain which closes the second and third strophes should probably be restored at the end of Psa 46:3. In the first strophe the psalmist paints chaos come again, by the familiar figures of a changed earth, tottering mountains sinking in the raging sea from which they rose at creation, and a wild ocean with thunderous dash appalling the ear and yeasty foam terrifying the eye, sweeping in triumphant insolence over all the fair earth. It is prosaic to insist on an allegorical meaning for the picture. It is rather a vivid sketch of utter confusion, dashed in with three or four bold strokes, an impossible case supposed in order to bring out the unshaken calm of those who have God for ark in such a deluge. He is not only a sure refuge and stronghold, but one easy of access when troubles come. There is little good in a fortress, however impregnable, if it is so difficult to reach that a fugitive might be slain a hundred times before he was safe in it. But this high tower, which no foe can scale, can be climbed at a thought, and a wish lifts us within its mighty walls. The psalmist speaks a deep truth, verified in the spiritual life of all ages, when he celebrates the refuge of the devout soul as "most readily to be found." As the text stands, this strophe is a verse too short, and Psalms 46:3 drags if connected with "will not we fear." The restoration of the refrain removes the anomaly in the length of the strophe, and enables us to detach Psalms 46:3 from the preceding. Its sense is then completed, if we regard it as the protasis of a sentence of which the refrain is the apodosis, or if, with Cheyne and others, we take Psalms 46:3, "Let its waters roar," etc.-what of that? "Jehovah of hosts is with us." If the strophe is thus completed, it conforms to file other two, in each of which may be traced a division into two pairs of verses. These two verse pairs of the first strophe would then be inverted parallelism, -the former putting security in God first, and surrounding trouble second; the latter dealing with the same two subjects, but in reversed sequence. The second strophe brings a new picture to view with impressive suddenness, which is even more vividly dramatic if the refrain is not supplied. Right against the vision of confusion comes one of peace. The abrupt introduction of "a river" as an isolated noun, which dislocates grammatical structure, is almost an exclamation. "There is a river" enfeebles the swing of the original. We might almost translate, "Lo! a river!" Jerusalem was unique among historical cities in that it had no great river. It had one tiny thread of water, of which perhaps the psalmist is thinking. But whether there is here the same contrast between Siloam’s gentle flow and the surging waters of hostile powers as Isaiah sets forth in the passage already referred to, (Isaiah 8:6) the meaning of this gladdening stream is the ever-flowing communication of God Himself in His grace. The stream is the fountain in flow. In the former strophe we hear the roar of the troubled waters, and see the firm hills toppling into their depths. Now we behold the gentle flow of the river, gliding through the city, with music in its ripples and sunshine in its flash and refreshment in its waters, parting into many arms and yet one in diversity, and bringing life and gladness wherever it comes. Not with noise nor tumult, but in silent communication, God’s grace and peace refresh the soul. Power is loud, but omnipotence is silent. The roar of all the billows is weak when compared with the quiet sliding onwards of that still stream. It has its divisions. As in old days each man’s bit of garden was irrigated by a branch led from the stream, so in endless diversity, corresponding to the infinite greatness of the source and the innumerable variety of men’s needs, God’s grace comes. "All these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally." The streams gladden the city of God with the gladness of satisfied thirsts, with the gladness which comes from the contact of the human spirit with Divine completeness. So supplied, the city may laugh at besiegers. It has unfailing supplies within itself, and the enemy may cut off all surface streams, but its "water shall be sure." Substantially the same thought is next stated in plain words: "God is in the midst of her." And therefore two things follow. One is unshaken stability, and another is help at the right time-"at the turn of the morning." "The Lord is in the midst of her"-that is a perennial fact. "The Lord shall help her"-that is the "grace for seasonable help." He, not we, determines when the night shall thin away its blackness into morning twilight. But we may be sure that the presence which is the pledge of stability and calm even in storm and darkness will flash into energy of help at the moment when He wills. The same expression is used to mark the time of His looking from the pillar of cloud and troubling the Egyptians, and there may be an allusion to that standing instance of His help here. "It is not for you to know the times and the seasons"; but this we may know-that the Lord of all times will always help at the right time; He will not come so quickly as to anticipate our consciousness of need, nor delay so long as to let us be irrevocably engulfed in the bog. "Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When He heard therefore that he was sick, He abode two days still in the same place where He was." Yet He came in time. With what vigour the short, crashing clauses of Psa 46:6 describe the wrath and turbulence of the nations, and the instantaneous dissolving of their strength into weakness at a word from those awful lips! The verse may be taken as hypothetical or as historical. In either case we see the sequence of events as by a succession of lightning flashes. The hurry of the style, marked by the omission of connecting particles, reflects the swiftness of incident, like Veni, vidi, vici. The utterance of God’s will conquers all. At the sound of that voice stillness and a pause of dread fall on the "roar" (same word as in Psalms 46:3) of the nations, like the hush in the woods when thunder rolls. He speaks, and all meaner sounds cease. "The lion hath roared, who shall not fear?" No material vehicle is needed. To every believer in God there is an incomprehensible action of the Divine Will on material things; and no explanations bridge the gulf recognised in the psalmist’s broken utterances, which declare sequence and not mode of operation: "He uttered His voice, the earth melted." Again the triumph of the refrain peals forth, with its musical accompaniment prolonging the impression. In it the psalmist gives voice, for himself and his fellows, to their making their own of the general truths which the psalm has been declaring. The two names of God set forth a twofold ground for confidence. "Jehovah of hosts" is all the more emphatic here since the Second Book of the Psalter is usually Elohistic. It proclaims God’s eternal, self-existent Being, and His covenant relation as well as His absolute authority over the ranked forces of the universe, personal or impersonal, spiritual or material. The Lord of all these legions is with us. When we say "The God of Jacob," we reach back into the past and lay hold of the Helper of the men of old as ours. What He has been, He is: what He did, He is doing still. The river is full today, though the van of the army did long ago drink and were satisfied. The bright waters are still as pellucid and abundant as then, and the last of the rearguard will find them the same. The third strophe summons to contemplate with fixed attention the "desolations" made by some great manifestation of God’s delivering power. It is presupposed that these are still visible. Broken bows, splintered spears, half-charred chariots, strew the ground, and Israel can go forth without fear and feast their eyes on these tokens of what God has done for them. The language is naturally applied to the relics of Sennacherib’s annihilated force. In any case it points to a recent act of God’s, the glad surprise of which palpitates all through the psalm. The field of history is littered with broken, abandoned weapons, once flourished in hands long since turned to dust; and the city and throne of God against which they were lifted remain unharmed. The voice which melted the earth speaks at the close of the psalm; not now with destructive energy, but in warning, through which tones of tenderness can be caught. God desires that foes would cease their vain strife before it proves fatal. "Desist" is here an elliptical expression, of which the full form is "Let your hands drop"; or, as we say, "Ground your weapons," and learn how vain is a contest with Him who is God, and whose fixed purpose is that all nations shall know and exalt Him. The prospect hinted at in the last words, of a world submissive to its King. softens the terrors of His destructive manifestations, reveals their inmost purpose, and opens to foes the possibility of passing, not as conquerors, but as subjects, and therefore fellow citizens, through the gate into the city. Psalms 47:1-9 THE closing thought of Psa 46:1-11 is nobly expanded in this jubilant summons to all nations to praise Jehovah as their King. Both psalms have a similar, and probably the same, historical basis: a Divine act so recent that the tumult of triumph has not yet subsided, and the waves of joy still run high. Only in Psalms 46:1-11 the effect of that God-wrought deliverance is principally regarded as the security and peace of Israel, and in this psalm as the drawing of the nations to obey Israel’s King, and so to join the chorus of Israel’s praise. While the psalm has many resemblances to the Songs of the King, (Psalms 93:1-5, seqq.) it is clearly in its right place here, as forming with the preceding and succeeding psalms a trilogy, occasioned by one great manifestation of God’s care for the nation. No event is more appropriate than the usually accepted destruction of Sennacherib’s army. The psalm has little of complexity in structure or thought. It is a gush of pure rapture. It rises to prophetic foresight, and, by reason of a comparatively small historical occasion, has a vision of the world wide expansion of the kingdom of God. It falls into two strophes of four verses each, with one longer verse appended to the latter. In the first strophe the nations are invited to welcome God as their King, not only because of His Divine exaltation and world wide dominion, but also because of His deeds for "Jacob." The same Divine act which in Psalms 46:1-11 is represented as quelling wars and melting the earth, and in Psalms 48:1-14, as bringing dismay, pain, and flight, is here contemplated as attracting the nations to worship. The psalmist knows that destructive providences have their gracious aspect, and that God’s true victory over men is not won when opposition is crushed and hearts made to quake, but when recognition of His sway and joy in it swell the heart. The quick clatter of clapping hands in sign of homage to the King (2 Kings 11:12) blends with the shrill cries with which Easterns express joy, in "a tumult of acclaim." Hupfeld thinks that to suppose the heathen called upon to do homage because of the victory for Israel won over them is entirely mistaken. But unless that victory is the reason for the summons, the psalm offers none; and it is surely not difficult to suppose that the exhibition of God’s power leads to reflection which issues in recognition of His sovereignty. Psalms 46:3-4, seem to state the grounds for the summons in Psalms 47:1. The tenses in these verses present a difficulty in the way of taking them for a historical retrospect of the conquest and partition of Canaan, which but for that objection would be the natural interpretation. It is possible to take them as "a truth of experience inferred from what has just been witnessed, the historical fact being expressed not in historical form, but generalised and idealised" (Delitzsch, in loc.). The just accomplished deliverance repeated in essence the wonders of the first entrance on possession of the land, and revealed the continuous working of the same Divine hand, ever renewing the choice of Jacob’s inheritance, and ever scattering its enemies. "The pride of Jacob" is a phrase in apposition with "our inheritance." The Holy Land was the object of "pride" to "Jacob," not in an evil sense "but in that he boasted of it as a precious treasure intrusted to him by God. The root fact of all God’s ancient and continued blessings is that He "loved." His own heart, not Jacob’s deserts, prompted His mercies. The second strophe is distinguished from the first by the increased fervour of its calls to praise, by its still more exultant rush, and by its omission of reference to Jacob. It is wholly concerned with the peoples whom it invites to take up the song. As in the former strophe the singer showed to the peoples God working in the world, here he bids them look up and see Him ascending on high. "Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended first?" The mighty deliverance of which the triumph throbs through this trilogy of paeans of victory was God’s coming down. Now He has gone back to His throne and seated Himself thereon, not as having ceased to work in the world-for He is still King over it all-but as having completed a delivering work. He does not withdraw when He goes up. He does not cease to work here below when He sits throned in His palace-temple above. The "shout" and "voice of a trumpet," which accompany that ascent, are borrowed from the ordinary attendants on a triumphal procession. He soars as in a chariot of praises, -from whose lips the psalm does not say, but probably it intends Israel to be understood as the singer. To that choir the nations are called to join their voices and harps, since God is their King too, and not Jacob’s only. The word rendered in the A.V. and R.V. (text) "with understanding" is a noun, the name of a description of psalm, which occurs in several psalm titles, and is best understood as "a skilful song." Psalms 47:8 gathers up the reasons for the peoples’ homage to God. He has "become King" over them by His recent act, having manifested and established His dominion; and He has now "sat down on His throne," as having accomplished His purpose, and as thence administering the world’s affairs. A final verse, of double the length of the others, stands somewhat apart from the preceding strophe both in rhythm and in thought. It crowns the whole. The invitations to the nations are conceived of as having been welcomed and obeyed. And there rises before the poet’s eye a fair picture of a great convocation, such as might wait before a world-ruling monarch’s throne on the day of his coronation. The princes of the nations, like tributary kings, come flocking to do homage, "as if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was by." The obliteration of distinction between Israel and the nations, by the incorporation of the latter, so that "the peoples" become part of the "people of the God of Abraham," floats before the singer’s prophetic eye, as the end of God’s great manifestation of Himself. The two parts of that double choir, which the preceding strophes summon to song, coalesce at last, and in grand unison send up one full-throated, universal melodious shout of praise. "The shields of the earth" are best understood as a figurative expression for the princes just spoken of, who now at last recognise to whom they belong. Thus God has exalted Himself by His deeds; and the result of these deeds is that He is greatly exalted by the praise of a world, in which Israel and the "peoples" dwell as one beneath His sceptre and celebrate His name. The psalmist looked far ahead. His immediate experience was as "a little window through which he saw great matters." The prophecy of the universal spread of God’s kingdom and the inclusion in it of the Gentiles is Messianic; and whether the singer knew that he spoke of a fair hope which should not be a fact for weary centuries, or anticipated wider and permanent results from that triumph which inspired his song, he spake of the Christ, and his strains are true prophecies of His dominion. There is no intentional reference in the psalm to the Ascension; but the thoughts underlying its picture of God’s going up with a shout are the same which that Ascension sets forth as facts, -the merciful coming down into humanity of the Divine Helper; the completeness of His victory as attested by His return thither where He was before; His session in heaven, not as idle nor wearied, but as having done what He meant to do; His continuous working as King in the world; and the widening recognition of His authority by loving hearts. The psalmist summons us all to swell with our voices that great chorus of praise which, like a sea, roils and breaks in music round His royal seat. Psalms 48:1-14 THE situation seems the same as in Psalms 46:1-11, with which this psalm has many points of contact. In both we have the same triumph, the same proud affection for the holy city and sanctuary, the same confidence in God’s dwelling there, the same vivid picturing of the mustering of enemies and their rapid dispersion, the same swift movement of style in describing that overthrow, the same thought of the diffusion of God’s praise in the world as its consequence, the same closing summons to look upon the tokens of deliverance, with the difference that, in the former psalm, these are the shattered weapons of the defeated foe, and in this the unharmed battlements and palaces of the delivered city. The emphatic word of the refrain in Psalms 46:1-11 also reappears here in Psalms 48:3. The psalm falls into three parts, of which the first (Psalms 48:1-2) is introductory, celebrating the glory of Zion as the city of God; the second (Psalms 48:3-8) recounts in glowing words the deliverance of Zion; and the third tells of the consequent praise and trust of the inhabitants of Zion (Psalms 48:9-14). The general sense of the first part is plain, but Psalms 48:2 is difficult. "Mount Zion" is obviously subject, and "lovely in loftiness" and "joy of all the earth" predicates; but the grammatical connection of the two last clauses is obscure. Further, the meaning of "the sides of the north" has not been satisfactorily ascertained. The supposition that there is an allusion in the phrase to the mythological mountain of the gods, with which Zion is compared, is surely most unnatural. Would a Hebrew psalmist be likely to introduce such a parallel, even in order to assert the superiority of Zion? Nor is the grammatical objection to the supposition less serious. It requires a good deal. of stretching and inserting to twist the two words "the sides of the north" into a comparison. It is more probable that the clause is topographical, describing some part of the city, but what part is far from clear. The accents make all the verse after "earth" the subject of the two preceding predicates, and place a minor division at "north," implying that "the sides of the north" is more closely connected with "Mount Zion" than with the "city of the great King," or than that last clause is. Following these indications, Stier renders "Mount Zion [and] the northern side (i.e., the lower city, on the north of Zion), which together make the city," etc. Others see here "the Holy City regarded from three points of view"-viz., "the Mount Zion" (the city of David), "the sides of the north" (Mount Moriah and the Temple), "the city of the great King" (Jerusalem proper). So Perowne and others. Delitzsch takes Zion to be the Temple hill, and "the sides of the north" to be in apposition. "The Temple hill, or Zion, in the narrower sense, actually formed the northeastern corner of ancient Jerusalem," says he, and thus regards the subject of the whole sentence as really twofold, not threefold, as appears at first-Zion on the north, which is the palace temple, and Jerusalem at its feet, which is "the city of the great King." But it must be admitted that no interpretation runs quite smoothly, though the summary ejection of the troublesome words "the sides of the north" from the text is too violent a remedy. But the main thought of this first part is independent of such minute difficulties. It is that the one thing which made Zion-Jerusalem glorious was God’s presence in it. It was beautiful in its elevation; it was safely isolated from invaders by precipitous ravines, inclosing the angle of the plateau on which it stood. But it was because God dwelt there and manifested Himself there that it was "a joy for all the earth." The name by which even the earthly Zion is called is "Jehovah-Shammah, The Lord is there." We are not forcing New Testament ideas into Old Testament words when we see in the psalm an eternal truth. An idea is one thing; the fact which more or less perfectly embodies it is another. The idea of God’s dwelling with men had its less perfect embodiment in the presence of the Shechinah in the Temple, its more perfect in the dwelling of God in the Church, and will have its complete when the city "having the glory of God" shall appear, and He will dwell with men and be their God. God in her, not anything of her own, makes Zion lovely and gladdening. "Thy beauty was perfect through My comeliness which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord." The second part pictures Zion’s deliverance with picturesque vigour (Psalms 48:3-8). Psalms 48:3 sums up the whole as the act of God, by which He has made Himself known as that which the refrain of Psa 46:1-11 declared Him to be-a refuge, or, literally, a high tower. Then follows the muster of the hosts. "The kings were assembled." That phrase need not be called exaggeration, nor throw doubt on the reference to Sennacherib’s army, if we remember the policy of Eastern conquerors in raising their armies from their conquests, and the boast which Isaiah puts into the mouth of the Assyrian: "Are not my princes altogether kings?" They advance against the city. "They saw,"-no need to say what. Immediately they "were amazed." The sight of the city broke on them from some hillcrest on their march. Basilisk-like, its beauty was paralysing, and shot a nameless awe into their hearts. "They were terror-struck: they fled." As in Psalms 46:6, the clauses, piled up without cement of connecting particles convey an impression of hurry, culminating in the rush of panic-struck fugitives. As has been often noticed, they recall Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici; but these kings came, saw, were conquered. No cause for the rout is named. No weapons were drawn in the city. An unseen hand "smites once, and smites no more"; for once is enough. The process of deliverance is not told; for a hymn of victory is not a chronicle. One image explains it all, and signalises the Divine breath as the sole agent. "Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind" is not history, but metaphor. The unwieldy, huge vessel, however strong for fight, is unfit for storms, and, caught in a gale, rolls heavily in the trough of the sea, and is driven on a lee shore and ground to pieces on its rocks. "God blew upon them, and they were scattered," as the medal struck on the defeat of the Armada had it. In the companion psalm God’s uttered voice did all. Here the breath of the tempest, which is the breath of His lips, is the sole agent. The past, of which the nation had heard from its fathers, lives again in their own history; and that verification of traditional belief by experience is to a devout soul the chief blessing of its deliverances. There is rapture in the thought that "As we have heard, so have we seen." The present ever seems commonplace. The sky is farthest from earth right overhead, but touches the ground on the horizon behind and before. Miracles were in the past; God will be manifestly in the far-off future, but the present is apt to seem empty of Him. But if we rightly mark His dealings with us, we shall learn that nothing in His past has so passed that it is not present. As the companion psalm says, The God of Jacob is our refuge," this exclaims, "As we have heard, so have we seen." But not only does the deliverance link the present with the past, but it flings a steady light into the future. "God shall establish her forever." The city is truly "the eternal city," because God dwells in it. The psalmist was thinking of the duration of the actual Jerusalem, the imperfect embodiment of a great idea. But whatever may be its fate, the heart of his confidence is no false vision; for God’s city will outlast the world. Like the "maiden fortresses," of which there is one in almost every land, fondly believed never to have been taken by enemies, that city is inexpugnable, and the confident answer to every threatening assailant is, "The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee." "God will establish her forever." The pledges of that stability are the deliverances of the past and present. The third part (Psalms 48:9-14) deals with the praise and trust of the inhabitants of Zion. Deliverance leads to thankful meditation on the lovingkindness which it so signally displayed, and the ransomed people first gather in the Temple, which was the scene of God’s manifestation of His grace, and therefore is the fitting place for them to ponder it. The world wide consequences of the great act of lovingkindness almost shut out of sight for the moment its bearing on the worshippers. It is a lofty height to which the song climbs, when it regards national deliverance chiefly as an occasion for wider diffusion of God’s praise. His "name" is the manifestation of His character in act. The psalmist is sure that wherever that character is declared praise will follow, because he is sure that that character is perfectly and purely good, and that God cannot act but in such a way as to magnify Himself. That great sea will cast up nothing but pearls. The words carry also a lesson for recipients of Divine lovingkindness, teaching them that they misapprehend the purpose of their blessings, if they confine these to their own well-being and lose sight of the higher object-that men may learn to know and love Him. But the deliverance not only produces grateful meditation and widespread praise; it sets the mother city and her daughter villages astir, like Miriam and her maidens, with timbrel and dance, and ringing songs which celebrate "Thy judgments," terrible as they were. That dead host was an awful sight, and hymns of praise seem heartless for its dirge. But it is not savage glee nor fierce hatred which underlies the psalmist’s summons, and still less is it selfish joy. "Thy judgments" are to be hymned when they smite some giant evil; and when systems and their upholders that array themselves against God are drowned in some Red Sea, it is fitting that on its banks should echo, "Sing ye to Jehovah, for He hath triumphed gloriously." The close of this part may be slightly separated from Psalms 48:9-11. The citizens who have been cooped up by the siege are bidden to come forth, and, free from fear, to compass the city without and pass between its palaces within, and so see how untouched they are. The towers and bulwark or rampart remain unharmed, with not a Stone smitten from its place. Within, the palaces stand without a trace of damage to their beauty. Whatever perishes in any assaults, that which is of God will abide; and, after all musterings of the enemy, the uncaptured walls will rise in undiminished strength, and the fair palaces which they guard glitter in untarnished splendour. And this complete exemption from harm is to be told to the generation following, that they may learn what a God this God is, and how safely and well He will guide all generations. The last word in the Hebrew text, which the A.V. and R.V. render "even unto death," can scarcely have that meaning. Many attempts have been made to find a signification appropriate to the close of such a triumphal hymn as this, but the simplest and most probable course is to regard the words as a musical note, which is either attached abnormally to the close of the psalm, or has strayed hither from the superscription of Psa 49:1-20. It is found in the superscription of Psa 9:1-20 ("Al-Muth") as a musical direction, and has in all likelihood the same meaning here. If it is removed, the psalm ends abruptly, but a slight transposition of words and change of the main division of the verse remove that difficulty by bringing "forever and aye" from the first half. The change improves both halves, laying the stress of the first exclusively on the thought that this God is such a God (or, by another rendering, "is here," i.e., in the city), without bringing in reference to the eternity of His protection, and completing the second half worthily, with the thought of His eternal guidance of the people among whom He dwells. Psalms 49:1-20 THIS psalm touches the high-water mark of Old Testament faith in a future life; and in that respect, as well as in its application of that faith to alleviate the mystery of present inequalities and non-correspondence of desert with condition, is closely related to the noble Psalms 73:1-28, with Which it has also several verbal identities. Both have the same problem before them-to construct a theodicy, or "to vindicate the ways of God to man"-and both solve it in the same fashion. Both appear to refer to the story of Enoch in their remarkable expression for ultimate reception into the Divine presence. But whether the psalms are contemporaneous cannot be determined from these data. Cheyne regards the treatment of the theme in Psalms 73:1-28, as "more skilful," and therefore presumably later than Psalms 49:1-20, which he would place "somewhat before the close of the Persian period." This date rests on the assumption that the amount of certitude as to a future life expressed in the psalm was not realised in Israel till after the exile. After a solemn summons to all the world to hear the psalmist’s utterance of what he has learned by Divine teaching (Psalms 49:1-4), the psalm is divided into two parts, each closed with a refrain. The former of these (Psalms 49:5-12) contrasts the arrogant security of the prosperous godless with the end that awaits them; while the second (Psalms 49:13-20) contrasts the dreary lot of these victims of vain self-confidence with the blessed reception after death into God’s own presence which the psalmist grasped as a certainty for himself, and thereon bases an exhortation to possess souls in patience while the godless prosper, and to be sure that their lofty structures will topple into hideous ruin. The psalmist’s consciousness that he speaks by Divine inspiration, and that his message imports all men, is grandly expressed in his introductory summons. The very name which he gives to the world suggests the latter thought; for it means-the world considered as fleeting. Since we dwell in so transitory an abode, it becomes us to listen to the deep truths of the psalm. These have a message for high and low, for rich and poor. They are like a keen lancet to let out too great fulness of blood from the former, and to teach moderation, lowliness, and care for the Unseen. They are a calming draught for the latter, soothing when perplexed or harmed by "the proud man’s contumely." But the psalmist calls for universal attention, not only because his lessons fit all classes, but because they are in themselves "wisdom," and because he himself had first bent his ear to receive them before he strung his lyre to utter them. The brother-psalmist, in Psalms 73:1-28, presents himself as struggling with doubt and painfully groping his way to his conclusion. This psalmist presents himself as a divinely inspired teacher, who has received into purged and attentive ears, in many a whisper from God, and as the result of many an hour of silent waiting, the word which he would now proclaim on the housetops. The discipline of the teacher of religious truth is the same at all times. There must be the bent ear before there is the message which men will recognise as important and true. There is no parable in the ordinary sense in the psalm. The word seems to have acquired the wider meaning of a weighty didactic utterance, as in Psalms 73:2. The expression "Open my riddle" is ambiguous, and is by some understood to mean the proposal and by others the solution of the puzzle; but the phrase is more naturally understood of solving than of setting a riddle, and if so, the disproportion between the characters and fortunes of good and bad is the mystery or riddle, and the psalm is its solution. The main theme of the first part is the certainty of death, which makes infinitely ludicrous the rich man’s arrogance. It is one version of "There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings." Therefore how vain the boasting in wealth, when all its heaps cannot buy a day of life! This familiar thought is not all the psalmist’s contribution to the solution of the mystery of life’s unequal partition of worldly good; but it prepares the way for it, and it lays a foundation for his refusal to be afraid, however pressed by insolent enemies. Very significantly he sets the conclusion, to which observation of the transiency of human prosperity has led him, at the beginning of his "parable." In the parallel psalm (Psalms 73:1-28) the stager shows himself struggling from the depths of perplexity up to the sunny heights of faith. But here the poet begins with the clear utterance of trustful courage, and then vindicates it by the thought of the impotence of wealth to avert death. The hostility to himself of the self-confident rich boasters appears only for a moment at first. It is described by a gnarled, energetic phrase which has been diversely understood. But it seems clear that the "iniquity" (A.V. and R.V.) spoken of in Psalms 49:5 b is not the psalmist’s sin, for a reference here to his guilt or to retribution would be quite irrelevant; and if it were the consequences of his own evil that dogged him at his heels, he had every reason to fear, and confidence would be insolent defiance. But the word rendered in the A.V. heels, which is retained in the R.V. with a change in construction, may be a participial noun, derived from a verb meaning to trip up or supplant; and this gives a natural coherence to the whole verse, and connects it with the following one. "Pursuers" is a weak equivalent for the literal "those who would supplant me," but conveys the meaning, though in a somewhat enfeebled condition. Psalms 49:6 is a continuance of the description of the supplanters. They are "men of this world," the same type of man as excites stern disapproval in many psalms: as, for instance, in Psalms 17:14 -a psalm which is closely related to this, both in its portrait of the godless and its lofty hope for the future. It is to be noted that they are not described as vicious or God-denying or defying. They are simply absorbed in the material, and believe that land and money are the real, solid goods. They are the same men as Jesus meant when He said that it was hard for those who trusted in riches to enter into the kingdom of heaven. It has been thought that the existence of such a class points to a late date for the psalm; but the reliance on riches does not require large riches to rely on, and may flourish in full perniciousness in very primitive social conditions. A small elevation suffices to lift a man high enough above his fellows to make a weak head giddy. Those to whom material possessions are the only good have a natural enmity towards those who find their wealth in truth and goodness. The poet, the thinker, and, most of all, the religious man, are targets for more or less active "malice," or, at all events, are recognised as belonging to another class, and regarded as singular and "unpractical," if nothing worse. But the psalmist looks far enough ahead to see the end of all the boasting, and points to the great instance of the impotence of material good-its powerlessness to prolong life. It would be more natural to find in Psalms 49:7 the statement that the rich man cannot prolong his own days than that he cannot do so for a "brother." A very slight change in the text would make the initial word of the verse ("brother") the particle of asseveration, which occurs in Psalms 49:15 (the direct antithesis of this verse), and is characteristic of the parallel Psalms 73:1-28. With that reading (Ewald, Cheyne, Baethgen, etc.) other slight difficulties are smoothed; but the present text is attested by the LXX and other early versions, and is capable of defence. It may be necessary to observe that there is no reference here to any other "redemption" than that of the body from physical death. There is a distinct intention to contrast the man’s limited power with God’s, for Psalms 49:15 points back to this verse, and declares that God can do what man cannot. Psalms 49:8 must be taken as a parenthesis, and the construction carried on from Psalms 49:7 to Psalms 49:9, which specifies the purpose of the ransom, if it were possible. No man can secure for another continuous life or an escape from the necessity of seeing the pit-i.e., going down to the depths of death. It would cost more than all the rich man’s store; wherefore he-the would-be ransomer-must abandon the attempt forever. The "see" in Psalms 49:10 is taken by many to have the same object as the "see" in Psalms 49:9. "Yea, he shall see it." (So Hupfeld, Hitzig, Perowne, and others.) "The wise die" will then begin a new sentence. But the repetition is feeble, and breaks up the structure of Psa 49:10 undesirably. The fact stares the rich man in the face that no difference of position or of character affects the necessity of death. Down into that insatiable maw of Sheol ("the ever asking"?) beauty, wisdom, wealth, folly, and animalism go alike, and it still gapes wide for fresh food. But a strange hallucination in the teeth of all experience is cherished in the "inward thought" of "the men of this world" - namely, that their houses shall continue forever. Like the godless man in Psalms 10:1-18, this rich man has reached a height of false security, which cannot be put into words without exposing its absurdity, but which yet haunts his inmost thoughts. The fond imagination of perpetuity is not driven out by the plain facts of life and death. He acts on the presumption of permanence; and he whose working hypothesis is that he is to abide always as his permanent home in his sumptuous palace, is rightly set down as believing in the incredible belief that the common lot will not be his. A man’s real belief is that which moulds his life, though he has never formulated it in words. This "inward thought" either underlies the rich godless man’s career, or that career is inexplicable. There is an emphatic contrast drawn between what he "sees" and what he, all the while, hugs in his secret heart. That contrast is lost if the emendation found in the LXX and adopted by many modern commentators is accepted, according to which, by the transposition of a letter, we get "their grave" instead of "their inward [thought]." A reference to the grave comes too early; and if the sense of Psa 49:11 a-is that "their grave (or, the graves) are their houses forever," there is no parallelism between Psalms 49:11 a-and c. The delusion of continuance is, on the other hand, naturally connected with the proud attempt to make their names immortal by impressing them on their estates. The language of Psa 49:11 c is somewhat ambiguous; but, on the whole, the rendering "they call their lands by their own names" accords best with the context. Then comes with a crash the stern refrain which pulverises all this insanity of arrogance. The highest distinction among men gives no exemption from the grim law which holds all corporeal life in its gripe. The psalmist does not look, and probably did not see, beyond the external fact of death. He knows nothing of a future for the men whose portion is in this life. As we shall see in the second part of the psalm, the confidence in immortality is for him a deduction from the fact of communion with God here, and, apparently, his bent ear had received no whisper as to any distinction between the godless man and the beast in the regard to their deaths. They are alike "brought to silence." The awful dumbness of the dead strikes on his heart and imagination as most pathetic. "That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once," and now the pale lips are locked in eternal silence, and some ears hunger in vain "for the sound of a voice that is still." Hupfeld would transfer Psalms 49:13, which begins the second part, so that it should stand before the refrain, which would then have the Selah, that now comes in peculiarly at the end of Psa 49:13. But there is nothing unnatural in the first verse of the second part summing up the contents of the first part; and such a summary is needed in order to bring out the contrast between the godless folly and end of the rich men on the one hand, and the hope of the psalmist on the other. The construction of Psa 49:13 is disputed. The "way" may either mean conduct or fate, and the word rendered in the A.V. and R.V. "folly" has also the meaning of stupid security or self-confidence. It seems best to regard the sentence as not pronouncing again that the conduct described in Psalms 49:6-11 is foolish, but that the end foretold in Psalms 49:12 surely falls on such as have that dogged insensibility to the facts of life which issues in such presumptuous assurance. Many commentators would carry on the sentence into Psalms 49:13 b, and extend the "lot" to those who in after generations approve their sayings. But the paradoxical fact that notwithstanding each generation’s experience the delusion is obstinately maintained from father to son yields a fuller meaning. In either case the notes of the musical interlude fix attention on the thought, in order to make the force of the following contrast greater. That contrast first deals with the fate of godless men after death. The comparison with the "beasts" in the refrain may have suggested the sombre grandeur of the metaphor in Psalms 49:14 a-and b: Sheol is as a great fold into which flocks are driven. There Death rules as the shepherd of that dim realm. What a contrast to the fold and the flock of the other Shepherd, who guides His unterrified sheep through the "valley of the shadow of death"! The waters of stillness beside which this sad shepherd makes his flock lie down are doleful and sluggish. There is no cheerful activity for these, nor any fair pastures, but they are penned in compelled inaction in that dreadful fold. So far the picture is comparatively clear, but with the next clause difficulties begin. Does the "morning" mean only the end of the night of trouble; the beginning in this life of the upright’s deliverance, or have we here an eschatological utterance? The whole of the rest of the verse has to do with the unseen world, and to confine this clause to the temporal triumph of the righteous over their dead oppressors drags in an idea belonging to another sphere altogether. We venture to regard the interpretation of these enigmatical words, which sees in them a dim adumbration of a great morning which will yet stream its light into the land of darkness, and in which not this or that upright man but the class as a whole shall triumph, as the only one which keeps the parts of the verse in unity. It is part of the "riddle" of the psalmist, probably not perfectly explicable to himself. We cannot say that there is here the clear teaching of a resurrection, but there is the germ of it, whether distinctly apprehended by the singer or not. The first glimpses of truth in all regions are vague, and the gazer does not know that the star he sees is a sun. Not otherwise did the great truths of the future life rise on inspired men of old. This psalmist divined, or, more truly, heard in his bent ear, that good and its lovers should triumph beyond the grave, and that somehow a morning would break for them. But he knew nothing of any such for the godless dead. And the remainder of the verse expresses in enigmatical brevity and obscurity the gloomy fate of those for whom there was no such awakening as he hoped for himself. Very different renderings have been given of the gnarled words. If we adhere to the accents, the literal translation is, "Their form is [destined] for the wasting of Sheol, from a dwelling place for it," or "without its dwelling place"-an obscure saying, which is, however, intelligible when rendered as above. It describes the wasting away of the whole man, not merely his corporeal form, in Sheol, of which the corruption of the body in the grave may stand as a terrible symbol, so that only a thin shred of personality remains, which wanders homeless, unclothed with any house either "of this tabernacle" or any other, and so found drearily naked. Homeless desolation of bare being, from which all that is fair or good has been gnawed away, is awfully expressed in the words. Other renderings, neglecting the accents, and amending the text, bring out other meanings: such as "Their form is for corruption; Hades [will be] its dwelling place" (Jennings and Lowe); "Their form shall waste away. Sheol shall be their castle forever" (so Cheyne in "Book of Psalms"; in "Orig. of Psalt." frame is substituted for form, and palace for castle. Baethgen gives up the attempt to render the text or to restore it, and takes to asterisks). To this condition of dismal inactivity, as of sheep penned in a fold, of loss of beauty, of wasting and homelessness, the psalmist opposes the fate which he has risen to anticipate for himself. Psalms 49:15 is plainly antithetical, not only to Psalms 49:14, but to Psalms 49:7. The "redemption" which was impossible with men is possible with God. The emphatic particle of asseveration and restriction at the beginning is, as we have remarked, characteristic of the parallel Psalms 63:1-11. It here strengthens the expression of confidence, and points to God as alone able to deliver His servant from the "hand of Sheol." That deliverance is clearly not escape from the universal lot, which the psalmist has just proclaimed so impressively as affecting wise and foolish alike. But while he expects that he, too, will have to submit to the strong hand that plucks all men from their dwelling places, he has won the assurance that sameness of outward lot covers absolute difference in the conditions of those who are subjected to it. The faith that he will be delivered from the power of Sheol does not necessarily imply the specific kind of deliverance involved in resurrection, and it may be a question whether that idea was definitely before the singer’s mind. But, without dogmatising on that doubtful point, plainly his expectation was of a life beyond death, the antithesis of the cheerless one just painted in such gloomy colours. The very brevity of the second clause of the verse makes it the more emphatic. The same pregnant phrase occurs again with the same emphasis in Psalms 73:24, "Thou shalt take me," and in both passages the psalmist is obviously quoting from the narrative of Enoch’s translation. "God took him. (Genesis 5:24) He has fed his faith on that signal instance of the end of a life of communion with God, and it has; confirmed the hopes which such a life cannot but kindle, so that he is ready ‘to submit to the common lot, bearing in his heart the assurance that, in experiencing it, he will not be driven by that grim shepherd into his gloomy fold, but lifted by God into His own presence. As in Psalms 16:1-11; Psalms 17:1-15 we have here the certainty of immortality filling a devout soul as the result of present experience of communion with God. These great utterances as to the two contrasted conditions after death are, in one aspect, the psalmist’s "riddle," in so far as they are stated in "dark and cloudy words," but, in another view, are the solution of the painful enigma of the prosperity of the godless and the afflictions of the righteous. Fittingly the Selah follows this solemn, great hope. As the first part began with the psalmist’s encouraging of himself to put away fear so the whole ends with the practical application of the truths declared, in the exhortation to others not to be terrified nor bewildered out of their faith by the insolent inflated prosperity of the godless. The lofty height of wholesome mysticism reached in the anticipation of personal immortality is not maintained in this closing part. The ground of the exhortation is simply the truth proclaimed in the first part, with additional emphasis on the thought of the necessary parting from all wealth and pomp. "Shrouds have no pockets." All the external is left behind, and much of the inward too-such as habits, desires, ways of thinking, and acquirements which have been directed to and bounded by the seen and temporal. What is not left behind is character and desert. The man of this world is wrenched from his possessions by death; but he who has made God his portion here carries his portion with him, and does not enter on that other state "in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory does he come To God who is his home." Our Lord’s parable of the foolish rich man has echoes of this psalm. "Whose shall those things be?" reminds us of "He will not take away any of it"; and "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up take thine ease" is the best explanation of what the psalmist meant by "blessing his soul." The godless rich man of the psalm is a selfish and godless one. His condemnation lies not in his wealth, but in his absorption in it and reliance upon it, and in his cherishing the dream of perpetual enjoyment of it, or at least shunning the thought of its loss. Therefore, "when he dies, he goes to the generation of his fathers," who are conceived of as gathered in solemn assembly in that dark realm. "Generation" here implies, as it often does moral similarity. It includes all the man’s predecessors of like temper with himself. A sad company sitting there in the dark! Going to them is not identical with death nor with burial, but implies at least some rudimentary notion of companionship according to character, in that land of darkness. The darkness is the privation of all which deserves the name of light, whether it be joy or purity. Psalms 49:18 b is by some taken to be the psalmist’s address to the rich man, and by others to be spoken to the disciple who had been bidden not to fear. In either case it brings in the thought of the popular applause which flatters success, and plays chorus to the prosperous man’s own self-congratulations. Like Psalms 49:13 b, it gibbets the servile admiration of such men, as indicating what the praisers would fain themselves be, and as a disclosure of that base readiness to worship the rising sun, which has for its other side contempt for the unfortunate who should receive pity and help. The refrain is slightly but significantly varied. Instead of "abides not," it reads "and has not understanding." The alteration in the Hebrew is very slight, the two verbs differing only by one letter, and the similarity in sound is no doubt, the reason for the selection of the word. But the change brings out the limitations under which the first form of the refrain is true, and guards the whole teaching of the psalm from being taken to be launched at rich men as such. The illuminative addition in this second form shows that it is the abuse of riches, when they steal away that recognition of God and of man’s mortality which underlies the psalmist’s conception of understanding, that is doomed to destruction like the beasts that are put to silence. The two forms of the refrain, are, then, precisely parallel to our Lord’s two sayings, when He first declared that it was hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, and then, in answer to His disciples’ surprise, put His dictum in the more definite form, "How hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom!" Psalms 50:1-23 This is the first of the Asaph psalms, and is separated from the other eleven (Psalms 73:1-28; Psalms 74:1-23; Psalms 75:1-10; Psalms 76:1-12; Psalms 77:1-20; Psalms 78:1-72; Psalms 79:1-13; Psalms 80:1-19; Psalms 81:1-16; Psalms 82:1-8; Psalms 83:1-18) for reasons that do not appear. Probably they are no more recondite than the verbal resemblance between the summons to all the earth at the beginning of Psa 49:1 and the similar proclamation in the first verses of Psa 50:1-23. The arrangement of the Psalter is often obviously determined by such slight links. The group has certain features in common, of which some appear here: e.g., the fondness for descriptions of theophanies; the prominence given to God’s judicial action; the preference for the Divine names of El, Adonai (the Lord), Elyon (Most High). Other peculiarities of the class-e.g., the love for the designation "Joseph" for the nation, and delight in the image of the Divine Shepherd-are not found in this psalm. It contains no historical allusions which aid in dating it. The leading idea of it-viz., the depreciation of outward sacrifice-is unhesitatingly declared by many to have been impossible in the days of the Levite Asaph, who was one of David’s musical staff. But is it so certain that such thoughts were foreign to the period in which Samuel declared that obedience was better than sacrifice? Certainly the tone of the psalm is that of later prophets, and there is much probability in the view that Asaph is the name of the family or guild of singers from whom these psalms came rather than that of an individual. The structure is clear and simple. There is, first, a magnificent description of God’s coming to judgment and summoning heaven and earth to witness while He judges His people (Psalms 50:1-6). The second part (Psalms 50:7-15) proclaims the worthlessness of sacrifice; and the third (Psalms 50:16-21) brands hypocrites who pollute God’s statutes by taking them into their lips while their lives are foul. A closing strophe of two verses (Psalms 50:22-23) gathers up the double lesson of the whole. The first part falls again into two, of three verses each, of which the former describes the coming of the judge, and the latter the opening of the judgment. The psalm begins with a majestic heaping together of the Divine names, as if a herald were proclaiming the style and titles of a mighty king at the opening of a solemn assize. No English equivalents are available, and it is best to retain the Hebrew, only noting that each name is separated from the others by the accents in the original, and that to render either "the mighty God" (A.V.) or "the God of gods" is not only against that punctuation, but destroys the completeness symbolised by the threefold designation. Hupfeld finds the heaping together of names "frosty." Some ears will rather hear in it a solemn reiteration like the boom of triple thunders. Each name has its own force of meaning. El speaks of God as mighty; Elohim, as the object of religious fear; Jehovah, as the self-existent and covenant God. The earth from east to west is summoned, not to be judged, but to witness God judging His people. The peculiarity of this theophany is that God is not represented as coming from afar or from above, but as letting His light blaze out from Zion, where He sits enthroned. As His presence made the city "the joy of the whole earth," (Psalms 48:2) so it makes Zion the sum of all beauty. The idea underlying the representation of His shining out of Zion is that His presence among His people makes certain His judgment of their worship. It is the poetic clothing of the prophetic announcement, "You only have I known of all the inhabitants of the earth; therefore will I punish you for your iniquities." The seer beholds the dread pomp of the advent of the Judge, and describes it with accessories familiar in such pictures: devouring fire is His forerunner, as clearing a path for Him among tangles of evil, and wild tempests whirl round His stable throne. "He cannot be silent." The form of the negation in the original is emotional or emphatic, conveying the idea of the impossibility of His silence in the face of such corruptions. The opening of the court or preparation for the judgment follows. That Divine voice speaks, summoning heaven and earth to attend as spectators of the solemn process. The universal significance of God’s relation to and dealings with Israel, and the vindication of His righteousness by His inflexible justice dealt out to their faults, are grandly taught in this making heaven and earth assessors of that tribunal. The court having been thus constituted, the Judge on His seat, the spectators standing around, the accused are next brought in. There is no need to be prosaically definite as to the attendants who are bidden to escort them. His officers are everywhere, and to ask who they are in the present case is to apply to poetry the measuring lines meant for bald prose. It is more important to note the names by which the persons to be judged are designated. They are "My favoured ones, who have made a covenant with Me by (lit. over) sacrifice." These terms carry an indictment, recalling the lavish mercies so unworthily requited, and the solemn obligations so unthankfully broken. The application of the name "favoured ones" to the whole nation is noteworthy. In other psalms it is usually applied to the more devout section, who are by it sharply distinguished from the mass: here it includes the whole. It does not follow that the diversity of usage indicates difference of date. All that is certainly shown is difference of point of dew. Here the ideal of the nation is set forth, in order to bring out more emphatically the miserable contrast of the reality. Sacrifice is set aside as worthless in the subsequent verses. But could the psalmist have given clearer indication that his depreciation is not to be exaggerated into entire rejection of external rites, than by thus putting in front of it the worth of sacrifice when offered aright, as the means of founding and sustaining covenant relations with God? If his own words had been given heed to, his commentators would have been saved the blunder of supposing that he is antagonistic to the sacrificial worship which he thus regards. But before the assize opens, the heavens, which had been summoned to behold, declare beforehand His righteousness, as manifested by the fact that He is about to judge His people. The Selah indicates that a long-drawn swell of music fills the expectant pause before the Judge speaks from His tribunal. The second part (Psalms 50:7-15) deals with one of the two permanent tendencies which work for the corruption of religion-namely, the reliance on external worship, and neglect of the emotions of thankfulness and trust. God appeals first to the relation into which He has entered with the people, as giving Him the right to judge. There may be a reference to the Mosaic formula, "I am Jehovah, thy God," which is here converted, in accordance with the usage of this book of the Psalter, into "God (Elohim), thy God." The formula which was the seal of laws when enacted is also the warrant for the action of the Judge. He has no fault to find with the external acts of worship. They are abundant and "continually before Him." Surely this declaration at the outset sets aside the notion that the psalmist was launching a polemic against sacrifices per se. It distinctly takes the ground that the habitual offering of these was pleasing to the Judge. Their presentation continually is not reproved, but approved. What then is condemned? Surely it can be nothing but sacrifice without the thanksgiving and prayer required in Psalms 50:14-15. The irony of Psa 50:9-13 is directed against the folly of believing that in sacrifice itself God delighted; but the shafts are pointless as against offerings which are embodied gratitude and trust. The gross stupidity of supposing that man’s gift makes the offering to be God’s more truly than before is laid bare in the fine, sympathetic glance at the free, wild life of forest, mountain, and plain, which is all God’s possession, and present to His upholding thought, and by the side of which man’s folds are very small affairs. "The cattle" in Psalms 50:10 are not, as usually, domesticated animals, but the larger wild animals. They graze or roam "on the mountains of a thousand"-a harsh expression, best taken, perhaps, as meaning mountains where thousands [of the cattle] are. But the omission of one letter gives the more natural reading "mountains of God". (cf. Psalms 36:6) It is adopted by Olshausen and Cheyne, and smooths the construction, but has against it its obliteration of the fine thought of the multitudes of creatures peopling the untravelled hills. The word rendered "whatever moves" is obscure; but that meaning is accepted by most. Cheyne in his Commentary gives as alternative "that which comes forth abundantly," and in "Orig. of Psalt.," 473, "offspring." All these are "with Me"-i.e., present to His mind-a parallel to "I know" in the first clause of the same verse. Psalms 50:12-13 turn the stream of irony on another absurdity involved in the superstition attacked-the grossly material thought of God involved in it. What good do bulls’ flesh and goats’ blood do to Him? But if these are expressions of thankful love, they are delightsome to Him. Therefore the section ends with the declaration that the true sacrifice is thanksgiving and the discharge of vows. Men honour God by asking and taking, not by giving. They glorify Him when, by calling on Him in trouble, they are delivered; and then, by thankfulness and service, as well as by the evidence which their experience gives that prayer is not in vain, they again glorify Him. All sacrifices are God’s before they are offered, and do not become any more His by being offered. He neither needs nor can partake of material sustenance. But men’s hearts are not His without their glad surrender, in the same way as after it; and thankful love, trust, and obedience are as the food of God, sacrifices acceptable, well-pleasing to Him. The third part of the psalm is still sterner in tone. It strikes at the other great corruption of worship by hypocrites. As has been often remarked, it condemns breaches of the second table of the law, just as the former part may be regarded as dealing with transgressions of the first. The eighth, seventh, and ninth commandments are referred to in Psalms 50:18-19 as examples of the hypocrites’ sins. The irreconcilable contradiction of their professions and conduct is vividly brought out in the juxtaposition of "declare My statutes" and "castest My words behind thee." They do two opposite things with the same words-at the same time proclaiming them with all lip-reverence, and scornfully flinging them behind their backs in their conduct. The word rendered in the A.V. "slanderest" is better taken as in margin of the R.V, "givest a thrust," meaning to use violence so as to harm or overthrow. Hypocrisy finds encouragement in impunity. God’s silence is an emphatic way of expressing His patient tolerance of evil unpunished. Such "long suffering" is meant to lead to repentance, and indicates God’s unwillingness to smite. But, as experience shows, it is often abused, and "because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men is thoroughly set in them to do evil." The gross mind has gross conceptions of God. One nemesis of hypocrisy is the dimming of the idea of the righteous Judge. All sin darkens the image of God. When men turn away from God’s self-revelation, as they do by transgression and most fatally by hypocrisy, they cannot but make a God after their own linage. Browning has taught us in his marvellous "Caliban on Setebos" how a coarse nature projects its own image into the heavens and calls it God. God made man in His own likeness. Men who have lost that likeness make God in theirs, and so sink deeper in evil till He speaks. Then comes an apocalypse to the dreamer, when there is flashed before him what God is and what he himself" is. How terror-stricken the gaze of these eyes before which God arrays the deeds of a life, seen for the first time in their true character! It will be the hypocrite’s turn to keep silence then, and his thought of a complaisant God like himself wilt perish before the stern reality. The whole teaching of the psalm is gathered up in the two closing verses. "Ye that forget God" includes both the superstitious formalists and the hypocrites. Reflection upon such truths as those of the psalm will save them from else inevitable destruction. "This" points on to Psalms 50:23, which is a compendium of both parts of the psalm. The true worship, which consists in thankfulness and praise, is opposed in Psalms 50:23 a to mere externalisms of sacrifice, as being the right way of glorifying God. The second clause presents a difficulty. But it would seem that we must expect to find in it a summing up of the warning of the third part of the psalm similar to that of the second part in the preceding clause. That consideration goes against the rendering in the R.V. margin (adopted from Delitzsch): "and prepares a way [by which] I may show, etc. The ellipsis of the relative is also somewhat harsh. The literal rendering of the ambiguous words is, "one setting a way." Graetz, who is often wild in his emendations, proposes a very slight one here-the change of one letter, which would yield a good meaning: "he that is perfect in his way." Cheyne adopts this, and it eases a difficulty. But the received text is capable of the rendering given in the A.V, and, even without the natural supplement "aright," is sufficiently intelligible. To order one’s way or "conversation" is, of course, equivalent to giving heed to it according to God’s word, and is the opposite of the conduct stigmatised in Psalms 50:16-21. The promise to him who thus acts is that he shall see God’s salvation, both in the narrower sense of daily interpositions for deliverance, and in the wider of a full and final rescue from all evil and endowment with all good. The psalm has as keen an edge for modern as for ancient sins. Superstitious reliance on externals of worship survives, though sacrifices have ceased; and hypocrites, with their months full of the Gospel, still cast God’s words behind them, as did those ancient hollow-hearted proclaimers and breakers of the Law. Psalms 51:1-19 THE main grounds on which the Davidic authorship of this psalm is denied are four. First, it is alleged that its conceptions of sin and penitence are in advance of his stage of religious development; or, as Cheyene puts it, "David could not have had these ideas" ("Aids to Dev. Study of Crit.," 166). The impossibility depends on theory which is not yet so established as to be confidently used to settle questions of date. Again, the psalmist’s wail, "Against Thee only have I sinned," is said to be conclusive proof that the wrong done to Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah cannot be referred to. But is not God the correlative of sin, and may not the same act be qualified in one aspect as a crime and in another as a sin, bearing in the latter character exclusive relation to God? The prayer in Psalms 51:18 is the ground of a third objection to the Davidic authorship. Certainly it is hopeless to attempt to, explain "Build the walls of Jerusalem" as David’s prayer. But the opinion held by both advocates and opponents of David’s authorship, that Psalms 51:18-19 are a later liturgical addition, removes this difficulty. Another ground on which the psalm is brought down to a late date is the resemblances in it to Isaiah 40:1-31; Isaiah 41:1-29; Isaiah 42:1-25; Isaiah 43:1-28; Isaiah 44:1-28; Isaiah 45:1-25; Isaiah 46:1-13, which are taken to be echoes of the prophetic words. The resemblances are undoubted; the assumption that. the psalmist is the copyist is not. The personified nation is supposed by most modern authorities to be the speaker; and the date is sometimes taken to be the Restoration period, before the rebuilding of the walls by Nehemiah (Cheyne, "Orig. of Psalt.," 162); by others, the time of the Babylonish exile; and, as usual, by some, the Maccabean epoch. It puts considerable strain upon the theory of personification to believe that these confessions of personal sin, and longing cries for a clean heart, which so many generations have felt to fit their most secret experiences, were not the wailings of a soul which had learned the burden of individuality, by consciousness of sin, and by realisation of the awful solitude of its relation to God. There are also expressions in the psalm which seem to clog the supposition that the speaker is the nation with great difficulties-e.g., the reference to birth in Psalms 51:5, the prayer for inward truth in Psalms 51:6, and for a clean heart in Psalms 51:10. Baethgen acknowledges that the two latter only receive their full meaning when applied to an individual. He quotes Olshausen, a defender of the national reference, who really admits the force of the objection to it, raised on the ground of these expressions, while he seeks to parry it by saying that "it is not unnatural that the poet, speaking in the singular, should, although he writes for the congregation, bring in occasional expressions here and there which do not fit the community so well as they do each individual in it." The acknowledgment is valuable; the attempt to turn its edge may be left to the reader’s judgment. In Psalms 51:1-9 the psalmist’s cry is chiefly for pardon; in Psalms 51:10-12 he prays chiefly for purity; in Psalms 51:13-17 he vows grateful service. Psalms 51:18-19 are probably a later addition. The psalm begins with at once grasping the character of God as the sole ground of hope. That character has been revealed in an infinite number of acts of love. The very number of the psalmist’s sins drove him to contemplate the yet greater number of God’s mercies. For where but in an infinite placableness and lovingkindness could he find pardon? If the Davidic authorship is adopted, this psalm followed Nathan’s assurance of forgiveness, and its petitions are the psalmist’s efforts to lay hold of that assurance. The revelation of God’s love precedes and causes true penitence. Our prayer for forgiveness is the appropriation of God’s promise of forgiveness. The assurance of pardon does not lead to a light estimate of sin, but drives it home to the conscience. The petitions of Psa 51:1-2 teach us how the psalmist thought of sin. They are all substantially the same, and their repetition discloses the depth of longing in the suppliant. The language fluctuates between plural and singular nouns, designating the evil as "transgressions" and as "iniquity" and "sin." The psalmist regards it, first, as a multitude of separate acts, then as all gathered together into a grim unity. The single deeds of wrong doing pass before him. But these have a common root; and we must not only recognise acts, but that alienation of heart from which they come-not only sin as it comes out in the life, but as it is coiled round our hearts. Sins are the manifestations of sin. We note, too, how the psalmist realises his personal responsibility. He reiterates "my"-"my transgressions, my iniquity, my sin." He does not throw blame on circumstances, or talk about temperament or maxims of society or bodily organisation. All these had some share in impelling him to sin; but after all allowance made for them, the deed is the doer’s, and he must bear its burden. The same eloquent synonyms for evil deeds which are found in Psalms 32:1-11 occur again here. "Transgression" is literally rebellion; "iniquity," that which is twisted or bent; "sin," missing a mark. Sin is rebellion, the uprising of the will against rightful authority-not merely the breach of abstract propriety or law, but opposition to a living Person, who has right to obedience. The definition of virtue is obedience to God, and the sin in sin is the assertion of independence of God and opposition to His will. Not less profound is that other name, which regards sin as "iniquity" or distortion. Then there is a straight line to which men’s lives should run parallel. Our life’s paths should be like these conquering Roman roads, turning aside for nothing, but going straight to their aim over mountain and ravine, stream or desert. But this man’s passion had made for him a crooked path, where he found no end, "in wandering mazes lost." Sin is, further, missing an aim, the aim being either the Divine purpose for man, the true ideal of manhood, or the satisfaction proposed by the sinner to himself as the result of his sin. In both senses every sin misses the mark. These petitions show also how the psalmist thought of forgiveness. As the words for sin give a threefold view of it, so those for pardon set it forth in three aspects. "Blot out"; -that petition conceives of forgiveness as being the erasure of a writing, perhaps of an indictment. Our past is a blurred manuscript full of false and bad things. The melancholy theory of some thinkers is summed up in the despairing words, "What I have written, I have written." But the psalmist knew better than that; and we should know better than he did. Our souls may become palimpsests: and, as devotional meditations might be written by a saint on a parchment that had borne foul legends of false gods, the bad writing on them may be obliterated, and God’s law be written there. "Wash me thoroughly" needs no explanation. But the word employed is significant, in that it probably means washing by kneading or beating, not by simple rinsing. The psalmist is ready to submit to any painful discipline, if only he may be cleansed. "Wash me, beat me, tread me down, hammer me with mallets, dash me against stones, do anything with me, if only these foul stains are melted from the texture of my soul." The psalmist had not heard of the alchemy by which men can "wash their robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb"; but he held fast by God’s "lovingkindness," and knew the blackness of his own sin, and groaned under it; and therefore his cry was not in vain. An anticipation of the Christian teaching as to forgiveness lies in his last expression for pardon, "make me clean," which is the technical word for the priestly act of declaring ceremonial purity, and for the other priestly act of making as well as declaring clean from the stains of leprosy. The suppliant thinks of his guilt not only as a blotted record or as a polluted robe, but as a fatal disease, the "firstborn of death," and as capable of being taken away only by the hand of the Priest laid on the feculent mass. We know who put out His hand and touched the leper, and said, "I will: be thou clean." The petitions for cleansing are, in Psalms 51:3, urged on the ground of the psalmist’s consciousness of sin. Penitent confession is a condition of forgiveness. There is no need to take this verse as giving the reason why the psalmist offered his prayer, rather than as presenting a plea why it should be answered. Some commentators have adopted the former explanation, from a fear lest the other should give countenance to the notion that repentance is a meritorious cause of forgiveness; but that is unnecessary scrupulousness. "Sin is always sin, and deserving of punishment, whether it is confessed or not. Still, confession of sin is of importance on this account-that God will be gracious to none but to those who confess their sin" (Luther, quoted by Perowne). Psalms 51:4 sounds the depths in both its clauses. In the first the psalmist shuts out all other aspects of his guilt, and is absorbed in its solemnity as viewed in relation to God. It is asked, How could David have thought of his sin, which had in so many ways been "against" others, as having been "against Thee, Thee only"? As has been noted above, this confession has been taken to demonstrate conclusively the impossibility of the Davidic authorship. But surely it argues a strange ignorance of the language of a penitent soul, to suppose that such words as the psalmist’s could be spoken only in regard to sins which had no bearing at all on other men. David’s deed had been a crime against Bathsheba, against Uriah, against his family and his realm; but these were not its blackest characteristics. Every crime against man is sin against God. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these ye have done it unto Me" is the spirit of the Decalogue as well as the language of Jesus. And it is only when considered as having relation to God that crimes are darkened into sins. The psalmist is stating a strictly true and profound thought when he declares that he has sinned "against Thee only." Further, that thought has, for the time being, filled his whole horizon. Other aspects of his shameful deed will torture him enough in coming days, even when he has fully entered into the blessedness of forgiveness; but they are not present to his mind now, when the one awful thought of his perverted relation to God swallows up all others. A man who has never felt that all-engrossing sense of his sin as against God only has much to learn. The second clause of Psa 51:4 opens the question whether "in order that" is always used in the Old Testament in its full meaning as expressing intention, or sometimes in the looser signification of "so that," expressing result. Several passages usually referred to on this point (e.g., Exodus 11:9; Isaiah 44:9; Hosea 8:4) strongly favour the less stringent view, which is also in accordance with the genius of the Hebrew race, who were not metaphysicians. The other view, that the expression here means "in order that," insists on grammatical precision in the cries of a penitent heart, and clogs the words with difficulty. If their meaning is that the psalmist’s sin was intended to show forth God’s righteousness in judging, the intention must have been God’s, not the sinner’s; and such a thought not only ascribes man’s sin directly to God, but is quite irrelevant to the psalmist’s purpose in the words. For he is not palliating his transgression or throwing it on Divine predestination (as Cheyne takes him to be doing), but is submitting himself, in profoundest abasement of undivided guilt, to the just judgment of God. His prayer for forgiveness is accompanied with willingness to submit to chastisement, as all true desire for pardon is. He makes no excuses for his sin, but submits himself unconditionally to the just judgment of God. "Thou remainest the Holy One; I am the sinner; and therefore Thou mayest, with perfect justice, punish me and spurn me from Thy presence" (Stier). Psalms 51:5-6 are marked as closely related by the "Behold" at the beginning of each. The psalmist passes from penitent contemplation and confession of his acts of sin to acknowledge his sinful nature, derived from sinful parents. "Original sin" is theological terminology for the same facts which science gathers together under the name of "heredity." The psalmist is not responsible for later dogmatic developments of the idea, but he feels that he has to confess not only his acts but his nature. "A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit." The taint is transmitted. No fact is more plain than this, as all the more serious observers of human life and of their own characters have recognised. Only a superficial view of humanity or an inadequate conception of morality can jauntily say that "all children are born good." Theologians have exaggerated and elaborated, as is their wont, and so have made the thought repugnant; but the derived sinful bias of human nature is a fact, not a dogma, and those who know it and their own share of it best will be disposed to agree with Browning, in finding one great reason for believing in Biblical religion, that- "‘Tis the faith that launched point blank her dart At the head of a lie-taught Original Sin, The Corruption of Man’s Heart." The psalmist is not, strictly speaking, either extenuating or aggravating his sin by thus recognising his evil nature. He does not think that sin is the less his, because the tendency has been inherited. But he is spreading all his condition before God. In fact, he is not so much thinking of his criminality as of his desperate need. From a burden so heavy and so entwined with himself none but God can deliver him. He cannot cleanse himself, for self is infected. He cannot find cleansing among men, for they too have inherited the poison. And so he is driven to God, or else must sink into despair. He who once sees into the black depths of his own heart will give up thereafter all ideas of "every man his own redeemer." That the psalmist’s purpose was not to minimise his own guilt is clear, not only from the tone of the psalm, but from the antithesis presented by the Divine desire after inward truth in the next verse, which is out of place if this verse contains a palliation for sin. We can scarcely miss the bearing of this verse on the question of whether the psalm is the confession of an individual penitent or that of the nation. It strongly favours the former, view, though it does not make the latter absolutely impossible. The discovery of inherent and inherited sinfulness brings with it another discovery-that of the penetrating depth of the requirements of God’s law. He cannot be satisfied with outside conformity in deed. The more intensely conscience realises sin, the more solemnly rises before it the Divine ideal of man in its inwardness as well as in its sweep. Truth within - inward correspondence with His will, and absolute sincerity of soul are His desire. But I am "born in iniquity": a terrible antithesis, and hopeless but for one hope which dawns over the suppliant like morning on a troubled sea. If we cannot ask God to make us what He wishes us to be, these two discoveries of our nature and of His will are open doorways to despair; but he who apprehends them wisely will find in their conjoint operation a force impelling him to prayer, and therefore to confidence. Only God can enable such a Being as man to become such as He will delight in; and since He seeks for truth within, He thereby pledges Himself to give the truth and wisdom for which He seeks. Meditation on the sin which was ever before the psalmist, passes into renewed prayers for pardon, which partly reiterate those already offered in Psalms 51:1-2. The petition in Psalms 51:7 for purging with hyssop alludes to sprinkling of lepers and unclean persons, and indicates both a consciousness of great impurity and a clear perception of the symbolic meaning of ritual cleansings. "Wash me" repeats a former petition; but now the psalmist can venture to dwell more on the thought of future purity than he could do then. The approaching answer begins to make its brightness visible through the gloom, and it seems possible to the suppliant that even his stained nature shall glisten like sunlit snow. Nor does that expectation exhaust his confidence. He hopes for "joy and gladness." His bones have been crushed-i.e., his whole self has been, as it were, ground to powder by the weight of God’s hand; but restoration is possible. A penitent heart is not too bold when it asks for joy. There is no real well-founded gladness without the consciousness of Divine forgiveness. The psalmist closes his petitions for pardon (Psalms 51:9) with asking God to "hide His face from his sins," so that they be, as it were, no more existent for Him, and, by a repetition of the initial petition in Psalms 51:1, for the blotting out of "all mine iniquities." The second principal division begins with Psalms 51:10, and is a prayer for purity, followed by vows of glad service. The prayer is contained in three verses (Psalms 51:10-12), of which the first implores complete renewal of nature, the second beseeches that there may be no break between the suppliant and God, and the third asks for the joy and willingness to serve which would flow from the granting of the desires preceding. In each verse the second clause has "spirit" for its leading word, and the middle one of the three asks for "Thy holy spirit." The petitions themselves, and the order in which they occur, are deeply significant, and deserve much more elucidation than can be given here. The same profound consciousness of inward corruption which spoke in the former part of the psalm shapes the prayer for renewal. Nothing less than a new creation will make this man’s heart "clean." His past has taught him that. The word employed is always used of God’s creative act; and the psalmist feels that nothing less than the power which brooded over the face of primeval chaos, and evolved thence an ordered world, can deal with the confused ruin within himself. What he felt that he must have is what prophets promised (Jeremiah 24:7; Ezekiel 36:26) and Christ has brought-a new creation, in which, while personality remains unaffected, and the components of character continue as before, a real new life is bestowed, which stamps new directions on affections, gives new aims, impulses, convictions, casts out inveterate evils, and gradually changes "all but the basis of the soul." A desire for pardon which does not unfold into such longing for deliverance from the misery of the old self is not the offspring of genuine penitence, but only of base fear. "A steadfast spirit" is needful in order to keep a cleansed heart clean; and, on the other hand, when, by cleanness of heart, a man is freed from the perturbations of rebellious desires and the weakening influences of sin, his spirit will be steadfast. The two characteristics sustain each other. Consciousness of corruption dictated the former desire; penitent recognition of weakness and fluctuation inspires the latter. It may be observed, too, that the triad of petitions having reference to "spirit" has for its central one a prayer for God’s Spirit, and that the other two may be regarded as dependent on that. Where God’s spirit dwells, the human spirit in which it abides will be firm with uncreated strength. His energy, being infused into a tremulous, changeful humanity, will make it stable. If we are to stand fast, we must be stayed on God. The group of petitions in Psalms 51:11 is negative. It deprecates a possible tragic separation from God, and that under two aspects. "Part me not from Thee; part not Thyself from me." The former prayer, "Cast me not out from Thy presence," is by some explained according to the analogy of other instances of the occurrence of the phrase, where it means expulsion from the land of Israel; and is claimed, thus interpreted, as a clear indication that the psalmist speaks in the name of the nation. But however certainly the expression is thus used elsewhere, it cannot, without introducing an alien thought, be so interpreted in its present connection, imbedded in petitions of the most spiritual and individual character: much rather, the psalmist is recoiling from what he knows only too well to be the consequence of an unclean heart-separation from God, whether in the sense of exclusion from the sanctuary, or in the profounder sense, which is not too deep for such a psalm, of conscious loss of the light of God’s face. He dreads being, Cain-like, shut out from that presence which is life; and he knows that, unless his previous prayer for a clean heart is answered, that dreary solitude of great darkness must be his lot. The sister petition, "Take not Thy holy spirit from me," contemplates the union between God and him from the other side. He regards himself as possessing that Divine spirit; for he knows that, notwithstanding his sin, God has not left him, else he would not have these movements of godly sorrow and yearnings for purity. There is no reason to commit the anachronism of supposing that the psalmist had any knowledge of New Testament teaching of a personal Divine Spirit. But if we may suppose that he is David, this prayer has special force. That anointing which designated and fitted him for kingly office symbolised the gift of a Divine influence accompanying a Divine call. If we further remember how it had fared with his predecessor, from whom, because of impenitence, "the Spirit of the Lord departed, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him," we understand how Saul’s successor, trembling as he remembers his fate, prays with peculiar emphasis, "Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me." The last member of the triad, in Psalms 51:12, looks back to former petitions, and asks for restoration of the "joy of Thy salvation," which had lain like dew on this man before he fell. In this connection the supplication for joy follows on the other two, because the joy which it desires is the result of their being granted. For what is "Thy salvation" but the gift of a clean heart and a steadfast spirit, the blessed consciousness of unbroken closeness of communion with God, in which the suppliant suns himself in the beams of God’s face, and receives an uninterrupted communication of His Spirit’s gifts? These are the sources of pure joy, lasting as God Himself, and victorious over all occasions for surface sorrow. The issue of all these gifts will be "a willing spirit," delighting to obey, eager to serve. If God’s Spirit dwells in us, obedience will be delight. To serve God because we must is not service. To serve Him because we had rather do His will than anything else is the service which delights Him and blesses us. The word rendered "willing" comes by a very natural process, to mean nobles. God’s servants are princes and lords of everything besides, themselves included. Such obedience is freedom. If desires flow with equable motion parallel to God’s will, there is no sense of restraint in keeping within limits beyond which we do not desire to go. "I will walk at liberty; for I keep Thy precepts." The last part of the psalm runs over with joyful vows-first, of magnifying God’s name (Psalms 51:13-15), and then of offering true sacrifices. A man who has passed through such experiences as the psalmist’s and has received the blessings for which he prayed, cannot be silent. The instinct of hearts touched by God’s mercies is to speak of them to others. And no man who can say "I will tell what He has done for my soul" is without the most persuasive argument to bring to bear on others. A piece of autobiography will touch men who are unaffected by elaborate reasonings and deaf to polished eloquence. The impulse and the capacity to "teach transgressors Thy ways" are given in the experience of sin and forgiveness; and if anyone has not the former, it is questionable whether he has, in any real sense or large measure, received the latter. The prayer for deliverance from blood guiltiness in Psalms 51:14 breaks for a moment the flow of vows; but only for a moment. It indicates how amid them the psalmist preserved his sense of guilt, and how little he was disposed to think lightly of the sins of whose forgiveness he had prayed himself into the assurance. Its emergence here, like a black rock pushing its grimness up through a sparkling, sunny sea, in no sign of doubt whether his prayers had been answered; but it marks the abiding sense of sinfulness, which must ever accompany abiding gratitude for pardon and abiding holiness of heart. It seems hard to believe, as the advocates of a national reference in the psalm are obliged to do, that "blood guiltiness" has no special reference in the psalmist’s crime, but is employed simply as typical of sin in general. The mention of it finds a very obvious explanation on the hypothesis of Davidic authorship, and a rather constrained one on any other. Psalms 51:16 introduces the reason for the preceding vow of grateful praise, as is shown by the initial "For." The psalmist will bring the sacrifices of a grateful heart making his lips musical, because he has learned that these, and not ritual offerings, are acceptable. The same depreciation of external sacrifices is strongly expressed in Psalms 40:6, and here, as there, is not to be taken as an absolute condemnation of these, but as setting them decisively below spiritual service. To suppose that prophets or psalmists waged a polemic against ritual observances per se misapprehends their position entirely. They do war against "the sacrifice of the wicked," against external acts which had no inward reality corresponding to them, against reliance on the outward and its undue exaltation. The authors of the later addition to this psalm had a true conception of its drift when they appended to it, not as a correction of a heretical tendency, but as a liturgical addition in full harmony with its spirit, the vow to "offer whole burnt offerings on" the restored "altar," when God should again build up Zion. The psalmist’s last words are immortal. "A heart broken and crushed, O God, Thou wilt not despise." But they derive still deeper beauty and pathos when it is observed that they are spoken after confession has been answered to his consciousness by pardon, and longing for purity by at least some bestowal of it. The "joy of Thy salvation," for which he had prayed has begun to flow into his heart. The "bones" which had been "crushed" are beginning to reknit, and thrills of gladness to steal through his frame; but still he feels that with all these happy experiences contrite consciousness of his sin must mingle. It does not rob his joy of one rapture, but it keeps it from becoming careless. He goes safely who goes humbly. The more sure a man is that God has put away the iniquity of his sin, the more should he remember it; for the remembrance will vivify gratitude and bind close to Him without whom there can be no steadfastness of spirit nor purity of life. The clean heart must continue contrite, if it is not to cease to be clean. The liturgical addition implies that Jerusalem is in ruins. It cannot be supposed without violence to come from David. It is not needed in order to form a completion to the psalm, which ends more impressively, and has an inner unity and coherence, if the deep words of Psa 51:17 are taken as its close. Psalms 52:1-9 THE progress of feeling in this psalm is clear, but there is no very distinct division into strophes and one of the two Selahs does not mark a transition, though it does make a pause. First, the poet, with a few indignant and contemptuous touches, dashes on his canvas an outline portrait of an arrogant oppressor, whose weapon was slander and his words like pits of ruin. Then, with vehement, exulting metaphors, he pictures his destruction. On it follow reverent awe of God, whose justice is thereby displayed, and deepened sense in righteous hearts of the folly of trust in anything but Him. Finally, the singer contrasts with thankfulness his own happy continuance in fellowship with God with the oppressor’s fate, and renews his resolve of praise and patient waiting. The themes are familiar, and their treatment has nothing distinctive. The portrait of the oppressor does not strike one as a likeness either of the Edomite herdsman Doeg, with whose betrayal of David’s asylum at Nob the superscription connects the psalm or of Saul, to whom Hengstenberg, feeling the difficulty of seeing Doeg in it, refers it. Malicious lies and arrogant trust in riches were not the crimes that cried for vengeance in the bloody massacre at Nob. Cheyne would bring this group of "Davidic" psalms (Psalms 52:1-9, Psalms 59:1-17) down to the Persian period (Orig of Psalt., 121-23). Olshausen, after Theodore of Mopsuestia (see Cheyne loc. cit.) to the Maccabean. But the grounds alleged are scarcely strong enough to carry more than the weight of a "may be"; and it is better to recognise that, if the superscription is thrown over, the psalm itself does not yield sufficiently characteristic marks to enable us to fix its date. It may be worth considering whether the very absence of any obvious correspondences with David’s circumstances does not show that the superscription rested on a tradition earlier than itself, and not on an editor’s discernment. The abrupt question at the beginning reveals the psalmist’s long-pent indignation. He has been silently brooding over the swollen arrogance and malicious lies of the tyrant till he can restrain himself no longer, and out pours a fiery flood. Evil gloried in is worse than evil done. The word rendered in the A.V. and R.V. "mighty man" is here used in a bad sense, to indicate that he has not only a giant’s power, but uses it tyrannously, like a giant. How dramatically the abrupt question is followed by the equally abrupt thought of the ever-during lovingkindness of God! That makes the tyrant’s boast supremely absurd, and the psalmist’s confidence reasonable, even in face of hostile power. The prominence given to sins of speech is peculiar. We should have expected high-handed violence rather than these. But the psalmist is tracking the deeds to their source; and it is not so much the tyrant’s words as his love of a certain kind of words which is adduced as proof of his wickedness. These words have two characteristics in addition to boastfulness. They are false and destructive. They are, according to the forcible literal meaning in Psalms 52:4, "words of swallowing." They are, according to the literal meaning of "destructions," in Psalms 52:2, "yawning gulfs." Such words lead to acts which make a tyrant. They flow from perverted preference of evil to good. Thus the deeds of oppression are followed up to their den and birthplace. Part of the description of the "words" corresponds to the fatal effect of Doeg’s report but nothing in it answers to the other part-falsehood. The psalmist’s hot indignation speaks in the triple, direct address to the tyrant which comes in each case like a lightning flash at the end of a clause (Psalms 52:1-2, Psalms 52:4). In the second of these the epithet "framing deceit" does not refer to the "sharpened razor," but to the tyrant. If referred to the former, it weakens rather than strengthens the metaphor, by bringing in the idea that the sharp blade misses its proper aim, and wounds cheeks instead of shearing off hair. The Selah of Psa 52:3 interrupts the description, in order to fix attention, by a pause filled up by music, on the hideous picture thus drawn. That description is resumed and summarised in Psalms 52:4, which, by the Selahs, is closely bound to Psalms 52:5 in order to enforce the necessary connection of sin and punishment, which is strongly underlined by the "also" or "so" at the beginning of the latter verse. The stern prophecy of destruction is based upon no outward signs of failure in the oppressor’s might, but wholly on confidence in God’s continual lovingkindness, which must needs assume attributes of justice when its objects are oppressed. A tone of triumph vibrates through the imagery of Psa 52:5, which is not in the same key as Christ has set for us. It is easy for those who have never lived under grinding, godless tyranny to reprobate the exultation of the oppressed at the sweeping away of their oppressors; but if the critics had seen their brethren set up as torches to light Nero’s gardens, perhaps they would have known some thrill of righteous joy when they heard that he was dead. Three strong metaphors describe the fall of this tyrant. He is broken down, as a building levelled with the ground. He is laid hold of, as a coal in the fire, with tongs (for so the word means), and dragged, as in that iron grip, out of the midst of his dwelling. He is uprooted like a tree with all its pride of leafage. Another blast of trumpets or clang of harps or clash of cymbals bids the listeners gaze on the spectacle of insolent strength laid prone, and withering as it lies. The third movement of thought (Psalms 52:6-7) deals with the effects of this retribution. It is a conspicuous demonstration of God’s justice and of the folly of reliance on anything but Himself. The fear which it produces in the "righteous" is reverential awe, not dread lest the same should happen to them. Whether or not history and experience teach evil men that "verily there is a God that judgeth," their lessons are not wasted on devout and righteous souls. But this is the tragedy of life, that its teachings are prized most by those who have already learned them, and that those who need them most consider them least. Other tyrants are glad when a rival is swept off the field, but are not arrested in their own course. It is left to "the righteous" to draw the lesson which all men should have learned. Although they are pictured as laughing at the ruin, that is not the main effect of it. Rather it deepens conviction, and is a "modern instance" witnessing to the continual truth of "an old saw." There is one safe stronghold, and only one. He who conceits himself to be strong in his own evil, and, instead of relying on God, trusts in material resources, will sooner or later be levelled with the ground, dragged, resisting vainly the tremendous grasp, from his tent and laid prostrate, as melancholy a spectacle as a great tree blown down by tempest with its roots turned up to the sky and its arms with drooping leaves trailing on the ground. A swift turn of feeling carries the singer to rejoice in the contrast of his own lot. No uprooting does he fear. It may be questioned whether the words "in the house of God" refer to the psalmist or to the olive tree. Apparently there were trees in the Temple; (Psalms 92:13) but the parallel in the next clause, "in the lovingkindness of God," points to the reference of the words to the speaker. Dwelling in enjoyment of God’s fellowship, as symbolised by and realised through presence in the sanctuary, whether it were at Nob or in Jerusalem, he dreads no such forcible removal as had befallen the tyrant. Communion with God is the source of flourishing and fruitfulness, and the guarantee of its own continuance. Nothing in the changes of outward life need touch it. The mists which lay on the psalmist’s horizon are cleared away for us, who know that "forever and aye" designates a proper eternity of dwelling in the higher house and drinking the full dew of God’s lovingkindness. Such consciousness of present blessedness in communion lifts a soul to prophetic realisation of deliverance, even while no change has occurred in circumstances. The tyrant is still boasting; but the psalmist’s tightened hold of God enables him to see "things that are not as though they were," and to anticipate actual deliverance by praise for it. It is the prerogative of faith to alter tenses, and to say, Thou hast done, when the world’s grammar would say, Thou wilt do. "I will wait on Thy name" is singular, since what is done "in the presence of Thy favoured ones" would naturally be something seen or heard by them. The reading "I will declare" has been suggested. But surely the attitude of patient, silent expectance implied in "wait" may very well be conceived as maintained in the presence of, and perceptible by, those who had like dispositions, and who would sympathise and be helped thereby. Individual blessings are rightly used when they lead to participation in common thankfulness and quiet trust. Psalms 53:1-6 IN this psalm we have an Elohistic recast of Psa 14:1-7, differing from its original in substituting Elohim for Jehovah (four times) and in the language of Psa 53:5. There are also other slight deviations not affecting the sense. For the exposition the reader is referred to that of Psa 14:1-7. It is only necessary here to take note of the divergences. The first of these occurs in Psalms 53:1. The forcible rough construction "they corrupt, they make abominable," is smoothed down by the insertion of "and." The editor apparently thought that the loosely piled words needed a piece of mortar to hold them together, but his emendation weakens as well as smooths. On the other hand, he has aimed at increased energy of expression by substituting "iniquity" for "doings" in the same clause, which results in tautology and is no improvement. In Psalms 53:3 the word for "turned aside" is varied, without substantial difference of meaning. The alteration is very slight, affecting only one letter, and may be due to error in transcription or to mere desire to amend. In Psalms 53:4 "all," which in Psalms 14:1-7 precedes "workers of iniquity," is omitted, probably as unnecessary. The most important changes are in Psalms 53:5, which stands for Psalms 14:5 and Psalms 14:6 of Psalms 14:1-7. The first is the insertion of "where no fear was." These words may be taken as describing causeless panic, or, less probably, as having a subjective reference, and being equal to "while in the midst of careless security." They evidently point to some fact, possibly the destruction of Sennacherib’s army. Their insertion shows that the object of the alterations was to adapt an ancient psalm as a hymn of triumph for recent deliverance, thus altering its application from evil-doers within Israel to enemies without. The same purpose is obvious in the transformations effected in the remainder of this verse. Considerable as these are, the recast most ingeniously conforms to the sound of the original. If we could present the two versions in tabular form, the resemblance would appear more strikingly than we can here bring it out. The first variation-i.e., "scatters" instead of "in the generation"-is effected by reading "pizzar" for "b’dhor," a clear case of intentional assonance. Similarly the last word of the verse, "has rejected them," is very near in consonants and sound to "his refuge" in Psalms 14:6. The like effort at retaining the general sound of the earlier psalm runs through the whole verse. Very significantly the complaint of the former singer is turned into triumph by the later, who addresses the delivered Israel with "Thou hast put them to shame," while the other psalm could but address the "fools" with "Ye would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted." In like manner the tremulous hope of the original, "God is his refuge," swells into commemoration of an accomplished fact in "God has rejected them." The natural supposition is that some great deliverance of Israel had just taken place, and inspired this singular attempt to fit old words to new needs. Whatever the historical occasion may have been, the two singers unite in one final aspiration, a sigh of longing for the coming of Israel’s full salvation, which is intensified in the recast by being put in the plural ("salvations") instead of the singular, as in Psalms 14:1-7, to express the completeness and manifoldness of the deliverance thus yearned for of old, and not yet come in its perfection. Psalms 54:1-7 THE tone and language of this psalm have nothing special. The situation of the psalmist is the familiar one of being encompassed by enemies. His mood is the familiar one of discouragement at the sight of surrounding perils, which passes through petition into confidence and triumph. There is nothing in the psalm inconsistent with the accuracy of the superscription, which ascribes it to David, when the men of Ziph would have betrayed him to Saul. Internal evidence does not suffice to fix its date, if the traditional one is discarded. But there seems no necessity for regarding the singer as the personified nation, though there is less objection to that theory in this instance than in some psalms with a more marked individuality and more fervent expression of personal emotion, to which it is proposed to apply it. The structure is simple, like the thought and expression. The psalm falls into two parts, divided by Selah-of which the former is prayer, spreading before God the suppliant’s straits; and the latter is confident assurance, blended with petition and vows of thanksgiving. The order in which the psalmist’s thoughts run in the first part (Psalms 54:1-3) is noteworthy. He begins with appeal to God, and summons before his vision the characteristics in the Divine nature on which he builds his hope. Then he pleads for the acceptance of his prayer, and only when thus heartened does he recount his perils. That is a deeper faith which begins with what God is, and thence proceeds to look calmly at foes, than that which is driven to God in the second place, as a consequence of an alarmed gaze on dangers. In the latter case fear strikes out a spark of faith in the darkness; in the former, faith controls fear. The name of God is His manifested nature or character, the sum of all of Him which has been made known by His word or work. In that rich manifoldness of living powers and splendours this man finds reserves of force, which will avail to save him from any peril. That name is much more than a collection of syllables. The expression is beginning to assume the meaning which it has in post-Biblical Hebrew, where it is used as a reverential euphemism for the ineffable Jehovah. Especially to God’s power does the singer look with hopeful petitions, as in Psalms 54:1 b. But the whole name is the agent of his salvation. Nothing less than the whole fulness of the manifested God is enough for the necessities of one poor man; and that prayer is not too bold, nor that estimate of need presumptuous, Which asks for nothing less. Since it is God’s "might" which is appealed to, to judge the psalmist’s cause, the judgment contemplated is clearly not the Divine estimate of the moral desert of his doings, or retribution to him for these, but the vindication of his threatened innocence and deliverance of him from enemies. The reason for the prayer is likewise alleged as a plea with God to hear. The psalmist prays because he is ringed about by foes. God will hear because He is so surrounded. It is blessed to know that the same circumstances in our lot which drive us to God incline God to us. "Strangers," in Psalms 54:3, would most naturally mean foreigners, but not necessarily so. The meaning would naturally pass into that of enemies-men who, even though of the psalmist’s own blood, behave to him in a hostile manner. The word, then, does not negative the tradition in the superscription; though the men of Ziph belonged to the tribe of Judah, they might still be called "strangers." The verse recurs in Psalms 86:14, with a variation of reading-namely, "proud" instead of "strangers." The same variation is found here in some MSS and in the Targum. But probably it has crept in here in order to bring our psalm into correspondence with the other, and it is better to retain the existing reading, which is that of the LXX and other ancient authorities. The psalmist has no doubt that to hunt after his life is a sign of godlessness. The proof that violent men have not "set God before them" is the fact that they "seek his soul." That is a remarkable assumption, resting upon a very sure confidence that he is in such relation to God that enmity to him is sin. The theory of a national reference would make such identification of the singer’s cause with God’s most intelligible. But the theory that he is an individual, holding a definite relation to the Divine purposes and being for some end a Divine instrument, would make it quite as much so. And if David, who knew that he was destined to be king, was the singer, his confidence would be natural. The history represents that his Divine appointment was sufficiently known to make hostility to him a manifest indication of rebellion against God. The unhesitating fusion of his own cause with God’s could scarcely have been ventured by a psalmist, however vigorous his faith, if all that he had to go on and desired to express was a devout soul’s confidence that God would protect him. That may be perfectly true, and yet it may not follow that opposition to a man is godlessness. We cannot regard ourselves as standing in such a relation; but we may be sure that the name, with all its glories, is mighty to save us too. Prayer is, as so often in the Psalter, followed by immediately deepened assurance of victory. The suppliant rises from his knees, and points the enemies round him to his one Helper. In Psalms 54:4 b a literal rendering would mislead. "The Lord is among the upholders of my soul" seems to bring God down to a level on which others stand. The psalmist does not mean this, but that God gathers up in Himself, and that supremely, the qualities belonging to the conception of an upholder. It is, in form, an inclusion of God in a certain class. It is, in meaning, the assertion that He is the only true representative of the class. Commentators quote Jephthah’s plaintive words to his daughter as another instance of the idiom: "Alas, my daughter thou art one of them that trouble me"-i.e., my greatest troubler. That one thought, vivified into new power by the act of prayer, is the psalmist’s all-sufficient buckler, which he plants between himself and his enemies, bidding them "behold." Strong in the confidence that has sprung in his heart anew, he can look forward in the certainty that his adversaries (lit. those who lie in wait for me) will find their evil recoiling on themselves. The reading of the Hebrew text is, Evil shall return to; that of the Hebrew margin, adopted by the A.V. and R.V, is, He shall requite evil to. The meanings are substantially the same, only that the one makes the automatic action of retribution more prominent, while the other emphasises God’s justice in inflicting it. The latter reading gives increased force to the swift transition to prayer in Psalms 54:5 b. That petition is, like others in similar psalms, proper to the spiritual level of the Old Testament, and not to that of the New; and it is far more reverent, as well as accurate, to recognise fully the distinction than to try to slur it over. At the same time, it is not to be forgotten that the same lofty consciousness of the identity of his cause with God’s, which we have already had to notice, operating here in these wishes for the enemies’ destruction, gives another aspect to them than that of mere outbursts of private vengeance. That higher aspect is made prominent by the addition "in Thy troth." God’s faithfulness to His purposes and promises was concerned in the destruction, because these were pledged to the psalmist’s protection. His well-being was so intertwined with God’s promises that the Divine faithfulness demanded the sweeping away of his foes. That is evidently not the language which fits our lips. It implies a special relation to God’s plans, and it modifies the character of this apparently vindictive prayer. The closing verses of this simple little psalm touch very familiar notes. The faith which has prayed has grown so sure of answer that it already begins to think of the thank offerings. This is not like the superstitious vow. "I will give so-and-so if Jupiter"-or the Virgin-"will hear me." This praying man knows that he is heard, and is not so much vowing as joyfully anticipating his glad sacrifice. The same incipient personification of the name as in Psalms 54:1 is very prominent in the closing strains, Thank offerings - not merely statutory and obligatory, but brought by free, uncommanded impulse-are to be offered to "Thy name," because that name is good: Psalms 54:7 probably should be taken as going even further in the same direction of personification, for "Thy name" is probably to be taken as the subject of "hath delivered." The tenses of the verbs in Psalms 54:7 are perfects. They contemplate the deliverance as already accomplished. Faith sees the future as present. This psalmist, surrounded by strangers seeking his life, can quietly stretch out a hand of faith, and bring near to himself the tomorrow when he will look back on scattered enemies and present, glad sacrifices! That power of drawing a brighter future into a dark present belongs not to those who build anticipations on wishes, but to those who found their forecasts on God’s known purpose and character. The name is a firm foundation for hope. There is no other. The closing words express confidence in the enemies’ defeat and destruction, with a tinge of feeling that is not permissible to Christians. But the supplement, "my desire," is perhaps rather too strongly expressive of wish for their ruin. Possibly there needs no supplement at all, and the expression simply paints the calm security of the man protected by God, who can "look upon" impotent hostility without the tremor of an eyelid, because he knows who is his Helper. Psalms 55:1-23 THE situation of the psalmist has a general correspondence with that of David in the period of Absalom’s rebellion, and the identification of the traitorous friend with Ahithophel is naturally suggested. But there are considerable difficulties in the way of taking that view. The psalmist is evidently in the city, from which he longs to escape; but Ahithophel’s treachery was not known to David till after his flight. Would a king have described his counsellor, however trusted, as "a man my equal"? The doubt respecting the identity of the traitor, however, does not seriously militate against the ordinary view of the date and occasion of the psalm, if we suppose that it belongs to the period immediately before the outburst of the conspiracy, when David was still in Jerusalem, but seeing the treason growing daily bolder, and already beginning to contemplate flight. The singularly passive attitude which he maintained during the years of Absalom’s plotting was due to his consciousness of guilt and his submission to punishment. Hitzig ascribes the psalm to Jeremiah, principally on the ground of the resemblance of the prophet’s wish for a lodge in the wilderness (Jeremiah 9:2) to the psalmist’s yearning in Psalms 55:6-8. Cheyne brings it down to the Persian period; Olshausen, to the Maccabean. The Davidic authorship has at least as much to say for itself as any of these conjectures. The psalm may be regarded as divided into three parts, in each of which a different phase of agitated feeling predominates, but not exclusively. Strong excitement does not marshal emotions or their expression according to artistic proprieties of sequence, and this psalm is all ablaze with it. That vehemence of emotion sufficiently accounts for both the occasional obscurities and the manifest want of strict accuracy in the flow of thought, without the assumption of dislocation of parts or piecing it with a fragment of another psalm. When the heart is writhing within, and tumultuous feelings are knocking at the door of the lips, the words will be troubled and heaped together, and dominant thoughts will repeat themselves in defiance of logical continuity. But, still, complaint and longing sound through the wailing, yearning notes of Psa 55:1-8; hot indignation and terrible imprecations in the stormy central portion (Psalms 55:9-15); and a calmer note of confidence and hope, through which, however, the former indignation surges up again, is audible in the closing verses (Psalms 55:16-23). The psalmist pictures his emotions in the first part, with but one reference to their cause, and but one verse of petition. He begins, indeed, with asking that his prayer may be heard; and it is well when a troubled heart can raise itself above the sea of troubles to stretch a hand towards God. Such an effort of faith already prophesies firm footing on the safe shore. But very pathetic and true to the experience of many a sorrowing heart is the psalmist’s immediately subsequent dilating on his griefs. There is a dumb sorrow, and there is one which unpacks its heart in many words and knows not when to stop. The psalmist is distracted in his bitter brooding on his troubles. The word means to move restlessly, and may either apply to body or mind, perhaps to both; for Eastern demonstrativeness is not paralysed, but stimulated to bodily tokens, by sorrow. He can do nothing but groan or moan. His heart "writhes" in him. Like an avalanche, deadly terrors have fallen on him and crushed him. Fear and trembling have pierced into his inner being, and "horror" (a rare word, which the LXX here renders darkness) wraps him round or covers him, as a cloak does. It is not so much the pressure of present evil, as the shuddering anticipation of a heavier storm about to burst, which is indicated by these pathetic expressions. The cause of them is stated in a single verse (Psalms 55:3). "The voice of the enemy" rather than his hand is mentioned first, since threats and reproaches precede assaults; and it is budding, not full-blown, enmity which is in view. In Psalms 55:3 b "oppression" is an imperfect parallelism with "voice," and the conjectural emendation (which only requires the prefixing of a letter) of "cries," adopted by Cheyne, after Olshausen and others, is tempting. They "fling down iniquity" on him as rocks are hurled or rolled from a height on invaders-a phrase which recalls David’s words to his servants, urging flight before Absalom, "lest he bring down evil upon us." Then, from out of all this plaintive description of the psalmist’s agitation and its causes, starts up that immortal strain which answers to the deepest longings of the soul, and has touched responsive chords in all whose lives are not hopelessly outward and superficial-the yearning for repose. It may be ignoble, or lofty and pure; it may mean only cowardice or indolence; but it is deepest in those who stand most unflinchingly at their posts, and crush it down at the command of duty. Unless a soul knows that yearning for a home in stillness, "afar from the sphere of our sorrow," it will remain a stranger to many high and noble things. The psalmist was moved to utter this longing by his painful consciousness of encompassing evils; but the longing is more than a desire for exemption from these. It is the cry of the homeless soul, which, like the dove from the ark, finds no resting place in a world full of carrion, and would fain return whence it came. "O God, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and we are unquiet till we find rest in Thee." No obligation of duty keeps migratory birds in a land where winter is near. But men are better than birds, because they have other things to think of than repose, and must face, not flee, storms and hurricanes. It is better to have wings "like birds of tempest-loving kind," and to beat up against the wind, than to outfly it in retreat. So the psalmist’s wish was but a wish; and he, like the rest of us, had to stand to his post, or be tied to his stake, and let enemies and storms do their worst. The LXX has a striking reading of Psa 55:8, which Cheyne has partially adopted. It reads for Psalms 55:8 a "waiting for Him who saves me"; but beautiful as this is, as giving the picture of the restful fugitive in patient expectation, it brings an entirely new idea into the picture, and blends metaphor and fact confusedly. The Selah at the close of Psa 55:7 deepens the sense of still repose by a prolonged instrumental interlude. The second part turns from subjective feelings to objective facts. A cry for help and a yearning for a safe solitude were natural results of the former; but when the psalmist’s eye turns to his enemies, a flash of anger lights it, and, instead of the meek longings of the earlier verses, prayers for their destruction are vehemently poured out. The state of things in the city corresponds to what must have been the condition of Jerusalem during the incubation of Absalom’s conspiracy, but is sufficiently general to fit any time of strained party feeling. The caldron simmers, ready to boil over. The familiar evils, of which so many psalms complain, are in full vigour. The psalmist enumerates them with a wealth of words which indicates their abundance. Violence, strife, iniquity, mischief, oppression, and deceit-a goodly company to patrol the streets and fill the open places of the city! Psalms 55:10 a-is sometimes taken as carrying on the personification of Violence and Strife in Psalms 55:9, by painting these as going their rounds on the walls like sentries; but it is better to suppose that the actual foes are meant, and that they are keeping up a strict watch to prevent the psalmist’s escape. Several commentators consider that the burst of indignation against the psalmist’s traitorous friend in Psalms 55:12-14 interrupts the sequence, and propose rearrangements by which Psalms 55:20-21, will be united with Psalms 55:12-14, and placed either before Psalms 55:6 or after Psalms 55:15. But the very abruptness with which the thought of the traitor is interjected here, and in the subsequent reference to him, indicates how the singer’s heart was oppressed by the treason; and the return to the subject in Psalms 55:20 is equally significant of his absorbed and pained brooding on the bitter fact. That is a slight pain which is removed by one cry. Rooted griefs, overwhelming sorrows, demand many repetitions. Trouble finds ease in tautology. It is absurd to look for cool, logical sequence in such a heart’s cry as this psalm. Smooth continuity would be most unnatural. The psalmist feels that the defection of his false friend is the worst blow of all. He could have braced himself to bear an enemy’s reviling; he could have found weapons to repel, or a shelter in which to escape from, open foes; but the baseness which forgets all former sweet companionship in secret, and all association in public and in worship, is more than he can bear up against. The voice of wounded love is too plain in the words for the hypothesis that the singer is the personified nation. Traitors are too common to allow of a very confident affirmation that the psalm must point to Ahithophel, and the description of the perfidious friend as the equal of the psalmist does not quite fit that case. As he thinks of all the sweetness of past intimacy, turned to gall by such dastardly treachery, his anger rises. The description of the city and of the one enemy in whom all its wickedness is, as it were, concentrated, is framed in a terrible circlet of prayers for the destruction of the foes. Psalms 55:9 a begins and Psalms 55:15 ends this part with petitions which do not breathe the spirit of "Father, forgive them." There may be a reference to the confusion of tongues at Babel in the prayer of Psa 55:9. As then the impious work was stopped by mutual unintelligibility, so the psalmist desires that his enemies machinations may be paralysed in like manner. In Psalms 55:15 the translation "desolations" follows the Hebrew text, while the alternative and in some respects preferable reading "May death come suddenly" follows the Hebrew marginal correction. There are difficulties in both, and the correction does not so much smooth the language as to be obviously an improvement. The general sense is clear, whichever reading is preferred. The psalmist is calling down destruction on his enemies; and while the fact that he is in some manner an organ of the Divine purpose invests hostility to him with the darker character of rebellion against God, and therefore modifies the personal element in the prayer, it still remains a plain instance of the lower level on which the Old Testament saints and singers stood, when compared with the "least in the kingdom of heaven." The third part of the psalm returns to gentler tones of devotion and trust. The great name of Jehovah appears here significantly. To that ever-living One, the Covenant God, will the psalmist cry, in assurance of answer. "Evening, and morning, and noon" designate the whole day by its three principal divisions, and mean, in effect, continually. Happy are they who are impelled to unintermitting prayer by the sight of unslumbering enmity! Enemies may go their rounds "day and night," but they will do little harm, if the poor, hunted man, whom they watch so closely, lifts his cries to Heaven "evening, and morning, and noon." The psalmist goes back to his first words. He had begun by saying that he was distracted as he mused, and could do nothing but groan, and in Psalms 55:17 he repeats that he will still do so. Has he, then, won nothing by his prayer but the prolongation of his first dreary tone of feeling? He has won this-that his musing is not accompanied by distraction, and that his groaning is not involuntary expression of pain, but articulate prayer, and therefore accompanied by the confidence of being heard. Communion with God and prayerful trust in his help do not at once end sadness and sobbing, but do change their character and lighten the blackness of grief. This psalmist, like so many of his fellows, realises deliverance before he experiences it, and can sing "He has redeemed my soul" even while the calamity lasts. "They come not near me," says he. A soul hidden in God has an invisible defence which repels assaults. As with a man in a diving bell, the sea may press on the crystal walls, but cannot crush them in or enter, and there is safe, dry lodging inside, while sea billows and monsters are without, close to the diver and yet far from him. Psalms 55:19 is full of difficulty, and most probably has suffered some textual corruption. To "hear and answer" is uniformly an expression for gracious hearing and beneficent answering. Here it can only mean the opposite, or must be used ironically. God will hear the enemies’ threats, and will requite them. Various expedients have been suggested for removing the difficulty. It has been proposed to read "me" for "them" which would bring everything into order-only that, then, the last clauses of the verse, which begin with a relative ("who have no changes," etc.), would want an antecedent. It has been proposed to read "will humble them" for "will answer them," which, is the LXX translation. That requires a change in the vowels of the verb, and "answer" is more probable than "humble" after "hear." Cheyne follows Olshausen in supposing that "the cry of the afflicted" has dropped out after "hear." The construction of Psa 55:19 b is anomalous, as the clause is introduced by a superfluous "and," which may be a copyist’s error. The Selah attached is no less anomalous. It is especially difficult to explain, in view of the relative which begins the third clause, and which would otherwise be naturally brought into close connection with the "them," the objects of the verbs in a. These considerations lead Hupfeld to regard Psalms 55:19 as properly ending with Selah, and the remaining clauses as out of place, and properly belonging to Psalms 55:15 or Psalms 55:18; while Cheyne regards the alternative supposition that they are a fragment of another psalm as possible. There is probably some considerable corruption of the text, not now to be remedied; but the existing reading is at least capable of explanation and defence. The principal difficulty in the latter part of Psa 55:19 is the meaning of the word rendered "changes." The persons spoken of are those whom God will hear and answer in His judicial character, in which He has been throned from of old. Their not having "changes" is closely connected with their not fearing God. The word is elsewhere used for changes of raiment, or for the relief of military guards. Calvin and others take the changes intended to be vicissitudes of fortune, and hence draw the true thought that unbroken prosperity tends to forgetfulness of God. Others take the changes to be those of mind or conduct from evil to good, while others fall back upon the metaphor of relieving guard, which they connect with the picture in Psalms 55:10 of the patrols on the walls, so getting the meaning "they have no cessation in their wicked watchfulness." It must be acknowledged that none of these meanings is quite satisfactory; but probably the first, which expresses the familiar thought of the godlessness attendant on uninterrupted prosperity, is best. Then follows another reference to the traitorous friend, which, by its very abruptness, declares how deep is the wound he has inflicted. The psalmist does not stand alone. He classes with himself those who remained faithful to him. The traitor has not yet thrown off his mask. though the psalmist has penetrated his still retained disguise. He comes with smooth words; but, in the vigorous language of Psa 55:21, "his heart is war." The fawning softness of words known to be false cuts into the heart, which had trusted and knows itself betrayed, more sharply than keen steel. Psalms 55:22 has been singularly taken as the smooth words which cut so deep; but surely that is a very strained interpretation. Much rather does the psalmist exhort himself and all who have the same bitterness to taste, to commit themselves to Jehovah. What is it which he exhorts us to cast on Him? The word employed is used here only, and its meaning is therefore questionable. The LXX and others translate "care." Others, relying on Talmudical usage, prefer "burden," which is appropriate to the following promise of being held erect. Others (Hupfeld, etc.) would read "that which He has given thee." The general sense is clear, and the faith expressed in both exhortation and appended promise has been won by the singer through his prayer. He is counselling and encouraging himself. The spirit has to spur the "soul" to heroisms of faith and patience. He is declaring a universal truth. However crushing our loads of duty or of sorrow, we receive strength to carry them with straight backs, if we cast them on Jehovah. The promise is not that He will take away the pressure, but that He will hold us up under it; and, similarly, the last clause declares that the righteous will not be allowed to stumble. Faith is mentioned before righteousness. The two must go together; for trust which is not accompanied and manifested by righteousness is no true trust, and righteousness which is not grounded in trust is no stable or real righteousness. The last verse sums up the diverse fates of the "men of blood and deceit" and of the psalmist. The terrible prayers of the middle portion of the psalm have wrought the assurance of their fulfilment, just as the cries of faith have brought the certainty of theirs. So the two closing verses of the psalm turn both parts of the earlier petitions into prophecies; and over against the trustful, righteous psalmist, standing erect and unmoved, there is set the picture of the "man of blood and deceit," chased down the black slopes to the depths of destruction by the same God whose hand holds up the man that trusts in Him. It is a dreadful contrast, and the spirit of the whole psalm is gathered into it. The last clause of all makes "I" emphatic. It expresses the final resolution which springs in the singer’s heart in view of that dread picture of destruction and those assurances of support. He recoils from the edge of the pit, and eagerly opens his bosom for the promised blessing. Well for us if the upshot of all our meditations on the painful riddle of this unintelligible world, and of all our burdens and of all our experiences and of our observation of other men’s careers, is the absolute determination, "As for me, I will trust in Jehovah!" Psalms 56:1-13 THE superscription dates this psalm from the time of David’s being in Gath. Probably his first stay there is meant, during which he had recourse to feigned insanity in order to secure his safety. What a contrast between the seeming idiot scrabbling on the walls and the saintly singer of this lovely song of purest trust! But striking as the contrast is, it is not too violent to be possible. Such heroic faith might lie very near such employment of pardonable dissimulation, even if the two moods of feeling can scarcely have been contemporaneous. Swift transitions characterise the poetic temperament; and, alas! fluctuations of courage and faith characterise the devout soul. Nothing in the psalm specially suggests the date assigned in the superscription; but, as we have already had occasion to remark, that may be an argument for, not against, the correctness of the superscription. The psalm is simple in structure. Like others ascribed to David during the Sauline period, it has a refrain, which divides it into two parts; but these are of substantially the same purport, with the difference that the second part enlarges the description of the enemies’ assaults, and rises to confident anticipation of their defeat. In that confidence the singer adds a closing expression of thankfulness for the deliverance already realised in faith. The first part begins with that significant contrast which is the basis of all peaceful fronting of a hostile world or any evil. On one side stands man, whose very name here suggests feebleness, and on the other is God. "Man" in Psalms 56:1 is plainly a collective. The psalmist masses the foes, whom he afterwards individualises and knows only too well to be a multitude, under that generic appellation, which brings out their inherent frailty. Be they ever so many, still they all belong to the same class, and an infinite number of nothings only sums up into nothing. The Divine Unit is more than all these. The enemy is said to "pant after" the psalmist, as a wild beast openmouthed and ready to devour; or, according to others, the word means to crush. The thing meant by the strong metaphor is given in Psalms 56:1 b, Psalms 56:2; namely, the continual hostile activity of the foe. The word rendered "proudly" is literally "on high," and Baethgen suggests that the literal meaning should be retained. He supposes that the antagonists "held an influential position in a princely court." Even more literally the word may describe the enemies as occupying a post of vantage, from which they shower down missiles. One brief verse, the brevity of which gives it emphasis, tells of the singer’s fears, and of how he silences them by the dead lift of effort by which he constrains himself to trust. It is a strangely shallow view which finds a contradiction in this utterance, which all hearts, that have ever won calmness in agitation and security amid encompassing dangers by the same means, know to correspond to their own experience. If there is no fear, there is little trust. The two do coexist. The eye that takes in only visible facts on the earthly level supplies the heart with abundant reasons for fear. But it rests with ourselves whether we shall yield to those, or whether, by lifting our eyes higher and fixing the vision on the Unseen and on Him who is invisible, we shall call such an ally to our side as shall make fear and doubt impossible. We have little power of directly controlling fear or any other feeling, but we can determine the objects on which we shall fix attention. If we choose to look at "man," we shall be unreasonable if we do not fear; if we choose to look at God, we shall be more unreasonable if we do not trust. The one antagonist of fear is faith. Trust is a voluntary action for which we are responsible. The frequent use of the phrase "In the day when" is noticeable. It occurs in each verse of the first part, excepting the refrain. The antagonists are continually at work, and the psalmist, on his part, strives to meet their machinations and to subdue his own fears with as continuous a faith. The phrase recurs in the second part in a similar connection. Thus, then, the situation as set forth in the first part has three elements, -the busy malice of the foes; the effort of the psalmist, his only weapon against them, to hold fast his confidence; and the power and majesty of God, who will be gracious when besought. The refrain gathers up these three in a significantly different order. The preceding verses arranged them thus-God, man, the trusting singer. The refrain puts them thus-God, the trusting singer, man. When the close union between a soul and God is clearly seen and inwardly felt, the importance of the enemies dwindles. When faith is in the act of springing up, God, the refuge, and man, the source of apprehension, stand over against each other, and the suppliant, looking on both, draws near to God. But when faith has fruited, the believing soul is coupled so closely to the Divine Object of its faith, that He and it are contemplated as joined in blessed reciprocity of protection and trust, and enemies are in an outer region, where they cannot disturb its intercourse with its God. The order of thought in the refrain is also striking. First, the singer praises God’s word. By God’s gracious help he knows that he will receive the fulfilment of God’s promises (not necessarily any special "word," such as the promise of a throne to David). And then, on the experience of God’s faithfulness thus won, is reared a further structure of trust, which completely subdues fear. This is the reward of the effort after faith which the psalmist made. He who begins with determining not to fear will get such tokens of God’s troth that fear will melt away like a cloud, and he will find his sky cleared, as the nightly heavens are swept free of cloud rack by the meek moonlight. The second part covers the same ground. Trust, like love, never finds it grievous to write the same things. There is delight, and there is strengthening for the temper of faith, in repeating the contemplation of the earthly facts which make it necessary, and the super-sensuous facts which make it blessed. A certain expansion of the various parts of the theme, as compared with the first portion of the psalm, is obvious. Again the phrase "all the day" occurs in reference to the unwearying hostility which dogs the singer. "They wrest my words" may be, as Cheyne prefers, "They torture me with words." That rendering would supply a standing feature of the class of psalms to which this belongs. The furtive assembling, the stealthy setting of spies who watch his steps (lit. heels, as ready to spring on him from behind), are no new things, but are in accordance with what has long been the enemies’ practice. Psalms 56:7 brings in a new element not found in the first part-namely, the prayer for the destruction of these unwearied watchers. Its first clause is obscure. If the present text is adhered to, the rendering of the clause as a question is best. A suggested textual correction has been largely adopted by recent commentators, which by a very slight alteration gives the meaning "For their iniquity requite them." The alteration, however, is not necessary, and the existing text may be retained, though the phrase is singular. The introduction of a prayer for a world wide judgment in the midst of so intensely individual a psalm is remarkable, and favours the theory that the afflicted man of the psalm is really the nation; but it may be explained on the ground that, as in Psalms 7:8, the judgment on behalf of one man is contemplated as only one smaller manifestation of the same judicial activity which brings about the universal judgment. This single reference to the theme which fills so considerable a part of the other psalms of this class is in harmony with the whole tone of this gem of quiet faith, which is too much occupied with the blessedness of its own trust to have many thoughts of the end of others. It passes, therefore, quickly, to dwell on yet another phase of that blessedness. The tender words of Psa 56:8 need little elucidation. They have brought comfort to many, and have helped to dry many tears. How the psalmist presses close to God, and how sure he is of His gentle care and love! "Thou reckonest my wandering." The thought is remarkable, both in its realisation of God’s individualising relation to the soul that trusts Him, and as in some degree favouring the Davidic authorship. The hunted fugitive feels that every step of his weary interlacing tracks, as he stole from point to point as danger dictated, was known to God. The second clause of the verse is thought by prosaic commentators to interrupt the sequence, because it interjects a petition between two statements; but surely nothing is more natural than such an "interruption." What a lovely figure is that of God’s treasuring up His servants’ tears in His "bottle," the skin in which liquids were kept! What does He keep them for? To show how precious they are in His sight, and perhaps to suggest that they are preserved for a future use. The tears that His children shed and give to Him to keep cannot be tears of rebellious or unmeasured weeping, and will be given back one day to those who shed them, converted into refreshment, by the same Power which of old turned water into wine. "Think not thou canst weep a tear, And thy Maker is not near." Not only in order to minister retribution to those who inflicted them, but also in order to give recompense of gladness to weepers, are these tears preserved by God; and the same idea is repeated by the other metaphor of Psa 56:8 c. God’s book, or reckoning, contains the count of all the tears as well as wanderings of His servant. The certainty that it is so is expressed by the interrogative form of the clause. The "then" of Psalms 56:9 may be either temporal or logical. It may mean "things being so," or "in consequence of this," or it may mean "at the time when," and may refer to the further specification of period in the next clause. That same day which has already been designated as that of the enemies’ panting after the psalmist’s life, and wresting of his words, and, on the other hand, as that of his fear, is now the time of his prayer, and consequently of their defeat and flight. The confidence which struggled with fear in the closing words of the first part, is now consolidated into certain knowledge that God is on the singer’s side, and in a very deep sense belongs to him. This is the foundation of his hope of deliverance; and in this clear knowledge he chants once more his refrain. As is often the case, slight differences, mainly due to artistic love of variety in uniformity, occur in the repeated refrain. "Word" stands instead of "His word"; "man," instead of "flesh"; and a line is intercalated, in which Jehovah is substituted for God. The addition may be a later interpolation, but is probably part of the original text, and due to the same intelligible motives which prompted the occasional use of the great Covenant Name in the Elohistic psalms of this second book. The psalmist’s exuberant confidence overflows the limits of his song, in a closing couple of verses which are outside its scheme. So sure is he of deliverance, that, as often in similar psalms, his thoughts are busied in preparing his sacrifice of thanks before the actual advent of the mercy for which it is to be offered. Such swift-footed Gratitude is the daughter of very vivid Faith. The ground of the thank offering is deliverance of "the soul," for which foes have "waited." "Thou hast delivered" is a perfect tense expressing confidence in the certainty of the as yet unrealised exercise of God’s power. The question of Psa 56:13 b, like that of Psa 56:8 c (and perhaps that of Psa 56:7 a), is an emphatic affirmation, and the verb to be supplied is not "Wilt thou?" as the A.V. has it, but, as is plain from the context, and from the quotation of this verse in Psalms 116:8, "Hast thou?" The Divine deliverance is complete, -not only doing the greater, but also the less; and not barely saving life, but sustaining the steps. God does not rescue by halves, either in the natural or spiritual realm; but in the former He first rescues and next preserves, and in the latter He delivers from the true death of the spirit, and then inspires to glad obedience. The psalm crowns its celebration of God’s miracles of deliverance by declaring the aim of them all to be that their recipient may walk before God-i.e., in continual consciousness of His cognisance of his deeds, and "in the light of the living" or "of life." The expression seems here to mean simply the present life, as contrasted with the darkness and inactivity of Sheol; but we can scarcely help remembering the deeper meaning given to it by Him who said that to follow Him was to have the light of life. Whether any dim foreboding of a better light than streams from even an Eastern sun, and of a truer life than the vain shadow which men call by that august name, floated before the singer or not, we can thankfully interpret his words, so as to make them the utterance of the Christian consciousness that the ultimate design of all God’s deliverances of souls from death and of feet from falling is that, not only in ways of holiness here, but in the more perfect consciousness of His greater nearness hereafter, and in correspondingly increased perfectness of active service, we should walk before God in the light of the living. Psalms 57:1-11 THIS psalm resembles the preceding in the singer’s circumstances of peril and in his bold faith. It has also points of contact in the cry, "Be gracious," and in the remarkable expression for enemies, "Those that would swallow me up." It has also several features in common with the other psalms ascribed by the superscriptions to the time of the Sauline persecution. Like Psalms 7:1-17 are the metaphor of lions for enemies, that of digging a pit for their plots, the use of glory as a synonym for soul. The difficult word rendered "destructions" in Psalms 57:1 connects this psalm with Psalms 55:11, dated as belonging to the time of Saul’s hostility, and with Psalms 5:9; Psalms 38:12, both traditionally Davidic. There is nothing in the psalm against the attribution of it to David in the cave, whether of Adullam or Engedi, and the allusions to lying down among lions may possibly have been suggested by the wild beasts prowling round the psalmist’s shelter. The use in Psalms 57:1 of the picturesque word for taking refuge derives special appropriateness from the circumstances of the fugitive, over whose else defenceless head the sides of his cave arched themselves like great wings, beneath which he lay safe, though the growls of beasts of prey echoed round. But there is no need to seek for further certainty as to the occasion of the psalm. Baethgen thinks that it can only have been composed after "the annihilation of the independence of the Israelite state," because the vow in Psalms 57:9 to make God’s name known among the nations can only be the utterance of the oppressed congregation, which is sure of deliverance, because it is conscious of its Divine call to sing God’s praise to heathens. But that vow is equally explicable on the assumption that the individual singer was conscious of such a call. There is no very sharp division of parts in the psalm. A grand refrain separates it into two portions, in the former of which prayer for deliverance and contemplation of dangers prevail, while in the latter the foe is beheld as already baffled, and exuberant praise is poured forth and vowed. As in Psalms 54:1-7 and often, the first part begins with an act of faith reaching out to God, and strengthening itself by the contemplation of His character and acts. That energy of confidence wins assurance of help, and only after that calming certitude has filled the soul does the psalmist turn his eye directly on his enemies. His faith does not make him oblivious of his danger, but it minimises his dread. An eye that has seen God sees little terror in the most terrible things. The psalmist knows that a soul which trusts has a right to God’s gracious dealings, and he is not afraid to urge his confidence as a plea with God. The boldness of the plea is not less indicative of the depth and purity of his religious experience than are the tender metaphors in which it is expressed. What truer or richer description of trust could be given than that which likens it to the act of a fugitive betaking himself to the shelter of some mountain fastness, impregnable and inaccessible? What lovelier thought of the safe, warm hiding place which God affords was ever spoken than that of "the shadow of Thy wings"? Very significant is the recurrence of the same verb in two different tenses in two successive clauses (Psalms 57:1 b, c). The psalmist heartens himself for present and future trust by remembrance of past days, when he exercised it and was not put to shame. That faith is blessed, and cannot but be strong, which is nurtured by the remembrance of past acts of rewarded faith, as the leaves of bygone summers make rich mould for a new generation of flowers. When kites are in the sky, young birds seek protection from the mother’s wing as well as warmth from her breast. So the singer betakes himself to his shelter till "destructions are gone by." Possibly these are likened to a wild storm which sweeps across the land, but is not felt in the stillness of the cave fortress. Hidden in God, a man "heareth not the loud winds when they call," and may solace himself in the midst of their roar by the thought that they will soon blow over. He will not cease to take refuge in God when the stress is past, nor throw off his cloak when the rain ceases; but he will nestle close while it lasts, and have as his reward the clear certainty of its transiency. The faith which clings to God after the tempest is no less close than that which screened itself in Him while it raged. Hidden in his shelter, the psalmist, in Psalms 57:2 tells himself the grounds on which he may be sure that his cry to God will not be in vain. His name is "Most High," and His elevation is the pledge of His irresistible might. He is the "God" (the Strong) who accomplishes all for the psalmist which he needs, and His past manifestations in that character make His future interventions certain. Therefore the singer is sure of what will happen. Two bright angels-Lovingkindness and Troth or Faithfulness their names-will be despatched from heaven for the rescue of the man who has trusted. That is certain, because of what God is and has done. It is no less certain, because of what the psalmist is and has done; for a soul that gazes on God as its sole Helper, and has pressed, in its feebleness, close beneath these mighty pinions, cannot but bring down angel helpers, the executants of God’s love. The confidence expressed in Psalms 57:2 is interrupted by an abrupt glance at the enemy. "He that would swallow me up blasphemes" is the most probable rendering of a difficult phrase, the meaning and connection of which are both dubious. If it is so rendered, the connection is probably that Which we have expressed in the translation by inserting "For." The wish to destroy the psalmist is itself blasphemy, or is accompanied with blasphemy; and therefore God will surely send down what will bring it to nought. The same identification of his own cause with God’s, which marks many of the psalms ascribed to the persecuted David, underlies this sudden reference to the enemy, and warrants the conclusion drawn, that help will come. The Selah at the end of the clause is unusual in the middle of a verse; but it may be intended to underscore, as it were, the impiety of the enemy, and so corresponds with the other Selah in Psalms 57:6, which is also in an unusual place, and points attention to the enemy’s ruin, as this does to his wickedness. The description of the psalmist’s circumstances in Psalms 57:4 presents considerable difficulty. The division of clauses, the force of the form of the verb rendered I must lie down, and the meaning and construction of the word rendered "those who breathe out fire," are all questionable. If the accents are adhered to, the first clause of the verse is "My soul is among lions." That is by some-e.g., Delitzsch-regarded as literal description of the psalmist’s environment, but it is more natural to suppose that he is applying a familiar metaphor to his enemies. In Psalms 57:4 b the verb rendered above "I must lie down" is in a form which has usually a cohortative or optative force, and is by some supposed to have that meaning here, and to express trust which is willing to lie down even in a lion’s den. It seems, however, here to denote objective necessity rather than subjective willingness. Hupfeld would read lies down (third person), thus making "My soul" the subject of the verb, and getting rid of the difficult optative form. Cheyne suggests a further slight alteration in the word, so as to read, "My soul hath dwelt"-a phrase found in Psalms 120:6; and this emendation is tempting. The word rendered "those who breathe out fire" is by some taken to mean "those who devour," and is variously construed, as referring to the lions in a, taken literally, or as describing the sons of men in c. The general drift of the verse is clear. The psalmist is surrounded by enemies, whom he compares, as the Davidic psalms habitually do, to wild beasts. They are ready to rend. Open mouthed they seem to breathe out flames, and their slanders cut like swords. The psalmist’s contemplation of his forlorn lair among men worse than beasts of prey drives him back to realise again his refuge in God. He, as it were, wrenches his mind round to look at God rather than at the enemies. Clear perception of peril and weakness does its best work, when it drives to as clear recognition of God’s help, and wings faithful prayer. The psalmist, in his noble refrain, has passed beyond the purely personal aspect of the desired deliverance, and wishes not only that he may be shielded from his foes, but that God would, in that deliverance, manifest Himself in His elevation above and power over all created things. To conceive of his experience as thus contributing to God’s world wide glory seems presumptuous; but even apart from the consideration that the psalmist was conscious of a world wide mission, the lowliest suppliant has a right to feel that his deliverance will enhance the lustre of that Glory; and the lowlier he feels himself, the more wonderful is its manifestations in his well-being. But if there is a strange note in the apparent audacity of this identification, there is a deep one of self-suppression in the fading from the psalmist’s prayer of all mention of himself, and the exclusive contemplation of the effects on the manifestation of God’s character, which may follow his deliverance. It is a rare and lofty attainment to regard one’s own well-being mainly in its connection with God’s "Glory," and to desire the latter more consciously and deeply than the former. It has been proposed by Hupfeld to transpose Psalms 57:5-6, on the ground that a recurrence to the description of dangers is out of place after the refrain, and incongruous with the tone of the second part of the psalm. But do the psalmists observe such accuracy in the flow of their emotions? and is it not natural for a highly emotional lyric like this to allow some surge of feeling to run over its barriers? The reference to the enemies in Psalms 57:6 is of a triumphant sort, which naturally prepares for the burst of praise following, and worthily follows even the lyrical elevation of the refrain. The perfects seem at first sight to refer to past deliverances, which the psalmist recalls in order to assure himself of future ones. But this retrospective reference is not necessary, and the whole description in Psalms 57:6 is rather to be taken as that of approaching retribution on the foes, which is so certain to come that the singer celebrates it as already as good as done. The familiar figures of the net and pit by both of which wild animals are caught, and the as familiar picture of the hunter trapped in his own pitfall, need no elucidation. There is a grim irony of events, which often seems to delight in showing "the engineer hoised with his own petard"; and whether that spectacle is forthcoming or not the automatic effects of wrongdoing" always follow, and no man digs pits for others but somehow and somewhen he finds himself at the bottom of them, and his net wrapped round his own limbs. The Selah at the end of Psa 57:6 calls spectators to gather, as it were, round the sight of the ensnared plotter, lying helpless down there. A slight correction of the text does away with a difficulty in Psalms 57:6 b. The verb there is transitive, and in the existing text is in the singular, but "He has bowed down my soul" would be awkward, though not impossible, when coming between two clauses in which the enemies are spoken of in the plural. The emendation of the verb to the third person plural by the addition of a letter brings the clauses into line, and retains the usual force of the verb. The psalmist has done with the enemies; they are at the bottom of the pit. In full confidence of triumph and deliverance, he breaks out into a grand burst of praise. "My heart is fixed," or "steadfast." Twice the psalmist repeats this, as he does other emphatic thoughts in this psalm. (cp. Psalms 57:2, Psalms 57:4, Psalms 57:8-9). What power can steady that fluttering, wayward, agitated thing, a human heart? The way to keep light articles fixed on deck amidst rolling seas and howling winds; is to lash them to something fixed; and the way to steady a heart is to bind it to God. Built into the Rock, the building partakes of the steadfastness of its foundation. Knit to God, a heart is firm. The psalmist’s was steadfast because it had taken refuge in God; and so, even before his rescue from his enemies came to pass, he was emancipated from the fear of them, and could lift this song of praise. He had said that he must lie down among lions. But wherever his bed may be he is sure that he will rise from it; and however dark the night, he is sure that a morning will Come. In a bold and beautiful figure he says that he will "wake the dawn" with his song. The world wide destination of his praise is clear to him. It is plain that such anticipations as those of Psa 57:9 surpass the ordinary poetic consciousness, and must be accounted for on some special ground. The favourite explanation at present is that the singer is Israel, conscious of its mission. The old explanation that the singer is a king, conscious of his inspiration and divinely given office, equally meets the case. The psalmist had declared his trust that God would send out His angels of Lovingkindness and Troth. He ends his song with the conviction, which has become to him matter of experience, that these Divine "attributes" tower to heaven, and in their height symbolise their own infinitude. Nor is the other truth suggested by Psalms 57:10 to be passed over, that the manifestation of these attributes on earth leads to their being more gloriously visible in heaven. These two angels, who come forth from on high to do God’s errands for His poor, trusting servant go back, their work done, and are hailed as victors by the celestial inhabitants. By God’s manifestation of these attributes to a man, His glory is exalted above the heavens and all the earth. The same thought is more definitely expressed in Paul’s declaration that "to the principalities and powers in heavenly places is known by the Church the manifold wisdom of God." Psalms 58:1-11 THIS psalmist’s fiery indignation against unjust judges and evil-doers generally is not kindled by personal wrongs. The psalm comes hot from a heart lacerated by the sight of widespread corruption, and constrained to seek for patience in the thought of the swift sweeping away of evil men before their plans are effected. Stern triumph in the punitive manifestations of God’s rule, and keen sense of the need of such, are its keynotes. Vehement emotion stirs the poet’s imagination to heap together strong and, in part, obscure metaphors. Here emphatically "Indignatio facit versus." The psalm is Dantesque in its wealth of sombre imagination, which produces the most solemn effects with the homeliest metaphors, and in its awed and yet satisfied contemplation of the fate of evil-doers. It parts itself into three portions, -a dark picture of abounding evil (Psalms 58:1-5); its punishment prayed for (Psalms 58:6-9); and the consequent joy of the righteous and widespread recognition of the rule of a just God (Psalms 58:10-11). The abrupt question of Psa 58:1 speaks of long pent-up indignation, excited by protracted experience of injustice, and anticipates the necessary negative answer which follows. The word rendered by the A.V. and R.V. "in silence" or "dumb" can scarcely be twisted into intelligibility, and the small alteration of reading required for the rendering "gods" is recommended by the similar expressions in the kindred Psalms 82:1-8. Taken thus, the question is hurled at the appointed depositaries of judicial power and supreme authority. There is no need to suppose, with Hupfeld and others, whom Cheyne follows, that these "gods" are supernatural beings intrusted with the government of the world. The explanation of the name lies in the conception of such power as bestowed by God, and in some sense a delegation of His attribute; or, as our Lord explained the similar name in Psalms 82:1-8, as given because "to them the word of God came." It sets in sinister light the flagrant contradiction between the spirit in which these men exercised their office and the source from which they derived it, and thus sharpens the reproach of the question. The answer is introduced by a particle conveying a strong opposition to the previous supposition couched in the question. "Heart" and "hands" are so obviously antithetical, that the alteration of "in heart" to "ye all" is not acceptable, though it removes the incongruity of plans being wrought in the heart, the seat of devices, not of actions. "Work" may be here used anomalously, as we say "work out," implying the careful preparation of a plan, and there may even be a hint that the true acts are the undone acts of the heart. The unaccomplished purpose is a deed, though never clothed in outward fact. Evil determined is, in a profound sense, done before it is done; and, in another equally solemn, not done when "‘tis done," as Macbeth has taught us. The "act," as men call it, follows: "In the earth"-not only in the heart-"ye weigh out the violence of your hands." The scales of justice are untrue. Instead of dispensing equity, as they were bound to do, they clash into the balance the weight of their own violence. It is to be noted that the psalm says no more about the sins of unjust authorities, but passes on to describe the "wicked" generally. The transition may suggest that under unjust rulers all wrong doers find impunity, and so multiply and worsen; or it may simply be that these former are now merged in the class to which they belong. The type of "wickedness" gibbeted is the familiar one of malicious calumniators and persecutors. From birth onwards they have continuously been doers of evil. The psalmist is not laying down theological propositions about heredity, but describing the inveterate habit of sin which has become a second nature, and makes amendment hopeless. The reference to "lies" naturally suggests the image of the serpent’s poison. An envenomed tongue is worse than any snake’s bite. And the mention of the serpent stimulates the poet’s imagination to yet another figure, which puts most graphically that disregard ox warnings, entreaties, and every voice, human or Divine, that marks long-practised, customary sinfulness. There can be no more striking symbol of determined disregard to the calls of patient Love and the threats of outraged Justice than that of the snake lying coiled, with its head in the centre of its motionless folds, as if its ears were stopped by its own bulk, while the enchanter plays his softest notes and speaks his strongest spells in vain. There are such men, thinks this psalmist. There are none whom the mightiest spell, that of God’s love in Christ, could not conquer and free from their poison; but there are such as will close their ears to its plaintive sweetness. This is the condemnation that light is come and men love darkness, and had rather lie coiled in their holes than have their fangs extracted. The general drift of the second part (Psalms 58:6-9) is to call down Divine retribution on these obstinate, irreclaimable evil-doers. Figure is heaped on figure in a fashion suggestive of intense emotion. The transiency of insolent evil, the completeness of its destruction, are the thoughts common to them all. There are difficulties in translation, and, in Psalms 58:9, probable textual corruption: but these should not hide the tremendous power of gloomy imagination, which can lay hold of vulgar and in part loathsome things, and, by sheer force of its own solemn insight, can free them from all low or grotesque associations, and turn them into awful symbols. The intense desire for the sweeping away of evil-doers has met us in many previous psalms, and it is needless to repeat former observations on it. But it is nowhere expressed with such a wealth of metaphor as here. The first of these, that of crushing the jaws and breaking the teeth of a beast of prey, occurs also in Psalms 3:7. It is less terrible than the subsequent imprecations, since it only contemplates the wicked’s deprivation of power to do harm. In Psalms 58:7 a their destruction is sought, while, in the second clause of the same verse, the defeat of their attempts is desired. Psalms 58:8 then expands the former wish, and Psalms 58:9 the latter. This plain symmetrical arrangement makes the proposals to resort to transposition unnecessary. Mountain torrents quickly run themselves dry; and the more furious their rush, the swifter their exhaustion. They leave a chaos of whitened stones, that lie bleaching in the fierce sun when the wild spate is past. So stormy and so short will be the career of evil-doers. So could a good man of old wish it to be; and so may we be sure of and desire the cessation of oppression and man’s inhumanity to man. Psalms 58:7 b is obscure. All these figures are struck out with such parsimony of words that they are difficult. They remind one of some of the stern, unfinished work of Michael Angelo, where a blow or two of his chisel, or a dash or two of his brush, has indicated rather than expressed his purpose, and left a riddle, fascinating in its incompleteness, for smaller men to spell out. In Psalms 58:7 b it may be asked, Who is the archer? If God, then the whole is a presentation as if of an occurrence taking place before our eyes. God shoots His arrow, and at once it lodges in the heart of the enemies, and they are as though cut off. But it is better to take the wicked as the subject of both verbs, the change from singular to plural being by no means unusual in successive clauses with the same subject. If so, this clause recurs to the thought of Psa 58:6, and prays for the neutralising of the wicked man’s attempts. He fits his arrows, aims, and draws the bow. May they fall harmless, as if barbless! An emendation has been proposed by which the clause is made parallel with Psalms 37:2, "As grass let them be quickly cut off," thus securing a complete parallel with a, -and avoiding the difficulty in the word rendered by us "pointless." But the existing text gives a vigorous metaphor, the peculiarity of which makes it preferable to the feebler image of withering grass. The prayer for destruction is caught up again in Psalms 58:8, in two daring figures which tremble on the verge of lowering the key of the whole; but by escaping that peril, produce the contrary effect, and heighten it. A slug leaves a shining track of slime as it creeps, which exudes from its soft body, and thus it seems to disintegrate itself by its own motion. It is the same thought of the suicidal character of bad men’s efforts which was expressed by the stream foaming itself away in the nullah. It is the eternal truth that opposition to God’s will destroys itself by its own activity. The unfulfilled life of a premature birth, with eyes which never opened to the light for which they were made and possibilities which never unfolded, and which is huddled away into a nameless grave, still more impressively symbolises futility and transiency. In Psalms 58:9 the figure has given much trouble to commentators. Its broad meaning is, however, undoubted. It is, as Psalms 58:6 and Psalms 58:7 b, symbolic of the Divine intervention which wrecks wicked men’s plans before they are wrought out. The picture before the psalmist seems to be that of a company of travellers round their camp fire, preparing their meal. They heap brush wood under the pot, and expect to satisfy their hunger; but before the pot is warmed through, not to say before the water boils or the meat is cooked, down comes a whirlwind, which sweeps away fire, pot, and all. Every word of the clause is doubtful, and with the existing text, the best that can be done is not wholly satisfactory. If emendation is resorted to, the suggestion of Bickell, adopted by Cheyne, gives a good sense: "[And] while your [flesh] is yet raw, the hot wrath [of Jehovah] shall sweep it away." Baethgen makes a slighter alteration, and renders, "While it is still raw, He sweeps it away in wrath." Retaining the existing text (which is witnessed by the LXX and other old versions), probably the best rendering is, "Whether [it be] green or burning, He shall whirl it away." This general understanding of the words is shared by commentators who differ as to what is represented as swept away-some making it the thorn fire, the twigs of which may be either full of sap or well alight; while others take the reference to be to the meat in the pot, which may be either "living," i.e. raw, or well on the way to being cooked. Neither application is quite free from difficulty, especially in view of the fact that some pressure has to be put on the word rendered "burning," which is not an adjective, but a noun, and is usually employed to designate the fiery wrath of God, as it is rendered in the amended text just mentioned. After all attempts at clearing up the verse, one must be content to put a mark of interrogation at any rendering. But the scope of the figure seems discoverable through the obscurity: It is a homely and therefore vigorous picture of half-accomplished plans suddenly reduced to utter failure, and leaving their concocters hungry for the satisfaction which seemed so near. The cookery may go on merrily and the thorns crackle cheerily, but the simoom comes, topples over the tripod on which the pot swung, and blows the fire away in a hundred directions. Peter’s gibbet was ready, and the morning of his execution was near; but when day dawned, "there was no small stir what was become of him." The wind had blown him away from the expectation of the people of the Jews into safe quarters; and the fire was dispersed. The closing part (Psalms 58:10-11) breathes a stern spirit of joy over the destruction of the wicked. That is a terrible picture of the righteous bathing his feet in the blood of the wicked. (Psalms 68:23) It expresses not only the dreadful abundance of blood, but also the satisfaction of the "righteous" at its being shed. There is an ignoble and there is a noble and Christian satisfaction in even the destructive providences of God. It is not only permissible but imperative on those who would live in sympathy with His righteous dealings and with Himself, that they should see in these the manifestation of eternal justice, and should consider that they roll away burdens from earth and bring hope and rest to the victims of oppression. It is no unworthy shout of personal vengeance, nor of unfeeling triumph, that is lifted up from a relieved world when Babylon falls. If it is right in God to destroy, it cannot be wrong in His servants to rejoice that He does. Only they have to take heed that their emotion is untarnished by selfish gratulation, and is not untinged with solemn pity for those who were indeed doers of evil, but were themselves the greatest sufferers from their evil. It is hard, but not impossible, to take all that is expressed in the psalm, and to soften it by some effluence from the spirit of Him who wept over Jerusalem, and yet pronounced its doom. The last issue of God’s judgments contemplated by the psalm warrants the joy of the righteous; for in these there is a demonstration to the world that there is "fruit" to the righteous, and that notwithstanding all bewilderments from the sight of prosperous wickedness and oppressed righteousness "there is a God who judges in the earth." The word "judging" is here in the plural, corresponding with "‘God" (Elohim), which is also plural in form. Possibly the construction is to be explained on the ground that the words describe the thoughts of surrounding, polytheistic nations, who behold the exhibition of God’s righteousness. But more probably the plural is, here used for the sake of the contrast with the gods of Psa 58:1. Over these unworthy representatives of Divine justice sits the true judge, in the manifoldness of His attributes, exercising His righteous though slow-footed judgments. Psalms 59:1-17 THE superscription makes this the earliest of David’s psalms, dating from the Sauline persecution. It has many points of connection with the others of that group, but its closest affinities are with Psalms 55:1-23, which is commonly considered to belong to the period of incubation of Absalom’s rebellion (cf. Psalms 55:10 with Psalms 59:6; Psalms 59:14, and Psalms 55:21 with Psalms 59:7. The allusion to enemies patrolling the city, which is common to both psalms, seems to refer to a fact, and may in this psalm be founded on the watchfulness of Saul’s emissaries: but its occurrence in both weakens its force as here confirmatory of the superscription. It does not necessarily follow from the mention of the "nations" that the psalmist’s enemies are foreigners. Their presence in the city and the stress laid on words as their weapons are against that supposition. On the whole, the contents of the psalm do not negative the tradition in the title, but do not strongly attest it. If we have accepted the Davidic authorship of the other psalms of this group, we shall extend it to this one; for they clearly are a group, whether Davidic or not. The psalm falls into two principal divisions (Psalms 59:1-9 and Psalms 59:10-17), each closing with a refrain, and each subdivided into two minor sections, the former of which in each case ends with Selah, and the latter begins with another refrain. The two parts travel over much the same ground of petition, description of the enemies, confidence in deliverance and in the defeat of the foes. But in the first half the psalmist prays for himself, and in the second he prays against his persecutors, while assured confidence in his own deliverance takes the place of alarmed gaze on their might and cruelty. The former half of the first part begins and ends with petitions. Imbedded in these is a plaintive recounting of the machinations of the adversaries, which are, as it were, spread before God’s eyes, accompanied with protestations of innocence. The prayers, which enclose as in a circlet, this description of unprovoked hatred, are varied, so that the former petitions are directed to the singer’s deliverance, while the latter invoke judgment on his antagonists. The strong assertion of innocence is, of course, to be limited to the psalmist’s conduct to his enemies. They attack him without provocation. Obviously this feature corresponds to the facts of Saul’s hatred of David, and as obviously it does not correspond to the facts of Israel’s sufferings from foreign enemies, which are supposed by the present favourite interpretation to be the occasion of the psalm. No devout singer could so misunderstand the reason of the nation’s disasters as to allege that they had fallen upon innocent heads. Rather, when a psalmist bewailed national calamities, he traced them to national sins. "Anger went up against Israel, because they believed not in God." The psalmist calls God to look upon the doings of his enemies. Privy plots and open assaults are both directed against him. The enemy lie in wait for his life; but also, with fell eagerness, like that of soldiers making haste to rank themselves in battle array, they "run and set themselves." This is probably simply metaphor, for the rest of the psalm does not seem to contemplate actual warfare. The imminence of peril forces an urgent prayer from the threatened man. So urgent is it that it breaks in on the parallelism of Psa 59:4, substituting its piercing cry "Awake, behold!" for the proper second clause carrying on the description in the first. The singer makes haste to grasp God’s hand, because he feels the pressure of the wind blowing in his face. It is wise to break off the contemplation of enemies and dangers by crying to God. Prayer is a good interruption of a catalogue of perils. The petitions in Psalms 59:5 are remarkable, both in their accumulation of the Divine names and in their apparent transcending of the suppliant’s need. The former characteristic is no mere artificial or tautological heaping together of titles, but indicates repeated acts of faith and efforts of contemplation. Each name suggests something in God which encourages hope, and when appealed to by a trusting soul, moves Him to act. The very introductory word of invocation, "And Thou," is weighty. It sets the might of God in grand contrast to the hurrying hatred of the adversary; and its significance is enhanced if its recurrence in Psalms 59:8 and its relation to "And I" in Psalms 59:16 are taken into account. The combination of the Divine names is remarkable here, from the insertion of God (Elohim) between the two parts of the standing name, Jehovah of hosts. The anomaly is made still more anomalous by the peculiar form of the word, Elohim, which does not undergo the modification to be expected in such a construction. The same peculiarities occur in other Elohistic psalms. (Psalms 80:4; Psalms 80:19, and Psalms 84:8) The peculiar grammatical form would be explained if the three words were regarded as three coordinate names, Jehovah, Elohim, Zebaoth, and this explanation is favoured by good critics. But it is going too far to say, with Baethgen, that "Zebaoth can only be understood as an independent Divine name (Komm., in loc.). Other explanations are at least possible, such as that of Delitzsch, that "Elohim, like Jehovah, has become a proper name," and so does not suffer modification. The supplicatory force of the names, however, is clear, whatever may be the account of the formal anomalies. They appeal to God and they hearten the appellant’s confidence by setting forth the loftiness of God, who rules over the embattled forces of the universe, which "run and set themselves in array" at His bidding and for His servant’s help, and before which the ranks of the foes seem thin and few. They set forth also God’s relation to Israel, of which the single suppliant is a member. The petition, grounded upon these names, is supposed by modern commentators to prove that the psalmist’s enemies were heathens, which would, of course destroy the Davidic authorship, and make the singer a personification of the nation. But against this is to be observed the description of the enemies in the last clause of Psa 59:5 as "apostates," which must refer to Israelites. The free access to the "city," spoken of in Psalms 59:6, is also unfavourable to that supposition, as is the prominence given to the words of the enemy. Foreign foes would have had other swords than those carried between their lips. The prayer that Jehovah would arise to visit "all nations" is much more naturally explained, as on the same principle as the judgment of "the peoples" in Psalms 7:1-17. All special cases are subsumed under the one general judgment. The psalmist looks for his own deliverance as one instance of that world wide manifestation of Divine justice which will "render to every man according to his deeds." Not only personal considerations move him to his prayer; but, pressing as these are, and shrill as is the cry for personal deliverance, the psalmist is not so absorbed in self as that he cannot widen his thoughts and desires to a world wide manifestation of Divine righteousness, of which his own escape will be a tiny part. Such recognition of the universal in the particular is the prerogative in lower walks of the poet and the man of genius; it is the strength and solace of the man who lives by faith and links all things with God. The instruments here strike in, so as to fix attention on the spectacle of God aroused to smite and of the end of apostates. The comparison of the psalmist’s enemies to dogs occurs in another psalm ascribed to David. (Psalms 22:16; Psalms 22:20) They are like the masterless, gaunt, savage curs which infest the streets of Eastern cities, hungrily hunting for offal and ready to growl or snarl at every passer-by. Though the dog is not a nocturnal animal, evening would naturally be a time when these would specially prowl round the city in search of food, if disappointed during the day. The picture suggests the enemies’ eagerness, lawlessness, foulness, and persistency. If the psalm is rightly dated in the superscription, it finds most accurate realisation in the crafty, cruel watchfulness of Saul’s spies. The word rendered by the A.V. and R.V. "make a noise" is "said usually of the growling of the bear and the cooing of the dove" (Delitzsch). It indicates a lower sound than barking, and so expresses rage suppressed lest its object should take alarm. The word rendered (A.V. and R.V.) "belch" means to gush out, and is found in a good sense in Psalms 19:1. Here it may perhaps be taken as meaning "foam," with some advantage to the truth of the picture. "Swords are in their lips"-i.e., their talk is of slaying the psalmist, or their slanders cut like swords; and the crown of their evil is their scoff at the apparently deaf and passive God. With startling suddenness, as if one quick touch drew aside a curtain, the vision of God as He really regards the enemies is flashed on them in Psalms 59:8. The strong antithesis expressed by the "And Thou," as in Psalms 59:5, comes with overwhelming force. Below is the crowd of greedy foes, obscene, cruel, and blasphemous; above, throned in dread repose, which is not, as they dream, carelessness or ignorance, is Jehovah, mocking their fancied security. The tremendous metaphor of the laughter of God is too boldly anthropomorphic to be misunderstood. It sounds like the germ of the solemn picture in Psalms 2:1-12, and is probably the source of the similar expression in Psalms 37:13. The introduction of the wider thought of God’s "mocking"-i.e., discerning, and manifesting in act, the impotence of the ungodly efforts of "all nations"-is to be accounted for on the same principle of the close connection discerned by the devout singer between the particular and the general, which explains the similar extension of view in Psalms 59:5. Psalms 59:9 is the refrain closing the first part. The reading of the Hebrew text, "His strength," must be given up, as unintelligible, and the slight alteration required for reading "my" instead of "his" adopted, as in the second instance of the refrain in Psalms 59:17. The further alteration of text, however, by which "I will harp" would be read in Psalms 59:9 instead of "I will watch" is unnecessary, and the variation of the two refrains is not only in accordance with usage, but brings out a delicate phase of progress in confidence. He who begins with waiting for God ends with singing praise to God. The silence of patient expectance is changed for the melody of received deliverance. The first part of the second division, like the corresponding portion of the first division, is mainly prayer, but with the significant difference that the petitions now are directed, not to the psalmist’s deliverance but to his enemies’ punishment. For himself, he is sure that his God will come to meet him with His lovingkindness, and that, thus met and helped, he will look on, secure, at their ruin. The Hebrew margin proposes to read "The God of my lovingkindness will meet me"-an incomplete sentence, which does not tell with what God will meet him. But the text needs only the change of one vowel point in order to yield the perfectly appropriate reading. "My God shall meet me with His lovingkindness," which is distinctly to be preferred. It is singular that the substitution of "my" for "his," which is needlessly suggested by the Hebrew margin for Psalms 59:10, is required but not suggested for Psalms 59:9. One is tempted to wonder whether there has been a scribe’s blunder attaching the correction to the wrong verse. The central portion of this part of the psalm is composed of terrible wishes for the enemies’ destruction. There is nothing more awful in the imprecations of the Psalter than that petition that the boon of a swift end to their miseries may not be granted them. The dew of pity for suffering is dried up by the fire of stern desire for the exhibition of a signal instance of Divine judicial righteousness. That desire lifts the prayer above the level of personal vengeance, but does not lighten its awfulness. There may be an allusion to the fate of Cain, who was kept alive and made a "fugitive and a vagabond." Whether that is so or not, the wish that the foes may be kept alive to be buffeted by God’s strength-or, as the word may mean, to be scattered in panic-struck rout by God’s army-is one which marks the difference between the old and the new covenants. The ground of these fearful punishments is vehemently set forth in Psalms 59:12. Every word which the adversaries speak is sin. Their own self-sufficient pride, which is revolt against dependence on God, is like a trap to catch them. They speak curses and lies, for which retribution is due. This recounting of their crimes, not so much against the psalmist, though involving him, as against God, fires his indignation anew, and he flames out with petitions which seem to forget the former ones for lingering destruction: "End them in wrath, end them." The contradiction may be apparent only, and this passionate cry may presuppose the fulfilment of the former. The psalmist will then desire two dreadful things-first, protracted suffering, and then a crushing blow to end it. His ultimate desire in both is the same. He would have the evildoers spared long enough to be monuments of God’s punitive justice; he would have them ended, that the crash of their fall may reverberate afar and proclaim that God rules in Jacob. "Unto the ends of the earth" may be connected either with "rules" or with "know." In the former construction the thought will be, that from His throne in Israel God exercises dominion universally; in the latter, that the echo of the judgment on these evil-doers will reach distant lands. The latter meaning is favoured by the accents, and is, on the whole, to be preferred. But what a strange sense of his own significance for the manifestation of God’s power to the world this singer must have had, if lie could suppose that the events of his life were thus of universal importance! One does not wonder that the advocates of the personification theory find strong confirmation of it in such utterances; and, indeed, the only other explanation of them is that the psalmist held, and knew himself to hold, a conspicuous place in the evolution of the Divine purpose so that in his life, as in a small mirror, there were reflected great matters. If such anticipations were more than wild dreams, the cherisher of them must either have been speaking in the person of the nation, or he must have known himself to be God’s instrument for extending His name through the world. No single person so adequately meets the requirements of such words as David. The second part of this division (Psalms 59:14) begins with the same words as the corresponding part of the first division (Psalms 59:6), so that there is a kind of refrain here. The futures in Psalms 59:14-15, may be either simple futures or optatives. In the latter case the petitions of the preceding verses would be continued here and the pregnant truth would result that continuance in sin is the punishment of sin. But probably the imprecations are better confined to the former part, as the Selah draws a broad line of demarcation, and there would be an incongruity in following the petition "End them" with others which contemplated the continuance of the enemies. If the verses are taken as simply predictive, the point of the reintroduction of the figure of the pack of dogs hunting for their prey lies in Psalms 59:15. There they are described as balked in their attempts, and having to pass the night unsatisfied. Their prey has escaped. Their eager chase, their nocturnal quest. their growling and prowling, have been vain. They lie down empty and in the dark a vivid picture, which has wider meanings than its immediate occasion. "Ye lust and desire to have, and cannot obtain." An eternal nemesis hangs over godless lives, condemning them to hunger, after all efforts, and wrapping their pangs of unsatisfied desire in tragic darkness. A clear strain of trust springs up like a lark’s morning song. The singer contrasts himself with his baffled foes. The "they" at the beginning of Psa 59:15 is emphatic in the Hebrew, and is matched with the emphatic "And I" which begins Psalms 59:16. His "morning" is similarly set over against their "night." So petition, complaint, imprecation, all merge into a song of joy and trust and the whole ends with the refrain significantly varied and enlarged. In its first form the psalmist said "For Thee will I watch"; in its second he rises to "To Thee will I harp." Glad praise is ever the close of the vigils of a faithful, patient heart. The deliverance won by waiting and trust should be celebrated by praise. In the first form the refrain ran "God is my high tower," and the second part of the psalm began with "My God shall meet me with His lovingkindness." In its second form the refrain draws into itself these words which had followed it, and so modifies them that the lovingkindness which in them was contemplated as belonging to and brought by God is now joyfully clasped by the singer as his very own, by Divine gift and through his own acceptance. Blessed they who are led by occasion of foes and fears to take God’s rich gifts, and can thankfully and humbly feel that His lovingkindness and all its results are theirs, because He Himself is theirs and they are His! Psalms 60:1-12 THIS psalm has evidently a definite historical background. Israel has been worsted in fight, but still continues its campaign against Edom. Meditating on God’s promises, the psalmist anticipates victory, which will cover defeat and perfect partial successes, and seeks to breathe his own spirit of confidence into the ranks of his countrymen. But the circumstances answering to those required by the psalm are hard to find. The date assigned by the superscription cannot be called satisfactory; for David’s war there referred to (2 Samuel 8:1-18) had no such stunning defeats as are here lamented. The Divine Oracle of which the substance is given in the central part of the psalm, affords but dubious indications of date. At first sight it seems to imply the union of all the tribes in one kingdom, and therefore to favour the Davidic authorship. But it may be a question whether the united Israel of the Oracle is fact or prophecy. To one school of commentators, the mention of Ephraim in conjunction with Judah is token that the psalm is prior to the great revolt; to another, it is proof positive that the date is after the destruction of the northern kingdom. The Maccabean date is favoured by Olshausen, Hitzig, and Cheyne among moderns; but, apart from other objections, the reappearance of Psa 60:5-12 in Psalms 108:1-13, implies that this piece of Hebrew psalmody was already venerable when a later compiler wove part of it into that psalm. On the whole, the Davidic authorship is possible, though clogged with the difficulty already mentioned. But the safest conclusion seems to be Baethgen’s modest one, which contrasts strongly with the confident assertions of some other critics-namely, that assured certainty in dating the psalm "is no longer possible." It falls into three parts of four verses each, of which the first (Psalms 60:1-4) is complaint of defeat and prayer for help; the second (Psalms 60:5-8), a Divine Oracle assuring victory; and the third (Psalms 60:9-12), the flash of fresh hope kindled by that God’s word. The first part blends complaint and prayer in the first pair of verses, in each of which there is, first, a description of the desperate state of Israel, and then a cry for help. The nation is broken, as a wall is broken down, or as an army whose ordered ranks are shattered and scattered. Some crushing defeat is meant, which in Psalms 60:2 is further described as an earthquake. The land trembles, and then gapes in hideous clefts, and houses become gaunt ruins. The state is disorganised as in consequence of defeat. It is an unpoetical mixture of fact and figure to see in the "rending" of the land allusion to the separation of the kingdoms, especially as that was not the result of defeat. There is almost a tone of wonder in the designation of Israel as "Thy people," so sadly does the fate meted out to them contrast with their name. Stranger still and more anomalous is it, that, as Psalms 60:3 b laments, God’s own hand has commended such a chalice to their lips as should fill them with infatuation. The construction "wine of reeling," is grammatically impossible, and the best explanation of the phrase regards the nouns as in apposition-"wine which is reeling," or "reeling as wine." The meaning is that God not only sent the disaster which had shaken the nation like an earthquake, but had sent, too, the presumptuous self-confidence which had led to it. Psalms 60:4 has received two opposite interpretations, being taken by some as a prolongation of the tone of lament over disaster, and by others as commemoration of God’s help. The latter meaning violently interrupts the continuity of thought. "The only natural view is that which sees" in Psalms 60:4 "a continuation of the description of calamity" in Psalms 60:3 (Cheyne, in loc.). Taking this view, we render the second clause as above. The word translated "that they may flee" may indeed mean to lift themselves up, in the sense of gathering round a standard, but the remainder of the clause cannot be taken as meaning "because of the truth," since the preposition here used never means "because of." It is best taken here as from before. The word variously rendered bow and truth is difficult. It occurs again in Proverbs 22:21, and is there parallel with "truth" or faithfulness in fulfilling Divine promises. But that meaning would be inappropriate here, and would require the preceding preposition to be taken in the impossible sense already noted. It seems better, therefore, to follow the LXX and other old versions, in regarding the word as a slightly varied mode of spelling the ordinary word for a bow (the final dental letter being exchanged for a cognate dental). The resulting meaning is deeply coloured by sad irony. "Thou hast indeed given a banner-but it was a signal for flight rather than for gathering round." Such seems the best view of this difficult verse; but it is not free from objection. "Those who fear Thee" is not a fitting designation for persons who were thus scattered in flight by God even if it is taken as simply a synonym for the nation. We have to make choice between two incongruities. If we adopt the favourite view, that the verse continues the description of calamity, the name given to the sufferers is strange. If we take the other, that it describes God’s gracious rallying of the fugitives, we are confronted with a violent interruption of the tone of feeling in this first part of the psalm. Perowne accepts the rendering from before the bow, but takes the verb in the sense of mustering round, so making the banner to be a rallying point and the giving of it a Divine mercy. The second part (Psalms 60:5-8) begins with a verse which Delitzsch and others regard as really connected, notwithstanding the Selah at the end Psalms 60:4, with the preceding. But it is quite intelligible as independent, and is in its place as the introduction to the Divine Oracle which follows and makes the kernel of the psalm. There is beautiful strength of confidence in the psalmist’s regarding the beaten, scattered people as still God’s "darlings." He appeals to Him to answer, in order that a result so accordant with God’s heart as the deliverance of His beloved ones may be secured. And the prayer has no sooner passed his lips than he hears the thunderous response, "God has spoken in His holiness." That infinite elevation of His nature above creatures is the pledge of the fulfilment of His word. The following verses contain the substance of the Oracle; but it is too daring to suppose that they reproduce its words; for "I will exult" can scarcely be reverently put into the mouth of God. The substance of the whole is a twofold promise-of a united Israel, and a submissive heathendom. Shechem on the west and Succoth on the east of Jordan, Gilead and Manasseh on the east, and Ephraim and Judah on the west, are the possession of the speaker, whether he is king or representative of the nation. No trace of a separation of the kingdoms is here. Ephraim, the strongest tribe of the northern kingdom, is the "strength of my head," the helmet, or perhaps with allusion to the horns of an animal as symbols of offensive weapons. Judah is the ruling tribe, the commander’s baton, or possibly "lawgiver," as in Genesis 49:1-33. Israel thus compact together may count on conquests over hereditary foes. Their defeat is foretold in contemptuous images. The basin for washing the feet was "a vessel unto dishonour"; and, in Israel’s great house, no higher function for his ancestral enemy, when conquered, would be found. The meaning of casting the shoe upon or over Edom is doubtful. It may be a symbol for taking possession of property, though that lacks confirmation; or Edom may be regarded as the household slave to whom the master’s shoes are thrown when taken off; or, better, in accordance with the preceding reference to Moab, Edom may be regarded as part of the master’s house or furniture. The one was the basin for his feet; the other, the corner where he kept his sandals. If the text of Psa 60:8 c is correct Philistia is addressed with bitter sarcasm, and bidden to repeat her ancient shouts of triumph over Israel now, if she can. But the edition of these verses in Psalms 108:1-13, gives a more natural reading which may be adopted here: "Over Philistia will I shout aloud." The third part (Psalms 60:9-12) is taken by some commentators to breathe the same spirit as the first part. Cheyne, for instance, speaks of it as a "relapse into despondency," whilst others more truly hear in it the tones of rekindled trust. In Psalms 60:9 there is a remarkable change of tense from "Who, will bring?" in the first clause, to "Who has guided?" in the second. This is best explained by the supposition that some victory over Edom, had preceded the psalm, which is regarded by the singer as a guarantee of success in his assault of "the fenced city," probably Petra. There is no need to supplement Psalms 60:10, so as to read, "Wilt not Thou, O God, which," etc. The psalmist recurs to his earlier lament, not as if he thought that it still held true, but just because it does not. It explained the reason of past disasters; and, being now reversed by the Divine Oracle, becomes the basis of the prayer which follows. It is as if he had said, "We were defeated because Thou didst cast us off. Now help as Thou hast promised and we shall do deeds of valour." It is impossible to suppose that the result of the Divine answer, which makes the very heart of the psalm, should be a hopeless repetition of the initial despondency. Rather glad faith acknowledges past weakness and traces past failures to self-caused abandonment by a loving God, who let His people be worsted that they might learn who was their strength, and ever goes forth with those who go. forth to war with the consciousness that all help but His is vain, and with the hope that in Him even their weakness shall do deeds of prowess. "Hast not Thou cast us off?" may be the utterance of despair; but it may also be that of assured confidence and the basis of a prayer that will be answered by God’s present help. Psalms 61:1-8 THE situation of the singer in this psalm is the same as in Psalms 63:1-11. In both he is an exile longing for the sanctuary, and in both "the king" is referred to in a way which leaves his identity with the psalmist questionable. There are also similarities in situation, sentiment, and expression with Psalms 42:1-11; Psalms 43:1-5 -e.g., the singer’s exile, his yearning to appear in the sanctuary, the command given by God to His Lovingkindness (Psalms 42:8 and Psalms 61:8) the personification of Light and Troth as his guides, (Psalms 43:3) compared with the similar representation here of Lovingkindness and Troth as guards set by God over the psalmist. The traditional attribution of the psalm to David has at least the merit of providing an appropriate setting for its longings and hopes, in his flight from Absalom. No one of the other dates proposed by various critics seems to satisfy anybody but its proposer. Hupfeld calls Hitzig’s suggestion "wunderbar zu lesen." Graetz inclines to the reign of Hezekiah, and thinks that "the connection gains" if the prayer for the preservation of the king’s life refers to that monarch’s sickness. The Babylonish captivity, with Zedekiah for "the king," is preferred by others. Still later dates are in favour now. Cheyne lays it down that "pre-Jeremian such highly spiritual hymns (i.e., Psalms 61:1-8; Psalms 63:1-11) obviously cannot be," and thinks that "it would not be unplausible to make them contemporanaeous with Psalms 42:1-11, the king being Antiochus the Great," but prefers to assign them to the Maccabean period, and to take "Jonathan, or (better) Simon" as the king. Are "highly spiritual hymns" probable products of that time? If the Selah is accepted as marking the end of the first part of the psalm, its structure is symmetrical, so far as it is then divided into two parts of four verses each; but that division cuts off the prayer in Psalms 61:4 from its ground in Psalms 61:5. Selah frequently occurs in the middle of a period, and is used to mark emphasis, but not necessarily division. It is therefore better to keep Psalms 61:4 and Psalms 61:5 together, thus preserving their analogy with Psalms 61:2 and Psalms 61:3. The scheme of this little psalm will then be an introductory verse, followed by two parallel pairs of verses, each consisting of petition and its grounding in past mercies (Psalms 61:2, Psalms 61:3, and Psalms 61:4-5), and these again succeeded by another pair containing petitions for "the king," while a final single verse, corresponding to the introductory one, joyfully foresees life-long praise evoked by the certain answers to the singer’s prayer. The fervour of the psalmist’s supplication is strikingly expressed by his use in the first clause, of the word which is ordinarily employed for the shrill notes of rejoicing. It describes the quality of the sound as penetrating and emotional, not the nature of the emotion expressed by it. Joy is usually louder tongued than sorrow; but this suppliant’s need has risen so high that his cry is resonant. To himself he seems to be at "the end of the earth"; for he measures distance not as a map maker, but as a worshipper. Love and longing are potent magnifiers of space. His heart "faints," or is "overwhelmed." The word means literally "covered," and perhaps the metaphor may be preserved by some such phrase as wrapped in gloom. He is, then, an exile and therefore sunk in sadness. But while he had external separation from the sanctuary chiefly in view, his cry wakes an echo in all devout hearts. They who know most about the inner life of communion with God best know how long and dreary the smallest separation between Him and them seems, and how thick is the covering spread over the heart thereby. The one desire of such a suppliant is for restoration of interrupted access to God. The psalmist embodies that yearning in its more outward form, but not without penetrating to the inner reality in both the parallel petitions which follow. In the first of these, (Psalms 61:2 b) the thought is fuller than the condensed expression of it. "Lead me on" or in, says he, meaning, Lead me to and set me on. His imagination sees towering above him a great cliff, on which, if he could be planted, he might defy pursuit or assault. But he is distant from it, and the inaccessibility which, were he in its clefts, would be his safety, is now his despair. Therefore he turns to God and asks Him to bear him up in His hands, that he may set his foot on that rock. The figure has been, strangely enough, interpreted to mean a rock of difficulty, but against the usage in the Psalter. But we do not reach the whole significance of the figure if we give it the mere general meaning of a place of safety. While it would be too much to say that "rock" is here an epithet of God (the absence of the definite article and other considerations are against that), it may be affirmed that the psalmist, like all devout men, knew that his only place of safety was in God. "A rock" will not afford adequate shelter; our perils and storms need "the Rock." And, therefore, this singer bases his prayer on his past experience of the safe hiding that he had found in God. "Place of refuge" and "strong tower" are distinctly parallel with "rock." The whole, then, is like the prayer in Psalms 31:2-3: "Be Thou to me a strong rock. For Thou art my rock." The second pair of verses, containing petition and its ground in past experience (Psalms 61:4-5), brings out still more clearly the psalmist’s longing for the sanctuary. The futures in Psalms 61:4 may be taken either as simple expressions of certainty, or, more probably, as precative, as is suggested by the parallelism with the preceding pair. The "tent" of God is the sanctuary, possibly so called because at the date of the psalm "the ark of God dwelt in curtains." The "hiding place of Thy wings" may then be an allusion to the Shechinah and outspread pinions of the Cherubim. But the inner reality is more to the psalmist than the external symbols, however his faith was trained to connect the two more indissolubly than is legitimate for us. His longing was no superstitious wish to be near that sanctuary, as if external presence brought blessing, but a reasonable longing, grounded on the fact for his stage of revelation, that such presence was the condition of fullest realisation of spiritual communion, and of the safety and blessedness thence received. His prayer is the deepest desire of every soul that has rightly apprehended the facts of life, its own needs and the riches of God. The guests in God’s dwelling have guest rights of provision and protection. Beneath His wings are safety, warmth, and conscious nearness to His heart. The suppliant may feel far off, at the end of the world: but one strong desire has power to traverse all the distance in a moment. "Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also"; and where the heart is, there the man is. The ground of this second petition is laid in God’s past listening to vows, and His having given the psalmist "the heritage of those that fear Thy name." That is most naturally explained as meaning primarily the land of Israel, and as including therein all other blessings needful for life there. While it is capable of being otherwise understood, it is singularly appropriate to the person of David during the period of Absalom’s rebellion, when victory was beginning to declare itself for the king. If we suppose that he had already won a battle, (2 Samuel 18:6) we can understand how he takes that success as an omen and urges it as a plea. The pair of verses will then be one instance of the familiar argument which trustful hearts instinctively use, when they present past and incomplete mercies as reasons for continued gifts, and for the addition of all which is needed to "perfect that which concerneth" them. It rests on the confidence that God is not one who "begins and is not able to finish." Very naturally, then, follows the closing prayer in Psalms 61:6-7. The purely individual character of the rest of the psalm, which is resumed in the last verse, where the singer speaking in the first person, represents his continual praise as the result of the answer to his petitions for the king, makes these petitions hopelessly irrelevant, unless the psalmist is the king and these prayers are for himself. The transition to the third person does not necessarily negative this interpretation, which seems to be required by the context. The prayer sounds hyperbolical, but has a parallel in Psalms 21:4, and need not be vindicated by taking the dynasty rather than the individual to be meant, or by diverting it to a Messianic reference. It is a prayer for length of days, in order that the deliverance already begun may be perfected, and that the psalmist may dwell in the house of the Lord forever (cf. Psalms 23:6; Psalms 27:4) He asks that he may sit enthroned before God forever-that is, that his dominion may by God’s favour be established and his throne upheld in peace. The psalm is in so far Messianic that the everlasting kingdom of the Christ alone fulfils its prayer. The final petition has, as has been noticed above, parallels in Psalms 42:1-11 and Psalms 43:1-5, to which may be added the personifications of Goodness and Lovingkindness in Psalms 23:6. These bright harnessed angels stand sentries over the devout suppliant, set on their guard by the great Commander; and no harm can come to him over whom God’s Lovingkindness and Faithfulness keep daily and nightly watch; Thus guarded, the psalmist’s prolonged life will be one long anthem of praise, and the days added to his days will be occupied with the fulfilment of his vows made in trouble and redeemed in his prosperity. What congruity is there between this closing verse which is knit closely to the preceding by that "So," and the previous pair of verses, unless the king is himself the petitioner? "Let him sit before God forever"-how comes that to lead up to "So will I harp to Thy name forever"? Surely the natural answer is, Because "he" and "I" are the same person. Psalms 62:1-12 THERE are several points of affinity between this psalm and the thirty-ninth-such as the frequent use of the particle of asseveration or restriction ("surely" or "only"); the rare and beautiful word for "silence," as expressing restful, still resignation; and the characterisation of men as "vanity." These resemblances are not proofs of identity of authorship, though establishing a presumption in its favour. Delitzsch accepts the psalm as Davidic, and refers it to the time of Absalom’s revolt. The singer is evidently in a position of dignity ("elevation," Psalms 62:4), and one whose exhortations come with force to the "people" (Psalms 62:8), whether that word is understood as designating the nation or his immediate followers. Cheyne, who relegates the psalm to the Persian period, feels that the recognition of the singer as "a personage who is the Church’s bulwark" is the natural impression on reading the psalm ("Orig. of Psalt.," 227 and 242). If so, David’s position is precisely that which is required. Whoever sang this immortal psalm, rose to the heights of conquering faith, and gave voice to the deepest and most permanent emotions of devout souls. The psalm is in three strophes of four verses each, the divisions being marked by Selah. The two former have a long refrain at the beginning, instead of, as usually, at the end. In the first the psalmist sets his quiet trust in contrast with the furious assaults of his foes; while, in the second, he stirs himself to renewed exercise of it, and exhorts others to share with him in the security of God as a place of refuge. In the third strophe the nothingness of man is set in strong contrast to the power and lovingkindness of God and the dehortation from trust in material wealth urged as the negative side of the previous exhortation to trust in God. The noble saying of Psa 62:1 a is hard to translate without weakening. The initial word may have the meanings of "Only" or "Surely." The former seems more appropriate in this psalm, where it occurs six times, in one only of which (Psalms 62:4) does the latter seem the more natural rendering, though even there the other is possible. It is, however, to be noticed that its restrictive power is not always directed to the adjacent word; and here it may either present God as the exclusive object of the psalmist’s waiting trust, or his whole soul as being nothing else but silent resignation. The reference to God is favoured by Psalms 62:2, but the other is possible. The psalmist’s whole being is, as it were, but one stillness of submission. The noises of contending desires, the whispers of earthly hopes, the mutterings of short-sighted fears, the self-asserting accents of an insisting will, are hushed, and all his nature waits mutely for God’s voice. No wonder that a psalm which begins thus should end with "God hath spoken once, twice have I heard this"; for such waiting is never in vain. The soul that cleaves to God is still; and, being still, is capable of hearing the Divine whispers which deepen the silence which they bless. "There is no joy but calm"; and the secret of calm is to turn the current of the being to God. Then it is like a sea at rest. The psalmist’s silence finds voice, which does not break it, in saying over to himself what God is to him. His accumulation of epithets reminds us of Psa 18:1-2. Not only does his salvation come from God, but God Himself is the salvation which He sends forth like an angel. The recognition of God as his defence is the ground of "silence"; for if He is "my rock and my salvation," what can be wiser than to keep close to Him, and let Him do as He will? The assurance of personal safety is inseparable from such a thought of God. Nothing which does not shake the rock can shake the frail tent pitched on it. As long as the tower stands, its inhabitant can look down from his inaccessible fastness with equanimity, though assailed by crowds. Thus the psalmist turns swiftly, in the latter pair of verses making up the first strophe, to address remonstrances to his enemies, as engaged in a useless effort, and then drops direct address and speaks of their hostility and treachery. The precise meaning of parts of Psa 62:3 has been misapprehended, by reason of the peculiarities of some of the words and the condensed character of the imagery in b, c. The rendering above is substantially that generally accepted now. It sets in striking contrast the single figure of the psalmist and the multitude of his assailants. "All of you" rush upon a man like a pack of hounds on one defenceless creature, and try to break him down, as men put their shoulders to a wall in order to overthrow it. The partial success of the assault is hinted in the epithets applied to wall and fence, which are painted as beginning to give under pressure. Language of confidence sounds strangely in such circumstances. But the toppling wall, with all these strong men pushing at it, will "not be greatly moved." The assailants might answer the psalmist’s "How long?" with defiant confidence that a short time only was needed to complete the begun ruin; but he, firm in his faith, though tottering in his fortunes, knows better, and in effect, tells them by his question that, however long they may press against his feebleness, they will never overthrow him. The bulging wall outlasts its would be destroyers. But appeal to them is vain; for they have one settled purpose absorbing them-namely, to cast him down from his height. He is then, probably in some position of distinction, threatened by false friends, who are plotting his deposition, while their words are fair. All these circumstances agree well with the Davidic authorship. The second strophe reiterates the refrain, with slight but significant variations, and substitutes for the address to and contemplation of the plotters a meditation on the psalmist’s own security, and an invitation to others to share it. In Psalms 62:5 the refrain is changed from a declaration of the psalmist’s silent waiting to self-exhortation thereto. Cheyne would assimilate the two verses by making both verbs imperatives; but that change destroys the beautiful play of feeling, so true to experience, which passes from consciousness of one’s attitude towards God to effort at preserving it. No emotions, however blessed, deep, and real, will last, unless perpetually renewed. Like carbon points in electric lights, they burn away as they burn, and the light dies, unless there is some impulse which presses a fresh surface forward to receive the fiery kiss that changes its blackness into radiance. The "expectation" in Psalms 62:5 b is substantially equivalent to the "salvation" in Psalms 62:1 b. It means not the emotion (which could not be said to be "from Him"), but the thing expected, just as "hope" is used for the res sperata. The change in expression from "salvation" to "expectation" makes prominent the psalmist’s attitude. In his silence his wistful eyes look up, watching for the first far-off brightening which tells him that help is on its road from the throne. Salvation will not come unexpected, and expectation will not look for succours in vain. There may be deep meaning in the slight omission of "greatly" in the second refrain. Confidence has grown. The first hope was that the waiting heart should not be much shaken, that the tottering fence should not be quite thrown down; the second is that it shall not be shaken at all. An access of faith has poured into the singer’s soul with his song; and now he has no thought of the crowd of assailants, who have faded from his sight because he is gazing on God. Hence the second pair of verses in this strophe (Psalms 62:7-8) substitutes for the description of their fierce rush the triumphant reiteration of what God is to the psalmist, and an invitation to others to come with him into that strong refuge. The transition to addressing the "people" is natural, if the psalm is David’s. The phrase would then apply to his immediate followers, who were one with him in peril, and whom he would fain have one with him in trust. But the LXX has another reading, which involves only the insertion of a letter, that may easily have dropped out, in the word rendered "time," and which makes the verse run more smoothly. It reads "all the congregation of the people," in which it is followed by Baethgen, Cheyne, and others. Whoever the psalmist was, he felt the impulse which follows all deep experience of the security that comes from hiding in God-namely, the longing to beckon in others out of the storm into peace. Every man who has learned that God is a refuge for him is thereby assured that He is the same for all men, and thereby moved to beseech them to make the like blessed discovery. The way into that hiding place is trust. "Pour out before Him your heart," says the psalmist. "In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God," says Paul. They both mean the same thing. We take refuge in our refuge when we set our faith on God, and tell Him all that threatens or troubles us. When we do, we are no longer in the open, defenceless before the rush of enemies, but housed in God, or, as Paul puts it, guarded in Christ Jesus, as in a fortress. No wonder that the psalm pauses for a moment on that thought, and lets the notes of harp and horn impress it on the listeners! The third strophe sets the emptiness of men in strong contrast to the sufficiency of God. "Vanity" is literally "a breath," and would better be so rendered in Psalms 62:9, but for the recurrence of the verb from the same root in Psalms 62:10, which requires the rendering "be not vain." It is desirable to preserve identity of translation, so as to retain the play of words. But by doing so Psalms 62:9 is somewhat weakened. The eyes that have been looking on God are cleared to see the shadowy nothingness of men of all degrees. The differences of high and low dwindle when seen from that "high tower," as lower lands appear flat when viewed from a mountain top. They are but "breath," so fleeting, unsubstantial are they. They are a "lie" in so far as hopes directed to them are deceived and trust misplaced. The singer is not cynically proclaiming man’s worthlessness, but asserting his insufficiency as the object of man’s trust. His point of view is different from that of Psa 39:1-13, though his words are the same. The "Only" which begins Psalms 62:9 carries us back to the similar beginning of the preceding strophes, and brings out the true force of the following words, by suggesting the contrast between men and the God on whom the psalmist’s soul waits in silence. That contrast may be further continued in Psalms 62:9 b. The lowly and the lofty are in one scale. What is in the other, the solid weight of which sends them aloft as lighter? Is it pressing the metaphor too far to suppose that the psalmist is weighing the whole mass of men against God only? Heap them all together and balance them against Him, and the gathered mass does not weigh as much as an imponderable breath. Who could trust in that emptiness when he has God to trust in? Who would grasp shadows when he may cling to that eternal Substance? The natural conclusion from Psalms 62:9 follows in the exhortation of Psa 62:10, which completes the positive presentation of the true object of trust (Psalms 62:8) by the warning against false refuges. The introduction of "oppression" and "robbery" is singular, for it can scarcely be supposed that the assailants of the psalmist are here addressed, and still less that his followers needed to be warned against these crimes. Cheyne, therefore, follows Graetz and others in reading "perverseness" for "oppression," and "crookedness" for "robbery"; but the alteration throws the clause out of harmony with the next clause. It may be that in Psalms 62:10 a the psalmist has in view unjust gain and in b justly acquired wealth, and that thus his two dehortations cover the whole ground of material riches, as if he had said, "Whether rightly or wrongly won, they are wrongly used if they are trusted in." The folly and misery of such trust are vigorously set forth by that word "become vain." The curse of misplaced confidence is that it brings down a man to the level of what he trusts in, as the blessing of wisely placed trust is that it lifts him to that level. Trust in vanity is vain, and makes the truster "vanity." Wind is not a nourishing diet. It may inflate, or, as Paul says about knowledge, may "puff up," but not "build up." Men are assimilated to the objects of their trust; and if these are empty, "so is everyone that trusteth in them." So far the psalmist has spoken. But his silent waiting has been rewarded with a clear voice from heaven, confirming that of his faith. It is most natural to regard the double revelation received by the psalmist as repeated in the following proclamation of the two great aspects of the Divine nature- Power and Lovingkindness. The psalmist has learned that these two are not opposed nor separate, but blend harmoniously in God’s nature, and are confluent in all His works. Power is softened and directed by Lovingkindness. Lovingkindness has as its instrument Omnipotence. The synthesis of these two is in the God whom men are invited to trust; and such trust can never be disappointed; for His Power and His Lovingkindness will cooperate to "render to a man according to his work." The last word of the psalm adds the conception of Righteousness to those of Power and Lovingkindness. But the psalmist seems to have in view mainly one direction in which that rendering "to a man according to his work" is active-namely, in answering the trust which turns away from human power which is weakness, and from human love which may change and must die, to anchor itself on the might and tenderness of God. Such "work of faith" will not be in vain; for these twin attributes of Power and Love are pledged to requite it with security and peace. Psalms 63:1-11 IF the psalmist is allowed to speak, he gives many details of his circumstances in his song. He is in a waterless and weary land, excluded from the sanctuary, followed by enemies seeking his life. He expects a fight, in which they are to fall by the sword, and apparently their defeat is to lead to his restoration to his kingdom. These characteristics converge on David. Cheyne has endeavoured to show that they fit the faithful Jews in the Maccabean period, and that the "king" in Psalms 63:2 is "Jonathan or [better] Simon" ("Orig. of Psalt.," 99, and "Aids to Dev. Study of Crit.," 308 seqq.). But unless we are prepared to accept the dictum that "Pre-Jeremian such highly spiritual hymns obviously cannot be" (u.s.), the balance of probability will be heavily in favour of the Davidic origin. The recurrence of the expression "My soul" in Psalms 63:1, Psalms 63:5, Psalms 63:8, suggests the divisions into which the psalm falls. Following that clue, we recognise three parts, in each of which a separate phase of the experience of the soul in its communion with God is presented as realised in sequence by the psalmist. The soul longs and thirsts for God (Psalms 63:1-4). The longing soul is satisfied in God (Psalms 63:5-7). The satisfied soul cleaves to and presses after God (Psalms 63:8-11). These stages melt into each other in the psalm as in experience, but are still discernible. In the first strophe the psalmist gives expression in immortal words to his longing after God. Like many a sad singer before and after him, he finds in the dreary scene around an image of yet drearier experiences within. He sees his own mood reflected in the grey monotony of the sterile desert, stretching waterless on every side, and seamed with cracks, like mouths gaping for the rain that does not come. He is weary and thirsty; but a more agonising craving is in his spirit, and wastes his flesh. As in the kindred Psalms 42:1-11 and Psalms 43:1-5, his separation from the sanctuary has dimmed his sight of God. He longs for the return of that vision in its former clearness. But even while he thirsts, he in some measure possesses, since his resolve to "seek earnestly" is based on the assurance that God is his God. In the region of the devout life the paradox is true that we long precisely because we have. Every soul is athirst for God; but unless a man can say, "Thou art my God," he knows not how to interpret nor where to slake his thirst, and seeks, not after the living Fountain of waters, but after muddy pools and broken cisterns. Psalms 63:2 is difficult principally because the reference of the initial "So" is doubtful. By some it is connected with the first clause of Psa 63:1: "So"-i.e., as my God-"have I seen Thee." Others suppose a comparison to be made between the longing just expressed and former ones, and the sense to be, "With the same eager desire as now I feel in the desert have I gazed in the sanctuary." This seems the better view. Hupfeld proposes to transpose the two clauses, as the A.V. has done in its rendering, and thus gets a smoother run of thought. The immediate object of the psalmist’s desire is thus declared to be "to behold Thy power and glory," and the "So" is substantially equivalent to "According as." If we retain the textual order of the clauses, and understand the first as paralleling the psalmist’s desert longing with that which he felt in the sanctuary, the second clause will state the aim of the ardent gaze-namely, to "behold Thy power and Thy glory." These attributes were peculiarly manifested amid the imposing sanctities where the light of the Shechinah, which was especially designated as "the Glory," shone above the ark. The first clause of Psa 63:3 is closely connected with the preceding, and gives the reason for some part of the emotion there expressed, as the introductory "For" shows. But it is a question to which part of the foregoing verses it refers. It is probably best taken as assigning the reason for their main subject-namely, the psalmist’s thirst after God. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Our desires are shaped by our judgments of what is good. The conviction of God’s transcendent excellence and absolute sufficiency for all our cravings must precede the direction of these to Him. Unless all enjoyments and possessions, which become ours through our corporeal life, and that life itself, are steadfastly discerned to be but a feather’s weight in comparison with the pure gold of God’s lovingkindness, we shall not long for it more than for them. The deep desires of this psalmist were occasioned by his seclusion from outward forms of worship, which were to him so intimately related to the inward reality, that he felt farther away from God in the wilderness than when he caught glimpses of His face, through the power and glory which he saw visibly manifested in the sanctuary. But in his isolation he learns to equate his desert yearnings with his sanctuary contemplations, and thus glides from longing to fruition. His devotion, nourished by forms, is seen in the psalm in the very act of passing on to independence of form; and so springs break out for him in the desert. His passion of yearning after God rebukes and shames our faint desires. This man’s soul was all on the stretch to grasp and hold God. His very physical frame was affected by his intense longing. If he did not long too much, most men, even those who thirst after God most, long terribly too little. Strong desire has a joy in its very aching; feeble desire only makes men restless and uncomfortable. Nothing can be more preposterous than tepid aspirations after the greatest and only good. To hold as creed that God’s lovingkindness is better than life, and to wish a little to possess it, is surely irrational, if anything is so. The remaining clauses of Psa 63:3 and Psalms 63:4 form a transition to the full consciousness of satisfaction which animates the psalmist in the second part. The resolve to praise, and the assurance that he will have occasion to praise, succeed his longing with startling swiftness. The "So" of Psalms 63:4 seems to be equivalent to "Accordingly"-i.e., since Thy lovingkindness is such supreme good, and is mine because I have desired it. Continual praise and as continual invocation are the fitting employments of those who receive it, and by these alone can their possession of the lovingkindness bestowed be made permanent. If empty palms are not ever lifted towards God, His gifts will not descend. When these are received, they will fall like morning sunbeams on stony and dumb lips, which before were only parted to let out sighs, and will draw forth music of praise. There are longings which never are satisfied: but God lets no soul that thirsts for Him perish for lack of the water of life. Wisdom bids us fix our desires on that Sovereign Good, to long for which is ennobling and blessed, and to possess which is rest and the beginning of heaven. Thus the psalmist passes imperceptibly to the second strophe, in which the longing soul becomes the satisfied soul. The emblem of a feast is naturally suggested by the previous metaphor of thirst. The same conviction, which urged the psalmist forward in his search after God, now assures him of absolute satisfaction in finding Him. Since God’s lovingkindness is better than life, the soul that possesses Him can have no unappeased cravings, nor any yet hungry affections or wishes. In the region of communion with God, fruition is contemporaneous with and proportioned to desire. When the rain comes in the desert, what was baked earth is soon rich pasture, and the dry torrent beds, where the white stones glittered ghastly in the sunshine, are musical with rushing streams and fringed with budding oleanders. On that telegraph a message is flashed upwards and an answer speeds downwards, in a moment of time. Many of God’s gifts are delayed by Love; but the soul that truly desires Him has never long to wait for a gift that equals its desire. When God is possessed, the soul is satisfied. So entire is the correspondence between wants and gift, that every concavity in us finds, as it were, a convexity to match it in Him. The influx of the great ocean of God fills every curve of the shore to the brim, and the flashing glory of that sunlit sea covers the sands, and brings life where stagnation reigned and rotted. So the satisfied soul lives to praise, as the psalm goes on to vow. Lips that drink such draughts of Lovingkindness will not be slow to tell its sweetness. If we have nothing to say about God’s goodness, the probable cause is our want of experience of it. That feast leaves no bitter taste. The remembrance of it is all but as sweet as its enjoyment was. Thus, in Psalms 63:6, the psalmist recounts how, in the silent hours of night, when many joys are seen to be hollow, and conscience wakes to condemn coarse delights, he recalled his blessednesses in God, and, like a ruminant animal, tasted their sweetness a second time. The verse is best regarded as an independent sentence. So blessed was the thought of God, that, if once it rose in his wakeful mind as he lay on his bed, he "meditated" on it all the night. Hasty glances show little of anything great. Nature does not unveil her beauty to a cursory look; much less does God disclose His. If we would feel the majesty of the heavens, we must gaze long and steadfastly into their violet depths. The mention of the "night watches" is appropriate, if this psalm is David’s. He and his band of fugitives had to keep vigilant guard as they lay down shelterless in the desert; but even when thus ringed by possible perils, and listening for the shout of nocturnal assailants, the psalmist could recreate and calm his soul by meditation on God. Nor did his experience of God’s sufficiency bring only remembrances; it kindled hopes. "For Thou hast been a help for me; and in the shadow of Thy wings will I shout for joy." Past deliverances minister to present trust and assure of future joy. The prerogative of the soul, blessed in the sense of possessing God, is to discern in all that has been the manifestations of His help, and to anticipate in all that is to come the continuance of the same. Thus the second strophe gathers up the experiences of the satisfied soul as being fruition, praise, sweet lingering memories that fill the night of darkness and fear, and settled trust in the coming of a future which will be of a piece with such a present and past. The third strophe (Psalms 63:8-11) presents a stage in the devout soul’s experience which naturally follows the two preceding. Psalms 63:8 has a beautifully pregnant expression for the attitude of the satisfied soul. Literally rendered, the words run, "cleaves after Thee," thus uniting the ideas of close contact and eager pursuit. Such union, however impossible in the region of lower aims, is the very characteristic of communion with God, in which fruition subsists along with longing, since God is infinite, and the closest approach to and fullest possession of Him are capable of increase. Satisfaction tends to become satiety when that which produces it is a creature whose limits are soon reached; but the cup which God gives to a thirsty soul has no cloying in its sweetness. On the other hand, to seek after Him has no pain nor unrest along with it, since the desire for fuller possession comes from the felt joy of present attainment. Thus, in constant interchange satisfaction and desire beget each other, and each carries with it some trace of the other’s blessedness. Another beautiful reciprocity is suggested by the very order of the words in the two clauses of Psa 63:8. The first ends with "Thee"; the second begins with "Me." The mutual relation of God and the soul is here set forth. He who "cleaves after God" is upheld in his pursuit by God’s hand. And not in his pursuit only, but in all his life; for the condition of receiving sustaining help is desire for it, directed to God and verified by conduct. Whoever thus follows hard after God will feel his outstretched, seeking hand inclosed in a strong and loving palm, which will steady him against assaults and protect him in dangers. "No man is able to pluck them out of the Father’s hand," if only they do not let it go. It may slip from slack fingers. We descend from the heights of mystic communion in the remainder of the psalm. But in the singer’s mind his enemies were God’s enemies, and, as Psalms 63:11 shows, were regarded as apostates from God in being traitors to "the king." They did not "swear by Him"-i.e., they did not acknowledge God as God. Therefore, such being their character, the psalmist’s confidence that God’s right hand upheld him necessarily passes into assurance of their defeat. This is not vindictiveness, but confidence in the sufficiency of God’s protection, and is perfectly accordant with the lofty strains of the former part of the psalm. The picture of the fate of the beaten foe is partly drawn from that of Korah and his company. These rebels against God’s king shall go where those rebels against His priest long ago descended. "They shall be poured out upon the hands of the sword," or, more literally still, "They shall pour him out," is a vigorous metaphor, incapable of transference into English, describing how each single enemy is given over helplessly, as water is poured out, to the sword, which is energetically and to our taste violently, conceived of as a person with hands. The meaning is plain-a battle is impending, and the psalmist is sure that his enemies will be slain, and their corpses torn by beasts of prey. How can the "king’s" rejoicing in God be the consequence of their slaughter, unless they are rebels? And what connection would the defeat of a rebellion have with the rest of the psalm unless the singer were himself the king? "This one line devoted to the king is strange," says Cheyne. The strangeness is unaccounted for, but on the supposition that David is the king and singer. If so, it is most natural that his song should end with a note of triumph, and should anticipate the joy of his own heart and the "glorying" of his faithful followers, who had been true to God in being loyal to His anointed. Psalms 64:1-10 notes are struck in this psalm, which has no very distinctive features. Complaint of secret slanderers, the comparison of their words to arrows and swords, their concealed snares, their blasphemous defiance of detection, the sudden flashing out of God’s retribution, the lesson thereby read to and learned by men, the vindication of God’s justice, and praise from all true hearts, are frequent themes. They are woven here into a whole which much resembles many other psalms. But the singer’s heart is none the less in his words because many others before him have had to make like complaints and to stay themselves on like confidence. "We have all of us one human heart," and well-worn words come fresh to each lip when the grip of sorrow is felt. The division into pairs of verses is clear here. The burdened psalmist begins with a cry for help, passes on to dilate on the plots of his foes, turns swiftly from these to confidence in God, which brings future deliverance into present peril and sings of it as already accomplished, and ends with the assurance that his enemies’ punishment will witness for God and gladden the upright. In the first pair of verses complaint is sublimed into prayer, and so becomes strengthening instead of weakening. He who can cry "Hear, O God, guard, hide" has already been able to hide in a safe refuge. "The terror caused by the enemy" is already dissipated when the trembling heart grasps at God; and escape from facts which warrant terror will come in good time. This man knows himself to be in danger of his life. There are secret gatherings of his enemies, and he can almost hear their loud voices as they plan his ruin. What can he do, in such circumstances, but fling himself on God? No thought of resistance has he. He can but pray, but he can pray; and no man is helpless who can look up. However high and closely engirdling may be the walls that men or sorrows build around us, there is always an opening in the dungeon roof, through which heaven is visible and prayers can mount. The next two pairs of verses (Psalms 64:3-6) describe the machinations of the enemies in language for the most part familiar, but presenting some difficulties. The metaphors of a slanderous tongue as a sword and mischief-meaning words as arrows have occurred in several other psalms. (e.g., Psalms 55:21; Psalms 57:4; Psalms 59:7) The reference may either be to calumnies or to murderous threats and plans. The latter is the more probable. Secret plots are laid, which are suddenly unmasked. From out of some covert of seeming friendship an unlooked-for arrow whizzes. The archers "shoot, and fear not." They are sure of remaining concealed, and fear neither man’s detection of them nor God’s. The same ideas are enlarged on in the third verse pair (Psalms 64:5-6) under a new metaphor. Instead of arrows flying in secret, we have now snares laid to catch unsuspecting prey. "They strengthen themselves [in] an evil plan" (lit. word) pictures mutual encouragement and fixed determination. They discuss the best way of entrapping the psalmist, and, as in the preceding verse, flatter themselves that their subtle schemes are too well buried to be observed, whether by their victim or by God. Psalms 64:6 tells without a figure the fact meant in both figures. "They scheme villainies," and plume themselves upon the cleverness of their unsuspected plots. The second clause of the verse is obscure. But the suppositions that in it the plotters speak as in the last clause of the preceding verse, and that "they say" or the like expression is omitted for the sake of dramatic effect, remove much of the difficulty. "We have schemed a well-schemed plan" is their complacent estimate. God’s retribution scatters their dreams of impunity, as the next pair of verses (Psalms 64:7-8) tells. The verbs are in the past tense, though the events described are still in the future; for the psalmist’s faith reckons them to be as good as done. They were shooting at him. God will shoot at them. The archer becomes a target. "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." Punishment is moulded after the guise of sin. The allusion to Psalms 64:4 is made more obvious by adopting a different division of Psa 64:7 from that directed by the accents, and beginning the second half with "Suddenly," as in Psalms 64:4. Psalms 64:8 b is with difficulty made intelligible with the existing reading. Probably the best that can be done with it is to render it as above, though it must be acknowledged that "their tongue comes upon them" needs a good deal of explanation to be made to mean that the consequences of their sins of speech fall on them. The drift of the clause must be that retribution falls on the offending tongue; but there is probably some textual corruption now unremovable. Cheyne wisely falls back on asterisks. Whatever is the precise nature of the instance of lex talionis in the clause, it is hailed with gestures of scornful approval by all beholders. Many men approve the Divine punishments, who have no deep horror of the sins that are punished. There is something of a noble, if rough, sense of justice in most men, and something of an ignoble satisfaction in seeing the downfall of the powerful, and both sentiments set heads nodding approval of God’s judgments. The psalm closes with the familiar thought that these judgments will move to wholesome awe and be told from lip to lip while they become to the righteous occasion of joy, incitements to find refuge in God, and material for triumph. These are large consequences to flow from one man’s deliverance. The anticipation would be easily explained if we took the speaker to be the personified nation. But it would be equally intelligible if he were in any way a conspicuous or representative person. The humblest may feel that his experience of Divine deliverance witnesses, to as many as know it, of a delivering God. That is a high type of godliness which, like this psalmist, counts the future as so certain that it can be spoken of as present even in peril. It augurs a still higher to welcome deliverance, not only for the ease it brings to the suppliant, but for the glory it brings to God. Psalms 65:1-13 THIS and the two following psalms form a little group, with one great thought dominant in each, namely, that God’s manifestations of grace and providence to Israel are witnesses to the world. They all reach out to "the ends of the earth" in yearning and confidence that God’s name will be adored there, and they all regard His dealings with His people as His appeals to mankind, which will not always be vain. Psalms 65:1-13 begins with that privilege of approach to God with which Psalms 66:1-20 ends. In both, iniquity in heart is regarded as hindering access to God; and, in both, the psalmist’s experience of answered prayer is treated as testimony for the world of the blessedness of worshipping Israel’s God. This psalm falls into three parts, which set forth a threefold revelation of God in His acts. The first (Psalms 65:1-4) deals with the most intimate privileges of the men who dwell in His house. The second (Psalms 65:5-8) points to His rule in nature, the tokens of God’s power in the mighty things of creation-mountains, ocean, day and night, the radiant east, the solemn sunset west. The third (Psalms 65:9-13) gives a lovely picture of the annual miracle which brings harvest joys. The underlying thought binding these three parts into unity seems to be the witness to God’s name which each set of His acts bears-a witness which "they that dwell in the uttermost parts" hear sounded in their ears. If this is the true view of the psalm, we may hear a reminiscence of it in Paul’s remonstrance with the rude Lycaonian peasants: "He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness." The first strophe is wholly concerned with the glory of God as answering prayer. It begins with enigmatical words, which, if the existing text is adhered to, carry a deep truth. There are two kinds of prayer-wordless submission of will and spoken vows. The former is truly praise. The same thought is found in Psalms 62:1-12. It goes down to the root of the matter. The true notion of prayer is not that of swaying God’s will to gratify ours, but that of bringing ours into unremonstrating acceptance of His. When the accents of eager desire or of impatient murmuring and vain sobs and weeping are hushed, the still soul enters into closeness of communion, else unattainable. Beautiful and profoundly true as this is, it is not indubitably the psalmist’s meaning; and there is much to be said for the rendering which is adopted from the LXX by many commentators, and which only requires a slight change in the vocalisation-namely, "Praise is meet for Thee." But that idea is expressed in Psalms 33:1 by a different word, and the meaning of the one used here is not to be suitable for, but to be like. So that we have to choose between altering the text and then imposing a somewhat unusual meaning on the word gained, and adhering to the present reading and gaining a meaning which is admitted to be "fine" but alleged to be "unbiblical." On the whole, that meaning seems preferable. The convictions that God accepts silent devotion and answers vows, so that the thank offering promised in trouble will be called for by deliverance, "fill the psalmist with a longing that all mankind may have recourse to the same Divine Friend" (Cheyne, in loc.). His experience of accepted prayers has taught him that it is God’s nature and property to be "the hearer of prayer" (the word is a participle, expressive of a permanent characteristic), and therefore he is sure that "all flesh," in its weariness and need of an ear into which to pour necessities and sorrows, will come to Him. His eye travels far beyond Israel, and contemplates mankind as coming to worship. But one black barrier rises between men and God, the separating power of which the singer has painfully felt. Sin chokes the stream that would flow from seeking hearts into the ocean of God. The very act of gathering himself up to pray and praise quickens the sense of sinfulness in the psalmist. Therefore his look turns swiftly inwards, for the only time in the psalm. The consciousness of transgression wakes the sense of personality and isolation as nothing else will, and for one bitter moment the singer is, as it were, prisoned in the awful solitude of individual responsibility. His words reflect his vivid sight of his sins in their manifoldness, for he says that "matters of iniquities" have overcome him. The exuberant expression is not tautological, but emotional. And then he passes into sunshine again, and finds that, though he had to be alone in guilt, he is one of a company in the experience of forgiveness. Emphatically he reduplicates "Thou" in his burst of confidence in God’s covering of sins; for none but God can cope with the evil things that are too strong for man. I can neither keep them out, nor drive them out when they have come in, nor cleanse the stains that their hoofs have made; but Thou, Thou canst and dost cover them. Is not that an additional reason for "all flesh" coming to God, and almost a guarantee that they will? The strophe ends with an exclamation celebrating the blessedness of dwelling with God. That refers, no doubt, to Israel’s prerogative of access to the Temple; but the inward and outward are blended, as in many places in the Psalter where dwelling in the house of the Lord is yearned for or rejoiced in. The universalism of the psalm does not forget the special place held by the nation whom God "has chosen and brought near." But the reality beneath the symbol is too familiar and sweet to this singer for him to suppose that mere outward access exhausts the possibilities of blessed communion. It is no violent forcing more into his words than they contain, if we read in them deeply spiritual truths. It is noteworthy that they follow the reference to forgiveness, and, when taken in conjunction therewith, may be called an itinerary of the road to God. First comes forgiveness by expiation, for such is the meaning of "covering." Then the cleansed soul has "access with confidence"; then approaching, it happily dwells a guest in the house and is supplied with that which satisfies all desires. The guest’s security in the house of his host, his right to protection, help, and food, are, as usual, implied in the imagery. The prerogative of his nation, which the psalmist had in mind, is itself imagery, and the reality which it shadowed is that close abiding in God which is possible by faith, love, communion of spirit, and obedience of life, and which, wherever realised, keeps a soul in a great calm, whatever tempests rave, and satisfies its truest needs and deepest longings, whatever famine may afflict the outward life. Forgiven men may dwell with God. They who do are blessed. The second strophe (Psalms 65:5-8) celebrates another aspect of God’s manifestation by deeds, which has, in like manner, a message for the ends of the earth. Israel is again the immediate recipient of God’s acts, but they reverberate through the world. Therefore in Psalms 65:5 the two clauses are not merely adjacent, but connected. It is because God is ever revealing Himself to the nation (for the tense of the verb "answer" expresses continuous action) that He is revealed as the trust of the whole earth. God’s grace fructifies through Israel to all. How clearly the psalmist had grasped the truth that God has limited the knowledge of Himself to one spot of earth in order to its universal diffusion! The light is focused and set in a tower that it may shine out over sea and storm. The fire is gathered into a brasier that it may warm all the house. Some commentators take that strong expression "the trust of all the ends of the earth" as asserting that even the confidences of idolaters in their gods are at bottom trust in Jehovah and find their way to Him. But such a view of idolatry is foreign to the Old Testament, and is not needed to explain the psalmist’s words. God is the only worthy object of trust, and remains so whether men do in fact trust Him or not. And one day, thinks the psalmist, God’s patient manifestation of His grace to Israel will tell, and all men will come to know Him for what He is. "The remotest sea" is not translation, but paraphrase. The psalmist speaks in vague terms, as one who knew not what lay beyond the horizon of that little-traversed western ocean. Literally his words are "the sea of the remote [peoples]"; but a possible emendation has been suggested, reading instead of sea "regions" or "nations." The change is slight, and smooths an awkward expression, but destroys the antithesis of earth and sea, and makes the second clause a somewhat weak repetition of the first. From the self-revelation of God in history the psalm passes to His mighty deeds in nature (Psalms 65:6-7 a), and from these it returns to His providential guidance of human affairs (Psalms 65:7 b). The two specimens of Divine power celebrated in Psalms 65:6-7, are suggested by the closing words of Psa 65:5. "The ends of the earth" were, according to ancient cosmography, girdled by mountains; and God has set these fast. The dash of "the remotest seas" is hushed by Him. Two mighty things are selected to witness to the Mightier who made and manages them. The firm bulk of the mountains is firm because He is strong. The tossing waves are still because He bids them be silent. How transcendently great then is He, and how blind those who, seeing hill and ocean, do not see God! The mention of the sea, the standing emblem of unrest and rebellious power suggests the "tumult of the peoples," on which similar repressive power is exercised. The great deeds of God, putting down tyranny and opposition to Israel, which is rebellion against Himself, strike terror, which is wholesome and is purified into reverence, into the distant lands; and so, from the place where the sun rises to the "sad-coloured end of evening" where it sinks in the west, i.e., through all the earth; there rings out a shout of joy. Such glowing anticipations of universal results from the deeds of God, especially for Israel, are the products of diseased national vanity, unless they are God-taught apprehension of the Divine purpose of Israel’s history, which shall one day be fulfilled, when the knowledge of the yet more wondrous deeds which culminated in the Cross is spread to the ends of the earth and the remotest seas. God reveals Himself not only in the sanctities of His house, nor in His dread "signs" in nature and history, but in the yearly recurring harvest, which was waving as yet unreaped, while the poet sang. The local colouring which regards rain as the chief factor in fertility and the special gift of God is noticeable. In such a land as Palestine, irrigation seems the one thing needful to turn desert into fruitful field. To "water" the soil is there emphatically to "enrich" it. The psalmist uses for "river" the technical word for an irrigation cutting, as if he would represent God in the guise of the cultivator, who digs his ditches that the sparkling blessing may reach all his field. But what a difference between men-made watercourses and God’s! The former are sometimes flooded, but often dry; His are full of water. The prose of the figure is, of course, abundant rain. It prepares the earth for the seed, and "so" in effect prepares the corn. The one is the immediate, the other the ultimate issue and purpose. Spring showers prepare autumn fruits. It is so in all regions of man’s endeavour and of God’s work; and it is practical wisdom to train ourselves to see the assurance of the end in His means, and to be confident that whatever His doings have a manifest tendency to effect shall one day be ripened and harvested. How lovingly and patiently the psalm represents the Divine Husbandman as attending to all the steps of the process needed for the great ingathering! He guides the showers, he fills the little valleys of the furrows, and smooths down the tiny hills of the intervening ridges. He takes charge of the germinating seed, and His sunshine smiles a benediction on the tender green blade, as it pricks through the earth which has been made soft enough for it to pierce from beneath. This unhesitating recognition of the direct action of God in all "natural" processes is the true point of view from which to regard them. God is the only force; and His immediate action is present in all material changes. The Bible knows nothing of self-moving powers in nature, and the deepest conception of God’s relations to things sensible knows as little. "There is no power but of God" is the last word of religion and of true philosophy. The poet stands in the joyous time when all the beauty of summer flushes the earth, and the harvest is yet a hope, not a possibly disappointing reality. It is near enough to fill his song with exultation. It is far enough off to let him look on the whitened fields, and not on the bristly stubble. So he regards the "crown" as already set on a year of goodness. He sees God’s chariot passing in triumph and blessing over the land, and leaving abundance wherever its wheel tracks go. Out in the uncultivated prairie, where sweet grass unsown by man grows, is the flush of greenery, where, before the rain, was baked and gaping earth. The hills, that wear a girdle of forest trees halfway up towards their barren summits, wave their foliage, as if glad. The white fleeces of flocks are dotted over the vivid verdure of every meadow, and one cannot see the ground for the tall corn that stands waiting for the sickle, in each fertile plain. The psalmist hears a hymn of glad praise rising from all these happy and sunny things; and for its melody he hushes his own, that he and we may listen to "The fair music that all creatures make To their great Lord." Psalms 66:1-20 THE most striking feature of this psalm is the transition from the plural "we" and "our," in Psalms 66:1-12, to the singular "I" and "my," in Psalms 66:13-20. Ewald supposes that two independent psalms have been united, but Psalms 66:12 is as abrupt for an ending as Psalms 66:13 is for a beginning; and the "Come, hear," of Psalms 66:16 echoes the "Come, and see," of Psalms 66:5. It is possible that "the ‘I’ of the second part is identical with the ‘we’ of the first; in other words, that the personified community speaks here" (Baethgen); but the supposition that the psalm was meant for public worship, and is composed of a choral and a solo part, accounts for the change of number. Such expressions as "my soul" and "my heart" favour the individual reference. Of course, the deliverance magnified by the single voice is the same as that celebrated by the loud acclaim of many tongues; but there is a different note in the praise of the former-there is a tone of inwardness in it, befitting individual appropriation of general blessings. To this highest point, that of the action of the single soul in taking the deliverances of the community for its very own, and pouring out its own praise, the psalm steadily climbs. It begins with the widest outlook over "all the earth," summoned to ring forth joyous praise. It ends focused to one burning point, in a heart fired by the thought that God "has not turned away his lovingkindness from me." So we learn how each single soul has to claim its several part in world wide blessings, as each flower calyx absorbs the sunshine that floods the pastures. The psalm has no superscription of date or author, and no clue in its language to the particular deliverance that called it forth. The usual variety of conjectures have been hazarded. The defeat of Sennacherib occurs to some; the return from Babylon to others; the Maccabean period to yet another school of critics. It belongs to a period when Israel’s world significance and mission were recognised (which Cheyne considers a post-exilic feature, "Orig. of Psalt." 176), and when the sacrificial worship was in full force; but beyond these there are no clear data for period of composition. It is divided into five strophes, three of which are marked by Selah. That musical indication is wanting at the close of the third strophe (Psalms 66:12), which is also the close of the first or choral part, and its absence may be connected with the transition to a single voice. A certain progress in thought is noticeable, as will appear as we proceed. The first strophe calls upon all the earth to praise God for His works. The special deeds which fire the psalmist are not yet mentioned, though they are present to his mind. The summons of the world to praise passes over into the prophecy that it shall praise. The manifestation of God’s character by act will win homage. The great thought that God has but to be truly known in order to be reverenced is an axiom with this psalmist; and no less certain is he that such knowledge and such praise will one day fill the world. True, he discerns that submission will not always be genuine; for he uses the same word to express it as occurs in Psalms 18:44, which represents "feigned homage." Every great religious awakening has a fringe of adherents, imperfectly affected by it, whose professions outrun reality, though they themselves are but half conscious that they feign. But though this sobering estimate of the shallowness of a widely diffused recognition of God tones down the psalmist’s expectations, and has been abundantly confirmed by later experience, his great hope remains as an early utterance of the conviction, which has gathered assurance and definiteness by subsequent Revelation, and is now familiar to all. The world is God’s. His Self-revelation will win hearts. There shall be true submission and joyous praise girdling the earth as it rolls. The psalmist dwells mainly on the majestic and awe-inspiring aspect of God’s acts. His greatness of power bears down opposition. But the later strophes introduce other elements of the Divine nature and syllables of the Name, though the inmost secret of the "power of God" in the weakness of manhood and the all-conquering might of Love is not yet ripe for utterance. The second strophe advances to a closer contemplation of the deeds of God, which the nations are summoned to behold. He is not only "dread" in His doings towards mankind at large, but Israel’s history is radiant with the manifestation of His name, and that past lives on so that ancient experiences give the measure and manner of today’s working. The retrospect embraces the two standing instances of God’s delivering help-the passage of the Red Sea and of Jordan-and these are not dead deeds in a far-off century. For the singer calls on his own generation to rejoice "there" in Him. Psalms 66:6 c is by some translated as "There did we rejoice," and more accurately by others, "Let us rejoice." In the former case the essential solidarity of all generations of the nation is most vividly set forth. But the same idea is involved in the correct rendering, according to which the men of the psalmist’s period are entitled and invoked to associate themselves in thought with that long-past generation, and to share in their joy, since they do possess the same power which wrought then. God’s work is never antiquated. It is all a revelation of eternal activities. What He has been, He is. What He did, He does. Therefore faith may feed on all the records of old time, and expect the repetition of all that they contain. Such an application of history to the present makes the nerve of this strophe. For Psalms 66:7, following on the retrospect, declares the perpetuity of God’s rule, and that His eyes still keep an outlook, as a watchman on a tower might do, to mark the enemies’ designs, in order that He may intervene, as of old, for His people’s deliverance. He "looked forth upon the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of cloud". (Exodus 14:24) Thus He still marks the actions and plans of Israel’s foes. Therefore it were wise for the "rebellious" not to rear their heads so high in opposition. The third strophe comes still closer to the particular deliverance underlying the psalm. Why should all "peoples" be called upon to praise God for it? The psalmist has learned that Israel’s history is meant to teach the world what God is, and how blessed it is to dwell under His wing. No exclusiveness taints his enjoyment of special national privileges. He has reached a height far above the conceptions of the rest of the world in his day, and even in this day, except where the Christian conception of "humanity" has been heartily accepted. Whence came this width of view, this purifying from particularism, this anticipation by so many centuries of a thought imperfectly realised even now? Surely a man who in those days and with that environment could soar so high must have been lifted by something mightier than his own spirit. The details of the Divine dealings described in the strophe are of small consequence in comparison with its fixed expectation of the world’s participation in Israel’s blessings. The familiar figures for affliction reappear-namely, proving and refining in a furnace. A less common metaphor is that of being prisoned in a dungeon, as the word rendered "net" in the A.V. and R.V. probably means. Another peculiar image is that of Psa 66:12: "Thou hast caused men to ride over our head." The word for "men" here connotes feebleness and frailty, characteristics which make tyranny more intolerable; and the somewhat harsh metaphor is best explained as setting forth insolent and crushing domination, whether the picture intended is that of ruthless conquerors driving their chariots over their prone victims, or that of their sitting as an incubus on their shoulders and making them like beasts of burden. Fire and water are standing figures for affliction. With great force these accumulated symbols of oppression are confronted by one abrupt clause ending the strophe, and describing in a breath the perfect deliverance which sweeps them all away: "Thou broughtest us out into abundance." There is no need for the textual alteration of the last word into "a wide place" (Hupfeld), a place of liberty (Cheyne), or freedom (Baethgen). The word in the received text is that employed in Psalms 23:5. "My cup is overfulness" and "abundance" yields a satisfactory meaning here, though not closely corresponding to any of the preceding metaphors for affliction. The fourth strophe (Psalms 66:13-15) begins the solo part. It clothes in a garb appropriate to a sacrificial system the thought expressed in more spiritual dress in the next strophe, that God’s deliverance should evoke men’s praise. The abundance and variety of sacrifices named, and the fact that "rams" were not used for the offerings of individuals, seem to suggest that the speaker is, in some sense, representing the nation, and it has been supposed that he may be the high priest. But this is merely conjecture, and the explanation may be that there is a certain ideal and poetical tone over the representation, which does not confine itself to scrupulous accuracy. The last strophe (Psalms 66:16-20) passes beyond sacrificial symbols, and gives the purest utterance to the emotions and resolves which ought to well up in a devout soul on occasion of God’s goodness. Not only does the psalmist teach us how each individual must take the general blessing for his very own-of which act the faith which takes the world’s Christ for my Christ is the supreme example-but he teaches us that the obligation laid on all recipients of God’s mercy is to tell it forth, and that the impulse is as certain to follow real reception as the command is imperative. Just as Israel received deliverances that the whole earth might learn how strong and gracious was Israel’s God, we receive His blessings, and chiefly His highest gift of life in Christ, not only that we may live, but that, living, we may "declare the works of the Lord." He has little possession of God’s grace who has not felt the necessity of speech, and the impossibility of the lips being locked when the heart is full. The psalmist tells his experience of God’s answers to his prayer in a very striking fashion. Psalms 66:17 says that he cried to God; and while his uttered voice was supplication, the song extolling God for the deliverance asked was, as it were, lying under his tongue, ready to break forth, -so sure was he that his cry would be heard. That is a strong faith which prepares banners and music for the triumph before the battle is fought. It would be presumptuous folly, not faith, if it rested on anything less certain than God’s power and will. "I find David making a syllogism in mood and figure ‘If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me: but verily God hath heard me; He hath attended to the voice of my prayer.’ Now, I expected that David would have concluded thus ‘Therefore I regard not wickedness in my heart.’ But far otherwise he concludes: ‘Blessed be God, who hath not turned away my prayer, nor His mercy from me.’ Thus David hath deceived but not wronged me. I looked that he should have clapped the crown on his own, and he puts it on God’s head. I will learn this excellent logic." So says Fuller ("Good Thoughts in Bad Times," p. 34, Pickering’s ed., 1841). No doubt, however, the psalmist means to suggest, though he does not state, that his prayer was sincere. There is no self-complacent attribution of merit to his supplication, in the profession that it was untainted by any secret, sidelong looking towards evil; and Fuller is right in emphasising the suppression of the statement. But even the appearance of such is avoided by the jet of praise which closes the psalm. Its condensed brevity has induced some critics to mend it by expansion, as they regard it as incongruous to speak of turning away a man’s prayer from himself. Some would therefore insert "from Him" after "my prayer," and others would expand still further by inserting an appropriate negative before "His lovingkindness." But the slight incongruity does not obscure the sense, and brings out strongly the flow of thought. So fully does the psalmist feel the connection between God’s lovingkindness and his own prayer, that these are, as it were, smelted into one in his mind, and the latter is so far predominant in his thoughts that he is unconscious of the anomaly of his expression. To expand only weakens the swing of the words and the power of the thought. It is possible to tame lyric outbursts into accuracy at the cost of energy. Psalmists are not bound to be correct in style. Rivers wind; canals are straight. Psalms 67:1-7 THIS little psalm condenses the dominant thought of the two preceding into a series of aspirations after Israel’s blessing, and the consequent diffusion of the knowledge of God’s way among all lands. Like Psalms 65:1-13, it sees in abundant harvests a type and witness of God’s kindness. But, whereas in Psalms 65:1-13 the fields were covered with corn, here the increase has been gathered in. The two psalms may or may not be connected in date of composition as closely as these two stages of one harvest time. The structure of the psalm has been variously conceived. Clearly the Selahs do not guide as to divisions in the flow of thought. But it may be noted that the seven verses in the psalm have each two clauses, with the exception of the middle one (Psalms 67:4), which has three. Its place and its abnormal length mark it as the core, round which, as it were, the whole is built up. Further, it is as if encased in two verses (Psalms 67:3, Psalms 67:5), which, in their four clauses, are a fourfold repetition of a single aspiration. These three verses are the heart of the psalm-the desire that all the earth may praise God, whose providence blesses it all. They are again enclosed in two strophes of two verses each (Psalms 67:1-2 and Psalms 67:6-7), which, like the closer wrapping round the core, are substantially parallel and, unlike it, regard God’s manifestation to Israel as His great witness to the world. Thus, working outwards from the central verse, we have symmetry of structure, and intelligible progress and distinctness of thought. Another point of difficulty is the rendering of the series of verbs in the psalm. Commentators are unanimous in taking those of Psa 67:1 as expressions of desire; but they bewilderingly diverge in their treatment of the following ones. Details of the divergent interpretations, or discussions of their reasons, cannot be entered on here. It may be sufficient to say that the adherence throughout to the optative rendering, admitted by all in Psalms 67:1, gives a consistent colouring to the whole. It is arbitrary to vary the renderings in so short a psalm. But, as is often the case, the aspirations are so sure of their correspondence with the Divine purpose that they tremble on the verge of being prophecies, as, indeed, all wishes that go out along the line of God’s "way" are. Every deep, God-inspired longing whispers to its utterer assurance that so it shall be; and therefore such desires have ever in them an element of fruition, and know nothing of the pain of earthly wishes. They who stretch out empty hands to God never "gather dust and chaff." The priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24-26) moulds Psalms 67:1, but with the substitution of God for Jehovah, and of "among us" for "upon us." The latter variation gives an impression of closer contact of men with the lustre of that Divine Light, and of yet greater condescension in God. The soul’s longing is not satisfied by even the fullest beams of a Light that is fixed on high; it dares to wish. for the stooping of the Sun to dwell among its. The singer speaks in the name of the nation; and, by using the priestly formula, claims for the whole people the sacerdotal dignity which belonged to it by its original constitution. He gives that idea its widest extension, Israel is the world’s high priest, lifting up intercessions and holy hands of benediction for mankind. What self-effacement, and what profound insight into and sympathy with the mind of God breathe in that collocation of desires, in which the gracious lustre of God’s face shining on us is longed for, chiefly that thence it may be reflected into the dark places of earth, to gladden sad and seeking eyes! This psalmist did not know in how true a sense the Light would come to dwell among men of Israel’s race, and thence to flood the world; but his yearning is a foreshadowing of the spirit of Christianity, which forbids self-regarding monopoly of its blessings. If a man is "light in the Lord," he cannot but shine. "God hath shined into our hearts, that we may give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God." A Church illuminated with a manifestly Divine light is the best witness for God. Eyes which cannot look on the Sun may gaze at the clouds, which tone down its colourless radiance into purple and gold. The central core of the psalm may either be taken as summons to the nations or as expression of desire for them. The depth of the longing or the stringency of the summons is wonderfully given by that fourfold repetition of the same words in Psalms 67:3 and Psalms 67:5, with the emphatic "all of them" in the second clause of each. Not less significant is the use of three names for the aggregations of men-nations (Psalms 67:2), peoples, and tribes. All are included, whatever bond knits them in communities, whatever their societies call themselves, however many they are. The very vagueness gives sublimity and universality. We can fill the vast outline drawn by these sweeping strokes; and wider knowledge should not be attended with narrowed desires, nor feebler confidence that the Light shall lighten every land. It is noticeable that in this central portion the deeds of God among the nations are set forth as the ground of their praise and joy in Him. Israel had the light of His face, and that would draw men to Him. But all peoples have the strength of His arm to be their defender, and the guidance of His hand by providences and in other ways unrecognised by them. The "judgments" here contemplated are, of course, not retribution for evil, but the aggregate of dealings by which God shows His sovereignty in all the earth. The psalmist does not believe that God’s goodness has been confined to Israel, nor that the rest of the world has been left orphaned. He agrees with Paul, "That which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God manifested it to them." The final strophe (Psalms 67:6-7) is substantially a repetition of Psa 67:1-2, with the addition that a past fact is laid as the foundation of the desires or hopes of future blessings. "The earth has yielded her increase." This may show that the psalm is a harvest hymn, but it does not necessarily imply this. The thought may have been born at any time. The singer takes the plain fact that, year by year, by mysterious quickening which he recognises as of God, the fertile earth "causes the things sown in it to bring forth and bud," as an evidence of Divine care and kindliness, which warrants the desire and the confidence that all blessings will be given. It seems a large inference from such a premise; but it is legitimate for those who recognise God as working in nature, and have eyes to read the parables amid which we live. The psalmist reminds God of His own acts, and further, of His own name, and builds on these his petitions and his faith. Because He is "our God" He will bless us; and since the earth has, by His gift, "yielded her increase," He will give the better food which souls need. This the singer desires, not only because he and his brethren need it, but because a happy people are the best witnesses for a good King, and worshippers "satisfied with favour and full of the blessing of the Lord" proclaim most persuasively, "Taste, and see that God is good." This psalm is a truly missionary psalm, in its clear anticipation of the universal spread of the knowledge of God, in its firm grasp of the thought that the Church has its blessings in order to the evangelisation of the world, and in its intensity of longing that from all the ends of the earth a shout of praise may go up to the God who has sent some rays of His light into them all, and committed to His people the task of carrying a brighter illumination to every land. Psalms 68:1-35 THIS superb hymn is unsurpassed, if not unequalled, in grandeur, lyric fire, and sustained rush of triumphant praise. It celebrates a victory; but it is the victory of the God who enters as a conqueror into His sanctuary. To that entrance (Psalms 68:15-18) all the preceding part of the psalm leads up; and from it all the subsequent part flows down. The Exodus is recalled as the progress of a king at the head of his hosts, and old paeans re-echo. That dwelling of God in the sanctuary is "forever." Therefore in the second part of the psalm (Psalms 68:19-35) its consequences for the psalmist’s generation and for the future are developed-Israel’s deliverance, the conquest of the nations, and finally the universal recognition of God’s sovereignty and ringing songs sent up to Him. The Davidic authorship is set aside as impossible by most recent commentators, and there is much in the psalm which goes against it; but, on the other hand, the Syro-Ammonite war, (2 Samuel 11:1-27) in which the ark was taken into the field, is not unnaturally supposed by Delitzsch and others to explain the special reference to the entrance of God into the sanctuary. The numerous quotations and allusions are urged as evidence of late date, especially the undeniable resemblance with Isaiah 11:1-16. But the difficulty of settling which of two similar passages is original and which copy is great; and if by one critical canon such allusions are marks of lateness, by another, rugged obscurities, such as those with which this psalm bristles, are evidences of an early date. The mention of only four tribes in Psalms 68:27 is claimed as showing that the psalm was written when Judaea and Galilee were the only orthodox districts, and central Palestine was in the hands of the Samaritans. But could there be any talk of "princes of Zebulun and Naphtali" then? The exultant tone of the psalm makes its ascription to such a date as the age of the Ptolemies unlikely, when "Israel is too feeble, too depressed, to dream of self-defence; and if God does not soon interpose, will be torn to pieces" (Cheyne, "Aids to the Devout Study," etc., 335). To the present writer it does not appear that the understanding and enjoyment of this grand psalm depend so much on success in dating it as is supposed. It may be post-exilic. Whoever fused its reminiscences of ancient triumph into such a glowing outburst of exultant faith, his vision of the throned God and his conviction that ancient facts reveal eternal truths remain for all generations as an encouragement of trust and a prophecy of God’s universal dominion. The main division at Psalms 68:18 parts the psalm into two equal halves, which are again easily subdivided into strophes. The first strophe (Psalms 68:1-6) may be regarded as introductory to the chief theme of the first half-namely, the triumphant march of the conquering God to His sanctuary. It consists of invocation to Him to arise, and of summons to His people to prepare His way and to meet Him with ringing gladness. The ground of both invocation and summons is laid in an expansion of the meaning of His name as Helper of the helpless, Deliverer of the captive, righteous, and plentifully rewarding the proud doer. The invocation echoes the Mosaic prayer "when the ark set forward," (Numbers 10:35) with the alteration of the tense of the verb from a simple imperative into a precative future, and of "Jehovah" into God. This is the first of the quotations characteristic of the psalm, which is penetrated throughout with the idea that the deeds of the past are revelations of permanent relations and activities. The ancient history grows with present life. Whatever God has done He is doing still. No age of the Church needs to look back wistfully to any former, and say, "Where be all His wondrous works which our fathers have told us of?" The twofold conditions of God’s intervention are, as this strophe teaches, Israel’s cry to Him to arise, and expectant diligence in preparing His way. The invocation, which is half of Israel’s means of insuring His coming, being a quotation, the summons to perform the other half is naturally regarded by the defenders of the post-exilic authorship as borrowed from Isaiah 11:1-16., (e.g., Psalms 40:3; Psalms 62:10) while the supporters of an earlier date regard the psalm as the primary passage from which the prophet has drawn. God "arises" when He displays by some signal act His care for His people. That strong anthropomorphism sets forth the plain truth that there come crises in history, when causes, long silently working, suddenly produce their world-shaking effects. God has seemed to sit passive; but the heavens open, and all but blind eyes can see Him, standing ready to smite that He may deliver. When He rises to His feet, the enemy scatters in panic. His presence revealed is enough. The emphatic repetition of "before" in these verses is striking, especially when fully rendered, -from His face (Psalms 68:1); from the face of the fire (Psalms 68:2); from the face of God (Psalms 68:2); before His face (Psalms 68:3-4). To His foes that face is dreadful, and they would fain cower away from its light; His friends sun themselves in its brightness. The same fire consumes and vivifies. All depends on the character of the recipients. In the psalm "the righteous" are Israel, the ideal nation; the "wicked" are its heathen foes; but the principle underlying the fervid words demands a real assimilation of moral character to the Divine, as a condition of being at ease in the Light. The "deserts" are, in consonance with the immediately following reminiscences, those of the Exodus. Hupfeld and those who discover in the psalm the hopes of the captives in Babylon, take them to be the waste wilderness stretching between Babylon and Palestine. But it is better to see in them simply a type drawn from the past, of guidance through any needs or miseries. Psalms 68:5-6, draw out at length the blessed significance of the name Jah, in order to hearten to earnest desire and expectance of Him. They are best taken as in apposition with "Him" in Psalms 68:4. Well may we exult before Him who is the orphans’ father, the widows’ advocate. There may be significance in the contrast between what He is "in His holy habitation" and when He arises to ride through the deserts. Even in the times when he seems to be far above, dwelling in the separation of His unapproachable holiness, He is still caring and acting for the sad and helpless, But when He comes forth, it is to make the solitary to dwell in a home, to bring out prisoners into prosperity. Are these simply expressions for God’s general care of the afflicted, like the former clauses, or do they point back to the Exodus? A very slight change in the text gives the reading, "Makes the solitary to return home"; but even without that alteration, the last clause of the verse is so obviously an allusion to the disobedient, "whose carcasses fell in the wilderness," that the whole verse is best regarded as pointing back to that time. The "home" to which the people were led is the same as the "prosperity" into which the prisoners are brought-namely, the rest and well-being of Canaan; while the fate of the "rebellious" is, as it ever is, to live and die amidst the drought-stricken barrenness which they have chosen. With the second strophe (Psalms 68:7-10) begins the historical retrospect, which is continued till, at the end of the fourth (Psalms 68:18), God is enthroned in the sanctuary, there to dwell forever. In the second strophe the wilderness life is described. The third (Psalms 68:11-14) tells of the victories which won the land. The fourth triumphantly contrasts the glory of the mountain where God at last has come to dwell, with the loftier peaks across the Jordan on which no such lustre gleams. Psalms 68:7-8 are from Deborah’s song, with slight omissions and alterations, notably of "Jehovah" into "God." The phrase "before" still rings in the psalmist’s ears, and he changes Deborah’s words, in the first clause of Psa 68:7, so as to give the picture of God marching in front of His people, instead of, as the older song represented Him, coming from the east, to meet them marching from the west. The majestic theophany at the giving of the Law is taken as the culmination of His manifestations in the wilderness. Psalms 68:9-10, are capable of two applications. According to one, they anticipate the chronological order, and refer to the fertility of the land, and the abundance enjoyed by Israel when established there. According to the other they refer to the sustenance of the people it, the wilderness. The former view has in its favour the ordinary use of "inheritance" for the land, the likelihood that "rain" should be represented as falling on soil rather than on people, and the apparent reference in "dwelt therein," to the settlement in Canaan. The objection to it is that reference to peaceful dwelling in the land is out of place, since the next strophe pictures the conquest. If, then, the verses belong to the age of wandering, to what do they refer? Hupfeld tries to explain the "rain" as meaning the manna, and, still more improbably, takes the somewhat enigmatical "assembly" of Psalms 68:10 to mean (as it certainly does) "living creatures," and to allude (as it surely does not) to the quails that fell round the camp. Most commentators now agree in transferring "thine inheritance" to the first clause, and in understanding it of the people, not of the land. The verse is intelligible either as referring to gifts of refreshment of spirit and courage bestowed on the people, in which case "rain" is symbolical; or to actual rainfall during the forty years of desert life, by which sowing and reaping were made possible. The division of the verse as in our translation is now generally adopted. The allusion to the provision of corn in the desert is continued in Psalms 68:10, in which the chief difficulty is the ambiguous word "assembly." It may mean "living creatures," and is so taken here by the LXX and others. It is twice used in 2 Samuel 22:11 and 2 Samuel 22:13, for an army. Delitzsch takes it as a comparison of Israel to a flock, thus retaining the meaning of creatures. If the verse is interpreted as alluding to Israel’s wilderness life, "therein" must be taken in a somewhat irregular construction, since there is no feminine noun at hand to which the feminine pronominal suffix in the word can be referred. In that barren desert, God’s flock dwelt for more than a generation, and during all that time His goodness provided for them. The strophe thus gives two aspects of God’s manifestation in the wilderness-the majestic and terrible, and the gentle and beneficent. In the psalmist’s triumphant retrospect no allusion is made to the dark obverse-Israel’s long ingratitude. The same history which supplies other psalmists and prophets with material for penetrating accusations yields to this one only occasion of praise. God’s part is pure goodness; man’s is shaded with much rebellious murmuring. The next strophe (Psalms 68:11-14) is abrupt and disconnected, as if echoing the hurry of battle and the tumult of many voices on the field. The general drift is unmistakable, but the meaning of part is the despair of commentators. The whole scene of the conflict, flight, and division of the spoil is flashed before us in brief clauses, panting with excitement and blazing with the glow of victory. "The Lord giveth the word." That "word" may be the news which the women immediately repeat. But it is far more vivid and truer to the spirit of the psalm, which sees God as the only actor in Israel’s history, to regard it as the self-fulfilling decree which scatters the enemy. This battle is the Lord’s. There is no description of conflict. But one mighty word is hurled from heaven, like a thunderclap (the phrase resembles that employed so often, "the Lord gave His voice," which frequently means thunder peals) and the enemies’ ranks are broken in panic. Israel does not need to fight. God speaks, and the next sound we hear is the clash of timbrels and the clear notes of the maidens chanting victory. This picture of a battle, with the battle left out, tells best Who fought, and how He fought it. "He spake, and it was done." What scornful picture of the flight is given by the reduplication "they flee, they flee"! It is like Deborah’s fierce gloating over the dead Sisera: "He bowed, he fell, he lay: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell." What confidence in the power of weakness, when God is on its side, in the antithesis between the mighty kings scattered in a general sauve qui peut, and the matrons who had "tarried at home" and now divide the spoil! Sisera’s mother was pictured in Deborah’s song as looking long through her lattice for her son’s return, and solacing herself with the thought that he delayed to part the plunder and would come back laden with it. What she vainly hoped for Israel’s matrons enjoy. Psalms 68:13-14 are among the hardest in the Psalter. The separate clauses offer no great difficulties, but the connection is enigmatical indeed. "Will (lit. if) ye lie among the sheepfolds?" comes from Deborah’s song, (Judges 5:16) and is there a reproach flung at Reuben for preferring pastoral ease to warlike effort. Is it meant as reproach here? It is very unlikely that a song of triumph like this should have for its only mention of Israel’s warriors a taunt. The lovely picture of the dove with iridescent wings is as a picture perfect. But what does it mean here? Herder, whom Hupfeld follows, supposes that the whole verse is rebuke to recreants, who preferred lying stretched at ease among their flocks, and bidding each other admire the glancing plumage of the doves that flitted round them. But this is surely violent, and smacks of modern aestheticism. Others suppose that the first clause is a summons to be up and pursue the flying foe, and the second and third a description of the splendour with which the conquerors (or their households) should be clothed by the spoil. This meaning would require the insertion of some such phrase as "ye shall be" before the second clause. Delitzsch regards the whole as a connected description of the blessings of peace following on victory, and sees a reference to Israel as God’s dove. "The new condition of prosperity is compared with the play of colours of a dove basking in the rays of the sun." All these interpretations assume that Israel is addressed in the first clause. But is this assumption warranted? Is it not more natural to refer the "ye" to the "kings" just mentioned, especially as the psalmist recurs to them in the next verse? The question will then retain the taunting force which it has in Deborah’s song, while it pictures a very different kind of couching among the sheepfolds-namely, the hiding there from pursuit. The kings are first seen in full flight. Then the triumphant psalmist flings after them the taunt, "Will ye hide among the cattle?" If the initial particle retains its literal force, the first clause is hypothetical, and the suppression of the conclusion speaks more eloquently than its expression would have done: "If ye couch" The second and third clauses are then parallel with the second of Psa 68:12, and carry on the description of the home keeping matron, "the dove," adorned with rich spoils and glorious in her apparel. We thus have a complete parallelism between the two verses, which both lay side by side the contrasted pictures of the defeated kings and the women; and we further establish continuity between the three verses (Psalms 68:13-15), in so far as the "kings" are dealt with in them all. Psalms 68:14 is even harder than the preceding. What does "in it" refer to? Is the second clause metaphor, requiring to be eked out with "It is like as when"? If figure, what does it mean? One is inclined to say with Baethgen, at the end, of his comment on the words, "After all this, I can only confess that I do not understand the verse." Salmon was an inconsiderable hill in Central Palestine, deriving its name (Shady), as is probable, from forests on its sides. Many commentators look to that characteristic for explanation of the riddle. Snow on the dark hill would show very white. So after the defeat the bleached bones of the slain, or, as others, their glittering armour, would cover the land. Others take the point of comparison to be the change from trouble to joy which follows the foe’s defeat, and is likened to the change of the dark hillside to a gleaming snow field. Hupfeld still follows Herder in connecting the verse with the reproach which he finds in the former one, and seeing in the words "It snowed on Salmon" the ground of the recreants’ disinclination to leave the sheepfolds-namely, that it was bad weather, and that, if snow lay on Salmon in the south, it would be worse in the north, where the campaign was going on! He acknowledges that this explanation requires "a good deal of acuteness to discover," and says that the only alternative to accepting it, provisionally, at all events, is to give up the hope of any solution. Cheyne follows Bickell in supposing that part of the text has dropped out, and proposes an additional clause at the beginning of the verse and an expansion of the last clause, arriving at this result: "[For full is our land of spoil]. When Shaddai scatters kings therein, [As the snow,] when it snows in Salmon." The adoption of these additions is not necessary to reach this meaning of the whole, which appears the most consonant with the preceding verses, as continuing the double reference which runs through them-namely, to the fugitive kings and the dividers of the spoil. On the one side we see the kings driven from their lurking places among the sheepfolds: on the other, the gleam of rich booty, compared now to the shining white wrapping the dark hill, as formerly to the colours that shimmer on sunlit pinions of peaceful doves. If this is not the meaning, we can only fail back on the confession already quoted. The battle is over, and now the Conqueror enters His palace temple. The third strophe soars with its theme, describing His triumphal entry thither and permanent abiding there. The long years between the conquest of Canaan and the establishment of the ark on Zion dwindle to a span; for God’s enthronement there was in one view the purpose of the conquest, which was incomplete till that was effected. There is no need to suppose any reference in the mention of Bashan to the victories over Og, its ancient king. The noble figure needs no historic allusion to explain it. These towering heights beyond Jordan had once in many places been seats of idol worship. They are emblems of the world’s power. No light rests upon them, lofty though they are, like that which glorifies the insignificant top of Zion. They may well look enviously across the Jordan to the hill which God has desired for His abode. His triumphal procession is not composed of earthly warriors, for none such had appeared in the battle. He had conquered, not by employing human hands, but by His own "bright-harnessed angels." They now surround Him in numbers innumerable, which language strains its power in endeavouring to reckon. "Myriads doubled, thousands of repetition," says the psalmist-indefinite expressions for a countless host. But all their wide-flowing ranks are clustered round the Conqueror, whose presence makes their multitude a unity, even as it gives their immortal frames their life and strength, and their faces all their lustrous beauty. "God is in the midst of them"; therefore they conquer and exult. "Sinai is in the sanctuary." This bold utterance has led to a suggested emendation, which has the advantage of bringing out clearly a quotation Deuteronomy 33:2. It combines the second and third clauses of Psa 68:17, and renders "The Lord hath come from Sinai into the sanctuary." But the existing text gives a noble thought-that now, by the entrance of God thither, Sinai itself is in the sanctuary, and all the ancient sanctities and splendours, which flamed round its splintered peaks, are housed to shine lambent from that humble hill. Sinai was nothing but for God’s presence. Zion has that presence; and all that it ever meant it means still. The profound sense of the permanent nature of past revelation, which speaks all through the psalm, reaches its climax here. The "height" to which Psalms 68:18 triumphantly proclaims that God has gone up, can only be Zion. To take it as meaning the heavenly sanctuary, as in Psalms 7:7 it unquestionably does, is forbidden by the preceding verses. Thither the conquering God has ascended, as to His palace, leading a long procession of bound captives, and there receiving tribute from the vanquished. Assyrian slabs and Egyptian paintings illustrate these representations. The last clause has been variously construed and understood. Is "Yea, even the rebellious" to be connected with the preceding, and "among" to be supplied, so that those once rebellious are conceived of as tributary, or does the phrase begin an independent clause? The latter construction makes the remainder of the verse run more intelligibly, and obviates the need for supplying a preposition with "the rebellious." It still remains a question whether the last words of the clause refer to God’s dwelling among the submissive rebels, or to their dwelling with God. If, however, it is kept in view that the context speaks of God as dwelling in His sanctuary, the latter is the more natural explanation, especially as a forcible contrast is thereby presented to the fate of the "rebellious" in Psalms 68:6. They dwell in a burnt-up land; but, if they fling away their enmity, may be guests of God in His sanctuary. Thus the first half of the psalm closes with grand prophetic hopes that, when God has established His abode on Zion, distant nations shall bring their tribute, rebels return to allegiance, and men be dwellers with God in His house. In such anticipations the psalm is Messianic, inasmuch as these are only fulfilled in the dominion of Jesus. Paul’s quotation of this verse in Ephesians 4:8 does not require us to maintain its directly prophetic character. Rather, the apostle, as Calvin says, "deflects" it to Christ. That ascent of the ark to Zion was a type rather than a prophecy. Conflict, conquest, triumphant ascent to a lofty home, tribute, widespread submission, and access for rebels to the royal presence-all these, which the psalmist saw as facts or hopes in their earthly form, are repeated in loftier fashion in Christ, or are only attainable through His universal reign. The apostle significantly alters "received among" into "gave to," sufficiently showing that he is not arguing from a verbal prophecy, but from a typical fact, and bringing out the two great truths, that, in the highest manifestation of the conquering God, the conquered receive gifts from the victor, and that the gifts which the ascended Christ bestows are really the trophies of His battle, in which He bound the strong man and spoiled his house. The attempt to make out that the Hebrew word has the extraordinary double-barrelled meaning of receiving in order to give is futile, and obscures the intentional freedom with which the apostle deals with the text. The Ascension is, in the fullest sense, the enthronement of God; and its results are the growing submission of nations and the happy dwelling of even the rebellious in His house. The rapturous emphasis with which this psalm celebrates God’s entrance into His sanctuary is most appropriate to Davidic times. The psalm reaches its climax in God’s enthronement on Zion. Its subsequent strophes set forth the results thereof. The first of these, the fifth of the psalm (Psalms 68:19-23), suddenly drops from strains of exultation to a plaintive note, and then again as suddenly breaks out into stern rejoicing over the ruin of the foe. There is wonderful depth of insight and tenderness in laying side by side the two thoughts of God, that He sits on high as conqueror, and that He daily bears our burdens, or perhaps bears us as a shepherd might his lambs. Truly a Divine use for Divine might! To such lowly offices of continual individualising care will the Master of many legions stoop, reaching out from amid their innumerable myriads to sustain a poor weak man stumbling under a load too great for him. Israel had been delivered by a high hand, but still was burdened. The psalmist has been recalling the deeds of old, and he finds in them grounds for calm assurance as to the present. Today, he thinks, is as full of God as any yesterday, and our "burdens" as certain to be borne by Him, as were those of the generation that saw His Sinai tremble at His presence. To us, as to them, He is "a God of deliverances," and for us can provide ways of escape from death. The words breathe a somewhat plaintive sense of need, such as shades our brightest moments, if we bethink ourselves; but they do not oblige us to suppose that the psalm is the product of a time of oppression and dejection. That theory is contradicted by the bounding gladness of the former part, no less than by the confident anticipations of the second half. But no song sung by mortal lips is true to the singer’s condition, if it lacks the minor key into which this hymn of triumph is here modulated for a moment. It is but for a moment, and what follows is startlingly different. Israel’s escape from death is secured by the destruction of the enemy, and in it the psalmist has joy. He pictures the hand that sustained him and his fellows so tenderly, shattering the heads of the rebellions. These are described as long haired, an emblem of strength and insolence which one is almost tempted to connect with Absalom; and the same idea of determined and flaunting sin is conveyed by the expression "goes on in his guiltinesses." There will be such rebels, even though the house of God is open for them to dwell in, and there can be but one end for such. If they do not submit, they will be crushed. The psalmist is as sure of that as of God’s gentleness; and his two clauses do state the alternative that every man has to face-either to let God bear his burden or to be smitten by Him. Psalms 68:22-23 give a terrible picture of the end of the rebels. The psalmist hears the voice of the Lord promising to bring some unnamed fugitives from Bashan and the depths of the sea in order that they may be slain, and that he (or Israel) may bathe his foot in their blood, and his dogs may lick it, as they did Ahab’s. Who are to be brought back? Some have thought that the promise referred to Israel, but it is more natural to apply it to the flying foe. There is no reference to Bashan either as the kingdom of an ancient enemy or as envying Zion (Psalms 68:15). But the high land of Bashan in the east and the depths of the sea to the west are taken (cf. Amos 9:1-3) as representing the farthest and most inaccessible hiding places. Wherever the enemies lurk, thence they will be dragged and slain. The existing text is probably to be amended by the change of one letter in the verb, so as to read "shall wash" or bathe, as in Psalms 58:10, and the last clause to be read. "That the tongue of thy dogs may have its portion from the enemy." The blood runs ankle deep, and the dogs feast on the carcasses or lick it-a dreadful picture of slaughter and fierce triumph. It is not to be softened or spiritualised or explained away. There is, no doubt, a legitimate Christian joy in the fall of opposition to Christ’s kingdom, and the purest benevolence has sometimes a right to be glad when hoary oppressions are swept away and their victims set free; but such rejoicing is not after the Christian law unless it is mingled with pity, of which the psalm has no trace. The next strophe (Psalms 68:24-27) is by some regarded as resuming the description of the procession, which is supposed to have been interrupted by the preceding strophe. But the joyous march now to be described is altogether separate from the majestic progress of the conquering King in Psalms 68:17-18. This is the consequence of that. God has gone into His sanctuary. His people have seen His solemn entrance thither, and therefore they now go up to meet Him there with song and music. Their festal procession is the second result of His enthronement, of which the deliverance and triumph described in the preceding strophe were the first. The people escaped from death flock to thank their Deliverer. Such seems to be the connection of the whole, and especially of Psa 68:24-25. Instead of myriads of angels surrounding the conquering God, here are singers and flute-players and damsels beating their timbrels, like Miriam and her choir. Their shrill call in Psalms 68:26 summons all who "spring from the fountain of Israel"-i.e., from the eponymous patriarch-to bless God. After these musicians and singers, the psalmist sees tribe after tribe go up to the sanctuary, and points to each as it passes. His enumeration is not free from difficulties, both in regard to the epithets employed and the specification of the tribes. The meaning of the word rendered "ruler" is disputed. Its form is peculiar, and the meaning of the verb from which it is generally taken to come is rather to subdue or tread down than to rule. If the signification of ruler is accepted, a question rises as to the sense in which Benjamin is so called. Allusion to Saul’s belonging to that tribe is thought of by some; but this seems improbable, whether the psalm is Davidic or later. Others think that the allusion is to the fact that, according to Joshua 18:16, the Temple was within Benjamite territory; but that is a far-fetched explanation. Others confine the "rule" to the procession, in which Benjamin marches at the head, and so may be called its leader; but ruling and leading are not the same. Others get a similar result by a very slight textual change, reading "in front" instead of "their ruler." Another difficulty is in the word rendered above "their shouting multitude," which can only be made to mean a company of people by a somewhat violent twist. Hupfeld (with whom Bickell and Cheyne agree) proposes an alteration which yields the former sense and is easy. It may be tentatively adopted. A more important question is the reason for the selection of the four tribes named. The mention of Benjamin and Judah is natural; but why are Zebulun and Naphtali the only representatives of the other tribes? The defenders of a late date answer, as has been already noticed, Because in the late period when the psalm was written, Galilee and Judaea "formed the two orthodox provinces." The objection to this is that in the post-exilic period there were no distinct tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali, and no princes to rule. The mention of these tribes as sharing in the procession to the sanctuary on Zion would have been impossible during the period of the northern kingdom. If, then, these two periods are excluded, what is left but the Davidic? The fact seems to be that we have here another glance at Deborah’s song, in which the daring valour of these two tribes is set in contrast with the sluggish cowardice of Reuben and the other northern ones. Those who had done their part in the wars of the Lord now go up in triumph to His house. That is the reward of God’s faithful soldiers. The next strophe (Psalms 68:28-31) is the prayer of the procession. It fails into two parts of two verses each, of which the former verse is petition, and the latter confident anticipation of the results of answered prayer. The symmetry of the whole requires the substitution in Psalms 68:28 of "command" for "hath commanded." God’s strength is poetically regarded as distinct from Himself and almost personified, as "lovingkindness" is in Psalms 42:8. The prayer is substantially equivalent to the following petition in Psalms 68:28 b. Note how "strength" occurs four times in Psalms 68:33-35. The prayer for its present manifestation is, in accordance with the historical retrospect of the first part, based upon God’s past acts. It has been proposed to detach "From Thy Temple" from Psalms 68:20, and to attach it to Psalms 68:28. This gets over a difficulty, but unduly abbreviates Psalms 68:29, and is not in harmony with the representation in the former part, which magnifies what God has wrought, not "from the Temple," but in His progress thither. No doubt the retention of the words in Psalms 68:29 introduces a singular expression there. How can presents be brought to God "from Thy Temple"? The only explanation is that "Temple" is used in a restricted sense for the "holy place," as distinguished from the "holy of holies," in which the ark was contained. The tribute bearers stand in that outer sanctuary, and thence present their tokens of fealty. The city is clustered round the Temple mount, and therefore the psalm says, "Thy Temple above Jerusalem." One is tempted to read "unto" instead of "from"; for this explanation can scarcely be called quite satisfactory. But it seems the best that has been suggested. The submission of kings of unnamed lands is contemplated as the result of God’s manifestation of strength for Israel. Psalms 68:30 resumes the tone of petition, and maintains it throughout. "The beast of the reeds," probably the crocodile, is a poetic designation for Egypt, the reference to which is claimed by both the defenders of the Davidic and of the post-exilic date as in their favour. The former say that, in David’s day, Egypt was the greatest world power known to the Hebrews; and the latter, that the mention of it points to the time when Israel lay exposed to the attacks of Seleucidae on the one hand and of Ptolemies on the other. Why, then, should only one of the two hostile neighbours be mentioned here? "Bulls" are a standing emblem of leaders of nations, and "calved" are accordingly their subjects. The two metaphors are naturally connected, and the correction "leaders of the peoples" is unnecessary, and a prosaic intermingling of figure and fact. Psalms 68:30 c is extremely obscure. Baethgen roundly says, "The meaning of the words can no longer be ascertained, and in all probability they are corrupt." The first word is a participle, which is variously taken as meaning "casting oneself to the ground" (i.e., in submission), and "trampling to the ground." It is also variously referred to the nations and their leaders spoken of in the previous verse, and to God. In the former case it would describe their attitude of submission in consequence of "rebuke"; in the latter, God’s subjugation of them. The slightest change would make the word an imperative, thus bringing it into line with "rebuke"; but, even without this, the reference to God is apparently to be preferred. The structure of the strophe which, in the first verse of each pair, seems to put petitions and to confine its descriptions of the resulting subjugation of the enemy to the second verse in each case, favours the latter interpretation. The next words are also disputed. One rendering is, "with bars of silver"; another, "those that delight in silver." The former presupposes a very unusual word for "bars." It is necessarily adopted by those who refer the first word to the submission of the "herd of bulls." The enemies come with tribute of silver. The other rendering, which avoids the necessity of bringing in an otherwise unknown word, is necessarily preferred by the supporters of the second explanation of the preceding word. God is implored to crush "those who delight in silver," which may stand for a description of men of this world, but must be acknowledged to be rather a singular way of designating active enemies of God and Israel. Cheyne’s rendering, "That rolls itself in mire for gain of money," brings in the mercenaries of the Seleucidae. But "rolling oneself in mire" is a strange way of saying "hiring oneself out to fight." Certainty seems unattainable, and we must be content with the general trend of the verse as supplication for an exhibition of God’s strength against proud opponents. The last clause sums up the whole in the petition, "Scatter the peoples that delight in wars." One verse then tells what the result of that will be. "Great ones" shall come from the land of the beast of the reeds, and Ethiopia shall make haste to stretch out tribute-bearing hands to God. The vision of a world subjugated and loving its subjugation is rising before the poet. That is the end of the ways of God with Israel. So deeply had this psalmist been led into comprehension of the Divine purpose; so clearly was he given to see the future, "and all the wonder that should be." Therefore he breaks forth, in the last strophe, into invocation to all the kingdoms of the earth to sing to God. He had sung of His majesty as of old Jehovah "rode through the deserts"; and that phrase described His intervention in the field of history on behalf of Israel. Now the singer calls for praise from all the earth to Him who rides in the "most ancient heavens"; and that expression sets forth His transcendent majesty and eternal, universal sway. The psalmist had hymned the victory won When "God gave the word." Now he bids earth listen as "He gives His voice, a voice of strength," which moves and controls all creatures and events. Therefore all nations are summoned to give strength to God, who gives all fulnesses of strength to His people. The psalm closes with the utterance of the thought which has animated it throughout-that God’s deeds for and in Israel are the manifestation for the world of His power, and that these will one day lead all men to bless the God of Israel, who shines out in dread majesty from the sanctuary, which is henceforth His abode for evermore. Psalms 69:1-36 THE Davidic authorship of this psalm is evidently untenable, if for no other reason, yet because of the state of things presupposed in Psalms 69:35. The supposition that Jeremiah was the author has more in its favour than in the case of many of the modern attributions of psalms to him, even if, as seems most probable, the references to sinking in deep mire and the like are metaphorical. Cheyne fixes on the period preceding Nehemiah’s first journey to Jerusalem as the earliest possible date for this psalm and its kindred ones. (Psalms 22:1-31, Psalms 35:1-28, and Psalms 40:13-17) Baethgen follows Olshausen in assigning the psalm to the Maccabean period. The one point which seems absolutely certain is that David was not its author. It falls into two equal parts (Psalms 69:1-18 and Psalms 69:19-36). In the former part three turns of thought or feeling may be traced: Psalms 69:1-6 being mainly a cry for Divine help, with plaintive spreading out of the psalmist’s extremity of need; Psalms 69:7-12 basing the prayer on the fact that his sufferings flow from his religion; and Psalms 69:13-18 being a stream of petitions for deliverance, with continuous allusion to the description of his trials in Psalms 69:1-6. The second part (Psalms 69:19-36), begins with renewed description of the psalmist’s affliction (Psalms 69:19-21), and thence passes to invocation of God’s justice on his foes (Psalms 69:22-28), which takes the place of the direct petitions for deliverance in the first part. The whole closes with trustful anticipation of answers to prayer, which will call forth praise from ever-widening circles, - first from the psalmist himself; then from the oppressed righteous; and, finally, from heaven, earth, and sea. The numerous citations of this psalm in the New Testament have led many commentators to maintain its directly Messianic character. But its confessions of sin and imprecations of vengeance are equally incompatible with that view. It as Messianic as typical rather than as prophetic, exhibiting a history, whether of king, prophet, righteous man, or personified nation, in which the same principles are at work as are manifest in their supreme energy and highest form in the Prince of righteous sufferers. But the correspondence of such a detail as giving gall and vinegar, with the history of Jesus, carries us beyond the region of types, and is a witness that God’s Spirit shaped the utterances of the psalmist for a purpose unknown to himself, and worked in like manner on the rude soldiers, whose clumsy mockery and clumsy kindness fulfilled ancient words. There is surely something more here than coincidence or similarity between the experience of one righteous sufferer and another. If Jesus cried "I thirst" in order to bring about the "fulfilment" of one verse of our psalm, His doing so is of a piece with some other acts of His which were distinct claims to be the Messiah of prophecy; but His wish could not influence the soldiers to fulfil the psalm. The first note is petition and spreading out of the piteous story of the psalmist’s need. The burdened heart finds some ease in describing how heavy its burden is and the devout heart receives some foretaste of longed for help in the act of telling God how sorely His help is needed. He who knows all our trouble is glad to have us tell it to Him, since it is thereby lightened, and our faith in Him is thereby increased. Sins confessed are wholly cancelled, and troubles spoken to God are more than half calmed. The psalmist begins with metaphors in Psalms 69:1-2, and translates these into grim prose in Psalms 69:3-4, and then, with acknowledgment of sinfulness, cries for God’s intervention in Psalms 69:5-6. It is flat and prosaic to take the expressions in Psalms 69:1-2, literally, as if they described an experience like Jeremiah’s in the miry pit. Nor can the literal application be carried through; for the image of "waters coming in unto the soul" brings up an entirely different set of circumstances from that of sinking in mud in a pit. The one describes trouble as rushing in upon a man, like a deluge which has burst its banks and overwhelms him; the other paints it as yielding and tenacious, affording no firm spot to stand on, but sucking him up in its filthy, stifling slime. No water was in Jeremiah’s pit. The two figures are incompatible in reality, and can only be blended in imagination. What they mean is put without metaphor in Psalms 69:3-4. The psalmist is "weary with calling" on God; his throat is dry with much prayer; his eyes ache and are dim with upward gazing for help which lingers. Yet he does not cease to call, and still prays with his parched throat, and keeps the weary eyes steadfastly fixed, as the psalm shows. It is no small triumph of patient faith to wait for tarrying help. Psalms 69:4 tells why he thus cries. He is compassed by a crowd of enemies. Two things especially characterise these-their numbers, and their gratuitous hatred. As to the former, they are described as more numerous than the hairs of the psalmist’s head. The parallelism of clauses recommends the textual alteration which substitutes for the unnecessary word "my destroyers" the appropriate expression "more than my bones," which is found in some old versions. Causeless hatred is the portion of the righteous in all ages; and our Lord points to Himself as experiencing it in utmost measure, (John 15:25) inasmuch as He, the perfectly righteous One, must take into His own history all the bitterness which is infused into the cup of those who fear God and love the right, by a generation who are out of sympathy with them. The same experience, in forms varying according to the spirit of the times, is realised still in all who have the mind of Christ in them. As long as the world is a world, it will have some contempt mingling with its constrained respect for goodness, some hostility, now expressed by light shafts of mockery and ridicule, now by heavier and more hurtful missiles, for Christ’s true servants. The ancient "Woe" for those of whom all men speak well is in force today. The "hatred" is "without a cause," in so far as its cherishers have received no hurt, and its objects desire only their enemies’ good; but its cause lies deep in the irreconcilable antagonism of life principles and aims between those who follow Christ and those who do not. The psalmist had to bear unjust charges, and to make restitution of what he had never taken. Causeless hatred justified itself by false accusations, and innocence had but to bear silently and to save life at the expense of being robbed in the name of justice. He turns from enemies to God. But his profession of innocence assumes a touching and unusual form. He does not, as might be expected, say, "Thou knowest my guiltlessness," but, "Thou knowest my foolishness." A true heart, while conscious of innocence in regard to men, and of having done nothing to evoke their enmity, is, even in the act of searching itself, arrested by the consciousness of its many sins in God’s sight, and will confess these the more penitently, because it stands upright before men, and asserts its freedom from all crime against them. In so far as men’s hatred is God’s instrument, it inflicts merited chastisement. That does not excuse men; but it needs to be acknowledged by the sufferer, if things are to be right between him and God. Then, after such confession, he can pray, as this psalmist does, that God’s mercy may deliver him, so that others who, like him, wait on God may not be disheartened or swept from their confidence, by the spectacle of his vain hopes and unanswered cries. The psalmist has a strong consciousness of his representative character, and, as in so many other psalms, thinks that his experience is of wide significance as a witness for God. This consciousness points to something special in his position, whether we find the specialty in his office, or in the supposed personification of the nation, or in poetic consciousness heightened by the sense of being an organ of God’s Spirit. In a much inferior degree, the lowliest devout man may feel the same; for there are none whose experiences of God as answering prayer may not be a light of hope to some souls sitting in the dark. In Psalms 69:7-12 the prayer for deliverance is urged on the ground that the singer’s sufferings are the result of his devotion. Psalms 44:13-22 may be compared, and Jeremiah 15:15 is an even closer parallel. Fasting and sackcloth are mentioned again together in Psalms 35:13; and Lamentations 3:14 and Job 30:9 resemble Psalms 69:12 b. Surrounded by a godless generation, the psalmist’s earnestness of faith and concern for God’s honour made him an object of dislike, a target for drunken ridicule. These broke the strong ties of kindred, and acted as separating forces more strongly than brotherhood did, as a uniting one. "Zeal for God’s house" presupposes the existence of the Temple, and also either its neglect or its desecration. That sunken condition of the sanctuary distressed the psalmist more than personal calamity, and it was the departure of Israel from God that made him clothe himself in sackcloth and fast and weep. But so far had deterioration gone that his mourning and its cause supplied materials for tipsy mirth, and his name became a by word and a butt for malicious gossip. The whole picture is that of the standing experience of the godly among the godless. The Perfect Example of devotion and communion had to pass through these waters where they ran deepest and chilliest, but all who have His Spirit have their share of the same fate. The last division of this first part (Psalms 69:13-18) begins by setting in strong contrast the psalmist’s prayer and the drunkard’s song. He is sure that his cry will be heard, and so he calls the present time "a time of favour," and appeals, as often in the Psalter, to the multitude of God’s lovingkindnesses and the faithfulness of His promise of salvation. Such a pleading with God on the ground of His manifested character is heard in Psalms 69:13-16, thus inclosing, as it were, the prayer for deliverance in a wrapping of reminders to God of His own name. The petitions here echo the description of peril in the former part-mire and watery depths-and add another kindred image in that of the "pit shutting her mouth" over the suppliant. He is plunged in a deep dungeon, well-shaped; and if a stone is rolled on to its opening, his last gleam of daylight will be gone, and he will be buried alive. Beautifully do the pleas from God’s character and those from the petitioner’s sore need alternate, the latter predominating in Psalms 69:17-18. His thoughts pass from his own desperate condition to God’s mercy, and from God’s mercy to his own condition, and he has the reward of faith, in that he finds in his straits reasons for his assurance that this is a time of favour, as well as pleas to urge with God. They make the black backing which turns his soul into a mirror, reflecting God’s promises in its trust. The second part of the psalm (Psalms 69:19-36) has, like the former, three main divisions. The first of these, like Psalms 69:1-6, is mainly a renewed spreading before God of the psalmist’s trouble (Psalms 69:19-21). Rooted sorrows are not plucked up by one effort. This recrudescence of fear breaking in upon the newly won serenity of faith is true to nature. On some parts of our coasts, where a narrow outlet binders the free run of the tide, a second high water follows the first after an hour or so; and often a similar bar to the flowing away of fears brings them back in full rush after they had begun to sink. The psalmist had appealed to God’s knowledge of His "foolishness" as indorsing his protestations of innocence towards men. He now (Psalms 69:19) appeals to His knowledge of his distresses, as indorsing his pitiful plaints. His soul is too deeply moved now to use metaphors, He speaks no more of mire and flood, but we hear the moan of a broken heart, and that wail which sounds sad across the centuries and wakes echoes in many solitary hearts. The psalmist’s eyes had failed, while he looked upwards for a God whose coming seemed slow; but they had looked yet more wearily and vainly for human pity and comforters, and found none. Instead of pity He had received only aggravation of misery. Such seems to be the force of giving gall for food, and vinegar to His thirst. The precise meaning of the word rendered "gall" is uncertain, but the general idea of something bitter is sufficient. That was all that His foes would give Him when hungry; and vinegar, which would make Him more thirsty still, was all that they proffered for His thirst. Such was their sympathy and comforting. According to Matthew, the potion of "wine (or vinegar) mingled with gall" was offered to and rejected by Jesus, before being fastened to the cross. He does not expressly quote the psalm, but probably refers to it. John, on the other hand, does tell us that Jesus, "that the scripture might be accomplished, said, I thirst," and sees its fulfilment in the kindly act of moistening the parched lips. The evangelist’s expression does not necessarily imply that a desire to fulfil the scripture was our Lord’s motive. Crucifixion was accompanied with torturing thirst, which wrung that last complaint from Jesus. But the evangelist discerns a Divine purpose behind the utterance of Jesus’ human weakness: and it is surely less difficult, for anyone who believes in supernatural revelation at all to believe that the words of the psalmist were shaped by a higher power, and the hands of the Roman soldiers moved by another impulse than their own, than to believe that this minute correspondence of psalm and gospel is merely accidental. But the immediately succeeding section warns us against pushing the Messianic character of the psalm too far, for these fearful imprecations cannot have any analogies in Christ’s words (Psalms 69:22-28). The form of the wish in "Let their table become a snare" is explained by remembering that the Eastern table was often a leather flap laid on the ground, which the psalmist desires may start up as a snare, and close upon the feasters as they sit round it secure. Disease, continual terror, dimmed eyes, paralysed or quaking loins, ruin falling on their homes, and desolation round their encampment, so that they have no descendants, are the least of the evils invoked. The psalmist’s desires go further than all this corporeal and material disaster. He prays that iniquity may be added to their iniquity-i.e., that they may be held guilty of sin after sin; and that they may have no portion in God’s righteousness-i.e., in the gifts which flow from His adherence to His covenant. The climax of all these maledictions is that awful wish that the persecutors may be blotted out of the book of life or of the living. True, the high New Testament conception of that book, according to which it is the burgess roll of the citizens of the New Jerusalem, the possessors of eternal life, does not plainly belong to it in Old Testament usage, in which it means apparently the register of those living on earth. But to blot names therefrom is not only to kill, but to exclude from the national community, and so from all the privileges of the people of God. The psalmist desires for his foes the accumulation of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the extirpation of their families and their absolute exclusion from the company of the living and the righteous. It is impossible to bring such utterances into harmony with the teachings of Jesus, and the attempt to vindicate them ignores plain facts and does violence to plain words. Better far to let them stand as a monument of the earlier stage of God’s progressive revelation, and discern clearly the advance which Christian ethics has made on them. The psalm ends with glad anticipations of deliverance and vows of thanksgiving. The psalmist is sure that God’s salvation will lift him high above his enemies, and as sure that then he will be as grateful as he is now earnest in prayer, and surest of all that his thankful voice will sound sweeter in God’s ear than any sacrifice would smell in His nostrils. There is no contempt of sacrifices expressed in "horned and hoofed," but simply the idea of maturity which fits the animal to be offered. The single voice of praise will be caught up, the singer thinks, by a great chorus of those who would have been struck dumb with confusion if his prayer had not been answered (Psalms 69:6), and who, in like manner, are gladdened by seeing his deliverance. The grace bestowed on one brings thanksgivings from many, which redound to the glory of God. The sudden transition in Psalms 69:32 b to direct address to the seekers after God, as if they stood beside the solitary singer, gives vividness to the anticipation. The insertion of "behold" is warranted, and tells what revives the beholders’ hearts. The seekers after God feel the pulse of a quicker life throbbing, when they see the wonders wrought through prayer. The singer’s thoughts go beyond his own deliverance to that of Israel. "His captives" is most naturally understood as referring to the exiled nation. And this wider manifestation of God’s restoring power will evoke praise from a wider circle, even from heaven, earth, and sea. The circumstances contemplated in Psalms 69:33-36 are evidently those of a captivity. God’s people are in bondage, the cities of Judah are in ruins, the inhabitants scattered far from their homes. The only reason for taking the closing verses as being a liturgical addition is unwillingness to admit exilic or post-exilic psalms. But these verses cannot be fairly interpreted without recognising that they presuppose that Israel is in bondage, or at least on the verge of it. The circumstances of Jeremiah’s life and times coincide closely with those of the psalmist. Psalms 70:1-5 THIS psalm is all but identical with the last verses of Psa 40:13-17. Some unimportant alterations have been made, principally in the Divine names; but the principle on which they have been made is not obvious. It is scarcely correct to say, with Delitzsch, that the psalm "has been transformed, so as to become Elohistic" for though it twice replaces the name of Jehovah with that of God (Psalms 70:1, Psalms 70:4), it makes the converse change in Psalms 70:5, last clause, by reading Jehovah instead of "God," as in Psalms 40:1-17. Other changes are of little moment. The principal are in Psalms 70:3 and Psalms 70:5. In the former the vehement wish that the psalmist’s mockers may be paralysed with shame is softened down into a desire that they may be turned back. The two verbs are similar in sound, and the substitution may have been accidental, a slip of memory or a defect in hearing, or it may have been an artistic variation of the original. In Psalms 70:5 a prayer that God will hasten to the psalmist’s help takes the place of an expression of confidence that "Jehovah purposes [good]" to him, and again there is similarity of sound in the two words. This change is like the subtle alteration which a painter might make on his picture by taking out one spot of high light. The gleam of confidence is changed to a call of need, and the tone of the whole psalm is thereby made more plaintive. Hupfeld holds that this psalm is the original, and Psalms 40:1-17 a composite; but most commentators agree in regarding this as a fragment of that psalm. The cut has not been very cleanly made; for the necessary verb "be pleased" has been left behind, and the symmetry of Psa 70:1 is destroyed for want of it. The awkward incompleteness of this beginning witnesses that the psalm is a fragment. Psalms 71:1-24 ECHOES of former psalms make the staple of this one, and even those parts of it which are not quotations have little individuality. The themes are familiar, and the expression of them is scarcely less so. There is no well-defined strophical structure, and little continuity of thought or feeling. Psalms 71:13 and Psalms 71:24 b serve as a kind of partial refrain, and may be taken as dividing the psalm into two parts, but there is little difference between the contents of the two. Delitzsch gives in his adhesion to the hypothesis that Jeremiah was the author; and there is considerable weight in the reasons assigned for that ascription of authorship. The pensive, plaintive tone; the abundant quotations, with slight alterations of the passages cited; the autobiographical hints which fit in with Jeremiah’s history, are the chief of these. But they can scarcely be called conclusive. There is more to be said for the supposition that the singer is the personified nation in this case than in many others. The sudden transition to "us" in Psalms 71:20, which the Masoretic marginal correction corrects into "me," favours, though it does not absolutely require, that view, which is also supported by the frequent allusion to "youth" and "old age." These, however, are capable of a worthy meaning, if referring to an individual. Psalms 71:1-3 are slightly varied from Psalms 31:1-3. The character of the changes will be best appreciated by setting the two passages side by side. Psalms 31:1-24                         Psalms 71:1-24 1. In Thee, Jehovah, do I take                 1. In Thee, Jehovah, do I take refuge; let me not be ashamed                 refuge: forever:                            Let me not be put to shame forever: In Thy righteousness me.                             2. In Thy righteousness deliver 2. Bend Thine ear to me; de-                me and rescue me: liver me speedily.                    Bend Thine ear and save me. The two verbs, which in the former psalm are in separate clauses ("deliver" and "rescue"), are here brought together. "Speedily" is omitted, and "save" is substituted for "deliver," which has been drawn into the preceding clause. Obviously no difference of meaning is intended to be conveyed, and the changes look very like the inaccuracies of memoriter quotations. The next variation is as follows:- 2. Be to me for a strong                 3. Be to me for a rock of for a house of defence to save me.            habitation to go to continually: 3. For my rock and my fortress             Thou hast commanded to save me. art Thou.                        For my rock and my me; fortress art Thou. The difference between "a strong rock" and "rock of habitation" is but one letter. That between "for a house of defence" and "to go to continually: Thou has commanded" is extremely slight, as Baethgen has well shown. Possibly both of these variations are due to textual corruption, but more probably this psalmist intentionally altered the words of an older psalm. Most of the old versions have the existing text, but the LXX seems to have read the Hebrew here as in Psalms 31:1-24. The changes are not important, but they are significant. That thought of God as a habitation to which the soul may continually find access goes very deep into the secrets of the devout life. The variation in Psalms 71:3 is recommended by observing the frequent recurrence of "continually" in this psalm, of which that word may almost be said to be the motto. Nor is the thought of God’s command given to His multitude of unnamed servants, to save this poor man, one which we can afford to lose. Psalms 71:5-6, are a similar variation of Psa 22:9-10. "On Thee have I been stayed from the womb," says this psalmist; "On Thee was I cast from the womb," says the original passage. The variation beautifully brings out, not only reliance on God, but the Divine response to that reliance by lifelong upholding. That strong arm answers leaning weakness with firm support, and whosoever relies on it is upheld by it. The word rendered above "protector" is doubtful. It is substituted for that in Psalms 22:9 which means "One that takes out," and some commentators would attach the same meaning to the word used here, referring it to God’s goodness before and at birth. But it is better taken as equivalent to benefactor, provider, or some such designation, and as referring to God’s lifelong care. The psalmist has been a "wonder" to many spectators, either in the sense that they have gazed astonished at God’s goodness, or, as accords better with the adversative character of the next clause ("But Thou art my refuge"), that his sufferings have been unexampled. Both ideas may well be combined, for the life of every man, if rightly studied, is full of miracles both of mercy and judgment. If the psalm is the voice of an individual, the natural conclusion from such words is that his life was conspicuous; but it is obvious that the national reference is appropriate here. On this thankful retrospect of life-long help and life-long trust the psalm builds a prayer for future protection from eager enemies, who think that the charmed life is vulnerable at last. Psalms 71:9-13 rise to a height of emotion above the level of the rest of the psalm. On one hypothesis, we have in them the cry of an old man, whose strength diminishes as his dangers increase. Something undisclosed in his circumstances gave colour to the greedy hopes of his enemies. Often prosperous careers are overclouded at the end, and the piteous spectacle is seen of age overtaken by tempests which its feebleness cannot resist, and which are all the worse to face because of the calms preceding them. On the national hypothesis, the psalm is the prayer of Israel at a late stage of its history, from which it looks back to the miracles of old, and then to the ring of enemies rejoicing over its apparent weakness, and then upwards to the Eternal Helper. Psalms 71:12-13 are woven out of other psalms. Psalms 71:12 a "Be not far from me," is found in Psalms 22:11-19; Psalms 35:22; Psalms 38:21, etc. "Haste to my help" is found a Psalms 38:22; Psalms 40:13 (Psalms 70:1). For Psalms 71:13 compare Psalms 35:4; Psalms 40:14 (Psalms 70:2). With this, as a sort of refrain, the first part of the psalm ends. The second part goes over substantially the same ground, but with lighter heart. The confidence of deliverance is more vivid, and it, as well as the vow of praise following thereon, bulk larger. The singer has thinned away his anxieties by speaking them to God, and has by the same process solidified his faith. Aged eyes should see God, the helper, more clearly when earth begins to look grey and dim. The forward look of such finds little to stay it on this side of heaven. As there seems less and less to hope for here, there should be more and more there. Youth is the time for buoyant anticipation, according to the world’s notions, but age may have far brighter lights ahead than youth had leisure to see. "I will hope always" becomes sublime from aged lips, which are so often shaped to say, "I have nothing left to hope for now." This psalmist’s words may well be a pattern for old men, who need fear no failure of buoyancy, nor any collapse of gladness, if they will fix their thoughts where this singer did his. Other subjects of thought and speech will pall and run dry; but he whose theme is God’s righteousness and the salvation that flows from it will never lack materials for animating meditation and grateful praise. "I know not the numbers thereof." It is something to have fast hold of an inexhaustible subject. It will keep an old man young. The psalmist recognises his task, which is also his joy, to declare God’s wondrous works, and prays for God’s help till he has discharged it. The consciousness of a vocation to speak to later generations inspires him, and assures him that he is immortal till his work is done. His anticipations have been fulfilled beyond his knowledge. His words will last as long as the world. But men with narrower spheres may be animated by the same consciousness, and they who have rightly understood the purpose of God’s mercies to themselves, will, like the psalmist, recognise in their own participation in His salvation an imperative command to make it known, and an assurance that nothing shall by any means harm them till they have fulfilled their witnessing. A many-wintered saint should be a convincing witness for God. Psalms 71:20, with its sudden transition to the plural, may simply show that the singer passes out from individual contemplation to the consciousness of the multitude of fellow sufferers and fellow participants in God’s mercy. Such transition is natural; for the most private passages of a good man’s communion with God are swift to bring up the thought of others like minded and similarly blessed. "Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising." Every solo swells into a chorus. Again the song returns to "my" and "me," the confidence of the single soul being reinvigorated by the thought of sharers in blessing. So all ends with the certainty of, and the vow of praise for; deliverances already realised in faith, though not in fact. But the imitative character of the psalm is maintained even in this last triumphant vow; for Psalms 71:24 a-is almost identical with Psalms 35:28; and b, as has been already pointed out, is copied from several other psalms. But imitative words are none the less sincere; and new thankfulness may be run into old moulds; without detriment to its acceptableness to God and preciousness to men. Psalms 72:1-20 RIGHTLY or wrongly, the superscription ascribes this psalm to Solomon. Its contents have led several commentators to take the superscription in a meaning for which there is no warrant, as designating the subject, not the author. Clearly, the whole is a prayer for the king; but why should not he be both suppliant and object of supplication? Modern critics reject this as incompatible with the "phraseological evidence," and adduce the difference between the historical Solomon and the ideal of the psalm as negativing reference to him. Psalms 72:8 is said by them to be quoted from Zechariah 9:10, though Cheyne doubts whether there is borrowing. Psalms 72:17 b is said to be dependent on Genesis 22:18 and Genesis 26:4, which are assumed to be later than the seventh century. Psalms 72:12 is taken to be a reminiscence of Job 29:12, and Psalms 72:16 b of Job 5:25. But these are too uncertain criteria to use as conclusive, -partly because coincidence does not necessarily imply quotation; partly because, quotation being admitted, the delicate question of priority remains, which can rarely be settled by comparison of the passages in question; and partly because, quotation and priority being admitted, the date of the original is still under discussion. The impossibility of Solomon’s praying thus for himself does not seem to the present writer so completely established that the hypothesis must be abandoned, especially if the alternative is to be, as Hitzig, followed by Olshausen and Cheyne, proposes, that the king in the psalm is Ptolemy Philadelphus, to whom Psalms 45:1-17 is fitted by the same authorities. Baethgen puts the objections which most will feel to such a theory with studied moderation when he says "that the promises given to the patriarchs in Genesis 22:18; Genesis 26:4, should be transferred by a pious Israelite to a foreign king appears to me improbable." But another course is open-namely, to admit that the psalm gives no materials for defining its date, beyond the fact that a king of Davidic descent was reigning when it was composed. The authorship may be left uncertain, as may the name of the king for whom such far-reaching blessings were invoked: for he was but a partial embodiment of the kingly idea, and the very disproportion between the reality seen in any Jewish monarch and the lofty idealisms of the psalm compels us to regard the earthly ruler as but a shadow, and the true theme of the singer as being the Messianic King. We are not justified, however, in attempting to transfer every point of the psalmist’s prayer to the Messiah. The historical occasion of the psalm is to be kept in mind. A human monarch stands in the foreground; but the aspirations expressed are so far beyond anything that he is or can be, that they are either extravagant flattery, or reach out beyond their immediate occasion to the King Messiah. The psalm is not properly a prediction, but prayer. There is some divergence of opinion as to the proper rendering of the principal verbs, -some, as the A.V. and R.V. (text), taking them as uniformly futures, which is manifestly wrong; some taking them as expressions of wish throughout, which is also questionable; and others recognising pure futures intermingled with petitions, which seems best. The boundaries of the two are difficult to settle, just because the petitions are so confident that they are all but predictions, and the two melt into each other in the singer’s mind. The flow of thought is simple. The psalmist’s prayers are broadly massed. In Psalms 72:1-4 he prays for the foundation of the king’s reign in righteousness, which will bring peace; in Psalms 72:5-7 for its perpetuity, and in Psalms 72:8-11 for its universality; while in Psalms 72:12-15 the ground of both these characteristics is laid in the king’s becoming the champion of the oppressed. A final prayer for the increase of his people and the perpetuity and world wide glory of his name concludes the psalm, to which is appended in Psalms 72:18-20 a doxology, closing the Second Book of the Psalter. The first petitions of the psalm all ask for one thing for the king-namely, that he should give righteous judgment. They reflect the antique conception of a king as the fountain of justice, himself making and administering law and giving decisions. Thrice in these four verses does "righteousness" occur as the foundation attribute of an ideal king. Caprice, self-interest, and tyrannous injustice were rank in the world’s monarchies round the psalmist. Bitter experience and sad observation had taught him that the first condition of national prosperity was a righteous ruler. These petitions are also animated by the conception, which is as true in the modern as in the ancient world, that righteousness has its seat in the bosom of God, and that earthly judgments are righteous when they conform to and are the echo of His. "Righteousness" is the quality of mind, of which the several "judgments" are the expressions. This king sits on an ancestral throne. His people are God’s people. Since, then, he is God’s viceroy, the desire cannot be vain that in his heart there may be some reflection of God’s righteousness, and that his decisions may accord with God’s. One cannot but remember Solomon’s prayer for "an understanding heart," that he might judge this people; nor forget how darkly his later reign showed against its bright beginning. A righteous king makes a peaceful people, especially in a despotic monarchy. The sure results of such a reign-which are, likewise, the psalmist’s chief reason for his petitions-are set forth in the vivid metaphor of Psa 72:3, in which peace is regarded as the fruit which springs, by reason of the king’s righteousness, from mountains and hills. This psalmist has special fondness for that figure of vegetable growth (Psalms 72:7, Psalms 72:16-17); and it is especially suitable in this connection, as peace is frequently represented in Scripture as the fruit of righteousness, both in single souls and in a nation’s history. The mountains come into view here simply as being the most prominent features of the land, and not, as in Psalms 72:16, with any reference to their barrenness, which would make abundant growth on them more wonderful, and indicative of yet greater abundance on the plains. A special manifestation of judicial righteousness is the vindication of the oppressed and the punishment of the oppressor (Psalms 72:4). The word rendered "judge" in Psalms 72:4 differs from that in Psalms 72:2, and is the same from which the name of the "Judges" in Israel is derived. Like them, this king is not only to pronounce decisions, as the word in Psalms 72:2 means, but is to execute justice by acts of deliverance, which smite in order to rescue. Functions which policy and dignity require to be kept apart in the case of earthly rulers arc united in the ideal monarch. He executes his own sentences. His acts are decisions. The psalmist has no thought of inferior officers by the king’s side. One figure fills his mind and his canvas. Surely such an ideal is either destined to remain forever a fair dream, or its fulfilment is to be recognised in the historical Person in whom God’s righteousness dwelt in higher fashion than psalmists knew, who was, "first, King of righteousness, and then, after that, also King of peace," and who, by His deed, has broken every yoke, and appeared as the defender of all the needy. The poet prayed that Israel’s king might perfectly discharge his office by Divine help: the Christian gives thanks that the King of men has been and done all which Israel’s monarchs failed to be and do. The perpetuity of the king’s reign and of his subjects’ peace is the psalmist’s second aspiration (Psalms 72:5-7). The "Thee" of Psalms 72:5 presents a difficulty, as it is doubtful to whom it refers. Throughout the psalm the king is spoken of, and never to; and if it is further noticed that, in the preceding verses, God has been directly addressed, and "Thy" used thrice in regard to Him, it will appear more natural to take the reference in Psalms 72:5 to be to Him. The fear of God would be dig fused among the king’s subjects, as a consequence of his rule in righteousness. Hupfeld takes the word as referring to the king, and suggests changing the text to "him" instead of "Thee"; while others, among whom are Cheyne and Baethgen, follow the track of the LXX in adopting a reading which may be translated "May he live," or "Prolong his days." But the thought yielded by the existing text, if referred to God, is most natural and worthy. The king is, as it were, the shadow on earth of God’s righteousness, and consequently becomes an organ for the manifestation thereof, in such manner as to draw men to true devotion. The psalmist’s desires are for something higher than external prosperity, and his conceptions of the kingly office are very sacred. Not only peace and material well-being, but also the fear of Jehovah, are longed for by him to be diffused in Israel. And he prays that these blessings may be perpetual. The connection between the king’s righteousness and the fear of God requires that that permanence should belong to both. The cause is as lasting as its effect. Through generation after generation he desires that each shall abide. He uses peculiar expressions for continual duration "with the sun"-i.e., contemporaneous with that unfading splendour; "before the face of the moon"-i.e., as long as she shines. But could the singer anticipate such length of dominion for any human king? Psalms 21:1-13 has similar language in regard to the same person, and here, as there, it seems sufficiently accounted for by the consideration that, while the psalmist was speaking of an individual, he was thinking of the office rather than of the person, and that the perpetual continuance of the Davidic dynasty, not the undying life of anyone representative of it, was meant. The full light of the truth that there is a king whose royalty, like his priesthood, passes to no other is not to be forced upon the psalm. It stands as a witness that devout and inspired souls longed for the establishment of a kingdom, against which revolutions and enemies and mortality were powerless. They knew not that their desires could not be fulfilled by the longest succession of dying kings, but were to be more than accomplished by One, "of whom it is witnessed that He liveth." The psalmist turns for a moment from his prayer for the perpetuity of the king’s rule, to linger upon the thought of its blessedness as set forth in the lovely image of Psa 72:6. Rain upon mown grass is no blessing, as every farmer knows: but what is meant is, not the grass which has already been mown, but the naked meadow from which it has been taken. It needs drenching showers, in order to sprout again and produce an aftermath. The poet’s eye is caught by the contrast between the bare look of the field immediately after cutting and the rich growth that springs, as by magic, from the yellow roots after a plentiful shower. This king’s gracious influences shall fall upon even what seems dead, and charm forth hidden life that will flush the plain with greenness. The psalmist dwells on the picture, reiterating the comparison in Psalms 72:6 b, and using there an uncommon word, which seems best rendered as meaning a heavy rainfall. With such affluence of quickening powers will the righteous king bless his people. The "Mirror for Magistrates." which is held up in the lovely poem 2 Samuel 23:4, has a remarkable parallel in its description of the just ruler as resembling a "morning without clouds, when the tender grass springeth out of the earth through clear shining after rain"; but the psalmist heightens the metaphor by the introduction of the mown meadow as stimulated to new growth. This image of the rain lingers with him and shapes his prayer in Psalms 72:7 a. A righteous king will insure prosperity to the righteous, and the number of such will increase. Both these ideas seem to be contained in the figure of their flourishing, which is literally bud or shoot. And, as the people become more and more prevailingly righteous, they receive more abundant and unbroken peace. The psalmist had seen deeply into the conditions of national prosperity, as well as those of individual tranquillity, when he based these on rectitude. With Psalms 72:8 the singer takes a still loftier flight, and prays for the universality of the king’s dominion. In that verse the form of the verb is that which expresses desire, but in Psalms 72:9 and following verses the verbs may be rendered as simple futures. Confident prayers insensibly melt into assurances of their own fulfilment. As the psalmist pours out his petitions, they glide into prophecies; for they are desires fashioned upon promises, and bear, in their very earnestness, the pledge of their realisation. As to the details of the form which the expectation of universal dominion here takes, it need only be noted that we have to do with a poet, not with a geographer. We are not to treat the expressions as if they were instructions to a boundary commission, and to be laid down upon a map. "The sea" is probably the Mediterranean; but what the other sea which makes the opposite boundary may be is hard to say. Commentators have thought of the Persian Gulf, or of an imaginary ocean encircling the flat earth, according to ancient ideas. But more probably the expression is as indeterminate as the parallel one, "the ends of the earth." In the first clause of the verse the psalmist starts from the Mediterranean, the western boundary, and his anticipations travel away into the unknown eastern regions; while, in the second clause, he begins with the Euphrates, which was the eastern boundary of the dominion promised to Israel, and, coming westward, he passes out in thought to the dim regions beyond. The very impossibility of defining the boundaries declares the boundlessness of the kingdom. The poet’s eyes have looked east and west, and in Psalms 72:9 he turns to the south, and sees the desert tribes, unconquered as they have hitherto been, grovelling before the king, and his enemies in abject submission at his feet. The word rendered "desert peoples" is that used in Psalms 74:14 for wild beasts inhabiting the desert, but here it can only mean wilderness tribes. There seems no need to alter the text, as has been proposed, and to read "adversaries." In Psalms 72:10 the psalmist again looks westward, across the mysterious ocean of which he, like all his nation, knew so little. The great city of Tarshish lay for him at the farthest bounds of the world; and between him and it, or perhaps still farther out in the waste unknown, were islands from which rich and strange things sometimes reached Judaea. These shall bring their wealth in token of fealty. Again he looks southward to Sheba in Arabia, and Seba far south below Egypt, and foresees their submission. His knowledge of distant lands is exhausted, and therefore he ceases enumeration, and falls back on comprehensiveness. How little he knew, and how much he believed! His conceptions of the sweep of that "all" were childish; his faith that, however many these unknown kings and nations were, God’s anointed was their king was either extravagant exaggeration, or it was nurtured in him by God, and meant to be fulfilled when a world, wide beyond his dreams and needy beyond his imagination, should own the sway of a King, endowed with God’s righteousness and communicative of God’s peace, in a manner and measure beyond his desires. The triumphant swell of these anticipations passes with wonderful pathos into gentler music, as if the softer tones of flutes should follow trumpet blasts. How tenderly and profoundly the psalm bases the universality of the dominion on the pitying care and delivering power of the King! The whole secret of sway over men lies in that "For," which ushers in the gracious picture of the beneficent and tender-hearted Monarch. The world is so full of sorrow, and men are so miserable and needy, that he who can stanch their wounds, solace their griefs, and shelter their lives will win their hearts and be crowned their king. Thrones based on force are as if set on an iceberg which melts away. There is no solid foundation for rule except helpfulness. In the world and for a little while "they that exercise authority are called benefactors"; but in the long run the terms of the sentence are inverted, and they that are rightly called benefactors exercise authority. The more earthly rulers approximate to this ideal portrait, the more "broad based upon their people’s will" and love will their thrones stand. If Israel’s kings had adhered to it, their throne would have endured. But their failures point to Him in whom the principle declared by the psalmist receives its most tender illustration. The universal dominion of Jesus Christ is based upon the fact that He "tasted death for every man." In the Divine purpose, He has won the right to rule men because He has died for them. In historical realisation, He wins men’s submission because He has given Himself for them. Therefore does He command with absolute authority; therefore do we obey with entire submission. His sway not only reaches out over all the earth, inasmuch as the power of His cross extends to all men, but it lays hold of the inmost will and makes submission a delight. The king is represented in Psalms 72:14 as taking on himself the office of Goel, or Kinsman-Redeemer, and ransoming his subjects’ lives from "deceit and violence." That "their blood is precious in his eyes" is another way of saying that they are too dear to him to be suffered to perish. This king’s treasure is the life of his subjects. Therefore he will put forth his power to preserve them and deliver them. The result of such tender care and delivering love is set forth in Psalms 72:15, but in obscure language. The ambiguity arises from the absence of expressed subjects for the four verbs in the verse. Who is he who "lives"? Is the same person the giver of the gold of Sheba, and to whom is it given? Who prays, and for whom? And who blesses, and whom does he bless? The plain way of understanding the verse is to suppose that the person spoken of in all the clauses is the same; and then the question comes whether he is the king or the ransomed man. Difficulties arise in carrying out either reference through all the clauses; and hence attempts have been made to vary the subject of the verbs. Delitzsch, for instance, supposes that it is the ransomed man who "lives," the king who gives to the ransomed man gold, and the man who prays for and blesses the king. But such an arbitrary shuttling about of the reference of "he" and "him" is impossible. Other attempts of a similar kind need not be noticed here. The only satisfactory course is to take one person as spoken of by all the verbs. But then the question comes, Who is he? There is much to be said in favour of either hypothesis as answering that question. The phrase which is rendered above "So that he lives," is so like the common invocation "May the king live," that it strongly favours taking the whole verse as a continuance of the petitions for the monarch. But if so, the verb in the second clause (he shall give) must be taken impersonally, as equivalent to "one will give" or "there shall be given," and those in the remaining clauses must be similarly dealt with, or the text altered so as to make them plurals, reading, "They shall pray for him (the king), and shall bless him." On the whole; it is best to suppose that the ransomed man is the subject throughout, and that the verse describes his glad tribute, and continual thankfulness. Ransomed from death, he brings offerings to his deliverer. It seems singular that he should be conceived of both as "needy" and as owning "gold" which he can offer; but in the literal application the incongruity is not sufficient to prevent the adoption of this view of the clause; and in the higher application of the words to Christ and His subjects, which we conceive to be warranted, the incongruity becomes fine and deep truth; for the poorest soul, delivered by Him, can bring tribute, which He esteems as precious beyond all earthly treasure. Nor need the remaining clauses militate against the view that the ransomed man is the subject in them, The psalm had, a historical basis, and all its points cannot be introduced into the Messianic interpretation. This one of praying for the king cannot be; notwithstanding the attempts of some commentators to find a meaning for it in Christian prayers for the spread of Christ’s kingdom. That explanation does violence to the language, mistakes the nature of Messianic prophecy, and brings discredit on the view that the psalm has a Messianic character. The last part of the psalm (Psalms 72:16-17) recurs to petitions for the growth of the nation and the perpetual flourishing of the king’s name. The fertility of the land and the increase of its people are the psalmist’s desires, which are also certainties, as expressed in Psalms 72:16. He sees in imagination the whole land waving with abundant harvests, which reach even to the tops of the mountains, and rustle in the summer air, with a sound like the cedars of Lebanon, when they move their layers of greenness to the breeze. The word rendered above "abundance" is doubtful; but there does not seem to be in the psalmist’s mind the contrast which he is often supposed to be expressing, beautiful and true as it is, between the small beginnings and the magnificent end of the kingdom on earth. The mountains are here thought of as lofty and barren. If waving harvests clothe their gaunt sides, how will the vales laugh in plentiful crops! As the earth yields her increase, so the people of the king shall be multiplied, and from all his cities they shall spring forth abundant as grass. That figure would bear much expansion; for what could more beautifully set forth rapidity of growth, close-knit community, multiplication of units, and absorption of these in a lovely whole, than the picture of a meadow clothed with its grassy carpet? Such hopes had only partial fulfilment in Israel. Nor have they had adequate fulfilment up till now. But they lie on the horizon of the future, and they shall one day be reached. Much that is dim is treasured in them. There may be a renovated world, from which the curse of barrenness has been banished. There shall be a swift increase of the subjects of the King, until the earlier hope of the psalm is fulfilled, and all nations shall serve him. But bright as are the poet’s visions concerning the kingdom, his last gaze is fastened on its king, and he prays that his name may last forever, and may send forth shoots as long as the sun shines in the sky. He probably meant no more than a prayer for the continual duration of the dynasty, and his conception of the name as sending forth shoots was probably that of its being perpetuated in descendants. But, as has been already noticed, the perpetuity, which he conceived of as belonging to a family and an office, really belongs to the One King, Jesus Christ, whose Name is above every name, and will blossom anew in fresh revelations of its infinite contents, not only while the sun shines, but when its fires are cold and its light quenched. The psalmist’s last desire is that the ancient promise to the fathers may be fulfilled in the King, their descendant, in whom men shall bless themselves. So full of blessedness may He seem to all men, that they shall take Him for the very type of felicity, and desire to be even as He is! In men’s relation to Christ the phrase assumes a deeper meaning still: and though that is not intended by the psalmist, and is not the exposition of his words, it still is true that in Christ all blessings for humanity are stored, and that therefore if men are to be truly blessed they must plunge themselves into Him, and in Him find all that they need for blessedness and nobility of life and character. If He is our supreme type of whatsoever things are fair and of good report, and if we have bowed ourselves to Him because He has delivered us from death, then we share in His life, and all His blessings are parted among us. Psalms 73:1-28 THE perennial problem of reconciling God’s moral government with observed facts is grappled with in this psalm, as in Psalms 37:1-40; Psalms 49:1-20. It tells how the prosperity of the godless, in apparent flat contradiction of Divine promises, had all but swept the psalmist from his faith, and how he was led, through doubt and struggle, to closer communion with God, in which he learned, not only the evanescence of the external well-being which had so perplexed him, but the eternity of the true blessedness belonging to the godly. His solution of the problem is in part that of the two psalms just mentioned, but it surpasses them in its clear recognition that the portion of the righteous, which makes their lot supremely blessed, is no mere earthly prosperity, but God Himself, and in its pointing to "glory" which comes afterwards, as one element in the solution of the problem. The psalm falls into two divisions, in the first of which (Psalms 73:1-14) the psalmist tells of his doubts, and, in the second (Psalms 73:15-28), of his victory over them. The body of the psalm is divided into groups of four verses, and it has an introduction and conclusion of two verses each. The introduction (Psalms 73:1-2) asserts, with an accent of assurance, the conviction which the psalmist had all but lost, and therefore had the more truly won. The initial word "Surely" is an indication of his past struggle, when the truth that God was good to Israel had seemed so questionable. "This I have learned by doubts; this I now hold as most sure; this I proclaim, impugn it who list, and seem to contradict it what may." The decisiveness of the psalmist’s conviction does not lead him to exaggeration. He does not commit himself to the thesis that outward prosperity attends Israel. That God is good to those who truly bear that name is certain; but how He shows His goodness, and who these are, the psalmist has, by his struggles, learned to conceive of in a more spiritual fashion than before. That goodness may be plainly seen in sorrows, and it is only sealed to those who are what the name of Israel imports-"pure in heart." That such are blessed in possessing God, and that neither are any other blessed, nor is there any other blessedness, are the lessons which the singer has brought with him from the darkness, and by which the ancient faith of the wellbeing of the righteous is set on surer foundations than before. The avowal of conquered doubts follows on this clear note of certitude. There is a tinge of shame in the emphatic "I" of Psalms 73:2, and in the broken construction and the change of subject to "my feet" and "my steps." The psalmist looks back to that dreary time, and sees more clearly than he did, while he was caught in the toils of perplexity and doubt, how narrow had been his escape from casting away his confidence. He shudders as he remembers it; but he can do so now from the vantage ground of tried and regained faith. How eloquently the order of thought in these two verses speaks of the complete triumph over doubt! In the first quatrain of verses, the prosperity of the godless, which had been the psalmist’s stumbling block, is described. Two things are specified-physical health, and exemption from calamity. The former is the theme of Psa 73:4. Its first clause is doubtful. The word rendered "bands" only occurs here and in Isaiah 58:6. It literally means bands, but may pass into the figurative signification of pains, and is sometimes by some taken in that meaning here, and the whole clause as asserting that the wicked have painless and peaceful deaths. But such a declaration is impossible in the face of Psa 73:18-19, which assert the very opposite, and would be out of place at this point of the psalm, which is here occupied with the lives, not the deaths, of the ungodly. Hupfeld translates "They are without pains even until their deaths"; but that rendering puts an unusual sense on the preposition "to," which is not "till." A very plausible conjecture alters the division of words, splitting the one which means "to their death" (l’motham) into two (lamo tam), of which the former is attached to the preceding words ("there are no pains to them" =" they have no pains"), and the latter to the following clause ("sound and well nourished is," etc.). This suggestion is adopted by Ewald and most modern commentators, and has much in its favour. If the existing text is retained, the rendering above seems best. It describes the prosperous worldling as free from troubles or diseases, which would be like chains on a captive, by which he is dragged to execution. It thus gives a parallel to the next clause, which describes their bodies (lit., belly) as stalwart. Psalms 73:5 carries on the description, and paints the wicked’s exemption from trouble. The first clause is literally, "In the trouble of man they are not." The word for man here is that which connotes frailty and mortality, while in the next clause it is the generic term "Adam." Thus the prosperous worldlings appeared to the psalmist in his times of scepticism, as possessing charmed lives, which were free from all the ills that came from frailty and mortality, and, as like superior beings, lifted above the universal lot. But what did their exemption do for them? Its effects might have taught the doubter that the prosperity at which his faith staggered was no blessing, for it only inflated its recipients with pride, and urged them on to high-handed acts. Very graphically does Psalms 73:6 paint them as having the former for their necklace, and the latter for their robe. A proud man carries a stiff neck and a high head. Hence the picture in Psalms 73:6 of "pride" as wreathed about their necks as a chain or necklace. High-handed violence is their garment, according to the familiar metaphor by which a man’s characteristics are likened to his dress, the garb of his soul. The double meaning of "habit," and the connection between "custom" and "costume," suggests the same figure. As the clothing wraps the body and is visible to the world, so insolent violence, masterfulness enforced by material weapons and contemptuous of others’ rights, characterised these men, who had never learned gentleness in the school of suffering. Tricked out with a necklace of pride and a robe of violence, they strutted among men, and thought themselves far above the herd, and secure from the touch of trouble. The next group of verses (Psalms 73:7-10) "further describes the unfeeling insolence begotten of unbroken prosperity, and the crowd of hangers on, admirers, and imitators attendant on the successful wicked. "Out of fat their eye flashes" gives a graphic picture of the fierce glare of insolent eyes, set in well-fed faces. But graphic as it is, it scarcely fits the context so well as does a proposed amended reading, which by a very small change in the word rendered "their eye" yields the meaning "their iniquity" and takes "fat" as equivalent to a fat, that is, an obstinate, self-confident, or unfeeling heart. "From an unfeeling heart their iniquity comes forth" makes a perfect parallel with the second clause of the verse rightly rendered. "the imaginations of their heart overflow"; and both clauses paint the arrogant tempers and bearing of the worldlings. Psalms 73:8 deals with the manifestation of these in speech. Well-to-do wickedness delights in making suffering goodness a butt for its coarse jeers. It does not need much wit to do that. Clumsy jests are easy, and poverty is fair game for vulgar wealth’s ridicule. But there is a dash of ferocity in such laughter, and such jests pass quickly into earnest, and wicked oppression. "As from on high they speak,"-fancying themselves set on a pedestal above the common masses. The LXX, followed by many moderns, attaches "oppression" to the second clause, which makes the verse more symmetrical; but the existing division of clauses yields an appropriate sense. The description of arrogant speech is carried on in Psalms 73:9, which has been variously understood, as referring in a to blasphemy against God ("they set against the heavens their mouth"), and in b to slander against men; or, as in a, continuing the thought of Psa 73:8 b, and designating their words as spoken as if from heaven itself, and in b ascribing to their words sovereign power among men. But it is better to regard "heaven" and "earth" as the ordinary designation of the whole visible frame of things, and to take the verse as describing the self-sufficiency which gives its opinions and lays down the law about everything, and on the other hand, the currency and influence which are accorded by the popular voice to the dicta of prosperous worldlings. That thought prepares the way for the enigmatic verse which follows. There are several obscure points in it. First, the verb in the Hebrew text means turns (transitive), which the Hebrew margin corrects into returns (intransitive). With the former reading, "his people" is the object of the verb, and the implied subject is the prosperous wicked man, the change to the singular "he" from the plural "they" of the preceding clauses being not unusual in Hebrew. With the latter reading, "his people" is the subject. The next question is to whom the "people" are conceived as belonging. It is, at first sight, natural to think of the frequent Scripture expression, and to take the "his" as referring to God, and the phrase to mean the true Israel. But the meaning seems rather to be the mob of parasites and hangers on, who servilely follow the successful sinner, in hope of some crumbs from his table. "Thither" means "to himself," and the whole describes how such a one as the man whose portrait has just been drawn is sure to attract a retinue of dependants, who say as he says, and would fain be what he is. The last clause describes the share of these parasites in their patron’s prosperity. "Waters of abundance"-i.e., abundant waters-may be an emblem of the pernicious principles of the wicked, which their followers swallow greedily; but it is more probably a figure for fulness of material good, which rewards the humiliation of servile adherents to the prosperous worldling. The next group (Psalms 73:11-14) begins with an utterance of unbelief or doubt, but it is difficult to reach certainty as to the speakers. It is very natural to refer the "they" to the last-mentioned persons-namely, the people who have been led to attach themselves to the prosperous sinners, and who, by the example of these, are led to question the reality of God’s acquaintance with and moral government of human affairs. The question is, as often, in reality a denial. But "they" may have a more general sense, equivalent to our own colloquial use of it for an indefinite multitude. "They say"-that is, "the common opinion and rumour is." So here, the meaning may be, that the sight of such flushed and flourishing wickedness diffuses widespread and deep-going doubts of God’s knowledge, and makes many infidels. Ewald, Delitzsch, and others take all the verses of this group as spoken by the followers of the ungodly; and, unquestionably, that view avoids the difficulty of allotting the parts to different unnamed interlocutors. But it raises difficulties of another kind-as, for instance, those of supposing that these adulators should roundly call their patrons wicked, and that an apostate should profess that he has cleansed his heart. The same objections do not hold against the view that these four verses are the utterance, not of the wicked rich man or his coterie of admirers, but of the wider number whose faith has been shaken. There is nothing in the verses which would be unnatural on such lips. Psalms 73:11 would then be a question anxiously raised by faith that was beginning to reel; Psalms 73:12 would be a statement of the anomalous fact which staggered it; and Psalms 73:13-14 the complaint of the afflicted godly. The psalmist’s repudiation of a share in such incipient scepticism would begin with Psalms 73:15. There is much in favour of this view of the speakers, but against it is the psalmist’s acknowledgment, in Psalms 73:2, that his own confidence in God’s moral government had been shaken, of which there is no further trace in the psalm, unless Psalms 73:13-14, express the conclusion which he had been tempted to draw, and which. as he proceeds to say, he had fought down. If these two verses are ascribed to him, Psalms 73:12 is best regarded as a summary of the whole preceding part, and only Psalms 73:11 as the utterance either of the prosperous sinner and his adherents (in which case it is a question which means denial), or as that of troubled faith (in which case it is a question that would fain be an affirmation, but has been forced unwillingly to regard the very pillars of the universe as trembling). Psalms 73:15-18 tell how the psalmist strove with and finally conquered his doubts, and saw enough of the great arc of the Divine dealings, to be sure that the anomaly, which had exercised his faith, was capable of complete reconciliation with the righteousness of Providence. It is instructive to note that he silenced his doubts, out of regard to "the generation of Thy children"-that is, to the true Israel, the pure in heart. He was tempted to speak as others did not fear to speak, impugning God’s justice and proclaiming the uselessness of purity; but he locked his lips, lest his words should prove him untrue to the consideration which he owed to meek and simple hearts, who knew nothing of the speculative difficulties torturing him. He does not say that his speaking would have been sin against God. It would not have been so, if, in speaking, he had longed for confirmation of his wavering faith. But whatever the motive of his words, they might have shaken some lowly believers. Therefore be resolved on silence. Like all wise and devout men, he swallowed his own smoke, and let the process of doubting go on to its end of certainty, one way or another, before he spoke. This psalm, in which he tells how he overcame them, is his first acknowledgment that he had had these temptations to cast away his confidence. Fermentation should be done in the dark. When the process is finished, and the product is clear, it is fit to be produced and drank. Certitudes are meant to be uttered; doubts are meant to be struggled with. The psalmist has set an example which many men need to ponder today. It is easy, and it is also cruel, to raise questions which the proposer is not ready to answer. Silent brooding over his problem did not bring light, as Psalms 73:16 tells us. The more he thought over it, the more insoluble did it seem to him. There are chambers which the key of thinking will not open. Unwelcome as the lesson is, we have to learn that every lock will not yield to even prolonged and strenuous investigation. The lamp of the Understanding throws its beams far, but there are depths of darkness too deep and dark for them; and they are wisest who know its limits and do not try to use it in regions where it is useless. But faith finds a path where speculation discerns none. The psalmist "went into the sanctuary (literally sanctuaries) of God," and there light streamed in on him, in which he saw light. Not mere entrance into the place of worship, but closer approach to the God who dwelt there, cleared away the mists. Communion with God solves many problems which thinking leaves unresolved. The eye which has gazed on God is purged for much vision besides. The disproportion between the deserts and fortunes of good and bad men assumes an altogether different aspect when contemplated in the light of present communion with Him, which brings a blessedness that makes earthly prosperity seem dross, and earthly burdens seem feathers. Such communion, in its seclusion from worldly agitations, enables a man to take calmer, saner views of life, and in its enduring blessedness reveals more clearly the transiency of the creatural good which deceives men with the figment of its permanence. The lesson which the psalmist learned in the solemn stillness of the sanctuary was the end of ungodly prosperity. That changes the aspect of the envied position of the prosperous sinner, for his very prosperity is seen to contribute to his downfall, as well as to make that downfall more tragic by contrast. His sure footing, exempt as he seemed from the troubles and ills that flesh is heir to, was really on a treacherous slope, like smooth sheets of rock on a mountainside. To stand on them is to slide down to hideous ruin. The theme of the end of the prosperous sinners is continued in the next group (Psalms 73:19-22). In Psalms 73:19 the psalmist seems as if standing an amazed spectator of the crash, which tumbles into chaos the solid-seeming fabric of their insolent prosperity. An exclamation breaks from his lips as he looks. And then destruction is foretold for all such, under the solemn and magnificent image of Psa 73:20. God has seemed to sleep, letting evil run its course; but He "rouses Himself"-that is, comes forth in judicial acts-and as a dreamer remembers his dream, which seemed so real, and smiles at its imaginary terrors or joys, so He will "despise" them, as no more solid nor lasting than phantasms of the night. The end contemplated by the psalmist is not necessarily death, but any sudden overthrow, of which there are many in the experience of the godless. Life is full of such awakings of God, both in regard to individuals and nations, which, if a man duly regards, he will find the problem of the psalm less insoluble than at first it appears. But if there are lives which, being without goodness, are also without chastisement, Death comes at last to such as God’s awaking, and a very awful dissipating of earthly prosperity into a shadowy nothing. The psalmist has no revelation here of future retribution. His vindication of God’s justice is not based on that, but simply on the transiency of worldly prosperity, and on its dangerous character. It is "a slippery place," and it is sure to come to an end. It is obvious that there are many other considerations which have to be taken into account, in order to a complete solution of the problem of the psalm. But the psalmist’s solution goes far to lighten the painful perplexity of it; and if we add his succeeding thoughts as to the elements of true blessedness, we have solution enough for peaceful acquiescence, if not for entire understanding. The psalmist’s way of finding an answer is even more valuable than the answer which he found. They who dwell in the secret place of the Most High can look on the riddle of this painful world with equanimity, and be content to leave it half unsolved. Psalms 73:21-22 are generally taken as one sentence, and translated as by Delitzsch "if my heart should grow bitter I should be brutish" etc; or as by Hupfeld, "When my heart grew bitter then I was as a beast," etc.; but they are better regarded as the psalmist’s penitent explanation of his struggle. "Unbelieving thoughts had fermented in his mind, and a pang of passionate discontent had pierced his inmost being. But the higher self blames the lower self for such folly" (Cheyne, in loc.). His recognition that his doubts had their source, not in defect in God’s providence, but in his own ignorance and hasty irritation, which took offence without cause, prepares him for the sweet, clear note of purely spiritual aspiration and fruition which follows in the next strophe. He had all but lost his hold of God; but though his feet had almost gone astray, his hand had been grasped by God, and that strong hold had kept him from utterly falling. The pledge of continual communion with God is not our own vacillating, wayward hearts, but God’s gentle, strong clasp, which will not let us go. Thus conscious of constant fellowship, and feeling thrillingly God’s touch in his inmost spirit, the psalmist rises to a height of joyous assurance, far above doubts and perplexities caused by the unequal distribution of earth’s trivial good. For him, all life will be illumined by God’s counsel, which will guide him as a shepherd leads his sheep, and which he will obey as a sheep follows his shepherd. How small the delights of the prosperous men seem now! And can there be an end to that sweet alliance, such as smites earthly good? There are blessings which bear in themselves assurance of their own undyingness; and this psalmist, who had nothing to say of the future retribution falling on the sinner whose delights were confined to earth, feels that death cannot put a period to a union so blessed and spiritual as was his with God. To him, "afterwards" was irradiated with light from present blessedness; and a solemnly joyful conviction springs in his soul, which he casts into words that glance at the story of Enoch’s translation, from which "take" is quoted. (cf. Psalms 49:16) Whether we translate "with glory" or "to glory," there can be no question that the psalmist is looking beyond life on earth to dwelling with God in glory. We have in this utterance, the expression of the conviction, inseparable from any true, deep communion with God, that such communion can never be at the mercy of Death. The real proof of a life beyond the grave is the resurrection of Jesus; and the pledge of it is present enjoyment of fellowship with God. Such thoughts lift the psalmist to a height from which earth’s troubles show small, and as they diminish, the perplexity arising from their distribution diminishes in proportion. They fade away altogether, when he feels how rich he is in possessing God. Surely the very summit of devotional rapture is reached in the immortal words which follow! Heaven without God were a waste to this man. With God, he needs not nor desires anything on earth. If the impossible should be actual, and heart as well as flesh should fail, his naked self would be clothed and rich, steadfast and secure, as long as he had God; and he is so closely knit to God, that he knows that he will not lose Him though he dies, but have Him for his very own forever. What care need he have how earth’s vain goods come and go? Whatever outward calamities or poverty may be his lot, there is no riddle in that Divine government which thus enriches the devout heart; and the richest ungodly man is poor, because he shuts himself out from the one all-sufficient and enduring wealth. A final pair of verses, answering to the introductory pair, gathers up the double truth, which the psalmist has learned to grasp more firmly by occasion of his doubts. To be absent from God is to perish. Distance from Him is separation from life. Drawing near to Him is the only good; and the psalmist has deliberately chosen it as his good, let worldly prosperity come or go as it list, or, rather, as God shall choose. By the effort of his own volition he has made God his refuge, and, safe in Him, he can bear the sorrows of the godly, and look unenvying on the fleeting prosperity of sinners, while, with insight drawn from communion, he can recount with faith and praise all God’s works, and find in none of them a stumbling block, nor fail to find in any of them material for a song of thankfulness. Psalms 74:1-23 Two periods only correspond to the circumstances described in this psalm and its companion (Psalms 79:1-13)-namely, the Chaldean invasion and sack of Jerusalem, and the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes. The general situation outlined in the psalm fits either of these; but, of its details, some are more applicable to the former and others to the later period. The later date is strongly supported by such complaints as those of the cessation of prophecy (Psalms 74:9), the flaunting of the invaders’ signs in the sanctuary (Psalms 74:4), and the destruction by fire of all the "meeting places of God in the land," (Psalms 74:8). On the other hand, the earlier date better fits other features of the psalm-since Antiochus did not destroy or burn, but simply profaned the Temple, though he did, indeed, set fire to the gates and porch, but to these only. It would appear that, on either hypothesis, something must be allowed for poetical coloring. Calvin, whom Cheyne follows in this, accounts for the introduction of the burning of the Temple into a psalm referring to the desolation wrought by Antiochus, by the supposition that the psalmist speaks in the name of the "faithful, who, looking on the horrid devastation of the Temple, and being warned by so sad a sight, carried back their thoughts to that conflagration by which it had been destroyed by the Chaldeans, and wove the two calamities together into one." It is less difficult to pare down the statement as to the burning of the Temple so as to suit the later date, than that as to the silence of prophecy and the other characteristics mentioned, so as to fit the earlier. The question is still further complicated by the similarities between the two psalms and Jeremiah. (compare Psalms 74:4 with Lamentations 2:7, and Psalms 74:9 with Lamentations 2:9) The prophet’s well-known fondness for quotations gives probability, other things being equal, to the supposition that he is quoting the psalm, which would, in that case, be older than Lamentations. But this inference scarcely holds good, if there are other grounds on which the later date of the psalm is established. It would be very natural in a singer of the Maccabean period to go back to the prophet whose sad strains had risen at another black hour. On the whole, the balance is in favour of the later date. The psalm begins with a complaining cry to God (Psalms 74:1-3), which passes into a piteous detail of the nation’s misery (Psalms 74:4-9), whence it rises into petition (Psalms 74:10-11), stays trembling faith by gazing upon His past deeds of help and the wonders of His creative power (Psalms 74:12-17), and closes with beseeching God to vindicate the honour of His own name by the deliverance of his people (Psalms 74:18-23). The main emphasis of the prayer in Psalms 74:1-3 lies on the pleas which it presents, drawn from Israel’s relation to God. The characteristic Asaphie name "Thy flock" stands in Psalms 74:1, and appeals to the Shepherd, both on the ground of His tenderness and of His honour as involved in the security of the sheep. A similar appeal lies in the two words "acquire" and "redeem," in both of which the deliverance from Egypt is referred to, -the former expression suggesting the price at which the acquisition was made, as well as the obligations of ownership; and the latter, the office of the Goel, the Kinsman-Redeemer, on whom devolved the duty of obtaining satisfaction for blood. The double designations of Israel as "Thy congregation" and as "the tribe of Thine inheritance" probably point to the religious and civil aspects of the national life. The strongest plea is put last - namely, God’s dwelling on Zion. For all these reasons, the psalmist asks and expects Him to come with swift footsteps to the desolations, which have endured so long that the impatience of despair blends with the cry for help, and calls them "everlasting," even while it prays that they may be built up again. The fact that the enemy of God and of His flock has marred everything in the sanctuary is enough, the psalmist thinks, to move God to action. The same thought, that the nation’s calamities are really dishonouring to God, and therefore worthy of His intervention, colours the whole of the description of these in Psalms 74:4-9. The invaders are "Thine adversaries." It is "in the place where Thou didst meet us" that their bestial noises, like those of lions over their prey, echo. It is "Thy sanctuary" which they have set on fire, "the dwelling place of Thy name" which they have profaned. It is "Thy meeting places" which they have burned throughout the land. Only at the end of the sad catalogue is the misery of the people touched on, and that, not so much as inflicted by human foes, as by the withdrawal of God’s Spirit. This is, in fact, the dominant thought of the whole psalm. It says very little about the sufferings resulting from the success of the enemy, but constantly recurs to the insult to God, and the reproach adhering to His name therefrom. The essence of it all is in the concluding prayer, "Plead Thine own cause" (Psalms 74:22). The vivid description of devastation in these verses presents some difficulties in detail, which call for brief treatment. The "signs" in Psalms 74:4 b may be taken as military, such as banners or the like; but it is more in accordance with the usage of the word to suppose them to be religious emblems, or possibly idols, such as Antiochus thrust upon the Jews. In Psalms 74:5 and Psalms 74:6 a change of tense represents the action described in them, as if in progress at the moment before the singer’s eyes. "They seem" is literally "He is known" (or makes himself known), which may refer to the invaders, the change from plural to singular being frequent in Hebrew; or it may be taken impersonally, =" It seems." In either case it introduces a comparison between the hacking and hewing by the spoilers in the Temple, and the work of a woodman swinging on high his axe in the forest. "And now" seems to indicate the next step in the scene, which the psalmist picturesquely conceives as passing before his horror-stricken sight. The end of that ill-omened activity is that at last it succeeds in shattering the carved work, which, in the absence of statues, was the chief artistic glory of the Temple. All is hewed down, as if it were no more than so much growing timber. With Psalms 74:7 the tenses change to the calmer tone of historical narration. The plundered Temple is set on fire-a point which, as has been noticed above, is completely applicable only to the Chaldean invasion. Similarly, the next clause, "they have profaned the dwelling place of Thy name to the ground," does not apply in literality to the action of Antiochus, who did indeed desecrate, but did not destroy, the Temple. The expression is a pregnant one, and calls for some such supplement as is given above, which, however, dilutes its vigour while it elucidates its meaning. In Psalms 74:8 the word "let us crush them" has been erroneously taken as a noun, and rendered "their brood," a verb like "we will root out" being supplied. So the LXX and some of the old versions, followed by Hitzig and Baethgen. But, as Delitzsch well asks, -Why are only the children to be rooted out? and why should the object of the action be expressed, and not rather the action, of which the object would be self-evident? The "meeting places of God in the land" cannot be old sanctuaries, nor the high places, which were Israel’s sin; for no psalmist could have adduced the destruction of these as a reason for God’s intervention. They can only be the synagogues. The expression is a strong argument for the later date of the psalm. Equally strong is the lament in Psalms 74:9 over the removal of the "signs"-i.e., as in Psalms 74:4, the emblems of religion, or the sacrifices and festivals, suppressed by Antiochus, which were the tokens of the covenant between God and Israel. The silence of prophecy cannot be alleged of the Chaldean period without some straining of facts and of the words here; nor is it true that then there was universal ignorance of the duration of the calamity, for Jeremiah had foretold it. Psalms 74:10 and Psalms 74:11 are the kernel of the psalm, the rest of which is folded round them symmetrically. Starting from this centre and working outwards, we note that it is preceded by six verses dilating on the profanations of the name of God, and followed by six setting forth the glories of that name in the past. The connection of these two portions of the psalm is obvious. They are, as it were, the inner shell round the kernel. The outer shell is the prayer in three verses which begins the psalm, and that in six verses which closes it. Psalms 74:10 takes up the despairing "How long" from the end of the preceding portion, and turns it into a question to God. It is best to ask Him, when ignorance pains us. But the interrogation does not so much beg for enlightenment as to the duration of the calamity as for its abbreviation. It breathes not precisely impatience, but longing that a state of things so dishonouring to God should end. That aspect, and not personal suffering, is prominent in the verse. It is "Thy name" which is insulted by the adversaries’ actions, and laid open to their contempt, as the name of a Deity powerless to protect His worshippers. Their action "reproaches," and His inaction lets them "despise," His name. The psalmist cannot endure that this condition should drag on indefinitely, as if "forever," and his prayer question "How long?" is next exchanged for another similar blending of petition and inquiry, "Why dost Thou draw back Thy hand?" Both are immediately translated into that petition which they both really mean. "From the midst of Thy bosom consume," is a pregnant phrase, like that in Psalms 74:7 b, and has to be completed as above, though, possibly, the verb stands absolutely as equivalent to "make an end"-i.e., of such a state of things. The psalmist’s petition is next grounded on the revelation of God’s name in Israel’s past, and in creative acts of power. These at once encourage him to expect that God will pluck His hand out from the folds of His robe, where it lies inactive, and appeal to God to be what He has been of old, and to rescue the name which He has thus magnified from insult. There is singular solemnity in the emphatic reiteration of "Thou" in these verses. The Hebrew does not usually express the pronominal nominative to a verb, unless special attention is to be called to it; but in these verses it does so uniformly, with one exception, and the sevenfold repetition of the word brings forcibly into view the Divine personality and former deeds which pledge God to act now. Remembrance of past wonders made present misery more bitter, but it also fanned into a flame the spark of confidence that the future would be like the past. One characteristic of the Asaph psalms is wistful retrospect, which is sometimes the basis of rebuke, and sometimes of hope, and sometimes of deepened sorrow, but is here in part appeal to God and in part consolation. The familiar instances of His working drawn from the Exodus history appear in the psalm. First comes the dividing of the Red Sea, which is regarded chiefly as occasioning the destruction of the Egyptians, who are symbolised by the "sea monsters" and by "leviathan" (the crocodile). Their fate is an omen of what the psalmist hopes may befall the oppressors of his own day. There is great poetic force in the representation that the strong hand, which by a stroke parted the waters, crushed by the same blow the heads of the foul creatures who "floated many a rood" on them. And what an end for the pomp of Pharaoh and his host, to provide a meal for jackals and the other beasts of the desert, who tear the corpses strewing the barren shore! The meaning is completely misapprehended when "the people inhabiting the wilderness" is taken to be wild desert tribes. The expression refers to animals, and its use as designating them has parallels. (as Proverbs 30:25-26) In Psalms 74:15 another pregnant expression occurs, which is best filled out as above, the reference being to cleaving the rock for the flow of water, with which is contrasted in b the drying up of the Jordan. Thus the whole of the Exodus period is covered. It is noteworthy that the psalmist adduces only wonders wrought on waters, being possibly guided in his selection by the familiar poetic use of floods and seas as emblems of hostile power and unbridled insolence. From the wonders of history he passes to those of creation, and chiefly of that might by which times alternate and each constituent of the Kosmos has its appointed limits. Day and night, summer and winter, recur by God’s continual operation. Is there to be no dawning for Israel’s night of weeping, and no summer making glad the winter of its discontent? "Thou didst set all the bounds of the earth,"-wilt Thou not bid back this surging ocean which has transgressed its limits and filled the breadth of Thy land? All the lights in the sky, and chiefly the greatest of them, Thou didst establish, -surely Thou wilt end this eclipse in which Thy people grope. Thus the psalmist lifts himself to the height of confident though humble prayer, with which the psalm closes, recurring to the opening tones. Its centre is, as we have seen, a double remonstrance-"How long?" and "Why?" The encircling circumference is earnest supplication, of which the keynote is "Remember" (Psalms 74:2 and Psalms 74:18). The gist of this closing prayer is the same appeal to God to defend His own honour, which we have found in the former verses. It is put in various forms here. Twice (Psalms 74:18 and Psalms 74:22) God is besought to remember the reproach and contumely heaped on His name, and apparently warranted by His inaction. The claim of Israel for deliverance is based in Psalms 74:19 upon its being "Thy turtle dove," which therefore cannot be abandoned without sullying Thy fame. The psalmist spreads the "covenant" before God, as reminding Him of His obligations under it. He asks that such deeds may be done as will give occasion to the afflicted and needy to "praise Thy name," which is being besmirched by their calamities. Finally, in wonderfully bold words, he calls on God to take up what is, after all, "His own" quarrel, and, if the cry of the afflicted does not move Him, to listen to the loud voices of those who blaspheme Him all the day. Reverent earnestness of supplication sometimes sounds like irreverence; but, "when the heart’s deeps boil in earnest," God understands the meaning of what sounds strange, and recognises the profound trust in His faithfulness and love which underlies bold words. The precise rendering of Psa 74:19 is very doubtful. The word rendered above by "company" may mean life or a living creature, or, collectively, a company of such. It has been taken in all these meanings here, and sometimes in one of them in the first clause, and in another in the second, as most recently by Baethgen, who renders "Abandon not to the beast" in a, -and "The life of thine afflicted" in b. But it must have the same meaning in both clauses, and the form of the word shows that it must be construed in both with a following "of." If so, the rendering adopted above is best, though it involves taking the word rendered "greed" (lit., soul) in a somewhat doubtful sense. This rendering is adopted in the R.V. (margin), and is, on the whole, the least difficult, and yields a probable sense. Delitzsch recognises the necessity for giving the ambiguous word the same meaning in both clauses, and takes that meaning to be "creature," which suits well enough in a, but gives a very harsh meaning to b. "Forget not Thy poor animals forever" is surely an impossible rendering. Other attempts have been made to turn the difficulty by textual alteration. Hupfeld would transpose two words in a-and so gets "Give not up to rage the life of Thy dove." Cheyne corrects the difficult word into "to the sword," and Graetz follows Dyserinck in preferring "to death," or Krochmal, who reads "to destruction." If the existing text is retained, probably the rendering adopted above is best. Psalms 75:1-10 THIS psalm deals with the general thought of God’s judgment in history, especially on heathen nations. It has no clear marks of connection with any particular instance of that judgment. The prevalent opinion has been that it refers, like the next psalm, to the destruction of Sennacherib’s army. There are in it slight resemblances to Psalms 46:1-11, and to Isaiah’s prophecies regarding that event, which support the conjecture. Cheyne seems to waver, as on page 148 of "Orig. of Psalt." he speaks of "the two Maccabean Psalms 74:1-23; Psalms 75:1-10," and on page 166 concludes that they "may be Maccabean, but we cannot claim for this view the highest degree of probability, especially as neither psalm refers to any warlike deeds of Israelites. It is safer, I think, to assign them at the earliest to one of the happier parts of the Persian age." It is apparently still safer to refrain from assigning them to any precise period. The kernel of the psalm is a majestic Divine utterance, proclaiming God’s judgment as at hand. The limits of that Divine word are doubtful, but it is best taken as occupying two pairs of verses (Psalms 75:2-5). It is preceded by one verse of praise, and followed by three (Psalms 75:6-8) of warning spoken by the psalmist, and by two (Psalms 75:9-10) in which he again praises God the Judge, and stands forth as an instrument of His judicial acts. In Psalms 75:1, which is as a prelude to the great Voice from heaven, we hear the nation giving thanks beforehand for the judgment which is about to fall. The second part of the verse is doubtful. It may be taken thus: "And Thy name is near; they (i.e., men) declare Thy wondrous works." So Delitzsch, who comments: The Church "welcomes the future acts of God with fervent thanks, and all they that belong to it declare beforehand God’s wondrous works." Several modern scholars, among whom are Gratz, Baethgen, and Cheyne, adopt a textual alteration which gives the reading, "They who call upon Thy name declare," etc. But the rendering of the A.V, which is also that of Hupfeld and Perowne, gives a good meaning. All God’s deeds in history proclaim that He is ever at hand to help. His name is His character as revealed by His self manifestation; and this is the glad thanks-evoking lesson, taught by all the past and by the judicial act of which the psalm is the precursor-that He is near to deliver His people. As Deuteronomy 4:7 has it, "What nation is there that hath God so near unto them?" The Divine voice breaks in with majestic abruptness, as in Psalms 46:10. It proclaims impending judgment, which will restore society, dissolving in dread or moral corruption, and will abase insolent wickedness, which is therefore exhorted to submission. In Psalms 75:2, two great principles are declared-one in regard to the time and the other in regard to the animating spirit of God’s judgment. Literally, the first words of the verse run, "When I lay hold of the appointed time." The thought is that He has His own appointed time at which His power will flash forth into act, and that till that moment arrives evil is permitted to run its course, and insolent men to play their "fantastic tricks" before an apparently indifferent or unobserving God. His servants are tempted to think that He delays too long; His enemies, that He will never break His silence. But the slow hand traverses the dial in time, and at last the hour strikes and the crash comes punctually at the moment. The purposes of delay are presented in Scripture as twofold: on the one hand, "that the long suffering of God may lead to repentance"; and on the other, that evil may work itself out and show its true character. To learn the lesson that, "when the set time is come," judgment will fall, would save the oppressed from impatience and despondency and the oppressor from dreams of impunity. It is a law fruitful for the interpretation of the world’s history. The other fundamental truth in this verse is that the principle of God’s judgment is equity, rigid adherence to justice, so that every act of man’s shall receive accurately "its just recompense of reward." The "I" of Psalms 75:2 b is emphatic. It brings to view the lofty personality of the Judge, and asserts the operation of a Divine hand in human affairs, while it also lays the basis for the assurance that, the judgment being His, and He being what He is, it must be "according to truth." Such a "set time" has arrived, as Psalms 75:3 proceeds to declare. Oppression and corruption have gone so far that "the earth and its inhabitants" are as if "dissolved." All things are rushing to ruin. The psalmist does not distinguish between the physical and the moral here. His figure is employed in reference to both orders, which he regards as indissolubly connected. Possibly he is echoing Psalms 46:6, "The earth melted," though there the "melting" is an expression for dread occasioned by God’s voice, and here rather refers to the results of "the proud man’s wrong." At such a supreme moment, when the solid framework of society and of the world itself seems to be on the point of dissolution, the mighty Divine Personality intervenes; that strong hand is thrust forth to grasp the tottering pillars and stay their fall; or, in plain words, God Himself then intervenes to reestablish the moral order of society, and thus to "save the sufferers." (Comp. Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2:8) That intervention has necessarily two aspects, being on the one hand restorative, and on the other punitive. Therefore in Psalms 75:4 and Psalms 75:5 follow Divine warnings to the "fools" and "wicked," whose insolent boasting and tyranny have provoked it. The word rendered "fools" seems to include the idea of boastfulness as well as folly in the Biblical sense of that word, which points to moral rather than to merely intellectual aberration. "Lifting up the horn" is a symbol of arrogance. According to the accents, the word rendered "stiff" is not to be taken as attached to "neck," but as the object of the verb "speak," the resulting translation being, "Speak not arrogance with a [stretched out] neck"; and thus Delitzsch would render. But it is more natural to take the word in its usual construction as an epithet of "neck," expressive of superciliously holding a high head. Cheyne follows Baethgen in altering the text so as to read "rock" for "neck"-a slight change which is supported by the LXX rendering ("Speak not unrighteousness against God")-and renders "nor speak arrogantly of the rock." Like the other advocates of a Maceabean date, he finds here a reference to the mad blasphemies of Antiochus Epiphanes; but the words would suit Rabshakeh’s railings quite as well. The exact point where the Divine oracle passes into the psalmist’s own words is doubtful. Psalms 75:7 is evidently his; and that verse is so closely connected with Psalms 75:6 that it is best to make the break at the end of Psa 75:5, and to suppose that what follows is the singer’s application of the truths which he has heard. Two renderings of Psa 75:6 b are possible, which, though very different in English, turn on the minute difference in the Hebrew of one vowel sign: The same letters spell the Hebrew word meaning mountains and that meaning lifting up. With one punctuation of the preceding word "wilderness," we must translate "from the wilderness of mountains"; with another, the two words are less closely connected, and we must render, "from the wilderness is lifting up." If the former rendering is adopted, the verse is incomplete, and some phrase like "help comes" must be supplied, as Delitzsch suggests. But "lifting up" occurs so often in this psalm, that it is more natural to take the word in that meaning here, especially as the next verse ends with it, in a different tense, and thus makes a sort of rhyme with this verse. "The wilderness of mountains," too, is a singular designation, either for the Sinaitic peninsula or for Egypt, or for the wilderness of Judah, which have all been suggested as intended here. "The wilderness" stands for the south, and thus three cardinal points are named. Why is the north omitted? If "lifting up" means deliverance, the omission may be due to the fact that Assyria (from which the danger came, if we adopt the usual view of the occasion of the psalm) lay to the north. But the meaning in the rest of the psalm is not deliverance, and the psalmist is addressing the "foolish boasters" here; and that consideration takes away the force of such an explanation of the omission. Probably no significance attaches to it. The general idea is simply that "lifting up" does not come from any quarter of earth, but, as the next verse goes on to say, solely from God. How absurd, then, is the self-sufficient loftiness of godless men! How vain to look along the low levels of earth, when all true elevation and dignity come from God! The very purpose of His judicial energy is to abase the lofty and raise the low. His hand lifts up, and there is no secure or lasting elevation but that which He effects. His hand casts down, and that which attracts His lightnings is "the haughtiness of man." The outburst of His judgment works like a volcanic eruption, which flings up elevations in valleys and shatters lofty peaks. The features of the country are changed after it, and the world looks new. The metaphor of Psa 75:8, in which judgment is represented as a cup of foaming wine, which God puts to the lips of the nations, receives great expansion in the prophets, especially in Jeremiah, and recurs in the Apocalypse. There is a grim contrast between the images of festivity and hospitality called up by the picture of a host presenting the wine cup to his guests, and the stern compulsion which makes the "wicked" gulp down the nauseous draught held by God to their reluctant lips. The utmost extremity of punitive inflictions, unflinchingly inflicted, is suggested by the terrible imagery. And the judgment is to be world wide; for "all the wicked of the earth" are to drink, and that to the dregs. And how does the prospect affect the psalmist? It moves him, first, to solemn praise-not only because God has proved Himself by these terrible things in righteousness to be the God of His people, but also because He has thereby manifested His own character as righteous and hating evil. It is no selfish nor cruel joy which stirs in devout hearts, when God comes forth in history and smites oppressing insolence. It is but a spurious benevolence which affects to recoil from the conception of a God who judges and, when needful, smites. This psalmist not only praised, but in his degree vowed to imitate. The last verse is best understood as his declaration of his own purpose, though some commentators have proposed to transfer it to the earlier part of the psalm, regarding it as part of the Divine oracle. But it is in its right place where it stands. God’s servants are His instruments in carrying out His judgments; and there is a very real sense in which all of them should seek to fight against dominant evil and to cripple the power of tyrannous godlessness. Psalms 76:1-12 IN contents and tone this psalm is connected with Psalms 46:1-11; Psalms 48:1-14. No known event corresponds so closely with its allusions as the destruction of Sennacherib’s army, to which the LXX in its superscription refers it. The singer is absorbed in the one tremendous judgment which had delivered the dwelling place of Jehovah. His song has but one theme-God’s forth flashing of judgment on Zion’s foes. One note of thankfulness sounds at the close, but till then all is awe. The psalm is divided into four strophes, of three verses each. The former two describe the act; the latter two deal with its results, in an awed world and thankful praise. The emphatic words in the first strophe are those which designate the scene of the Divine act. The glow of humble pride, of wonder and thankfulness, is perceptible in the fourfold reiteration-"in Judah, in Israel, in Salem, in Zion"; all which names are gathered up in the eloquent "There" of Psalms 76:3. The true point of view from which to regard God’s acts is that they are His Self-revelation. The reason why Israel is the object of the acts which manifest His name is that there He has chosen to dwell. And, since He dwells there, the special act of judgment which the psalm celebrates was there performed. "The lightnings of the bow" picturesquely designate arrows, from their swift flight and deadly impact. (Compare Psalms 46:9) The second strophe (Psalms 76:4-6) comes closer to the fact celebrated, and describes, with magnificent sweep, brevity, and vividness, the death sleep of the enemy. But, before it shows the silent corpses, it lifts one exclamation of reverence to the God who has thus manifested His power. The word rendered "Effulgent" is doubtful, and by a slight transposition of letters becomes, as in Psalms 76:7 which begins the next strophe, "dread." In Psalms 76:4 b the rendering "more excellent than," etc., yields a comparison which can scarcely be called worthy. It is little to say of God that He is more glorious than the enemies’ "mountains of prey," though Delitzsch tries to recommend this rendering by supposing that God is represented as towering above "the Lebanon of the hostile army of peoples." The Hebrew idiom expresses comparison by the preposition from appended to the adjective in its simple form, and it is best here to take the construction as indicating point of departure rather than comparison. God comes forth as "glorious," from the lofty heights where He sits supreme. But "mountains of prey" is a singular phrase, which can only be explained by the supposition that God is conceived of as a Conqueror, who has laid up his spoils in His inaccessible storehouse on high. But the LXX translates "everlasting mountains," which fits the context well, and implies a text, which might easily be misinterpreted as meaning "prey," which misinterpretation may afterwards have crept into the body of the text. If this alteration is not adopted, the meaning will be as just stated. Psalms 76:5 gives some support to the existing text, by its representation of the stout-hearted foe as "spoiled." They are robbed of their might, their weapons, and their life. How graphically the psalmist sets before the eyes of his readers the process of destruction from its beginning! He shows us the warriors falling asleep in the drowsiness of death. How feeble their "might" new! One vain struggle, as in the throes of death, and the hands which shot the "lightnings of the bow" against Zion are stiff for evermore. One word from the sovereign lips of the God of Jacob, and all the noise of the camp is hushed, and we look out upon a field of the dead, lying in awful stillness, dreamlessly sleeping their long slumber. The third strophe passes from description of the destruction of the enemy to paint its widespread results in the manifestation to a hushed world of God’s judgment. In it anger and love are wondrously blended; and while no creature can bear the terrible blaze of His face, nor endure the weight of His onset "in the time of His anger," the most awful manifestations thereof have a side of tenderness and an inner purpose of blessing. The core of judgment is mercy. It is worthy of God to smite the oppressor and to save the "afflicted," who not only suffer, but trust. When He makes His judgments reverberate from on high, earth should keep an awed stillness, as nature does when thunder peals. When some gigantic and hoary iniquity crashes to its fall, there is a moment of awed silence after the hideous tumult. The last Strophe is mainly a summons to praise God for His manifestation of delivering judgment. Psalms 76:10 is obscure. The first clause is intelligible enough. Since God magnifies His name by His treatment of opposing men, who set themselves against Him, their very foaming fury subserves His praise. That is a familiar thought with all the Scripture writers who meditate on God’s dealings. But the second clause is hard. Whose "wraths" are spoken of in it? God’s or man’s? The change from the singular ("wrath of man") to plural ("wraths") in b makes it all but certain that God’s fulness of "wrath" is meant here. It is set over against the finite and puny "wrath" of men, as an ocean might be contrasted with a shallow pond. If so, God’s girding Himself with the residue of His own wrath will mean that, after every such forth-putting of it as the psalm has been hymning, there still remains an unexhausted store ready to flame out if need arise. It is a stern and terrible thought of God, but it is solemnly true. His lovingkindness out measures man’s, and so does His judicial judgment. All Divine attributes partake of Infinitude, and the stores of His punitive anger are not less deep than those of His gentle goodness. Therefore men are summoned to vow and pay their vows; and while Israel is called to worship, the nations around, who have seen that field of the dead, are called to do homage and bring tribute to Him who, as it so solemnly shows, can cut off the breath of the highest, or can cut down their pride, as a grape gatherer does the ripe cluster (for such is the allusion in the word "cuts down"). The last clause of the psalm, which stands somewhat disconnected from the preceding, gathers up the lessons of the tremendous event which inspired it, when it sets Him forth as to be feared by the kings of the earth. Psalms 77:1-20 THE occasion of the profound sadness of the first part of this psalm may be inferred from the thoughts which brighten it into hope in the second. These were the memories of past national deliverance. It is natural to suppose that present national disasters were the causes of the sorrow which enveloped the psalmist’s spirit and suggested questions of despair, only saved from being blasphemous because they were so wistful. But it by no means follows that the singer is simply the personified nation. The piercing tone of individual grief is too clear, especially in the introductory verses, to allow of that hypothesis. Rather, the psalmist has taken into his heart the troubles of his people. Public calamity has become personal pain. What dark epoch has left its marks in this psalm remains uncertain. If Delitzsch’s contention that Habakkuk 3:1-19 is in part drawn from it were indubitably established, the attribution of the psalm to the times of Josiah would be plausible; but there is, at least, room for doubt whether there has been borrowing, and if so, which is original and which echo. The calamities of the Exile in their severity and duration would give reasonable ground for the psalmist’s doubts whether God had not cast off His people forever. No brief or partial eclipse of His favour would supply adequate occasion for these. The psalm falls into two parts, in the former of which (Psalms 77:1-9) deepest gloom wraps the singer’s spirit, while in the latter (Psalms 77:10-20) the clouds break. Each of these parts fall into three strophes, usually of three verses; but in the concluding strophe, consisting of five, Selah stands at the end of the first and third, and is not present at the end of the second, because it is more closely connected with the third than with the first. In like manner the first strophe of the second part (Psalms 77:10-12) has no Selah, but the second has (Psalms 77:13-15); the closing strophe (Psalms 77:16-20) being thus parted off. The psalmist’s agitation colours his language, which fluctuates in the first six verses between expressions of resolve or desire (Psalms 77:1, Psalms 77:3, Psalms 77:6) and simple statement of fact (Psalms 77:2, Psalms 77:4, Psalms 77:5). He has prayed long and earnestly, and nothing has been laid in answer on his outstretched palm. Therefore his cry has died down into a sigh. He fain would lift his voice to God, but dark thoughts make him dumb for supplication, and eloquent only in self-pitying monologue. A man must have waded through like depths to understand this pathetic bewilderment of spirit. They who glide smoothly over a sunlit surface of sea little know the terrors of sinking with choked lungs, into the abyss. A little experience will go further than much learning in penetrating the meaning of these moanings of lamed faith. They begin with an elliptical phrase, which, in its fragmentary character, reveals the psalmist’s discomposure. "My voice to God" evidently needs some such completion as is supplied above; and the form of the following verb ("cry") suggests that the supplied one should express wish or effort. The repetition of the phrase in Psalms 77:1 b strengthens the impression of agitation. The last words of that clause may be a petition, "give ear," but are probably better taken as above. The psalmist would fain cry to God, that he may be heard. He has cried, as he goes on to tell in calmer mood in Psalms 77:2, and has apparently not been heard. He describes his unintermitted supplications by a strong metaphor. The word rendered "stretched out" is literally poured out as water, and is applied to weeping eyes. (Lamentations 3:49) The Targum substitutes eye for hand here. but that is commentary, not translation. The clause which we render "without ceasing" is literally "and grew not stiff." That word, too, is used of tears, and derivatives from it are found in the passage just referred to in Lamentations ("intermission"), and in Lamentations 2:18 ("rest"). It carries on the metaphor of a stream, the flow of which is unchecked. The application of this metaphor to the hand is harsh, but the meaning is plain-that all night long the psalmist extended his hand in the attitude of prayer, as if open to receive God’s gift. His voice "rose like a fountain night and day"; but brought no comfort to his soul; and he bewails himself in the words which tell of Jacob’s despair when he heard that Joseph was dead. So rooted and inconsolable does he think his sorrows. The thought of God has changed its nature, as if the sun were to become a source of darkness. When he looks up, he can only sigh; when he looks within, his spirit is clothed or veiled-i.e., wrapped in melancholy. In the next strophe of three verses (Psalms 77:4-6) the psalmist plunges yet deeper into gloom, and unfolds more clearly its occasion. Sorrow, like a beast of prey, devours at night; and every sad heart knows how eyelids, however wearied, refuse to close upon as wearied eyes, which gaze wide opened into the blackness and see dreadful things there. This man felt as if God’s finger was pushing up his lids and forcing him to stare out into the night. Buffeted, as if laid on an anvil and battered with the shocks of doom, he cannot speak; he can only moan, as he is doing. Prayer seems to be impossible. But to say, "I cannot pray; would that I could!" is surely prayer, which will reach its destination, though the sender knows it not. The psalmist had found no ease in remembering God. He finds as little in remembering a brighter past. That he should have turned to history in seeking for consolation implies that his affliction was national in its sweep, however intensely personal in its pressure. This retrospective meditation on the great deeds of old is characteristic of the Asaph psalms. It ministers in them to many moods, as memory always does. In this psalm we have it feeding two directly opposite emotions. It may be the nurse of bitter Despair or of bright-eyed Hope. When the thought of God occasions but sighs, the remembrance of His acts can only make the present more doleful. The heavy spirit finds reasons for heaviness in God’s past and in its own. The psalmist in his sleepless vigils remembers other wakeful times, when his song filled the night with music and "awoke the dawn." Psalms 77:6 is parallel with Psalms 77:3. The three key words, remember, muse, spirit recur. There, musing ended in wrapping the spirit in deeper gloom. Here, it stings that spirit to activity in questionings, which the next strophe flings out in vehement number and startling plainness. It is better to be pricked to even such interrogations by affliction than to be made torpid by it. All depends on the temper in which they are asked. If that is right, answers which will scatter gloom are not far off. The comparison of present national evils with former happiness naturally suggests such questions. Obviously, the casting off spoken of in Psalms 77:7 is that of the nation, and hence its mention confirms the view that the psalmist is suffering under public calamities. All the questions mean substantially one thing-has God changed? They are not, as some questions are, the strongest mode of asserting their negative; nor are they, like others, a more than half assertion of their affirmative; but they are what they purport to be - the anxious interrogations of an afflicted man, who would fain be sure that God is the same as ever, but is staggered by the dismal contrast of Now and Then. He faces with trembling the terrible possibilities, and, however his language may seem to regard failure of resources or fickleness of purpose or limitations in long suffering as conceivable in God, his doubts are better put into plain speech than lying diffused and darkening, like poisonous mists, in his heart. A thought, be it good or bad, can be dealt with when it is made articulate. Formulating vague conceptions is like cutting a channel in a bog for the water to run. One gets it together in manageable shape, and the soil is drained. So the end of the despondent half of the psalm is marked by the bringing to distinct speech of the suspicions which floated in the singer’s mind and made him miserable. The Selah bids us dwell on the questions, so as to realise their gravity and prepare ourselves for their answer. The second part begins in Psalms 77:10 with an obscure and much-commented on verse, of which two explanations are possible, depending mainly on the meanings of the two words "sickness" and "years." The former word may mean "my wounding" or "my sickness." The latter is by many commentators taken to be an infinitive verb, with the signification to be changed, and, by others to be a plural noun meaning "years, " as in Psalms 77:6. Neglecting some minor differences, we may say that those who understand the word to mean being changed explain the whole thus: "This is my wound (misery, sorrow), that the right hand of the Most High has changed." So the old versions, and Hupfeld, Perowne, and Baethgen. But the use of the word in Psalms 77:6 for "years creates a strong presumption that its sense is the same here. As to the other word, its force is best seen by reference to a closely parallel passage in Jeremiah 10:19 -"I said, Truly this is my grief (margin, sickness), and I must bear it"; where the word for grief, though not the same as in the psalm, is cognate. The most probable meaning, then, for the expression here is, "This my affliction is sent from God, and I must bear it with resignation." Then follows an elevating thought expressed in its simplest form like an exclamation, "the years, " etc., -i.e., "I will remember (comp. Psalms 77:6) the time when the right hand of Jehovah had the preeminence" (Cheyne, in loc.). Delitzsch leaves the ellipsis unfilled, and takes the whole to mean that the psalmist says to himself that the affliction allotted will only last for the time which the mighty hand of God has determined. The rendering adopted above avoids the awkwardness of using the same word in two different senses in the same context, yields an appropriate meaning, especially in view of the continual references to remembering, and begins the new strophe with a new note of hopefulness, whereas the other renderings prolong the minor key of the first part into the second. It is therefore to be preferred. The revolution in feeling is abrupt. All is sunny and bright in the last half. What makes the change? The recognition of two great truths: first, that the calamity is laid on Israel, and on the psalmist as a member of the nation, by God, and has not come because of that impossible change in Him which the bitter questions had suggested; and, second, the unchangeable eternity of God’s delivering power. That second truth comes to him as with a flash, and the broken words of Psa 77:10 b hail the sudden rising of the new star. The remainder of the psalm holds fast by that thought of the great deeds of God in the past. It is a signal example of how the same facts remembered may depress or gladden, according to the point of view from which they are regarded. We can elect whether memory shall nourish despondency or gladness. Yet the alternative is not altogether a matter of choice; for the only people to whom "remembering happier things" need not be "a sorrow’s crown of sorrow" are those who see God in the past, and so are sure that every joy that was and is not shall yet again be, in more thrilling and lasting form. If He shines out on us from the east that we have left behind, His brightness will paint the western sky towards which we travel. Beneath confidence in the perpetuity of past blessings lies confidence in the eternity of God. The "years of the right hand of the Most High" answer all questions as to His change of purpose or of disposition, and supply the only firm foundation for calm assurance of the future. Memory supplies the colours with which Hope paints her truest pictures. That which hath been is that which shall be may be the utterance of the blase man of the world, or of the devout man who trusts in the living God, and therefore knows that "There shall never be one lost good! What was shall live as before." The strophe in Psalms 77:13-15 fixes on the one great redeeming act of the Exodus as the pledge of future deeds of a like kind, as need requires. The language is deeply tinged with reminiscences of Exo 15:1-27. "In holiness" (not "in the sanctuary"), the question "Who is so great a God?" the epithet "Who doest wonders," all come from Exodus 15:11. "[Thine] arm" in the psalm recalls "By the greatness of Thine arm" in Exodus (Psalms 77:16), and the psalmist’s "redeemed Thy people" reproduces "the people which Thou hast redeemed". (Exodus 15:13) The separate mention of "sons of Joseph" can scarcely be accounted for if the psalm is prior to the division of the kingdoms. But the purpose of the designation is doubtful. It may express the psalmist’s protest against the division as a breach of ancient national unity or his longings for reunion. The final strophe differs from the others in structure. It contains five verses instead of three, and the verses are (with the exception of the last) composed of three clauses each instead of two. Some commentators have supposed that Psalms 77:16-19 are an addition to the original psalm, and think that they do not cohere well with the preceding. This view denies that there is any allusion in the closing verses to the passage of the Red Sea, and takes the whole as simply a description of a theophany, like that in Psalms 18:1-50. But surely the writhing of the waters as if in pangs at the sight of Gods such an allusion. Psalms 77:19, too, is best understood as referring to the path through the sea, whose waters returned and covered God’s footprints from human eyes. Unless there is such a reference in Psalms 77:16-19, the connection with the preceding and with Psalms 77:20 is no doubt loose. But that is not so much a reason for denying the right of these verses to a place in the psalm as for recognising the reference. Why should a mere description of a theophany, which had nothing to do with the psalmist’s theme, have been tacked on to it? No doubt, the thunders, lightnings, and storm so grandly described here are unmentioned in Exodus; and, quite possibly, may be simply poetic heightening of the scene, intended to suggest how majestic was the intervention which freed Israel. Some commentators, indeed, have claimed the picture as giving additional facts concerning the passage of the Red Sea. Dean Stanley, for example, has worked these points into his vivid description; but that carries literalism too far. The picture in the psalm is most striking. The continuous short clauses crash and flash like the thunders and lightnings. That energetic metaphor of the waters writhing as if panic struck is more violent than Western taste approves, but its emotional vigour as a rendering of the fact is unmistakable. "Thine arrows went to and fro" is a very imperfect transcript of the Hebrew, which suggests the swift zigzag of the fierce flashes. In Psalms 77:18 the last word offers some difficulty. It literally means a wheel, and is apparently best rendered as above, the thunder being poetically conceived of as the sound of the rolling wheels of God’s chariot. There are several coincidences between Psalms 77:16-19 of the psalm and Habakkuk 3:10-15: namely, the expression "writhed in pain," applied in Habakkuk to the mountains; the word rendered "overflowing" (A.V.) or "tempest" (R.V.) in Habakkuk 3:10, cognate with the verb in Psalms 77:17 of the psalm, and there rendered "poured out"; the designation of lightnings as God’s arrows. Delitzsch strongly maintains the priority of the psalm; Hupfeld as strongly that of the prophet. The last verse returns to the two-claused structure of the earlier part. It comes in lovely contrast with the majestic and terrible picture preceding, like the wonderful setting forth of the purpose of the other theophany in Psalms 18:1-50, which was for no higher end than to draw one poor man from the mighty waters. All this pomp of Divine appearance, with lightnings, thunders, a heaving earth, a shrinking sea, had for its end the leading the people of God to their land, as a shepherd does his flock. The image is again an echo of Exo 15:13. The thing intended is not merely the passage of the Red Sea but the whole process of guidance begun there amid the darkness. Such a close is too abrupt to please some commentators. But what more was needful or possible to be said, in a retrospect of God’s past acts, for the solace of a dark present? It was more than enough to scatter fears and flash radiance into the gloom which had wrapped the psalmist. He need search no further. He has found what he sought; and so he hushes his song and gazes in silence on the all-sufficient answer which memory has brought to all his questions and doubts. Nothing could more completely express the living, ever-present worth of the ancient deeds of God than the "abruptness" with which this psalm ceases rather than ends. Psalms 78:1-72 THIS psalm is closely related to Psalms 105:1-45; Psalms 106:1-48; Psalms 107:1-43. Like them, it treats the history of Israel, and especially the Exodus and wilderness wanderings, for purposes of edification, rebuke, and encouragement. The past is held up as a mirror to the present generation. It has been one long succession of miracles of mercy met by equally continuous ingratitude, which has ever been punished by national calamities. The psalm departs singularly from chronological order. It arranges its contents in two principal masses, each introduced by the same formula (Psalms 78:12, Psalms 78:43) referring to "wonders in Egypt and the field of Zoan." But the first mass has nothing to do with Egypt, but begins with the passage of the Red Sea, and is wholly occupied with the wilderness. The second group of wonders begins in Psalms 78:44 with the plagues of Egypt, touches lightly on the wilderness history, and then passes to the early history of Israel when settled in the land, and finishes with the establishment of David on the throne. It is difficult to account for this singular bouleversement of the history. But the conjecture may be hazarded that its reason lies in the better illustration of continual interlacing of mercy and unthankfulness afforded by the events in the wilderness, than by the plagues of Egypt. That interlacing is the main point on which the psalmist wishes to lay stress, and therefore he begins with the most striking example of it. The use of the formula in Psalms 78:12 looks as if his original intention had been to follow the order of time. Another peculiarity is the prominence given to Ephraim, both in Psalms 78:9 as a type of faithlessness, and in Psalms 78:67 as rejected in favour of Judah. These references naturally point to the date of the psalm as being subsequent to the separation of the kingdoms; but whether it is meant as rebuke to the northern kingdom, or as warning to Judah from the fate of Ephraim, is not clear. Nor are there materials for closer determination of date. The tone of the closing reference to David implies that his accession belongs to somewhat remote times. There are no regular strophes, but a tendency to run into paragraphs of four verses, with occasional irregularities. Psalms 78:1-4 declare the singer’s didactic purpose. He deeply feels the solidarity of the nation through all generations-how fathers and children are knit by mystic ties, and by possession of an eternal treasure, the mighty deeds of God, of which they are bound to pass on the record from age to age. The history of ancient days is "a parable" and a "riddle" or "dark saying," as containing examples of great principles, and lessons which need reflection to discern and draw out. From that point of view, the psalmist will sum up the past. He is not a chronicler, but a religious teacher. His purpose is edification, rebuke, encouragement, the deepening of godly fear and obedience. In a word, he means to give the spirit of the nation’s history. Psalms 78:5-8 base this purpose on God’s declared will that the knowledge of His deeds for Israel might be handed down from fathers to sons. The obligations of parents for the religious training of their children, the true bond of family unity. the ancient order of things when oral tradition was the principal means of preserving national history, the peculiarity of this nation’s annals, as celebrating no heroes and recording only the deeds of God by men, the contrast between the changing bearers of the story and the undying deeds which they had to tell, are all expressed in these verses, so pathetic in their gaze upon the linked series of short-lived men, so stern in their final declaration that Divine commandment and mercy had been in vain, and that, instead of a tradition of goodness, there had been a transmission of stubbornness and departure from God, repeating itself with tragic uniformity. The devout poet, who knows what God meant family life to be and to do, sadly recognises the grim contrast presented by its reality. But yet he will make one more attempt to break the flow of evil from father to son. Perhaps his contemporaries will listen and shake themselves clear of this entail of disobedience. The reference to Ephraim in Psalms 78:9-11 is not to be taken as alluding to any cowardly retreat from actual battle. Psalms 78:9 seems to be a purely figurative way of expressing what is put without a metaphor in the two following verses. Ephraim’s revolt from God’s covenant was like the conduct of soldiers, well armed and refusing to charge the foe. The better their weapons, the greater the cowardice and ignominy of the recreants. So the faithlessness of Ephraim was made darker in criminality by its knowledge of God and experience of His mercy. These should have knit the tribe to Him. A general truth of wide application is implied-that the measure of capacity is the measure of obligation. Guilt increases with endowment, if the latter is misused. A poor soldier, with no weapon but a sling or a stick, might sooner be excused for flight than a fully armed archer. The mention of Ephraim as prominent in faithlessness may be an allusion to the separation of the kingdoms. That allusion has been denied on the ground that it is the wilderness history which is here before the psalmist’s mind. But the historical retrospect does not begin till Psalms 78:12, and this introduction may well deal with an event later than those detailed in the following verses. Whether the revolt of the Ten Tribes is here in view or not, the psalmist sees that the wayward and powerful tribe of Ephraim had been a centre of religious disaffection, and there is no reason why his view should not be believed, or should be supposed to be due to mere prejudiced hostility. The historical details begin with Psalms 78:12, but, as has been noticed above, the psalmist seems to change his intention of first narrating the wonders in Egypt, and passes on to dilate on the wilderness history. "The field of Zoan" is the territory of the famous Egyptian city of Tzan, and seems equivalent to the Land of Goshen. The wonders enumerated are the familiar ones of the passage of the Red Sea, the guidance by the pillar of cloud and fire, and the miraculous supply of water from the rock. In Psalms 78:15-16, the poet brings together the two instances of such supply, which were separated from each other by the forty years of wandering, the first having occurred at Horeb in the first year, and the second at Kadesh in the last year. The two words "rocks," in Psalms 78:15, and "cliff," in Psalms 78:16, are taken from the two narratives of these miracles, in Exodus 17:1-16 and Numbers 20:1-29. The group of four verses (Psalms 78:13-16) sets forth God’s mighty deeds; the next quartet of verses (Psalms 78:17-20) tells of Israel’s requital. It is significant of the thoughts which filled the singer’s heart, that he begins the latter group with declaring that, notwithstanding such tokens of God’s care, the people "went on to sin yet more," though he hid specified no previous acts of sin. He combines widely separated instances of their murmurings, as he had combined distant instances of God’s miraculous supply of water. The complaints which preceded the fall of the manna and the first supply of quails, (Exodus 16:1-36) and those which led to the second giving of these (Numbers 11:1-35) are thrown together, as one in kind. The speech put into the mouths of the murmurers in Psalms 78:19-20, is a poetic casting into bitter blasphemous words of the half-conscious thoughts of the faithless, sensuous crowd. They are represented as almost upbraiding God with His miracle, as quite unmoved to trust by it, and as thinking that it has exhausted His power. When they were half dead with thirst, they thought much of the water, but now they depreciate that past wonder as a comparatively small thing. So, to the churlish heart, which cherishes eager desires after some unattained earthly good, past blessings diminish as they recede, and leave neither thankfulness nor trust. There is a dash of intense bitterness and ironical making light of their relation to God in their question, "Can He provide flesh for His people?" Much good that name has done us, starving here! The root of all this blasphemous talk was sensuous desire; and because the people yielded to it, they "tempted God" - that is, they "unbelievingly and defiantly demanded, instead of trustfully waiting and praying" (Delitzsch). To ask food for their desires was sin; to ask it for their need would have been faith. In Psalms 78:21 the allusion is to the "fire of the Lord," which, according to Numbers 11:3, burnt in the camp, just before the second giving of quails. It comes in here out of chronological order, for the sending of manna follows it; but the psalmist’s didactic purpose renders him indifferent to chronology. The manna is called "corn of heaven" and "bread of the Mighty Ones"-i.e., angels, as the LXX renders the word. Both designations point to its heavenly origin, without its being necessary to suppose that the poet thought of angels as really eating it. The description of the fall of the quails (Psalms 78:26-29) is touched with imaginative beauty. The word rendered above "made to go forth" is originally applied to the breaking up of an encampment, and that rendered "guided" to a shepherd’s leading of his flock. Both words are found in the Pentateuch, the former in reference to the wind that brought the quails, (Numbers 11:31) the latter in reference to that which brought the plague of locusts. (Exodus 10:13) So the winds are conceived of as God’s servants, issuing from their tents at His command, and guided by Him as a shepherd leads his sheep. "He let it fall in the midst of their camp" graphically describes the dropping down of the wearied, storm, beaten birds. Psalms 78:30-33 paint the swift punishment of the people’s unbelief, in language almost identical with Numbers 11:33. The psalmist twice stigmatises their sin as "lust," and uses the word which enters into the tragical name given to the scene of the sin and the punishment-Kibroth-Hat-taavah (the graves of Lust). In Psalms 78:32-33, the faint-hearted despondency after the return of the spies, and the punishment of it by the sentence of death on all that generation, seem to be alluded to. The next group of four verses describes the people’s superficial and transient repentance, "When He slew them they sought Him"-i.e., when the fiery serpents were sent among them. But such seeking after God, which is properly not seeking Him at all, but only seeking to escape from evil, neither goes deep nor lasts long. Thus the end of it was only lip reverence proved robe false by life, and soon ended. "Their heart was not steadfast." The pressure being removed, they returned to their habitual position, as all such penitents do. From the midst of this sad narrative of faithlessness, springs up, like a fountain in a weary land, or a flower among half-cooled lava blocks, the lovely description of God’s forbearance in Psalms 78:38-39. It must not be read as if it merely carried on the narrative, and was in continuation of the preceding clauses. The psalmist does not say "He was full of compassion," though that would be much, in the circumstances; but he is declaring God’s eternal character. His compassions are unfailing. It is always His wont to cover sin and to spare. Therefore He exercised these gracious forbearances towards those obstinate transgressors. He was true to His own compassion in remembering their mortality and feebleness. What a melancholy sound, as of wind blowing among forgotten graves, has that summing up of human life as "a wind that goes and comes not again!" With Psalms 78:40 the second portion of the psalm may be regarded as beginning. The first group, of historical details dealt first with God’s mercies, and passed on to man’s requital. The second starts with man’s ingratitude, which it paints in the darkest colours, as provoking Him, grieving Him, tempting Him, and vexing Him. The psalmist is not afraid to represent God as affected with such emotions by reason of men’s indifference and unbelief. His language is not to be waved aside as anthroposnorphic and antiquated. No doubt, we come nearer to the unattainable truth, when we conceive of God as grieved by men’s sins and delighting in their trust, than when we think of Him as an impassive Infinitude, serenely indifferent to tortured or sinful hearts. For is not His name of names Love? The psalmist traces Israel’s sin to forgetfulness of God’s mercy, and thus glides into a swift summing up of the plagues of Egypt, regarded as conducing to Israel’s deliverance. They are not arranged chronologically, though the list begins with the first. Then follow three of those in which animals were the destroyers: namely, the fourth, that of flies; the second, that of frogs; and the eighth, that of locusts. Then comes the seventh, that of hail; and, according to some commentators, the fifth, that of the murrain, in Psalms 78:49, followed by the tenth in Psalms 78:51. But the grand, sombre imagery of Psa 78:49 is too majestic for such application. It rather sums up the whole series of plagues, likening them to an embassy (lit., a sending) of angels of evil. They are a grim company to come forth from His presence-Wrath, Indignation, and Trouble. The same power which sent them out on their errand prepared a way before them; and the crowning judgment, which, in the psalmist’s view was also the crowning mercy, was the death of the firstborn. The next quartet of verses (Psalms 78:52-55) passes lightly over the wilderness history and the settlement in the land, and hastens on to a renewed narration of repeated rebellion, which occupies the next group (Psalms 78:56-59). These verses cover the period from the entrance on Canaan to the fall of the sanctuary of Shiloh, during which there was a continual tendency to relapse into idolatry. That is the special sin here charged against the Israel of the time of the Judges. The figure of a "deceitful bow," in Psalms 78:57, well describes the people as failing to fulfil the purpose of their choice by God. As such a weapon does not shoot true, and makes the arrow fly wide, however well aimed and strongly drawn, so Israel foiled all Divine attempts, and failed to carry God’s message to the world, or to fulfil His will in themselves. Hence the next verses tell, with intense energy and pathos, the sad story of Israel’s humiliation under the Philistines. The language is extraordinarily strong in its description of God’s loathing and rejection of the nation and sanctuary and is instinct with sorrow blended with stern recognition of His righteousness in judgment. What a tragic picture the psalmist draws! Shiloh, the dwelling place of God, empty forever more; the "Glory"-that is, the Ark-in the enemy’s hands; everywhere stiffening corpses; a pall of silence over the land; no brides and no joyous bridal chaunts; the very priests massacred, unlamented by their widows, who had wept so many tears already that the fountain of them was dried up, and even sorrowing love was dumb with horror and despair! The two last groups of verses paint God’s great mercy in delivering the nation from such misery. The daring figure of His awakening as from sleep and dashing upon Israel’s foes, who are also His, with a shout like that of a hero stimulated by wine, is more accordant with Eastern fervour than with our colder imagination; but it wonderfully expresses the sudden transition from a period, during which God seemed passive and careless of His people’s wretchedness, to one in which His power flashed forth triumphant for their defence. The prose fact is the long series of victories over the Philistines and other oppressors, which culminated in the restoration of the Ark, the selection of Zion as its abode, which involved the rejection of Shiloh and consequently of Ephraim (in whose territory Shiloh was), and the accession of David. The Davidic kingdom is, in the psalmist’s view, the final form of Israel’s national existence; and the sanctuary, like the kingdom, is perpetual as the lofty heavens or the firm earth. Nor were his visions vain, for that kingdom subsists and will subsist forever, and the true sanctuary, the dwelling place of God among men, is still more closely intertwined with the kingdom and its King than the psalmist knew. The perpetual duration of both is, in truth, the greatest of God’s mercies, outshining all earlier deliverances; and they who truly have become the subjects of the Christ, the King of Israel and of the world, and who dwell with God in His house, by dwelling with Jesus; will not rebel against Him any more, nor ever forget His wonders, but faithfully tell them to the generations to come. Psalms 79:1-13 THE same national agony which was the theme of Psa 74:1-23, forced the sad strains of this psalm from the singer’s heart. There, the profanation of the Temple and here, the destruction of the city, are the more prominent. There, the dishonour to God; here, the distresses of His people, are set forth. Consequently, confession of sin is more appropriate here, and prayers for pardon blend with those for deliverance. But the tone of both psalms is the same, and there are similarities of expression which favour, though they do not demand, the hypothesis that the author is the same. Such similarities are the "how long" (Psalms 74:10; Psalms 79:5); the desecration of the Temple (Psalms 74:3; Psalms 74:7; Psalms 79:1) the giving over to wild beasts (Psalms 74:19; Psalms 79:2); the reproach of God (Psalms 74:10; Psalms 74:18; Psalms 74:22; Psalms 79:12). The comparison of Israel to a flock is found in both psalms, but in others of the Asaph group also. The same remarks which were made as to the date of the former psalm apply in this case. Two arguments have, however, been urged against the Maccabean date. The first is that drawn from the occurrence of Psa 79:6-7, in Jeremiah 10:25. It is contended that Jeremiah is in the habit of borrowing from earlier writers, that the verse immediately preceding that in question is quoted from Psalms 6:1, and that the connection of the passage in the psalm is closer than in the prophet, and, therefore, that the words are presumably in situ here, as also that the verbal alterations are such as to suggest that the prophet rather than the psalmist is the adapter. But, on the other hand, Hupfeld maintains that the connection in Jeremiah is the closer. Not much weight can be attached to that point, for neither prophet nor poet can be tied down to cool concatenation of sentences. Delitzsch claims the verbal alterations as indubitable proofs of the priority of the prophet, and maintains that "the borrower betrays himself" by changing the prophet’s words into less accurate and elegant ones, and by omissions which impair "the soaring fulness of Jeremiah’s expressions." The critics who hold that the psalm refers to the Chaldean invasion, and that Jeremiah has borrowed from it, have to face a formidable difficulty. The psalm must have been written after the catastrophe: the prophecy preceded it. How then can the prophet be quoting the psalm? The question has not been satisfactorily answered, nor is it likely to be. A second argument against the Maccabean date is based upon the quotation of Psa 79:3 in RAPC 1Ma 7:16, which it introduces by the usual formula of quotation from Scripture. It is urged that a composition so recent as the psalm would be, if of Maccabean date, would not be likely to be thus referred to. But this argument confuses the date of occurrence recorded in 1 Maccabees with the date of the record; and there is no improbability in the writer of the book quoting as Scripture a psalm which had sprung from the midst of the tragedy which he narrates. The strophical division is not perfectly clear, but it is probably best to recognise three strophes of four verses each, with an appended verse of conclusion. The first spreads before God His people’s miseries. The second and third are prayer for deliverance and confession of sin; but they differ, in that the former strophe dwells mainly upon the wished for destruction of the enemy, and the latter upon the rescue of Israel, while a subordinate diversity is that ancestral sins are confessed in the one, and those of the present generation in the other. Psalms 79:13 stands out of the strophe scheme as a kind of epilogue. The first strophe vividly describes the ghastly sights that wrung the psalmist’s heart, and will, as he trusts, move God’s to pity and help. The same thought as was expressed in Psalms 74:1-23 underlies the emphatic repetition of "Thy" in this strophe-namely, the implication of God’s fair name in His people’s disasters. "Thine inheritance" is invaded, and "Thy holy Temple" defiled by the "heathen." The corpses of "Thy servants" lie unburied, torn by vultures’ beaks and jackals’ claws. The blood of "Thy favoured Ones" saturates the ground. It was not easy to hold fast by the reality of God’s special relation to a nation thus apparently deserted, but the psalmist’s faith stood even such a strain, and is not dashed by a trace of doubt. Such times are the test and triumph of trust. If genuine, it will show brightest against the blackest background. The word in Psalms 79:1 rendered "heathen" is usually translated "nations," but here evidently connotes idolatry (Psalms 79:6). Their worship of strange gods, rather than their alien nationality, makes their invasion of God’s inheritance a tragic anomaly. The psalmist remembers the prophecy of Micah (Micah 3:12) that Jerusalem should become heaps, and sadly repeats it as fulfilled at last. As already noticed, Psalms 79:3 is quoted in RAPC 1Ma 7:16-17, and Psalms 79:4 is found in Psalms 44:13, which is by many commentators referred to the Maccabean period. The second strophe passes to direct petition, which, as it were, gives voice to the stiffened corpses strewing the streets, and the righteous blood crying from the ground. The psalmist goes straight to the cause of calamity-the anger of God-and, in the close of the strophe confesses the sins which had kindled it. Beneath the play of politics and the madness of Antiochus, he discerned God’s hand at work. He reiterates the fundamental lesson, which prophets were never weary of teaching, that national disasters are caused by the anger of God, which is excited by national sins. That conviction is the first element in his petitions. A second is the twin conviction that the "heathen" are used by God as His instrument of chastisement, but that, when they have done their work, they are called to account for the human passion-cruelty, lust of conquest, and the like-which impelled them to it. Even as they poured out the blood of God’s people, they have God’s wrath poured out on them, because "they have eaten up Jacob." The same double point of view is frequently taken by the prophets: for example, in Isaiah’s magnificent prophecy against "the Assyrian" (Isaiah 10:5 seq.), where the conqueror is first addressed as "the rod of Mine anger," and then his "punishment" is foretold, because, while executing God’s purpose, he had been unconscious of his mission, and had been gratifying his ambition. These two convictions go very deep into "the philosophy of history." Though modified in their application to modern states and politics, they are true in substance still. The Goths who swept down on Rome, the Arabs who crushed a corrupt Christianity, the French who stormed across Europe, were God’s scavengers, gathered vulture-like round carrion, but they were each responsible for their cruelty, and were punished "for the fruit of their stout hearts." The closing verse of the strophe (Psalms 79:8) is intimately connected with the next, which we take as beginning the third strophe; but this connection does not set aside the strophical division, though it somewhat obscures it. The distinction between the similar petitions of Psa 79:8-9, is sufficient to warrant our recognition of that division, even whilst acknowledging that the two parts coalesce more closely than usual. The psalmist knows that the heathen have been hurled against Israel because God is angry; and he knows that God’s anger is no arbitrarily kindled flame, but one lit and fed by Israel’s sins. He knows, too, that there is a fatal entail by which the iniquities of the fathers are visited on the children. Therefore, he asks first that these ancestral sins may not be "remembered," nor their consequences discharged on the children’s heads. "The evil that men do lives after them," and history affords abundant instances of the accumulated consequences of ancestors’ crimes lighting on descendants that had abandoned the ancient evil, and were possibly doing their best to redress it. Guilt is not transmitted, but results of wrong are; and it is one of the tragedies of history that "one soweth and another reapeth" the bitter fruit. Upon one generation may, and often does, come the blood of all the righteous men that many generations have slain. (Matthew 23:35) The last strophe (Psalms 79:9-12) continues the strain begun in Psalms 79:8, but with significant deepening into confession of the sins of the existing generation. The psalmist knows that the present disaster is no case of the fathers having eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth being set on edge, but that he and his contemporaries had repeated the fathers’ transgressions. The ground of his plea for cleansing and deliverance is the glory of God’s name, which he emphatically puts at the end of both clauses of Psa 79:9. He repeats the same thought in another form in the question of Psa 79:10, "Why should the heathen say, Where is their God?" If Israel, sinful though it is, and therefore meriting chastisement, is destroyed, there will be a blot on God’s name and the "heathen" will take it as proof, not that Israel’s God was just, but that He was too feeble or too far off to hear prayers or to send succours. It is bold faith which blends acknowledgment of sins with such a conviction of the inextricable intertwining of God’s glory and the sinners’ deliverance. Lowly confession is wonderfully wedded to confidence that seems almost too lofty. But the confidence is in its inmost core as lowly as the confession, for it disclaims all right to God’s help, and clasps His name as its only but sufficient plea. The final strophe dwells more on the sufferings of the survivors than the earlier parts of the psalm do, and in this respect contrasts with Psalms 74:1-23, which is all but entirely silent as to these. Not only does the spilt blood of dead confessors cry for vengeance since they died for their faith, as "Thy servants," but the groans and sighs of the living who are captives, and "sons of death"-i.e., doomed to die, if unrescued by God-appeal to Him. The expressions "the groaning of the captive" and "the sons of death" occur in Psalms 102:20, from which, if this is a composition of Maceabean date they are here quoted. The strophe ends with recurring to the central thought of both this and the companion psalm-the reproach on God from His servants’ calamities-and prays that the enemies’ taunts may be paid back into their bosoms sevenfold-i.e., in fullest measure. The epilogue in Psalms 79:13 has the image of a flock, so frequent in the Asaph psalms, suggesting tender thoughts of the shepherd’s care and of his obligations. Deliverance will evoke praise, and, instead of the sad succession of sin and suffering from generation to generation, the solidarity of the nation will be more happily expressed by ringing songs, transmitted from father to son, and gathering volume as they flow from age to age. Psalms 80:1-19 THIS psalm is a monument of some time of great national calamity; but its allusions do not enable us to reach certainty as to what that calamity was. Two striking features of it have been used as clues to its occasion-namely, the designation of the nation as "Joseph," and the mention, of the three tribes in Psalms 80:2. Calvin, Delitzsch, Hengstenberg, and others are led thereby to regard it as a prayer by an inhabitant of Judah for the captive children of the northern kingdom; while others, as Cheyne, consider that only the Persian period explains the usage in question. The name of "Joseph" is applied to the whole nation in other Asaph psalms. (Psalms 77:15; Psalms 81:5) It is tempting to suppose, with Hupfeld, that this nomenclature indicates that the ancient antagonism of the kingdoms has passed away with the captivity of the Ten Tribes, and that the psalmist, a singer in Judah, looks wistfully to the ideal unity, yearns to see breaches healed, and the old associations of happier days, when "Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh" encamped side by side in the desert, and marched one after the other, renewed in a restored Israel. If this explanation of the mention of the tribes is adopted, the psalm falls in some period after the destruction of the northern kingdom, but prior to that of Judah. The prayer in the refrain "turn us" might, indeed, mean "bring us back from exile," but may as accurately be regarded as asking for restored prosperity-an explanation which accords better with the rest of the psalm. We take the whole, then, as a prayer, for the nation, conceived of in its original, long-broken unity. It looks back to the Divine purpose as expressed in ancient deeds of deliverance, and prays that it may be fulfilled, notwithstanding apparent thwarting. Closer definition of date is unattainable. The triple refrain in Psalms 80:3, Psalms 80:7, Psalms 80:19, divides the psalm into three unequal parts. The last of these is disproportionately long, and may be further broken up into three parts, of which the first (Psalms 80:8-11) describes the luxuriant growth of Israel under the parable of a vine, the second (Psalms 80:12-14) brings to view the bitter contrast of present ruin, and, with an imperfect echo of the refrain, melts into the petitioning tone of the third (Psalms 80:15-19). which is all prayer. In the first strophe "Shepherd of Israel" reminds us of Jacob’s blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh in which he invoked "the God who shepherded me all my life long" to "bless the lads," and of the title in Genesis 49:24, "the shepherd, the stone of Israel." The comparison of the nation to a flock is characteristic of the Asaph psalms, and here refers to the guidance of the people at the Exodus. Delitzsch regards the notions of the earthly and heavenly sanctuary as being blended in the designation of God as sitting throned on the cherubim, but it is better to take the reference as being to His dwelling in the Temple. The word rendered "shine forth" occurs in Psalms 50:2, where it expresses His coming from "Zion," and so it does here. The same metaphor underlies the subsequent petition in Psalms 80:3. In both God is thought of as light, and the manifestation of His delivering help is likened to the blazing out of the sun from behind a cloud. In reference to the mention of the tribes in Psalms 80:2, we need only add to what has been already said, that the petitions of Psa 80:1, which look back to the wilderness marches, when the Ark led the van, naturally suggested the mention of the three tribes who were together reckoned as the "camp of Ephraim," and who, in the removal of the encampment, "set forth third"-that is, immediately in the rear of the tabernacle. The order of march explains not only the collocation here, but the use of the word "Before." Joseph and Benjamin were children of the same mother, and the schism which parted their descendants is, to the psalmist’s faith, as transient as unnatural. Once again shall the old unity be seen, when the brothers’ sons shall again dwell and fight side by side, and God shall again go forth before them for victory. The prayer of the refrain, "turn us," is not to be taken as for restoration from exile, which is negatived by the whole tone of the psalm, nor as for spiritual quickening, but simply asks for the return of the glories of ancient days. The petition that God would let His face shine upon the nation alludes to the priestly benediction, (Numbers 6:25) thus again carrying us back to the wilderness. Such a flashing forth is all that is needed to change blackest night into day. To be "saved" means here to be rescued from the assaults of hostile nations. The poet was sure that Israel’s sole defence was God, and that one gleam of His face would shrivel up the strongest foes, like unclean, slimy creatures which writhe and die in sunshine. The same conviction is valid in a higher sphere. Whatever elevation of meaning is given to "saved," the condition of it is always this-the manifestation of God’s face. That brings light into all dark hearts. To behold that light, and to walk in it, and to be transformed by beholding, as they are who lovingly and steadfastly gaze, is salvation. A piteous tale of suffering is wailed forth in the second strophe. The peculiar accumulation of the Divine names in Psalms 80:4, Psalms 80:19, is found also in Psalms 59:5; Psalms 84:8. It is grammatically anomalous, as the word for God (Elohim) does not undergo the modification which would show that the next word is to be connected with it by "of." Hence, some have regarded "Ts’bhaoth" (hosts) as being almost equivalent to a proper name of God, which it afterwards undoubtedly became; while others have explained the construction by supposing the phrase to be elliptical, requiring after "God" the supplement "God of." This accumulation of Divine names is by some taken as a sign of late date. Is it not a mark of the psalmist’s intensity rather than of his period? In accordance with the Elohistic character of the Asaph psalms, the common expression "Jehovah of Hosts" is expanded; but the hypothesis that the expansion was the work of a redactor is unnecessary. It may quite as well have been that of the author. The urgent question "How long?" is not petulant impatience, but hope deferred, and, though sick at heart, still cleaving to God and remonstrating for long-protracted calamities. The bold imagery of Psa 80:4 b cannot well be reproduced in translation. The rendering "wilt Thou be angry?" is but a feeble reproduction of the vigorous original, which runs "wilt Thou smoke?" Other psalms (e.g., Psalms 74:1) speak of God’s anger as smoking but here the figure is applied to God Himself. What a contrast it presents to the petition in the refrain! That "light" of Israel has become "as a flaming fire." A terrible possibility of darkening and consuming wrath lies in the Divine nature, and the very emblem of light suggests it. It is questionable whether the following words should be rendered "against the prayer of Thy people," or "while Thy people are praying" (Delitzsch). The former meaning is in accordance with the Hebrew, with other Scripture passages, and with the tone of the psalm, and is to be preferred, as more forcibly putting the anomaly of an unanswering God. Psalms 80:5 presents the national sorrows under familiar figures. The people’s food and drink were tears. The words of a may either be rendered "bread of tears"-i.e. eaten with, or rather consisting of tears; or, as above, "tears [as] bread." The word rendered "in large measure" means "the third part"-"of some larger measure." It is found only in Isaiah 11:12. "The third part of an ephah is a puny measure for the dust of the earth [but] it is a large measure for tears" (Delitzsch, in loc.). Psalms 80:6 adds one more touch to the picture-gleeful neighbours cynically rejoicing to their hearts content (lit., for themselves) over Israel’s calamities. Thus, in three verses, the psalmist points to an angry God, a weeping nation, and mocking foes, a trilogy of woe. On all he bases an urgent repetition of the refrain which is made more imploring by the expanded name under which God is invoked to help. Instead of the simple "God," as in Psalms 80:3, he now says "God of Hosts." As sense of need increases, a true suppliant goes deeper into God’s revealed character. From Psalms 80:8 onwards the parable of the vine as representing Israel fills the singer’s mind. As has been already noticed this part of the psalm may be regarded as one long strophe, the parts of which follow in orderly sequence, and are held closely together, as shown by the recurrence of the refrain at the close only. Three stages are discernible in it-a picture of what has been, the contrast of what is now, and a prayer for speedy help. The emblem of the vine, which has received so great development in the prophets, and has been hallowed forever by our Lord’s use of it, seems to have been suggested to the psalmist by the history of Joseph, to which he has already alluded. For, in Jacob’s blessing, (Genesis 49:22 seqq.) Joseph is likened to a fruitful bough. Other Old Testament writers have drawn out the manifold felicities of the emblem as applied to Israel. But these need not concern us here, where the point is rather God’s husbandry and the vine’s growth, both of which are in startling contrast with a doleful present. The figure is carried out with much beauty in detail. The Exodus was the vine’s transplanting; the destruction of the Canaanites was the grubbing up of weeds to clear the ground for it; the numerical increase of the people was its making roots and spreading far. In Psalms 80:10 b the rendering may be either that adopted above, or "And the cedars of God [were covered with] its branches." The latter preserves the parallelism of clauses and the unity of representation in Psalms 80:10-11, which will then deal throughout with the spreading growth of the vine. But the cedars would not have been called "of God,"-which implies their great size-unless their dimensions had been in point, which would not be the case if they were only thought of as espaliers for the vine. And the image of its running over the great trees of Lebanon is unnatural. The rendering as above is to be preferred even though it somewhat mars the unity of the picture. The extent of ground covered by the vine is described, in Psalms 80:11, as stretching from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. (Deuteronomy 11:24; 1 Kings 4:24) Such had been the glories of the past; and they had all been the work of God’s hand. In Psalms 80:12 the miserable contrast of present desolation is spread before God, with the bold and yet submissive question "Why?" The vineyard wall is thrown down, and the vine lies exposed to every vagrant passenger, and to every destructive creature. Swine from the woods burrow at its roots, and "whatever moves on the plain" (Psalms 50:11, the only other place where the expression occurs) feeds on it. The parallelism forbids the supposition that any particular enemy is meant by the wild boar. Hupfeld would transpose Psalms 80:16 so as to stand after Psalms 80:13, which he thinks improves the connection, and brings the last part of the psalm into symmetrical form, in three equal parts, containing four verses each. Cheyne would put Psalms 80:14-15, before Psalms 80:12-13, and thereby secures more coherence and sequence. But accuracy in these matters is not to be looked for in such highly emotional poetry, and perhaps a sympathetic ear may catch in the broken words a truer ring than in the more orderly arrangement of them by critics. Psalms 80:14 sounds like an imperfect echo of the refrain significantly modified, so as to beseech that God would "turn" Himself even as He had been implored to "turn" His people. The purpose of His turning is that He may "look and see" the condition of the desolated vineyard, and thence be moved to interfere for its restoration. The verse may be regarded as closing one of the imperfectly developed strophes of this last part; but it belongs in substance to the following petitions, though in form it is more closely connected with the preceding verses. The picture of Israel’s misery passes insensibly into prayer, and the burden of that prayer is, first, that God would behold the sad facts, as the preliminary to His acting in view of them. The last part (Psalms 80:15-19) is prayer for God’s help: into which forces itself one verse (Psalms 80:16), recurring to the miseries of the nation. It bursts in like an outcrop of lava, revealing underground disturbance and fires. Surely that interruption is more pathetic and natural than is the result obtained by the suggested transpositions. The meaning of the word in Psalms 80:15 rendered above "protect" is doubtful, and many commentators would translate it as a noun, and regard it as meaning "plant," or, as the A.V., "vineyard." The verse would then depend on the preceding verb in Psalms 80:14, "visit." But this construction is opposed by the copula (and) preceding, and it is best to render "protect," with a slight change in the vocalisation. There may be an allusion to Jacob’s blessing in Psalms 80:15 b, for in it (Genesis 49:22) Joseph is called a "fruitful bough"-lit., "son." If so, the figure of the vine is retained in Psalms 80:15 b as well as in a. The apparent interruption of the petitions by Psalms 80:16 is accounted for by the sharp pang that shot into the psalmist’s heart, when he recalled, in his immediately preceding words, the past Divine acts, which seemed so contradicted now. But the bitterness, though it surges up, is overcome, and his petitions return to their former strain in Psalms 80:17, which pathetically takes up, as it were, the broken thread, by repeating "right hand" from Psalms 80:15 a, -and "whom Thou madest strong for Thyself" from Psalms 80:15 b. Israel, not an individual, is the "man of Thy right hand," in which designation, coupled with "son," there may be an allusion to the name of Benjamin (Psalms 80:2), the "son of the right hand." Human weakness and Divine strength clothing it are indicated in that designation for Israel "the son of man whom Thou madest strong for Thyself." The inmost purpose of God’s gifts is that their recipients may be "the secretaries of His praise." Israel’s sacred calling, its own weakness, and the strength of the God who endows it are all set forth, not now as lessons to it, but as pleas with Him, whose gifts are without repentance, and whose purposes cannot be foiled by man’s unworthiness or opposition. The psalm closes with a vow of grateful adhesion to God as the result of His renewed mercy. They who have learned how bitter a thing it is to turn away from God, and how blessed when He turns again to them, and turns back their miseries and their sins, have good reason for not again departing from Him. But if they are wise to remember their own weakness, they will not only humbly vow future faithfulness, but earnestly implore continual help; since only the constant communication of a Divine quickening will open their lips to call upon God’s name. The refrain in its most expanded form closes the psalm. Growing intensity of desire and of realisation of the pleas and pledges hived in the name are expressed by its successive forms, -God; God of Hosts; Jehovah, God of Hosts. The faith that grasps all that is contained in that full-tone name already feels the light of God’s face shining upon it, and is sure that its prayer for salvation is not in vain. Psalms 81:1-16 THE psalmist summons priests and people to a solemn festival, commemorative of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, and sets forth the lessons which that deliverance teaches, the learning of which is the true way of keeping the feast. There has been much discussion as to which feast is in the psalmist’s mind. That of Tabernacles has been widely accepted as intended, chiefly on the ground that the first day of the month in which it occurred was celebrated by the blowing of trumpets, as the beginning of the civil year. This practice is supposed to account for the language of Psa 81:3, which seems to imply trumpet blowing both at new and full moon. But, on other grounds, the Passover is more likely to be intended, as the psalm deals with the manifestations of Divine power attending the beginning of the Exodus, which followed the first Passover, as well as with those during the desert sojourn, which alone were commemorated by the feast of Tabernacles. True, we have no independent knowledge of any trumpet blowing on the first day of the Passover month (Nisan); but Delitzsch and others suggest that from this psalm it may be inferred "that the commencement of each month, and more especially the commencement of the month (Nisan), which was at the same time the commencement of the ecclesiastical year, was signalised by the blowing of horns." On the whole, the Passover is most probably the feast in question. Olshausen, followed by Cheyne, regards the psalm as made up of two fragments (Psalms 81:1-5 a, - and Psalms 81:5-16). But surely the exhortations and promises of the latter portion are most relevant to the summons to the festival contained in the former part, and there could be no more natural way of preparing for the right commemoration of the deliverance than to draw out its lessons of obedience and to warn against departure from the delivering God. Definiteness as to date is unattainable. The presupposed existence of the full Temple ceremonial shows that the psalm was not written in exile, nor at a time of religious persecution. Its warning against idolatry would be needless in a post-exilic psalm, as no tendency thereto existed after the return from captivity. But beyond such general indications we cannot go. The theory that the psalm is composed of two fragments exaggerates the difference between the two parts into which it falls. These are the summons to the feast (Psalms 81:1-5), and the lessons of the feast (Psalms 81:6-16). Delitzsch suggests that the summons in Psalms 81:1 is addressed to the whole congregation; that in Psalms 81:2 to the Levites, the appointed singers and musicians; and that in Psalms 81:3 to the priests who are intrusted with blowing the Shophar, or horn. (Joshua 6:4, and 2 Chronicles 20:28) One can almost hear the tumult of joyful sounds, in which the roar of the multitude, the high-pitched notes of singers, the deeper clash of timbrels, the twanging of stringed instruments, and the hoarse blare of rams’ horns, mingle in concordant discord, grateful to Eastern ears, however unmusical to ours. The religion of Israel allowed and required exuberant joy. It sternly rejected painting and sculpture, blot abundantly employed music, the most ethereal of the arts, which stirs emotions and longings too delicate and deep for speech. Whatever differences in form have necessarily attended the progress from the worship of the Temple to that of the Church, the free play of joyful emotion should mark the latter even more than the former. Decorum is good, but not if purchased by the loss of ringing gladness. The psalmist’s summons has a meaning still. The reason for it is given in Psalms 81:4-5 a. It-i.e., the feast (not the musical accompaniments)-is appointed by God. The psalmist employs designations for it, which are usually applied to "the word of the Lord"; statute, ordinance, testimony, being all found in Psalms 19:1-14 and Psalms 119:1-176, with that meaning. A triple designation of the people corresponds with these triple names for the feast. Israel, Jacob, and Joseph are synonyms, the use of the last of these having probably the same force here as in the preceding psalm - namely, to express the singer’s longing for the restoration of the shattered unity of the nation. The summons to the feast is based, not only on Divine appointment, but also on Divine purpose in that appointment. It was "a testimony," a rite commemorative of a historical fact, and therefore an evidence of it to future times. There is no better proof of such a fact than a celebration of it, which originates contemporaneously and continues through generations. The feast in question was thus simultaneous with the event commemorated, as Psalms 81:5 b tells. It was God, not Israel, as is often erroneously supposed, who "went forth." For the following preposition is not "from," which might refer to the national departure, but "over" or "against," which cannot have such a reference, since Israel did not, in any sense, go "over" or "against" the land. God’s triumphant forth-putting of power over the whole land, especially in the death of the firstborn, on the night of the Passover, is meant to be remembered forever, and is at once the fact commemorated by the feast, and a reason for obeying His appointment of it. So far the thoughts and language are limpid, but Psalms 81:5 c interrupts their clear flow. Who is the speaker thus suddenly introduced? What is the "language" (lit., lip) which he "knew not"? The explanation implied by the A.V. and R.V., that the collective Israel speaks, and that the reference is, Psalms 114:1, to the "strange language" of the Egyptians, is given by most of the older authorities, and by Ewald and Hengstenberg, but has against it the necessity for the supplement "where," and the difficulty of referring the "I" to the nation. The more usual explanation in modern times is that the speaker is the psalmist, and that the language which he hears is the voice of God, the substance of which follows in the remainder of the psalm. As in Job 4:16 Eliphaz could not discern the appearance of the mysterious form that stood before his eyes, and thus its supernatural character is suggested, so the psalmist hears an utterance of a hitherto unknown kind, which he thus implies to have been Divine. God Himself speaks, to impress the lessons of the past, and to excite the thoughts and feelings which would rightly celebrate the feast. The glad noises of song, harp, and trumpet are hushed; the psalmist is silent, to hear that dread Voice, and then with lowly lips he repeats so much of the majestic syllables as he could translate into words which it was possible for a man to utter. The inner coherence of the two parts of the psalm is, on this explanation, so obvious, that there is no need nor room for the hypothesis of two fragments having been fused into one. The Divine Voice begins with recapitulating the facts which the feast was intended to commemorate-namely, the act of emancipation from Egyptian bondage (Psalms 81:6), and the miracles of the wilderness sojourn (Psalms 81:7). The compulsory labour, from which God delivered the people, is described by two terms, of which the former (burden) is borrowed from Exodus, where it frequently occurs, (Exodus 1:11; Exodus 5:4; Exodus 6:6) and the latter (basket) is by some supposed to mean the wicker work implement for carrying, which the monuments show was in use in Egypt (so LXX, etc.), and by others to mean an earthen vessel, as "an example of the work in clay in which the Israelites were engaged" (Hupfeld). The years of desert wandering are summed up, in Psalms 81:7, as one long continuance of benefits from God. Whenever they cried to Him in their trouble, He delivered them. He spoke to them "from the secret place of thunder" ("My thunder covert, " Cheyne). That expression is generally taken to refer to the pillar of cloud, but seems more naturally to be regarded as alluding to the thick darkness, in which God was shrouded on Sinai. when He spoke His law amid thunderings and lightnings. "The proving at the waters of Meribah" is, according to the connection and in harmony with Exodus 17:6, to be regarded as a benefit. "It was meant to serve the purpose of binding Israel still more closely to its God" (Baethgen). It is usually assumed that, in this reference to "the waters of Meribah," the two similar incidents of the miraculous supply of water-one of which occurred near the beginning of the forty years in the desert, at "Massah and Meribah," (Exodus 17:7) and the other at "the waters of Meribah," near Kadesh, in the fortieth year - have been blended, or, as Cheyne says, "confused." But there is no need to suppose that there is any confusion, for the words of the psalm will apply to the latter miracle as well as to the former, and, if the former clause refers to the manifestations at Sinai, the selection of an incident at nearly the end of the wilderness period is natural. The whole stretch of forty years is thereby declared to have been marked by continuous Divine care. The Exodus was begun, continued, and ended amid tokens of His watchful love. The Selah bids the listener meditate on that prolonged revelation. That retrospect next becomes the foundation of a Divine exhortation to the people, which is to be regarded as spoken originally to Israel in the wilderness, as Psalms 81:11 shows. Perowne well designates these verses (Psalms 81:8-10) "a discourse within a discourse." They put into words the meaning of the wilderness experience, and sum up the laws spoken on Sinai, which they in part repeat. The purpose of God’s lavish benefits was to bind Israel to Himself. "Hear, My people," reminds us of Deu 5:1; Deuteronomy 6:4. "I will bear witness to thee" here means rather solemn warning to, than testifying against, the person addressed. With infinite pathos, the tone of the Divine Speaker changes from that of authority to pleading and the utterance of a yearning wish, like a sigh. "Would that thou wouldest hearken!" God desires nothing so earnestly as that; but His Divine desire is tragically and mysteriously foiled. The awful human power of resisting His voice and of making His efforts vain, the still more awful fact of the exercise of that power, were clear before the psalmist, whose daring anthropopathy teaches a deep lesson, and warns us against supposing that men have to do with an impassive Deity. That wonderful utterance of Divine wish is almost a parenthesis. It gives a moment’s glimpse into the heart of God, and then the tone of command is resumed. "In Psalms 81:9 the keynote of the revelation of the law from Sinai is given; the fundamental command, which opens the Decalogue demanded fidelity towards Jehovah, and forbade idolatry, as the sin of sins" (Delitzsch). The reason for exclusive devotion to God is based in Psalms 81:10, as in Exodus 20:2, the fundamental passage, on His act of deliverance, not on His sole Divinity. A theoretic Monotheism would be cold; the consciousness of benefits received from One Hand alone is the only key that will unlock a heart’s exclusive devotion and lay it at His feet. And just as the commandment to worship God alone is founded on His unaided delivering might and love, so it is followed by the promise that such exclusive adhesion to Him will secure the fulfilment of the boldest wishes, and the satisfying of the most clamant or hungry desires. "Open wide thy mouth, and I will fill it." It is folly to go to strange gods for the supply of needs, when God is able to give all that every man can wish. We may be well content to cleave to Him alone, since He alone is more than enough for each and for all. Why should they waste time and strength in seeking for supplies from many, who can find all they need in One? They who put Him to the proof, and find Him enough, will have, in their experience of His sufficiency, a charm to protect them from all vagrant desire to "go further and fare worse." The best defence against temptations to stray from God is the possession by experience, of His rich gifts that meet all desires. That great saying teaches, too, that God’s bestowals are practically measured by men’s capacity and desire. The ultimate limit of them is His own limitless grace; but the working limit in each individual is the individual’s receptivity, of which his expectancy and desire are determining factors. In Psalms 81:11-12, the Divine Voice laments the failure of benefits and commandments and promises to win Israel to God. There is a world of baffled tenderness and almost wondering rebuke in the designation of the rebels as "My people." It would have been no cause of astonishment if other nations had not listened; but that the tribes bound by so many kindnesses should have been deaf is a sad marvel. Who should listen to "My voice" if "My people" do not? The penalty of not yielding to God is to be left unyielding. The worst punishment of sin is the prolongation and consequent intensifying of the sin. A heart that wilfully closes itself against God’s pleadings brings on itself the nemesis, that it becomes incapable of opening, as a self-torturing Hindoo fakir may clench his fist so long, that at last his muscles lose their power, and it remains shut for his lifetime. The issue of such "stubbornness" is walking in their own counsels, the practical life being regulated entirely by self-originated and God-for-getting dictates of prudence or inclination. He who will not have the Divine Guide has to grope his way as well as he can. There is no worse fate for a man than to be allowed to do as he chooses. "The ditch," sooner or later, receives the man who lets his active powers, which are in themselves blind, be led by his understanding, which he has himself blinded by forbidding it to look to the One Light of Life. In Psalms 81:13 the Divine Voice turns to address the joyous crowd of festal worshippers, exhorting them to that obedience which is the true keeping of the feast, and holding forth bright promises of the temporal blessings which, in accordance with the fundamental conditions of Israel’s prosperity, should follow thereon. The sad picture of ancient rebellion just drawn influences the language in this verse, in which "My people," "hearken," and "walk" recur. The antithesis to walking in one’s own counsels is walking in God’s ways, suppressing native stubbornness, and becoming docile to His guidance. The highest blessedness of man is to have a will submissive to God’s will, and to carry out that submission in all details of life. Self-engineered paths are always hard, and, if pursued to the end, lead into the dark. The listening heart will not lack guidance, and obedient feet will find God’s way the way of peace which steadily climbs to unfading light. The blessings attached in the psalm to such conformity with God’s will are of an external kind, as was to be expected at the Old Testament stage of revelation. They are mainly two-victory and abundance. But the precise application of Psa 81:15 b is doubtful. Whose "time" is to "endure forever"? There is much to be said in favour of the translation "that so their time might endure forever," as Cheyne renders, and for understanding it, as he does, as referring to the enemies who yield themselves to God, in order that they "might be a never-exhausted people." But to bring in the purpose of the enemies’ submission is somewhat irrelevant, and the clause is probably best taken to promise length of days to Israel. In Psalms 81:16 the sudden change of persons in a is singular, and, according to the existing vocalisation, there is an equally sudden change of tenses, which induces Delitzsch and others to take the verse as recurring to historical retrospect. The change to the third person is probably occasioned, as Hupfeld suggests, by the preceding naming of Jehovah, or may have been due to an error. Such sudden changes are more admissible in Hebrew than with us, and are very easily accounted for, when God is represented as speaking. The momentary emergence of the psalmist’s personality would lead him to say "He," and the renewed sense of being but the echo of the Divine Voice would lead to the recurrence to the "I," in which God speaks directly. The words are best taken as in line with the other hypothetical promises in the preceding verses. The whole verse looks back to Deuteronomy 32:13-14. "Honey from the rock" is not a natural product; but, as Hupfeld says, the parallel "oil out of the flinty rock," which follows in Deuteronomy, shows that "we are here, not on the ground of the actual, but of the ideal," and that the expression is a hyperbole for incomparable abundance. Those who hearken to God’s voice will have all desires satisfied and needs supplied. They will find furtherance in hindrances, fertility in barrenness; rocks will drop honey and stones will become bread. Psalms 82:1-8 IN Psalms 50:1-23 God is represented as gathering His people together to be judged; in this psalm He has gathered them together for His judgment on judges. The former psalm begins at an earlier point of the great Cause than this one does. In it, unnamed messengers go forth to summons the nation; in this, the first verse shows us the assembled congregation, the accused, and the Divine Judge standing in "the midst" in statuesque immobility. An awe-inspiring pause intervenes, and then the silence is broken by a mighty voice of reproof and admonition (Psalms 82:2-4). The speaker may be the psalmist, but the grand image of God as judging loses much of its solemnity and appropriateness, unless these stern rebukes and the following verses till the end of Psa 82:7 are regarded as His voice of judgment. Psalms 82:5 follows these rebukes with "an indignant aside from the Judge" (Cheyne), evoked by obstinate deafness to His words; and Psalms 82:6-7 pronounce the fatal sentence on the accused, who are condemned by their own refusal to hearken to Divine remonstrances. Then, in Psalms 82:8, after a pause like that which preceded God’s voice, the psalmist, who has been a silent spectator, prays that what he has heard in the inward ear, and seen with the inward eye, may be done before the nations of the world, since it all belongs to Him by right. The scene pictured in Psalms 82:1 has been variously interpreted. "The congregation of God" is most naturally understood according to the parallel in Psalms 50:1-23, and the familiar phrase "the congregation of Israel" as being the assembled nation. Its interpretation and that of the "gods" who are judged hang together. If the assembly is the nation, the persons at the bar can scarcely be other than those who have exercised injustice on the nation. If, on the other hand, the "gods" are ideal or real angelic beings, the assembly will necessarily be a heavenly one. The use of the expressions "the congregation of Jehovah" (Numbers 27:17; Numbers 31:16; Joshua 22:16-17) and "Thy congregation" (Psalms 74:2) makes the former interpretation the more natural, and therefore exercises some influence in determining the meaning of the other disputed word. The interpretation of "gods" as angels is maintained by Hupfeld; and Bleek, followed by Cheyne, goes the full length of regarding them as patron angels of the nations. But, as Baethgen says, that angels should be punished with death is a thought which lies utterly beyond the Old Testament sphere of representation," and the incongruity can hardly be reckoned to be removed by Cheyne’s remark, that, since angels are in other places represented as punished, "it is only a step further" to say that they are punished with death. If, however, these "gods" are earthly rulers, the question still remains whether they are Jewish or foreign judges? The latter opinion is adopted chiefly on the ground of the reference in Psalms 82:8 to a world-embracing judicial act, which, however, by no means compels its acceptance, since it is entirely in accordance with the manner of psalmists to recognise in partial acts of Divine retribution the operation in miniature of the same Divine power, which will one day set right all wrongs, and, on occasion of the smaller manifestation of Divine righteousness, to pray for a universal judgment. There would be little propriety in summoning the national assembly to behold judgments wrought on foreign rulers, unless these alien oppressors were afflicting Israel, of which there is no sure indications in the psalm. The various expressions for the afflicted in Psalms 82:3-4 are taken, by the supporters of the view that the judges are foreigners, to mean the whole nation as it groaned under their oppression, but there is nothing to show that they do not rather refer to the helpless in Israel. Our Lord’s reference to Psalms 82:6 in John 10:34-38 is, by the present writer, accepted as authoritatively settling both the meaning and the ground of the remarkable name of "gods" for human judges. It does not need that we should settle the mystery of His emptying Himself, or trace the limits of His human knowledge, in order to be sure that He spoke truth with authority, when He spoke on such a subject as His own Divine nature, and the analogies and contrasts between it and the highest human authorities. His whole argument is worthless, unless the "gods" in the psalm are men. He tells us why that august title is applied to them-namely, because to them "the word of God came." They were recipients of a Divine word, constituting them in their office; and, in so far as they discharged its duties, their decrees were God’s word ministered by them. That is especially true in a theocratic state such as Israel, where the rulers are, in a direct way, God’s vicegerents, clothed by Him with delegated authority, which they exercise under His control. But it is also true about all who are set in similar positions elsewhere. The office is sacred, whatever its holders are. The contents of the psalm need little remark. In Psalms 82:2-4 God speaks in stern upbraiding and command. The abrupt pealing forth of the Divine Voice, without any statement of who speaks, is extremely dramatic and impressive. The judgment hall is filled with a hushed crowd. No herald is needed to proclaim silence. Strained expectance sits on every ear. Then the silence is broken. These authoritative accents can come but from one speaker. The crimes rebuked are those to which rulers, in such a state of society as was in Israel, are especially prone, and such as must have been well-nigh universal at the time of the psalmist. They were no imaginary evils against which these sharp arrows were launched. These princes were like those gibbeted forever in Isaiah 1:1-31 -loving gifts and following after rewards, murderers rather than judges, and fitter to be "rulers of Sodom" than of God’s city. They had prostituted their office by injustice, had favoured the rich and neglected the poor, had been deaf to the cry of the helpless, had steeled their hearts against the miseries of the afflicted, and left them to perish in the gripe of the wicked. Such is the indictment. Does it sound applicable to angels? For a moment the Divine Voice pauses. Will its tones reach any consciences? No. There is no sign of contrition among the judges, who are thus solemnly being judged. Therefore God speaks again, as if wondering, grieved, and indignant "at the blindness of their hearts," as His Son was-when His words met the same reception from the same class. Psalms 82:5 might almost be called a Divine lament over human impenitence, ere the Voice swells into the fatal sentence. One remembers Christ’s tears, as He looked across the valley to the city glittering in the morning sun. His tears did not hinder His pronouncing its doom; nor did His pronouncing its doom hinder His tears. These judges were without knowledge. They walked in darkness, because they walked in selfishness, and never thought of God’s judgment. Their gait was insolent, as the form of the word "walk to and fro" implies. And, since they who were set to be God’s representatives on earth, and to show some gleam of His justice and compassion, were ministers of injustice and vicegerents of evil, fostering what they should have crushed, and crushing whom they should have fostered, the foundations of society were shaken, and, unless these were swept away, it would be dissolved into chaos. Therefore the sentence must fall, as it does in Psalms 82:6-7. The grant of dignity is withdrawn. They are stripped of their honours, as a soldier of his uniform before he is driven from his corps. The judge’s robe, which they have smirched, is plucked off their shoulders, and they stand as common men. Psalms 83:1-18 THIS psalm is a cry for help against a world in arms. The failure of all attempts to point to a period when all the allies here represented as confederate against Israel were or could have been united in assailing it, inclines one to suppose that the enumeration of enemies is not history, but poetic idealisation. The psalm would then be, not the memorial of a fact, but the expression of the standing relation between Israel and the outlying heathendom. The singer masses together ancient and modern foes of diverse nationalities and mutual animosities, and pictures them as burying their enmities and bridging their separations, and all animated by one tell hatred to the Dove of God, which sits innocent and helpless in the midst of them. There are weighty objections to this view; but no other is free from difficulties even more considerable. There are two theories which divide the suffrages of commentators. The usual assignment of date is to the league against Jehoshaphat recorded in 2 Chronicles 20:1-37. But it is hard to find that comparatively small local confederacy of three peoples in the wide-reaching alliance described in the psalm. Chronicles enumerates the members of the league as being "the children of Moab and the children of Ammon, and with them some of the Ammonites," which last unmeaning designation should be read, as in the LXX, "the Me’unim," and adds to these Edom. (2 Chronicles 20:2, corrected text) Even if the contention of the advocates of this date for the psalm is admitted, and "the Me’unim" are taken to include the Arab tribes, whom the psalmist calls Ishmaelites and Hagarenes, there remains the fact that he names also Philistia, Amalek, Tyre, and Asshur, none of whom is concerned in the alliance against Jehoshaphat. It was, in fact, confined to eastern and southeastern nations, with whom distant western tribes could have no common interest. Nor is the other view of the circumstances underlying the psalm free from difficulty. It advocates a Maccabean date. In RAPC 1Ma 5:1-68 it is recorded that the nations round about were enraged at the restoration of the altar and dedication of the Temple after its pollution by Antiochus Epiphanes, and were ready to break out in hostility. Cheyne points to the occurrence in Maccabees of six of the ten names mentioned in the psalm. But of the four not mentioned, two are Amalek and Asshur, both of which had been blotted out of the roll of nations long before the Maccabees’ era. "The mention of Amalek," says Cheyne, "is half-Haggadic, half-antiquarian." But what should Haggadic or antiquarian elements do in such a list? Asshur is explained on this hypothesis as meaning Syria, which is very doubtful, and, even if admitted, leaves unsolved the difficulty that the subordinate place occupied by the nation in question would not correspond to the importance of Syria in the time of the Maccabees. Of the two theories, the second is the more probable, but neither is satisfactory: and the view already stated, that the psalm does not refer to any actual alliance, seems to the present writer the most probable. The world is up in arms against God’s people; and what weapon has Israel? Nothing but prayer. The psalm naturally falls into two parts, separated by Selah, of which the first (Psalms 83:1-8) describes Israel’s extremity, and the second (Psalms 83:9-18) is its supplication. The psalmist begins with earnest invocation of God’s help, beseeching Him to break His apparent inactivity and silence. "Let there be no rest to Thee" is like Isaiah 62:6. God seems passive. It needs but His Voice to breathe dreary silence, and the foes will be scattered. And there is strong reason for His intervention, for they are His enemies, who riot and roar like the hoarse chafing of an angry sea, for so the word rendered "make a tumult" implies. (Psalms 46:3) It is "Thy people" who are the object of their crafty conspiracy, and it is implied that these are thus hated because they are God’s people. Israel’s prerogative, which evokes the heathen’s rage, is the ground of Israel’s confidence and the plea urged to God by it. Are we not Thy "hidden ones"? And shall a hostile world be able to pluck us from our safe hiding place in the hollow of Thy hand? The idea of preciousness, as well as that of protection, is included in the word. Men store their treasures in secret places; God hides His treasures in the "secret of His face," the "glorious privacy of light" inaccessible. How vain are the plotters’ whisperings against such a people! The conspiracy has for its aim nothing short of blotting out the national existence and the very name of Israel. It is therefore high-handed opposition to God’s counsel, and the confederacy is against Him. The true antagonists are, not Israel and the world, but God and the world. Calmness, courage, and confidence spring in the heart with such thoughts. They who can feel that they are hid in God may look out, as from a safe islet on the wildest seas, and fear nothing. And all who will may hide in Him. The enumeration of the confederates in Psalms 83:6-8 groups together peoples who probably were never really united for any common end. Hatred is a very potent cement, and the most discordant elements may be fused together in the fire of a common animosity. What a motley assemblage is here! What could bring together in one company Ishmaelites and Tyrians, Moab and Asshur? The first seven names in the list of allies had their seats to the east and southeast of Palestine. Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Amalek were ancestral foes, the last of which had been destroyed in the time of Hezekiah. (1 Chronicles 4:43) The mention of descendants of Ishmael and Hagar, nomad Arab tribes to the south and east, recalls their ancestors’ expulsion from the patriarchal family. Gebal is probably the mountainous region to the south of the Dead Sea. Then the psalmist turns to the west, to Philistia, the ancient foe, and Tyre, "the two peoples of the Mediterranean coast, which also appear in Amos (chapter 1; cf. Joe 3:1-21) as making common cause with the Edomites against Israel" (Delitzsch). Asshur brings up the rear-a strange post for it to occupy, to be reduced to be an auxiliary to "the children of Lot," i.e., Moab and Ammon. The ideal character of this muster roll is supported by this singular inferiority of position, as well as by the composition of the allied force, and by the allusion to the shameful origin of the two leading peoples, which is the only reference to Lot besides the narrative in Genesis. The confederacy is formidable, but the psalmist does not enumerate its members merely in order to emphasise Israel’s danger. He is contrasting this miscellaneous conglomeration of many peoples with the Almighty One, against whom they are vainly banded. Faith can look without a tremor on serried battalions of enemies, knowing that one poor man, with God at his back, outnumbers them all. Let them come from east and west, south and north, and close round Israel; God alone is mightier than they. So, after a pause marked by Selah, in which there is time to let the thought of the multitudinous enemies sink into the soul, the psalm passes into prayer, which throbs with confident assurance and anticipatory triumph. The singer recalls ancient victories, and prays for their repetition. To him, as to every devout man, today’s exigencies are as sure of Divine help as any yesterday’s were, and what God has done is pledge and specimen of what He is doing and will do. The battle is left to be waged by Him alone. The psalmist does not seem to think of Israel’s drawing sword, but rather that it should stand still and see God fighting for it. The victory of Gideon over Midian, to which Isaiah also refers as the very type of complete conquest, (Isaiah 9:3) is named first, but thronging memories drive it out of the singer’s mind for a moment, while he goes back to the other crushing defeat of Jabin and Sisera at the hands of Barak and Deborah. (Judges 4:1-24; Judges 5:1-31) He adds a detail to the narrative in Judges, when he localises the defeat at Endor, which lies on the eastern edge of the great plain of Esdraelon. In Psalms 83:2 he returns to his first example of defeat-the slaughter of Midian by Gideon. Oreb (raven) and Zeeb (wolf) were in command of the Midianites, and were killed by the Ephraimites in the retreat. Zebah and Zalmunnah were kings of Midian, and fell by Gideon’s own hand. (Judges 8:21) The psalmist bases his prayer for such a dread fate for the foes on their insolent purpose and sacrilegious, purpose of making the dwellings (or, possibly, the pastures) of God their own property. Not because the land and its peaceful homes belonged to the suppliant and his nation, but because they were God’s, does he thus pray. The enemies had drawn the sword; it was permissible to pray that they might fall by the sword, or by some Divine intervention, since such was the only way of defeating their God-insulting plans. The psalm rises to high poetic fervour and imaginative beauty in the terrible petitions of Psa 83:13-16. The word rendered "whirling dust" in Psalms 83:13 is somewhat doubtful. It literally means a rolling thing, but what particular thing of the sort is difficult to determine. The reference is perhaps to "spherical masses of dry weeds which course over the plains." Thomson ("Land and Book," 1870, p. 563) suggests the wild artichoke, which, when ripe, forms a globe of about a foot in diameter. "In autumn the branches become dry and as light as a feather, the parent stem breaks off at the ground, and the wind carries these vegetable globes whithersoever it pleaseth. At the proper season thousands of them come scudding over the plain, rolling, leaping, bounding." So understood, the clause would form a complete parallel with the next, which compares the fleeing foe to stubble, not, of course, rooted, but loose and whirled before the wind. The metaphor Psalms 83:14 is highly poetic, likening the flight of the foe to the swift rush of a forest fire, which licks up (for so the word rendered scorches means) the woods on the hillsides, and leaves a bare, blackened space. Still more terrible is the petition in Psalms 83:15, which asks that God Himself should chase the flying remnants, and beat them down, helpless and panic stricken, with storm and hurricane, as He did the other confederacy of Canaanitish kings, when they fled down the pass of Beth-Horon, and "Jehovah cast down great stones on them from heaven". (Joshua 10:10-11) But there is a deeper desire in the psalmist’s heart than the enemies’ destruction. He wishes that they should be turned into God’s friends and he wishes for their chastisement as the means to that end. "That they may seek Thy face, Jehovah," is the sum of his aspirations, as it is the inmost meaning of God’s punitive acts. The end of the judgment of the world, which is continually going on by means of the history of the world, is none other than what this psalmist contemplated as the end of the defeat of that confederacy of God’s enemies-that rebels should seek His face, not in enforced submission, but with true desire to sun themselves in its light, and with heart-felt acknowledgment of His Name as supreme through all the earth. The thought of God as standing alone in His majestic omnipotence, while a world is vainly arrayed against Him, which we have traced in Psalms 83:5-7, is prominent in the close of the psalm. The language of Psa 83:18 is somewhat broken, but its purport is plain, and its thought is all the more impressive for the irregularity of construction. God alone is the Most High. He is revealed to men by His Name. It stands alone, as He in His nature dots. The highest good of men is to know that that sovereign Name is unique and high above all creatures, hostile or obedient. Such knowledge is God’s aim in punishment and blessing. Its universal extension must be the deepest wish of all who have for themselves learned how strong a fortress against a world in arms that Name is; and their desires for the foes of God and themselves are not in harmony with God’s heart, nor with this psalmist’s song, unless they are, that His enemies may be led, by salutary defeat of their enterprises and experience of the weight of God’s hand, to bow, in loving obedience, low before the Name which, whether they recognise the fact or not, is high above all the earth. Psalms 84:1-12 THE same longing for and delight in the sanctuary which found pathetic expression in Psalms 42:1-11 and Psalms 43:1-5, inspire this psalm. Like these, it is ascribed in the superscription to the Korachites, whose office of door keepers in the Temple seems alluded to in Psalms 84:10. To infer, however, identity of authorship from similarity of tone is hazardous. The differences are as obvious as the resemblances. As Cheyne well says, "the notes of the singer of Psa 42:1-11 and Psalms 43:1-5 are here transposed into a different key. It is still ‘Te saluto, te suspiro,’ but no longer ‘De longinquo te saluto’ (to quote Hildebert)." The longings after God and the sanctuary, in the first part of the psalm, do not necessarily imply exile from the latter, for they may be felt when we are nearest to Him, and are, in fact, an element in that nearness. It is profitless to inquire what were the singer’s circumstances. He expresses the perennial emotions of devout souls, and his words are as enduring and as universal as the aspirations which they so perfectly express. No doubt the psalm identifies enjoyment of God’s presence with the worship of the visible sanctuary more closely than we have to do, but the true object of its longing is God, and so long as spirit is tied to body the most spiritual worship will be tied to form. The psalm may serve as a warning against premature attempts to dispense with outward aids to inward communion. It is divided into three parts by the Selahs. The last verse of the first part prepares the way for the first of the second, by sounding the note of "Blessed they," etc., which is prolonged in Psalms 84:5. The last verse of the second part (Psalms 84:8) similarly prepares for the first of the third (Psalms 84:9) by beginning the prayer which is prolonged there. In each part there is a verse pronouncing blessing on Jehovah’s worshippers, and the variation in the designations of these gives the key to the progress of thought in the psalm. First comes the blessing on those who dwell in God’s house (Psalms 84:4), and that abiding is the theme of the first part. The description of those who are thus blessed, is changed, in the second strophe, to those in whose heart are the [pilgrim] ways," and the joys of the progress of the soul towards God are the theme of that strophe. Finally, for dwelling in and journeying towards the sanctuary is substituted the plain designation of "the man that trusts in Thee," which trust is the impulse to following after God and the condition of dwelling with Him; and its joys are the theme of the third part. The man who thus interpreted his own psalm had no unworthy conception of the relation between outward nearness to the sanctuary, and inward communion with the God who dwelt there. The psalmist’s yearning for the Temple was occasioned by his longing for God. It was God’s presence there which gave it all its beauty. Because they were "Thy tabernacles," he felt them to be lovely and lovable, for the word implies both. The abrupt exclamation beginning the psalm is the breaking into speech of thought which had long increased itself in silence. The intensity of his desires is expressed very strikingly by two words, of which the former (longs) literally means grows pale, and the latter fails, or is consumed. His whole being, body and spirit, is one cry for the living God. The word rendered "cry out" is usually employed for the shrill cry of joy, and that meaning is by many retained here. But the cognate noun is not infrequently employed for any loud or high-pitched call, especially for fervent prayer, (Psalms 88:2) and it is better to suppose that this clause expresses emotion substantially parallel to that of the former one, than that it makes a contrast to it. "The living God" is an expression only found in Psalms 42:1-11, and is one of the points of resemblance between it and this psalm. That Name is more than a contrast with the gods of the heathen. It lays bare the reason for the psalmist’s longings. By communion with Him who possesses life in its fulness, and is its fountain for all that live, he will draw supplies of that "life whereof our veins are scant." Nothing short of a real, living Person can slake the immortal thirst of the soul, made after God’s own life, and restless till it rests in Him. The surface current of this singer’s desires ran towards the sanctuary; the depth of them set towards God; and, for the stage of revelation at which he stood, the deeper was best satisfied through the satisfaction of the more superficial. The one is modified by the progress of Christian enlightenment, but the other remains eternally the same. Alas that the longings of Christian souls for fellowship with God should be so tepid, as compared with the sacred passion of desire which has found imperishable utterance in these glowing and most sincere words! Psalms 84:3 has been felt to present grammatical difficulties, which need not detain us here. The easiest explanation is that the happy, winged creatures who have found resting places are contrasted by the psalmist with himself, seeking, homeless amid creation, for his haven of repose. We have to complete the somewhat fragmentary words with some supplement before "Thine altars," such as "So would I find," or the like. To suppose that he represents the swallows as actually nesting on the altar is impossible, and, if the latter clauses are taken to describe the places where the birds housed and bred, there is nothing to suggest the purpose for which the reference to them is introduced. If, on the other hand, the poet looks with a poet’s eye on these lower creatures at rest in secure shelters, and longs to be like them, in his repose in the home which his deeper wants make necessary for him, a noble thought is expressed with adequate poetic beauty. "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air roosting places, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." All creatures find environment suited to their need, and are at rest in it, man walks like a stranger on earth, and restlessly seeks for rest. Where but in God is it to be found? Who that seeks it in Him shall fail to find it? What their nests are to the swallows, God is to man. The solemnity of the direct address to God at the close of Psa 84:3 would be out of place if the altar were the dwelling of the birds, but is entirely natural if the psalmist is thinking of the Temple as the home of his spirit. By the accumulation of sacred and dear names, and by the lovingly reiterated "my," which claims personal relation to God, he deepens his conviction of the blessedness which would be his, were he in that abode of his heart, and lingeringly tells his riches, as a miser might delight to count his gold, piece by piece. The first part closes with an exclamation which gathers into one all-expressive word the joy of communion with God. They who have it are blessed," with something more sacred and lasting than happiness, with something deeper and more tranquil than joy, even with a calm delight, not altogether unlike the still, yet not stagnant, rest of supreme felicity which fills the life of the living and ever-blessed God. That thought is prolonged by the music. The second strophe (Psalms 84:5-8) is knit to the first, chain-wise, by taking up again the closing strain, "Blessed the man!" But it turns the blessedness in another direction. Not only are they blessed who have found their rest in God, but so also are they who are seeking it. The goal is sweet, but scarcely less sweet are the steps towards it. The fruition of God has delights beyond all that earth can give, but the desire after Him, too, has delights of its own. The experiences of the soul seeking God in His sanctuary are here cast into the image of pilgrim bands going up to the Temple. There may be local allusions in the details. The "ways" in Psalms 84:5 are the pilgrims’ paths to the sanctuary. Hupfeld calls the reading "ways" senseless, and would substitute "trust"; but such a change is unnecessary, and tasteless. The condensed expression is not too condensed to be intelligible, and beautifully describes the true pilgrim spirit. They who, are touched with that desire which impels men to "seek a better country, that is a heavenly," and to take flight from Time’s vanities to the bosom of God, have ever "the ways" in their hearts. They count the moments lost during which they linger, or are anywhere but on the road. Amid calls of lower duties and distractions of many sorts, their desires turn to the path to God. Like some nomads brought into city life, they are always longing to escape. The caged eagle sits on the highest point of his prison, and looks with filmed eye to the free heavens. Hearts that long for God have an irrepressible instinct stinging them to ever-new attainments. The consciousness of "not having already attained" is no pain, when the hope of attaining is strong. Rather, the. very blessedness of life lies in the sense of present imperfection, the effort for completeness, and the assurance of reaching it. Psalms 84:6 is highly imaginative and profoundly true. If a man has "the ways" in his heart, he will pass through "the valley of weeping," and turn it into a "place of fountains." His very tears will fill the wells. Sorrow borne as a help to pilgrimage changes into joy and refreshment. The remembrance of past grief nourishes the soul which is aspiring to God. God puts our tears into His bottle; we lose the benefit of them, and fail to discern their true intent, unless we gather them into a well, which may refresh us in many a weary hour thereafter. If we do, there will be another source of fertility, plentifully poured out. upon our life’s path. "The early rain covers it with blessings." Heaven-descended gifts will not be wanting, nor the smiling harvests which they quicken and mature. God meets the pilgrims’ love and faith with gently falling influences, which bring forth rich fruit. Trials borne aright bring down fresh bestowments of power for fruitful service. Thus possessed of a charm which transforms grief, and recipients of strength from on high, the pilgrims are not tired by travel, as others are, but grow stronger day by day, and their progressive increase in vigour is a pledge that they will joyously reach their journey’s end, and stand in the courts of the Lord’s house. The seekers after God are superior to the law of decay. It may affect their physical powers, but they are borne up by an unfulfilled and certain hope, and reinvigorated by continual supplies from above; and therefore, though in their bodily frame they, like other men, faint and grow weary, they shall not utterly fail, but, waiting on Jehovah, "will renew their strength." The fabled fountain of perpetual youth rises at the foot of God’s throne, and its waters flow to meet those who journey thither. Such are the elements of the blessedness of those who seek God’s presence; and with that great promise of certain finding of the good and the God whom they seek, the description and the strophe properly ends. But just as the first part prepared the way for the second, so the second does for the third, by breaking forth into prayer. No wonder that the thoughts which he has been dwelling on should move the singer to supplication that these blessednesses may be his. According to some, Psalms 84:8 is the prayer of the pilgrim on arriving in the Temple, but it is best taken as the psalmist’s own. The final part begins with invocation. In Psalms 84:9 "our shield" is in apposition to "God," not the object to "behold." It anticipates the designation of God in Psalms 84:11. But why should the prayer for "Thine anointed" break in upon the current of thought? Are we to say that the psalmist "completes his work by some rhythmical but ill-connected verses" (Cheyne)? There is a satisfactory explanation of the apparently irrelevant petition, if we accept the view that the psalm, like its kindred Psalms 42:1-11 and Psalms 43:1-5, was the work of a companion of David’s in his flight. If so, the king’s restoration would be the condition of satisfying the psalmist’s longing for the sanctuary. Any other hypothesis as to his date and circumstances fails to supply a connecting link between the main subject of the psalm and this petition. The "For" at the beginning of Psa 84:10 favours such a view, since it gives the delights of the house of the Lord, and the psalmist’s longing to share in them, as the reasons for his prayer that Jehovah would look upon the face of His anointed. In that verse he glides back to the proper theme of the psalm. Life is to be estimated, not according to its length, but according to the richness of its contents. Time is elastic. One crowded moment is better than a millennium of languid years. And nothing fills life so full or stretches the hours to hold so much of real living as communion with God, which works, on those who have plunged into its depths, some assimilation to the timeless life of Him with whom "one day is as a thousand years." There may be a reference to the Korachites’ function of door keepers, in that touchingly beautiful choice of the psalmist’s, rather to lie on the threshold of the Temple than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. Whether there is or not, the sentiment breathes sweet humility, and deliberate choice. Just as the poet has declared that the briefest moment of communion is in his sight to be preferred to years of earthly delight, so he counts the humblest office in the sanctuary, and the lowest place there, if only it is within the doorway, as better than aught besides. The least degree of fellowship with God has delights superior to the greatest measure of worldly joys. And this man, knowing that, chose accordingly. How many of us know it, and yet cannot say" with him, "Rather would I lie on the doorsill of the Temple than sit in the chief places of the world’s feasts!" Such a choice is the only rational one. It is the choice of supreme good, correspondent to man’s deepest needs, and lasting as his being. Therefore the psalmist vindicates his preference, and encourages himself in it, by the thoughts in Psalms 84:11, which he introduces with "For." Because God is what He is, and gives what He gives, it is the highest wisdom to take Him for our true good, and never to let Him go. He is "sun and shield." This is the only place in which He is directly called a sun, though the idea conveyed is common. He is "the master light of all our seeing," the fountain of. warmth, illumination, and life. His beams are too bright for human eyes to gaze on, but their effluence is the joy of creation. They who look to Him "shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." What folly to choose darkness rather than light, and, when that Sun is high in the heavens, ready to flood our hearts with its beams, to prefer to house ourselves in gloomy caverns of our own sad thoughts and evil doings! Another reason for the psalmist’s choice is that God is a shield. (Compare Psalms 84:9) Who that knows the dangers and foes that cluster thick round every life can wisely refuse to shelter behind that ample and impenetrable buckler? It is madness to stand in the open field, with arrows whizzing invisible all round, when one step, one heartfelt desire, would place that sure defence between us and every peril. God being such, "grace and glory" will flow from Him to those who seek Him. These two are given simultaneously, not, as sometimes supposed, in succession, as though grace were the sum of gifts for earth, and glory the all-comprehending expression for the higher bestowments of heaven. The psalmist thinks that both are possessed here. Grace is the sum of God’s gifts, coming from His loving regard to His sinful and inferior creatures. Glory is the reflection of His own lustrous perfection, which irradiates lives that are turned to Him, and makes them shine, as a poor piece of broken pottery will, when the sunlight fails on it. Since God is the sum of all good, to possess Him is to possess it all. The one gift unfolds into all things lovely and needful. It is the raw material, as it were, out of which can be shaped, according to transient and multiform needs, everything that can be desired or can bless a soul. But high as is the psalmist’s flight of mystic devotion, he does not soar so far as to lose sight of plain morality, as mystics have often been apt to do. It is the man who walks in his integrity who may hope to receive these blessings. "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord"; and neither access to His house nor the blessings flowing from His presence can belong to him who is faithless to his own convictions of duty. The pilgrim paths are paths of righteousness. The psalmist’s last word translates his metaphors of dwelling in and travelling towards the house of Jehovah into their simple meaning, "Blessed is the man that trusteth in Thee." That trust both seeks and finds God. There has never been but one way to His presence, and that is the way of trust. "I am the way . . . No man cometh to the Father but by Me." So coming, we shall find, and then shall seek more eagerly and find more fully, and thus shall possess at once the joys of fruition and of desires always satisfied, never satiated, but continually renewed. Psalms 85:1-13 THE outstanding peculiarity of this psalm is its sudden transitions of feeling. Beginning with exuberant thanksgiving for restoration of the nation (Psalms 85:1-3), it passes, without intermediate gradations, to complaints of God’s continued wrath and entreaties for restoration (Psalms 85:4-7). and then as suddenly rises to joyous assurance of inward and outward blessings. The condition of the exiles returned from Babylon best corresponds to such conflicting emotions. The book of Nehemiah supplies precisely such a background as fits the psalm. A part of the nation had returned indeed, but to a ruined city, a fallen Temple, and a mourning land, where they were surrounded by jealous and powerful enemies. Discouragement had laid hold on the feeble company; enthusiasm had ebbed away; the harsh realities of their enterprise had stripped off its imaginative charm; and the mass of the returned settlers had lost heart as well as devout faith. The psalm accurately reflects such a state of circumstances and feelings, and may, with some certitude, be assigned, as it is by most commentators, to the period of return from exile. It falls into three parts, of increasing length, -the first, of three verses (Psalms 85:1-3), recounts God’s acts of mercy already received; the second, of four verses (Psalms 85:4-7), is a plaintive prayer in view of still remaining national afflictions; and the third, of six verses (Psalms 85:8-13), a glad report by the psalmist of the Divine promises which his waiting ear had heard, and which might well quicken the most faint hearted into triumphant hope. In the first strophe one great fact is presented in a threefold aspect, and traced wholly to Jehovah. "Thou hast turned back the captivity of Jacob." That expression is sometimes used in a figurative sense for any restoration of prosperity, but is here to be taken literally. Now, as at first, the restored Israel, like their ancestors under Joshua, had not won the land by their own arm, but "because God had a favour unto them," and had given them favour in the eyes of those who carried them captive. The restoration of the Jews, seen from the conqueror’s point of view, was a piece of state policy, but from that of the devout Israelite was the result of God’s working upon the heart of the new ruler of Babylon. The fact is stated in Psalms 85:1; a yet more blessed fact, of which it is most blessed as being a token, is declared in Psalms 85:2. The psalmist knows that captivity had been chastisement, the issue of national sin. Therefore he is sure that restoration is the sign of forgiveness. His thoughts are running in the same line as in Isaiah 40:2 where the proclamation, to Jerusalem that her iniquity is pardoned is connected with the assurance that her hard service is accomplished. He uses two significant words for pardon, both of which occur in Psalms 32:1-11. In Psalms 85:2 a sin is regarded as a weight pressing down the nation, which God’s mercy lifts off and takes away; in Psalms 85:2 b it is conceived of as a hideous stain or foulness, which His mercy hides, so that it is no longer an offence to heaven. Psalms 85:3 ventures still deeper into the sacred recesses of the Divine nature, and traces the forgiveness, which in act had produced so happy a change in Israel’s position, to its source in a change in God’s disposition. "Thou hast drawn in all Thy wrath," as a man does his breath, or, if the comparison may be ventured, as some creature armed with a sting retracts it into its sheath. "Thou hast turned Thyself from the glow of Thine anger" gives the same idea under another metaphor. The word "turn" has a singular fascination for this psalmist. He uses it five times (Psalms 85:1, Psalms 85:3, Psalms 85:4, Psalms 85:6 -lit., wilt Thou not turn, quicken us?-and Psalms 85:8). God’s turning from His anger is the reason for Israel’s returning from captivity. The abruptness of the transition from joyous thanksgiving to the sad minor of lamentation and supplication is striking, but most natural, if the psalmist was one of the band of returning exiles, surrounded by the ruins of a happier past, and appalled by the magnitude of the work before them, the slenderness of their resources, and the fierce hostility of their neighbours. The prayer of Psa 85:4, "Turn us," is best taken as using the word in the same sense as in Psalms 85:1, where God is said to have "turned" the captivity of Jacob. What was there regarded as accomplished is here conceived of as still to be done. That is, the restoration was incomplete, as we know that it was, both in regard to the bulk of the nation, who still remained in exile, and in regard to the depressed condition of the small part of it which had gone back to Palestine. In like manner the petitions of Psa 85:5 look back to Psalms 85:3, and pray that the anger which there had been spoken of as passed may indeed utterly cease. The partial restoration of the people implied, in the psalmist’s view, a diminution rather than a cessation of God’s punitive wrath, and he beseeches Him to complete that which He had begun. The relation of the first to the second strophe is not only that of contrast, but the prayers of the latter are founded upon the facts of the former, which constitute both grounds for the suppliant’s hope of answer and pleas with God. He cannot mean to deliver by halves. The mercies received are incomplete; and His work must be perfect. He cannot be partially reconciled, nor have meant to bring His people back to the land, and then leave them to misery. So the contrast between the bright dawning of the return and its clouded day is not wholly depressing; for the remembrance of what has been heartens for the assurance that what is shall not always be, but will be followed by a future more correspondent to God’s purpose as shown in that past. When we are tempted to gloomy thoughts by the palpable incongruities between God’s ideals and man’s realisation of them, we may take a hint from this psalmist, and, instead of concluding that the ideal was a phantasm, argue with ourselves that the incomplete actual will one day give way to the perfect embodiment. God leaves no work unfinished. He never leaves off till He has done. His beginnings guarantee congruous endings. He does not half withdraw His anger; and, if He seems to do so, it is only because men have but half turned from their sins. This psalm is rich in teaching as to the right way of regarding the incompleteness of great movements, which, in their incipient stages, were evidently of God. It instructs us to keep the Divine intervention which started them clearly in view; to make the shortcomings, which mar them, a subject of lowly prayer; and to be sure that all which He begins He will finish, and that the end will fully correspond to the promise of the beginning. A "day of the Lord" which rose in brightness may cloud over as its hours roll, but "at eventide it shall be light," and none of the morning promise will be unfulfilled. The third strophe (Psalms 85:8-13) brings solid hopes, based upon Divine promises, to bear on present discouragements. In Psalms 85:8 the psalmist, like Habakkuk, (Habakkuk 2:1) encourages himself to listen to what God will speak. The word "I will hear" expresses resolve or desire, and might be rendered Let me hear, or I would hear. Faithful prayer will always be followed by patient and faithful waiting for response from God. God will not be silent, when His servant appeals to Him with recognition of His past mercies, joined with longing that these may be perfected. No voice will break the silence of the heavens; but, in the depths of the waiting soul, there will spring a sweet assurance which comes from God, and is really His answer to prayer, telling the suppliant that "He will speak peace to His people," and warning them not to turn away from Him to other helps, which is folly. "His favoured ones" seems here to be meant as coextensive with "His people." Israel is regarded as having entered into covenant relations with God; and the designation is the pledge that what God speaks will be "peace." That word is to be taken in its widest sense, as meaning, first and chiefly, peace with Him, who has "turned Himself from His anger"; and then, generally, well-being of all kinds, outward and inward, as a consequence of that rectified relation with God. The warning of Psa 85:8 c is thought by some to be out of place, and an emendation has been suggested, which requires little change in the Hebrew-namely, "to those who have turned their hearts towards Him." This reading is supported by the LXX; but the warning is perfectly appropriate, and carries a large truth-that the condition of God’s speaking of peace is our firm adherence to Him. Once more the psalmist uses his favourite word "turn." God had turned the captivity; He had turned Himself from His anger; the psalmist had prayed Him to turn or restore the people, and to turn and revive them, and now He warns against turning them again to folly. There is always danger of relapse in those who have experienced God’s delivering mercy. There is a blessed turning, when they are brought from the far-off land to dwell near God. But there is a possible fatal turning away from the Voice that speaks peace, and the Arm that brings salvation, to the old distance and bondage. Strange that any ears, which have heard the sweetness of His still small Voice whispering Peace should wish to stray where it cannot be heard! Strange that. the warning should ever be required, and tragic that it should so often be despised! After the introductory Psalms 85:8, the substance of what Jehovah spoke to the psalmist is proclaimed in the singer’s own words. The first assurance which the psalmist drew from the Divine word was that God’s salvation, the whole fulness of His delivering grace both in regard to external and in inward evils, is ever near to them that fear Him. "Salvation" here is to be taken in its widest sense. It means, negatively, deliverance from all possible evils, outward and inward; and, positively, endowment with all possible good, both for body and spirit. With such fulness of complete blessings, they, and they only, who keep near to God, and refuse to turn aside to foolish confidences, shall be enriched. That is the inmost meaning of what God said to the psalmist; and it is said to all. And that salvation being thus possessed, it would be possible for "glory"-i.e., the manifest presence of ‘God, as in the Shechinah-to tabernacle in the land. The condition of God’s dwelling with men is their acceptance of His salvation. That purifies hearts to be temples. The lovely personifications in Psalms 85:10-13 have passed into Christian poetry and art, but are not clearly apprehended when they are taken to describe the harmonious meeting and cooperation, in Christ’s great work, of apparently opposing attributes of the Divine nature. No such thoughts are in the psalmist’s mind. Lovingkindness and Faithfulness or Troth are constantly associated in Scripture as Divine attributes. Righteousness and Peace are as constantly united, as belonging to the perfection of human character. Psalms 85:10 seems to refer to the manifestation of God’s Lovingkindness and Faithfulness in its first clause, and to the exhibition of His people’s virtues and consequent happiness in its second. In all God’s dealings for His people, His Lovingkindness blends with Faithfulness. In all His people’s experience Righteousness and Peace are inseparable. The point of the assurance in Psalms 85:10 is that heaven and earth are blended in permanent amity, These four radiant angels "dwell in the land." Then, in Psalms 85:11, there comes a beautiful inversion of the two pairs of personifications, of each of which one member only reappears. Troth or Faithfulness, which in Psalms 85:10 came into view principally as a Divine attribute, in Psalms 85:11 is conceived of as a human virtue. It "springs out of the earth"-that is produced among men. All human virtue is an echo of the Divine, and they who have received into their hearts the blessed results of God’s Faithfulness will bring forth in their lives fruits like it in kind. Similarly, Righteousness, which in Psalms 85:10 was mainly viewed as a human excellence, here appears as dwelling in and looking down from heaven, like a gracious angel smiling on the abundance of Faithfulness which springs from earth. Thus "the bridal of the earth and sky" is set forth in these verses. The same idea is further presented in Psalms 85:12, in its most general, form. God gives that which is good, both outward and inward blessings, and, thus fructified by bestowments from above, earth yields her increase. His gifts precede men’s returns. Without sunshine and rain there are no harvests. More widely still, God gives first before He asks. He does not gather where He has not strawed, nor reap what He has not sown. Nor does He only sow, but He "blesses the springing thereof"; and to Him should the harvest be rendered. He gives before we can give. Isaiah 45:8 is closely parallel, representing in like manner the cooperation of heaven and earth, in the new world of Messianic times. In Psalms 85:13 the thought of the blending of heaven and earth, or of Divine attributes as being the foundation and parents of their human analogues, is still more vividly expressed. Righteousness, which in Psalms 85:10 was regarded as exercised by men, and in Psalms 85:11 as looking down from heaven, is now represented both as a herald preceding God’s royal progress, and as following in His footsteps. The last clause is rendered in different ways, which all have the same general sense. Probably the rendering above is best: "Righteousness shall make His footsteps a way"-that is, for men to "walk in. All God’s workings among men, which are poetically conceived as His way, have stamped on them Righteousness. That strong angel goes before Him to clear a path for Him, and trace the course which He shall take. That is the imaginative expression of the truth-that absolute. inflexible Righteousness guides all the Divine acts. But the same Righteousness, which precedes, also follows Him, and points His footsteps as the way for us. The incongruity of this double position of God’s herald makes the force of the thought greater. It is the poetical embodiment of the truth, that the perfection of man’s character and conduct lies in his being an "imitator of God," and that, however different in degree, our righteousness must be based on His. What a wonderful thought that is, that the union between heaven and earth is so close that God’s path is our way! How deep into the foundation of ethics the psalmist’s glowing vision pierces! How blessed the assurance that God’s Righteousness is revealed from heaven to make men righteous! Our psalm needs the completion, which tells of that gospel in which "the Righteousness of God from faith is revealed for faith." In Jesus the "glory" has tabernacled among men. He has brought heaven and earth together. In Him God’s Lovingkindness and Faithfulness have become denizens of earth, as never before. In Him heaven has emptied its choicest good on earth. Through Him our barrenness and weeds are changed into harvests of love, praise, and service. In Him the Righteousness of God is brought near; and, trusting in Him, each of us may tread in His footsteps, and have His Righteousness fulfilled in us "who walk, not after the flesh, but after the spirit." Psalms 86:1-17 THIS psalm is little more than a mosaic of quotations and familiar phrases of petition. But it is none the less individual, nor is the psalmist less heavily burdened, or less truly beseeching and trustful, because he casts his prayer into well-worn words. God does not give "originality" to every devout man; and He does not require it as a condition of accepted prayer. Humble souls, who find in more richly endowed men’s words the best expression of their own needs, may be encouraged by such a psalm. Critics may think little of it, as a mere cento: but God does not refuse to bow His ear, though He is asked to do so in borrowed words. A prayer full of quotations may be heartfelt, and then it will be heard and answered. This psalmist has not only shown his intimate acquaintance with earlier devotional words, but he has woven his garland with much quiet beauty, and has blended its flowers into a harmony of colour all his own. There is no fully developed strophical arrangement, but there is a discernible flow of thought, and the psalm may be regarded as falling into three parts. The first of these (Psalms 86:1-5) is a series of petitions, each supported by a plea. The petitions are the well-worn ones which spring from universal need, and there is a certain sequence in them. They begin with "Bow down Thine ear," the first of a suppliant’s desires, which, as it were, clears the way for those which follow. Trusting that he will not ask in vain, the psalmist then prays that God would "keep" his soul as a watchful guardian or sentry does, and that, as the result of such care, he may be saved from impending perils. Nor do his desires limit themselves to deliverance. They rise to more inward and select manifestations of God’s heart of tenderness, for the prayer "Be gracious" asks for such, and so goes deeper into the blessedness of the devout life than the preceding. And the crown of all these requests is "Rejoice the soul of Thy servant," with the joy which flows from experience of outward deliverance and of inward whispers of God’s grace, heard in the silent depths of communion with Him. It matters not that every petition has parallels in other psalms, which this singer is quoting. His desires are none the less his, because they have been shared by a company of devout souls before him. His expression of them is none the less his, because his very words have been uttered by others. There is rest in thus associating oneself with an innumerable multitude who have "cried to God and been lightened." The petition in Psalms 86:1 is like that in Psalms 55:2. Psalms 86:2 sounds like a reminiscence of Psa 25:20; Psalms 86:3 closely resembles Psalms 57:1. The pleas on which the petitions are grounded are also beautifully wreathed together. First, the psalmist asks to be heard because he is afflicted and poor. (compare Psalms 11:17) Our need is a valid plea with a faithful God. The sense of it drives us to Him; and our recognition of poverty and want must underlie all faithful appeal to Him. The second plea is capable of two interpretations. The psalmist says that he is Chasid; and that word is by some commentators taken to mean one who exercises, and by others one who is the subject of, Chesed-i.e., lovingkindness. As has been already remarked on Psalms 4:3, the passive meaning-i.e., one to whom God’s lovingkindness is shown-is preferable. Here it is distinctly better than the other. The psalmist is not presenting his own character as a plea, but urging God’s gracious relation to him, which, once entered on, pledges God to unchanging continuance in manifesting His lovingkindness. But though the psalmist does not plead his character, he does, in the subsequent pleas, present his faith, his daily and day-long prayers, and his lifting of his desires, aspirations, and whole self above the trivialities of earth to set them on God. These are valid pleas with Him. It cannot be that trust fixed on Him should be disappointed, nor that cries perpetually rising to His ears should be unanswered, nor that a soul stretching its tendrils heavenward should fail to find the strong stay, round which it can cling and climb. God owns the force of such appeals, and delights to be moved to answer, by the spreading before Him of His servant’s faith and longings. But all the psalmist’s other pleas are merged at last in that one contained in Psalms 86:5, where he gazes on the revealed Name of God, and thinks of Him as He had been described of old, and as this suppliant delights to set to his seal that he has found. Him to be-good and placable, and rich in lovingkindness. God is His own motive, and Faith can find nothing mightier to urge with God, nor any surer answer to its own doubts to urge with itself, than the unfolding of all that lies in the Name of the Lord. These pleas, like the petitions which they support, are largely echoes of older words. "Afflicted and poor" comes, as just noticed, from Psalms 40:17. The designation of "one whom God favours" is from Psalms 4:3, "Unto Thee do I lift up my soul" is taken verbatim from Psalms 25:1. The explication of the contents of the Name of the Lord, like the fuller one in Psalms 86:15, is based upon Exodus 34:6. Psalms 86:6-13 may be taken together, as the prayer proper, to which Psalms 86:1-5 are introductory. In them there is first, a repetition of the cry for help, and of the declaration of need (Psalms 86:6-7); then a joyful contemplation of God’s unapproachable majesty and works, which insure the ultimate recognition of His Name by all nations (Psalms 86:8-10); then a profoundly and tenderly spiritual prayer for guidance and consecration-wants more pressing still than outward deliverance (Psalms 86:11); and, finally, as in so many psalms, anticipatory thanksgivings for deliverance yet future, but conceived of as present by vivid faith. Echoes of earlier psalms sound through the whole; but the general impression is not that of imitation, but of genuine personal need and devotion. Psalms 86:7 is like Psalms 17:6 and other passages; Psalms 86:8 a is from Exodus 15:11; Psalms 86:8 b is modelled on Deuteronomy 3:24; Psalms 86:9, on Psalms 22:27; Psalms 86:11 a, - on Psalms 27:11; Psalms 86:11 b, on Psalms 26:3; "Sheol beneath" is from Deuteronomy 32:22. But, withal, there are unity and progress in this cento of citations. The psalmist begins with reiterating his cry that God would hear, and in Psalms 86:7 advances to the assurance that He will. Then in Psalms 86:8-10 he turns from all his other pleas to dwell on his final one (Psalms 86:5) of the Divine character. As, in the former verse, he had rested his calm hope on God’s willingness to help. so now he strengthens himself, in assurance of art answer, by the thought of God’s unmatched power, the unique majesty of His works and His sole Divinity. Psalms 86:8 might seem to assert only Jehovah’s supremacy above other gods of the heathen; but Psalms 86:10 shows that the psalmist speaks the language of pure Monotheism. Most naturally the prophetic assurance that all nations shall come and worship Him is deduced from His sovereign power and incomparableness. It cannot be that "the nations whom Thou hast made" shall forever remain ignorant of the hand that made them. Sooner or later that great character shall be seen by all men in its solitary elevation; and universal praise shall correspond to His sole Divinity. The thought of God’s sovereign power carries the psalmist beyond remembrance of his immediate outward needs, and stirs higher desires in him. Hence spring the beautiful and spiritual petitions of Psa 86:11, which seek for clearer insight into God’s will concerning the psalmist’s conduct, breathe aspirations after a "walk" in that God-appointed way and in "Thy troth," and culminate in one of the sweetest and deepest prayers of the Psalter: "Unite my heart to fear Thy Name." There, at least, the psalmist speaks words borrowed from no other, but springing fresh from his heart’s depths. Jeremiah 32:39 is the nearest parallel, and the commandment Deuteronomy 6:5, to love God "with all thine heart," may have been in the psalmist’s mind; but the prayer is all his own. He has known the misery of a divided heart, the affections and purposes of which are drawn in manifold directions, and are arrayed in conflict against each other. There is no peace nor blessedness, neither is any nobility of life possible, without whole-hearted devotion to one great object; and there is no object capable of evoking such devotion or worthy to receive it, except Him who is "God alone." Divided love is no love. It must be "all in all, or not at all." With deep truth, the command to love God with all the heart is based upon his Unity-"Hear, O Israel: The Lord Thy God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart". (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) The very conception of religion requires that it should be exclusive, and should dominate the whole nature. It is only God who is great enough to fill and engage all our capacities. Only the mass of the central sun is weighty enough to make giant orbs its satellites, and to wheel them in their courses. There is no tranquility nor any power in lives frittered away on a thousand petty loves. The river that breaks into a multitude of channels is sucked up in the sand without reaching the ocean, and has no force in its current to scour away obstructions. Concentration makes strong men; consecration makes saints. "This one thing I do" is the motto of all who have done anything worthy. "Unite my heart to fear Thy Name" is the prayer of all whose devotion is worthy of its object, and is the source of joy and power to themselves. The psalmist asks for a heart made one with itself in the fear of God, and then vows that, with that united heart, he will praise his delivering God. As in many other psalms, he anticipates the answers to his prayers, and in Psalms 86:13 speaks of God’s lovingkindness as freshly manifested to him, and of deliverance from the dismal depths of the unseen world, which threatened to swallow him up. It seems more in accordance with the usage in similar psalms to regard Psalms 86:13 as thus recounting, with prophetic certainty, the coming deliverance as if it were accomplished, than to suppose that in it the psalmist is ‘falling back on former instances of God’s rescuing grace. In the closing part (Psalms 86:14-17), the psalmist describes more precisely his danger. He is surrounded by a rabble rout of proud and violent men, whose enmity to him is, as in so many of the psalms of persecuted singers, a proof of their forgetfulness of God. Right against this rapid outline of his perils, he sets the grand unfolding of the character of God in Psalms 86:15. It is still fuller than that in Psalms 86:5, and like it, rests on Exodus 34:1-35. Such juxtaposition is all that is needed to show how little he has to fear from the hostile crew. On one hand are they in their insolence and masterfulness, eagerly hunting after his life; on the other is God with His infinite pity and lovingkindness. Happy are they who can discern high above dangers and foes the calm presence of the only God, and, with hearts undistracted and undismayed, can oppose to all that assails them the impenetrable shield of the Name of the Lord! It concerns our peaceful fronting of the darker facts of life, that we cultivate the habit of never looking at dangers or sorrows without seeing the helping God beside and above them. The psalm ends with prayer for present help. If God is, as the psalmist has seen Him to be, "full of compassion and gracious," it is no presumptuous petition that the streams of these perfections should be made to flow towards a needy suppliant. "Be gracious to me" asks that the light which pours through the universe, may fall on one heart, which is surrounded by earth-born darkness. As in the introductory verses, so in the closing petitions, the psalmist grounds his prayer principally on God’s manifested character, and secondarily on his own relation to God. Thus in Psalms 86:16 he pleads that he is God’s servant, and "the son of Thy handmaid". (compare Psalms 116:16) That expression does not imply any special piety in the psalmist’s mother, but pleads his hereditary relation as servant to God, or, in other words, his belonging by birth to Israel, as a reason for his prayers being heard. His last petition for "a sign" does not necessarily mean a miracle, but a clear manifestation of God’s favour, which might be as unmistakably shown by an everyday event as by a supernatural intervention. To the devout heart, all common things are from God, and bear witness for Him. Even blind eyes and hard hearts may be led to see and feel that God is the helper and comforter of humble souls who trust in Him. A heart that is made at peace with itself by the fear of God, and has but one dominant purpose and desire, will long for God’s mercies, not only because they have a bearing on its own outward well-being, but because they will demonstrate that it is no vain thing to wait on the Lord, and may lead some, who cherished enmity to God’s servant and alienation from Himself, to learn the sweetness of His Name and the security of trust in Him. Psalms 87:1-7 ONE clear note sounds in this remarkable psalm. Its single theme is the incorporation of ancestral foes and distant nations with the people of God. Aliens are to be enrolled as home-born citizens of Jerusalem. In modern words, the vision of a universal Church, a brotherhood of humanity, shines radiant before the seer. Other psalmists: and prophets have like insight into the future expansion of the nation, but this psalm stands alone in the emphasis which it places upon the idea of birth into the rights of citizenship. This singer has had granted to him a glimpse of two great truths-the universality of the Church, and the mode of entrance into it by reception of a new life. To what age of Israel he belonged is uncertain. The mention of Babylon as among the enemies who have become fellow citizens favours the supposition of a post-exilic date, which is also supported by resemblances to Isaiah 40:1-31; Isaiah 41:1-29; Isaiah 42:1-25; Isaiah 43:1-28; Isaiah 44:1-28; Isaiah 45:1-25; Isaiah 46:1-13. The structure is simple. The psalm is divided by Selah into two strophes, to which a closing verse is appended. The first strophe bursts abruptly into rapturous praise of Zion, the beloved of God. The second predicts the gathering of all nations into her citizenship, and the closing verse apparently paints the exuberant joy of the festal crowds, who shall then throng her streets. The abrupt beginning of the first strophe offends some commentators, who have tried to smooth Psalms 87:1 into propriety and tameness, by suggesting possible preliminary clauses, which they suppose to have dropped out. But there is no canon which forbids a singer, with the rush of inspiration, either poetic or other, on him, to plunge into the heart of his theme. Psalms 87:1 may be construed, as in the A.V. and R.V. (text), as a complete sentence, but is then somewhat feeble. It is better to connect it with Psalms 87:2, and to regard "His foundation upon the holy mountains" as parallel with "the gates of Zion," and as, like that phrase, dependent on the verb "loves." Hupfeld, indeed, proposes to transfer "Jehovah loves" from the beginning of Psa 87:2, where it now stands, to the end of Psa 87:1, supplying the verb mentally in the second clause. He thus gets a complete parallelism:- His foundation upon the holy mountains Jehovah loves, The gates of Zion before all the dwellings of Jacob. But this is not necessary; for the verb may as well be supplied to the first as to the second clause. The harshness of saying "His foundation," without designating the person to whom the pronoun refers, which is extreme if Psalms 87:1 is taken as a separate sentence, is diminished when it is regarded as connected with Psalms 87:2, in which the mention of Jehovah leaves no doubt as to whose the "foundation" is. The psalmist’s fervent love for Jerusalem is something more than national pride. It is the apotheosis of that emotion, clarified and hallowed into religion. Zion is founded by God Himself. The mountains on which it stands are made holy by the Divine dwelling. On their heads shines a glory before which the light that lies on the rock crowned by the Parthenon or on the seven hills of Rome pales. Not only the Temple mountain is meant, but the city is the psalmist’s theme. The hills, on which it stands, are emblems of the firmness of its foundation in the Divine purpose, on which it reposes. It is beloved of God, and that, as the form of the word "loves" shows, with an abiding affection. The "glorious things" which are spoken of Zion may be either the immediately following Divine oracle, or, more probably, prophetic utterances such as many of those in Isaiah, which predict its future glory. The Divine utterance which follows expresses the substance of these. So far, the psalm is not unlike other outpourings in praise of Zion, such as Psalms 48:1-14. But, in the second strophe, to which the first is introductory, the singer strikes a note all his own. There can be no doubt as to who is the speaker in Psalms 87:4. The abrupt introduction of a Divine Oracle accords with a not infrequent usage in the Psalter, which adds much to the solemnity of the words. If we regard the "glorious things" mentioned in Psalms 87:3 as being the utterances of earlier prophets, the psalmist has had his ears purged to hear God’s voice, by meditation on and sympathy with these. The faithful use of what God has said prepares for hearing further disclosures of His lips. The enumeration of nations in Psalms 87:4 carries a great lesson. First comes the ancient enemy, Egypt, designated by the old name of contempt (Rahab, i.e. pride), but from which the contempt has faded; then follows Babylon, the more recent inflicter of many miseries, once so detested, but towards whom animosity has died down. These two, as the chief oppressors, between whom, like a piece of metal between hammer and anvil, Israel’s territory lay, are named first, with the astonishing declaration that God will proclaim them as among those who know Him. That knowledge, of course, is not merely intellectual, but the deeper knowledge of personal acquaintance or friendship-a knowledge of which love is an element, and which is vital and transforming. Philistia is the old neighbour and foe, which from the beginning had hung on the skirts of Israel, and been ever ready to utilise her disasters and add to them. Tyre is the type of godless luxury and inflated material prosperity, and, though often in friendly alliance with Israel, as being exposed to the same foes which harassed her, she was as far from knowing God as the other nations were. Cush, or Ethiopia, seems mentioned as a type of distant peoples, rather than because of its hostility to Israel. God points to these nations-some of them near, some remote, some powerful and some feeble, some hereditarily hostile and some more or less amicable with Israel-and gives forth the declaration concerning them, "This one was born there." God’s voice ceases, and in Psalms 87:5 the psalmist takes up the wonderful promise which he has just heard. He slightly shifts his point of view: for while the nations that were to be gathered into Zion were the foremost figures in the Divine utterance, the Zion into which they are gathered is foremost in the psalmist’s, in Psalms 87:5. Its glory, when thus enriched by a multitude of new citizens, bulks in his eyes more largely than their blessedness. Another shade of difference between the two verses is that, in the former, the ingathering of the peoples is set forth as collective or national incorporation, and, in the latter, -as the expression "man after (or by) man" suggests, -individual accession is more clearly foretold. The establishment of Zion, which the psalmist prophesies, is the result of her reinforcement by these new citizens. The grand figure of Psa 87:6 pictures God as taking a census of the whole world; for it is "the peoples" whom He numbers. As He writes down each name, He says concerning it, "This one was born there." That list of citizens is "the Book of the Living." So "the end of all history is that Zion becomes the metropolis of all people" (Delitzsch). Three great truths had dawned on this psalmist, though their full light was reserved for the Christian era. He had been led to apprehend that the Jewish Church would expand into a world wide community. If one thinks of the gulfs of hatred and incompatibility which parted the peoples in his day, his clear utterance of that great truth, the apprehension of which so far transcended his time, and the realisation of which so far transcends ours, will surely be seen to be due to a Divine breath. The broadest New Testament expression of Universalism does not surpass the psalmist’s confident certainty. "There is neither Greek nor Jew, barbarian, Scythian," says no more than he said. More remarkable still is his conception of the method by which the nations should be gathered in to Zion. They are to be "born there." Surely there shines before the speaker some glimmering ray of the truth that incorporation with the people of God is effected by the communication of a new life, a transformation of the natural, which will set men in new affinities, and make them all brethren, because all participant of the same wondrous birth. It would be anachronism to read into the psalm the clear Christian truth "Ye must be born again," but it would be as false a weakening of its words to refuse to see in them the germ of that truth. The third discovery which the psalmist has made, or rather the third revelation which he has received, is that of the individual accession of the members of the outlying nations. The Divine voice, in Psalms 87:4, seems to speak of birth into citizenship as national; but the psalmist, in Psalms 87:6, represents Jehovah as writing the names of individuals in the burgess roll, and of saying in regard to each, as He writes, "This one was born there." In like manner, in Psalms 87:5, the form of expression is "Man after man," which brings out the same thought, with the addition that there is an unbroken series of new citizens. It is by accession of single souls that the population of Zion is increased. God’s register resolves the community into its component units. Men are born one by one, and one by one they enter the true kingdom. In the ancient world the community was more than the individual. But in Christ the individual acquires new worth, while the bands of social order are not thereby weakened, but made more stringent and sacred. The city, whose inhabitants have one by one been won by its King, and have been knit to Him in the sacred depths of personal being, is more closely "compact together" than the mechanical aggregations which call themselves civil societies. The unity of Christ’s kingdom does not destroy national characteristics any more than it interferes with individual idiosyncrasies. The more each constituent member is himself, the more will he be joined to others, and contribute his special mite to the general wealth and well-being. Psalms 87:7 is, on any interpretation, extremely obscure, because so abrupt and condensed. But probably the translation adopted above, though by no means free from difficulty or doubt, brings out the meaning which is most in accordance with the preceding. It may be supposed to flash vividly before the reader’s imagination the picture of a triumphal procession of rejoicing citizens, singers as well as dancers, who chant, as they advance, a joyous chorus in praise of the city, in which they have found all fountains of joy and satisfaction welling up for their refreshment and delight. Psalms 88:1-18 A PSALM which begins with "God of my salvation" and ends with "darkness" is an anomaly. All but unbroken gloom broods over it, and is densest at its close. The psalmist is so "weighed upon by sore distress," that he has neither definite petition for deliverance nor hope. His cry to God is only a long-drawn complaint, which brings no respite from his pains nor brightening of his spirit. But yet to address God as the God of his salvation, to discern His hand in the infliction of sorrows, is the operation of true though feeble faith. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him," is the very spirit of this psalm. It stands alone in the Psalter, which would be incomplete as a mirror of phases of devout experience, unless it had one psalm expressing trust which has ceased to ask or hope for the removal of life-long griefs, but still clasps God’s hand even in the "darkness." Such experience is comparatively rare, and is meant to be risen above. Therefore this psalm stands alone. But it is not unexampled, and all moods of the devout life would not find lyrical expression in the book unless this deep note was once sounded. It is useless to inquire what was the psalmist’s affliction. His language seems to point to physical disease of long continuance and ever threatening a fatal termination; but in all probability sickness is a symbol here, as so often. What racked his sensitive spirit matters little. The cry which his pains evoked is what we are concerned with. There is little trace of strophical arrangement, and commentators differ much in their disposition of the parts of the psalm. But we venture to suggest a principle of division which has not been observed, in the threefold recurrence of "I cry" or "I call," accompanied in each case by direct address to Jehovah. The resulting division into three parts gives, first, the psalmist’s description of his hopeless condition as, in effect, already dead (Psalms 88:1-8); second, an expostulation with God on the ground that, if the psalmist is actually numbered with the dead, he can no more be the object of Divine help, nor bring God praise (Psalms 88:9-12); and, third, a repetition of the thoughts of the first part with slight variation and addition (Psalms 88:13-18). The central portion of the first division is occupied with an expansion of the thought that the psalmist is already as good as dead (Psalms 88:3-6). The condition of the dead is drawn with a powerful hand and the picture is full of solemn grandeur and hopelessness. It is preceded in Psalms 88:1-2, by an invocation which has many parallels in the psalms, but which here is peculiarly striking. This saddest of them all has for its first words the Name Which ought to banish sadness. He who can call on Jehovah as the God of his salvation possesses a charm which has power to still agitation, and to flush despair with some light of hope as from an unrisen sun. But this poet feels no warmth from the beams, and the mists surge up, if not to hide the light, yet to obscure it. All the more admirable, then, the persistence of his cry; and all the more precious the lesson that Faith is not to let present experience limit its conceptions. God is none the less the God of salvation and none the less to be believed to be so though no consciousness of His saving power blesses the heart at the moment. Psalms 88:1 b is obscure. Psalms 22:2 and other places suggest that the juxtaposition of day and night is meant to express the continuity of the psalmist’s prayer; but, as the text now stands, the first part of the clause can only mean "In the time (day) when I cry," and the second has to be supplemented so as to read "[My cry comes] before Thee." This gives a poor meaning, and there is probability in the slight emendation on the word for day; which is required in order to make it an adverb of time equivalent to "In the day," as in the passage already quoted. Another emendation, adopted by Graetz, Bickell, and Cheyne, changes "God of" into "my God," and "my salvation" into "I cry" (the same word as in Psalms 88:13), and attaches "by day" to the first clause. The result is, - Jehovah, my God, I cry to Thee by day, I call in the night before Thee. The changes are very slight and easy, and the effect of them is satisfactory: The meaning of the verse is obvious, whether the emendation is accepted or not. The gain from the proposed change is dearly purchased by the loss of that solitary expression of hope in the name of "God of my salvation," the one star which gleams for a moment through a rift in the blackness. With "For" in Psalms 88:3 the psalmist begins the dreary description of his affliction, the desperate and all but deadly character of which he spreads before God as a reason for hearing his prayer. Despair sometimes strikes men dumb, and sometimes makes them eloquent. The sorrow which has a voice is less crushing than that which is tongueless. This overcharged heart finds relief in self-pitying depicting of its burdens, and in the exercise of a gloomy imagination, which draws out in detail the picture of the feebleness, the recumbent stillness, the seclusion and darkness of the dead. They have "no strength." Their vital force has ebbed away, and they are but as weak shadows, having an impotent existence, which does not deserve to be called life. The remarkable expression of Psa 88:5 "free among the dead," is to be interpreted in the light of Job 3:19, which counts it as one blessing of the grave, that "there the servant is free from his master." But the psalmist thinks that that "freedom" is loathsome, not desirable, for it means removal from the stir of a life, the heaviest duties and cares of which are better than the torpid immunity from these, which makes the state of the dead a dreary monotony. They lie stretched out and motionless. No ripple of cheerful activity stirs that stagnant sea. One unvarying attitude is theirs. It is not the stillness of rest which prepares for work, but of incapacity of action or of change. They are forgotten by Him who remembers all that are. They are parted from the guiding and blessing influence of the Hand that upholds all being. In some strange fashion they are and yet are not. Their death has a simulacrum of life. Their shadowy life is death. Being and non-being may both be predicated of them. The psalmist speaks in riddles; and the contradictions in his speech reflect his dim knowledge of that place of darkness. He looks into its gloomy depths, and he sees little but gloom. It needed the resurrection of Jesus to flood these depths with light, and to show that the life beyond may be fuller of bright activity than life here-a state in which vital strength is increased beyond all earthly experience, and wherein God’s all-quickening hand grasps more closely, and communicates richer gifts than are attainable in that death which sense calls life. Psalms 88:7 traces the psalmist’s sorrows to God. It breathes not complaint but submission, or, at least, recognition of His hand; and they who, in the very paroxysm of their pains, can say, "It is the Lord," are not far from saying, "Let Him do what seemeth Him good," nor from the peace that comes from a compliant will. The recognition implies, too, consciousness of sin which has deserved the "wrath" of God, and in such consciousness lies the germ of blessing. Sensitive nerves may quiver, as they feel the dreadful weight with which that wrath presses down on them, as if to crush them; but if the man lies still, and lets the pressure do its work, it will not force out his life, but only his evil, as foul water is squeezed from cloth. Psalms 88:7 b is rendered by Delitzsch "And Thy billows Thou pressest down," which gives a vivid picture; but "billows" is scarcely the word to use for the downward rushing waters of a cataract, and the ordinary rendering, adopted above, requires only natural supplements. Psalms 88:8 approaches nearer to a specification of the psalmist’s affliction. If taken literally, it points to some loathsome disease, which had long clung to him, and made even his, friends shrink from companionship, and thus had condemned him to isolation. All these details suggest leprosy, which, if referred to here, is most probably to be taken, as sickness is in several psalms, as symbolic of affliction. The desertion by friends is a common feature in the psalmist’s complaints. The seclusion as in a prison house is, no doubt, appropriate to the leper’s condition, but may also simply refer to the loneliness and compulsory inaction arising from heavy trials. At all events, the psalmist is flung back friendless on himself, and hemmed in, so that he cannot expatiate in the joyous bustle of life. Blessed are they who, when thus situated, can betake themselves to God, and find that He does not turn away! The consciousness of His loving presence has. not yet lighted the psalmist’s soul; but the clear acknowledgment that it is God who has put the sweetness of earthly companionship beyond his reach is, at least, the beginning of the happier experience, that God never makes a solitude round a soul without desiring to fill it with Himself. If the recurring cry to Jehovah in Psalms 88:9 is taken, as we have suggested it should be, as marking a new turn in the thoughts, the second part of the psalm will include Psalms 88:9-12. Psalms 88:10-12 are apparently the daily prayer referred to in Psalms 88:9. They appeal to God to preserve the psalmist from the state of death, which he has just depicted himself as having in effect already entered, by the consideration which is urged in other psalms as a reason for Divine intervention (Psalms 6:5; Psalms 30:9, etc.) -namely, that His power had no field for its manifestation in the grave, and that He could draw no revenue of praise from the pale lips that lay silent there. The conception of the state of the dead is even more dreary than that in Psalms 88:4-5. They are "shades," which word conveys the idea of relaxed feebleness. Their dwelling is Abaddon-i.e., "destruction,"-"darkness," "the land of forgetfulness" whose inhabitants remember not, nor are remembered, either by God or man. In that cheerless region God had no opportunity to show His wonders of delivering mercy, for monotonous immobility was stamped upon it, and out of that realm of silence no glad songs of praise could sound. Such thoughts are in startling contrast with the hopes that sparkle in some psalms (such as Psalms 16:10, etc.), and they show that clear, permanent assurance of future blessedness was net granted to the ancient Church. Nor could there be sober certainty of it until after Christ’s resurrection. But it is also to be noticed that this psalm neither affirms nor denies a future resurrection. It does affirm continuous personal existence after death, of however thin and shadowy a sort. It is not concerned with what may lie far ahead, but is speaking of the present state of the dead, as it was conceived of, at the then stage of revelation, by a devout soul, in its hours of despondency. The last part (Psalms 88:13-18) is marked, like the two preceding, by the repetition of the name of Jehovah, and of the allusion to the psalmist’s continual prayer. It is remarkable, and perhaps significant, that the time of prayer should here be "the morning," whereas in Psalms 88:1 it was, according to Delitzsch, the night, or, according to the other rendering, day and night. The psalmist had asked in Psalms 88:2 that his prayer might enter into God’s presence; he now vows that it will come to meet Him. Possibly some lightening of his burden may be hinted at by the reference to the time of his petition. Morning is the hour of hope, of new vigour, of a fresh beginning, which may not be only a prolongation of dreary yesterdays. But if there is any such alleviation, it is only for a moment, and then the cloud settles down still more heavily. But one thing the psalmist has won by his cry. He now longs to know the reason for his affliction. He is confident that God is righteous when He afflicts, and, heavy as his sorrow is, he has passed beyond mere complaint concerning it, to the wish to understand it. The consciousness that it is chastisement, occasioned by his own evil, and meant to purge that evil away, is present, in a rudimentary form at least in that cry, "Why castest Thou off my soul?" If sorrow has brought a man to offer that prayer, it has done its work, and will cease before long, or, if it lasts, will be easier to bear, when its meaning and purpose are clear. But the psalmist rises to such a height but for a moment, though his momentary attaining it gives promise that he will, by degrees, be able to remain there permanently. It is significant that the only direct naming of Jehovah, in addition to the three which accompany the references to his prayers, is associated with this petition for enlightenment. The singer presses close to God in his faith that His hardest blows are not struck at random, and that His administration has for its basis, not caprice but reason, moved by love and righteousness. Such a cry is never offered in vain, even though it should be followed, as it is here, by plaintive reiterations of the sufferer’s pains. These are now little more than a summary of the first part. The same idea of being in effect dead even while alive is repeated in Psalms 88:15, in which the psalmist wails that from youth he had been but a dying man, so close to him had death seemed, or so death-like bad been his life. He has borne God’s terrors till be is distracted. The word rendered "I am distracted" is only used here, and consequently is obscure. Hupfeld and others deny that it is a word at all (he calls it an "Unwort"), and would read another which means to become torpid. The existing text is defended by Delitzsch and others, who take the word to mean to be weakened in mind or bewildered. The meaning of the whole seems to be as rendered above. But it might also be translated, as by Cheyne, "I bear Thy terrors, my senses must fail." In Psalms 88:16 the word for wrath is in the plural, to express the manifold outbursts of that deadly indignation. The word means literally heat; and we may represent the psalmist’s thought as being that the wrath shoots forth many fierce tongues of licking flame, or, like a lava stream, pours out in many branches. The word rendered "Cut me off" is anomalous, and is variously translated annihilate, extinguish, or as above. The wrath which was a fiery flame in Psalms 88:16 is an overwhelming flood in Psalms 88:17. The complaint of Psa 88:8 recurs in Psalms 88:18, in still more tragic form. All human sympathy and help are far away, and the psalmist’s only familiar friend is darkness. There is an infinitude of despair in that sad irony. But there is a gleam of hope, though faint and far, like faint daylight seen from the innermost recesses of a dark tunnel, in his recognition that his dismal solitude is the work of God’s hand; for, if God has made a heart or a life empty of human love, it is that He may Himself fill it with His own sweet and all-compensating presence. Psalms 89:1-52 THE foundation of this psalm is the promise in 2 Samuel 7:1-29 which guaranteed the perpetuity of the Davidic kingdom. Many of the characteristic phrases of the prophecy recur here-e.g., the promises that the children of wickedness shall not afflict, and that the transgressions of David’s descendants should be followed by chastisement only, not by rejection. The contents of Nathan’s oracle are first given in brief in Psalms 89:3-4 -" like a text," as Hupfeld says-and again in detail and with poetic embellishments in Psalms 89:19-37. But these glorious promises are set in sharpest contrast with a doleful present, which seems to contradict them. They not only embitter it, but they bewilder faith, and the psalmist’s lament is made almost a reproach of God, whose faithfulness seems imperilled by the disasters which had fallen on the monarchy and on Israel. The complaint and petitions of the latter part are the true burden of the psalm, to which the celebration of Divine attributes in Psalms 89:1-18, and the expansion of the fundamental promise in Psalms 89:19-37, are meant to lead up. The attributes specified are those of Faithfulness (Psalms 89:1, Psalms 89:2, Psalms 89:5, Psalms 89:8, Psalms 89:14) and of Power, which render the fulfilment of God’s promises certain. By such contemplations the psalmist would fortify himself against the whispers of doubt, which were beginning to make themselves heard in his mind, and would find in the character of God both assurance that His promise shall not fail, and a powerful plea for his prayer that it may not fail. The whole tone of the psalm suggests that it was written when the kingdom was toppling to ruin, or perhaps even after its fall. Delitzsch improbably supposes that the young king, whom loss and shame make an old man (Psalms 89:45), is Rehoboam, and that the disasters which gave occasion to the psalm were those inflicted by the Egyptian king Shishak. Others see in that youthful prince Jehoiachin, who reigned for three months, and was then deposed by Nebuchadnezzar, and whom Jeremiah has bewailed. (Jeremiah 22:24-29) But all such conjectures are precarious. The structure of the psalm can scarcely be called strophical. There are three well-marked turns in the flow of thought, -first, the hymn to the Divine attributes (Psalms 89:1-18); second, the expansion of the promise, which is the basis of the monarchy (Psalms 89:19-37); and, finally, the lament and prayer, in view of present afflictions, that God would be true to His attributes and promises (Psalms 89:38-51). For the most part the verses are grouped in pairs, which are occasionally lengthened into triplets. The psalmist begins with announcing the theme of his song-the Lovingkindness and Faithfulness of God. Surrounded by disasters, which seem in violent contradiction to God’s promise to David, he falls back on thoughts of the Mercy which gave it and the Faithfulness which will surely accomplish it. The resolve to celebrate these in such circumstances argues a faith victorious over doubts, and putting forth energetic efforts to maintain itself. This bird can sing in midwinter. True, the song has other notes than joyous ones, but they, too, extol God’s Lovingkindness and Faithfulness, even while they seem to question them. Self-command, which insists on a man’s averting his thoughts from a gloomy outward present to gaze on God’s loving purpose and unalterable veracity, is no small part of practical religion. The psalmist will sing, because he said that these two attributes were ever in operation, and lasting as the heavens. "Lovingkindness shall be built up forever," its various manifestations being conceived as each being a stone in the stately building which is in continual course of progress through all ages, and can never be completed, since fresh stones will continually be laid as long as God lives and pours forth His blessings. Much less can it ever fall into ruin, as impatient sense would persuade the psalmist that it is doing in his day. The parallel declaration as to God’s Faithfulness takes the heavens as the type of duration and immobility, and conceives that attribute to be eternal and fixed, as they are. These convictions could not burn in the psalmist’s heart without forcing him to speak. Lover, poet, and devout man, in their several ways, feel the same necessity of utterance. Not every Christian can "sing," but all can and should speak. They will, if their faith is strong. The Divine promise, on which the Davidic throne rests, is summed up in the abruptly introduced pair of verses (Psalms 89:3-4). That promise is the second theme of the psalm; and just as, in some great musical composition, the overture sounds for the first time phrases which are to be recurrent and elaborated in the sequel, so, in the four first verses of the psalm, its ruling thoughts are briefly put. Psalms 89:1-2, stand first, but are second in time to Psalms 89:3-4. God’s oracle preceded the singer’s praise. The language of these two verses echoes the original passage in 2 Samuel 7:1-29, as in "David My servant, establish, forever, build, " the last three of which expressions were used in Psalms 89:2, with a view to their recurrence in Psalms 89:4. The music keeps before the mind the perpetual duration of David’s throne. In Psalms 89:6-18 the psalmist sets forth the Power and Faithfulness of God, which insure the fulfilment of His promises. He is the incomparably great and terrible God, who subdues the mightiest forces of nature and tames the proudest nations (Psalms 89:9-10), who is Maker and Lord of the world (Psalms 89:11-12), who rules with power, but also with righteousness, faithfulness, and grace (Psalms 89:13-14), and who, therefore, makes His people blessed and safe (Psalms 89:15-18). Since God is such a God, His promise cannot remain unfulfilled. Power and willingness to execute it to the last tittle are witnessed by heaven and earth, by history and experience. Dark as the present may be, it would, therefore, be folly to doubt for a moment. The psalmist begins his contemplations of the glory of the Divine nature with figuring the very heavens as vocal with His praise. Not only the object but the givers of that praise are noteworthy. The heavens are personified, as in Psalms 19:1-14; and from their silent depths comes music. There is One higher, mightier, older, more unperturbed, pure, and enduring than they, whom they extol by their lustre which they owe to Him. They praise God’s "wonder" (which here means, not so much His marvellous acts, as the wonderfulness of His Being, His incomparable greatness and power), and His Faithfulness, the two guarantees of the fulfilment of His promises. Nor are the visible heavens His only praisers. The holy ones, sons of the mighty-i.e., the angels-bow before Him who is high above their holiness and might, and own Him for God alone. With Psalms 89:9 the hymn descends to earth, and magnifies God’s Power and Faithfulness as manifested there. The sea is, as always, the emblem of rebellious tumult. Its insolence is calmed by Him. And the proudest of the nations, such as Rahab ("Pride," a current name for Egypt), had cause to own His power, when He brought the waves of the sea over her hosts, thus in one act exemplifying His sovereign sway over both nature and nations. He is Maker, and therefore Lord, of heaven and earth. In all quarters of the world His creative hand is manifest, and His praise sounds. Tabor and Hermon may stand, as the parallelism requires, for west and east, though some suppose that they are simply named as conspicuous summits. They "shout for joy at Thy Name," an expression like that used in Psalms 89:16, in reference to Israel. The poet thinks of the softly swelling Tabor with its verdure, and of the lofty Hermon with its snows, as sharing in that gladness, and praising Him to whom they owe their beauty and majesty. Creation vibrates with the same emotions which thrill the poet. The sum of all the preceding is gathered up in Psalms 89:13, which magnifies the might of God’s arm. But more blessed still for the psalmist, in the midst of national gloom, is the other thought of the moral character of God’s rule. His throne is broad based upon the sure foundation of righteousness and justice. The pair of attributes always closely connected-namely, Lovingkindness and Troth or Faithfulness-are here, as frequently, personified. They "go to meet Thy face"-that is, in order to present themselves before Him. "The two genii of the history of redemption (Psalms 43:3) stand before His countenance, like attendant maidens, waiting the slightest indication of His will" (Delitzsch). Since God is such a God, His Israel is blessed, whatever its present plight. So the psalmist closes the first part of his song, with rapturous celebration of the favoured nation’s prerogatives. "The festal shout" or "the trumpet blast" is probably the music at the festivals (Numbers 23:21; Numbers 31:6), and "those who know" it means "those who are familiar with the worship of this great God." The elements of their blessedness are then unfolded. "They walk in the light of Thy face." Their outward life is passed in continual happy consciousness of the Divine presence, which becomes to them a source of gladness and guidance. "In Thy Name do they exult all the day." God’s self-manifestation, and the knowledge of Him which arises therefrom, become the occasion of a calm, perpetual joy, which is secure from change, because its roots go deeper than the region where change works. "In Thy righteousness shall they be exalted." Through God’s strict adherence to His covenant, not by any power of their own, shall they be lifted above foes and fears. "The glory of their strength art Thou." In themselves they are weak, but Thou, not any arm of flesh, art their strength, and by possession of Thee they are not only clothed with might, but resplendent with beauty. Human power is often unlovely; God-given strength is, like armour inlaid with gold ornament as well as defence. "In Thy favour our horn shall be exalted." The psalmist identifies himself at last with the people, whose blessedness he has so glowingly celebrated. He could keep up the appearance of distinction no longer. "They" gives place to "we" unconsciously, as his heart swells with the joy which he paints. Depressed as he and his people are for the moment, he is sure that there is lifting up. The emblem of the lifted horn is common, as expressive of victory. The psalmist is confident of Israel’s triumph, because he is certain that the nation, as represented by and, as it were, concentrated in its king, belongs to God, who will not lose what is His. The rendering of Psa 89:18 in the A.V. cannot be sustained. "Our shield" in the first clause is parallel with "our king" in the second, and the meaning of both clauses is that the king of Israel is God’s, and therefore secure. That ownership rests on the promise to David, and on it in turn is rested the psalmist’s confidence that Israel and its king are possessed of a charmed life, and shall be exalted, however now abject and despondent. The second part (Psalms 89:19-37) draws out in detail, and at some points with heightened colouring, the fundamental prophecy by Nathan. It falls into two parts, of which the former (Psalms 89:19-27) refers more especially to the promises given to David, and the second (Psalms 89:28-37) to those relating to his descendants. In Psalms 89:19 "vision" is quoted from 2 Samuel 7:17; "then" points back to the period of giving the promise; "Thy favoured one" is possibly Nathan, but more probably David. The Masoretic reading, however, which is followed by many ancient versions, has the plural "favoured ones." which Delitzsch takes to mean Samuel and Nathan. "Help" means the help which, through the king, comes to his people, and especially, as appears from the use of the word "hero," aid in battle. But since the selection of David for the throne is the subject in hand, the emendation which reads for "help" crown recommends itself as probable. David’s prowess, his humble origin, and his devotion to God’s service are brought into view in Psalms 89:19-20, as explaining and magnifying the Divine choice. His dignity is all from God. Consequently, as the next pair of verses goes on to say, God’s protecting hand will ever be with him, since He cannot set a man in any position and fall to supply the gifts needed for it. Whom He chooses He will protect. Sheltered behind that strong hand, the king will be safe from all assaults. The word rendered "steal upon" in Psalms 89:22 is doubtful, and by some is taken to mean to exact, as a creditor does, but that gives a flat and incongruous turn to the promise. For Psalms 89:22 b compare 2 Samuel 7:10. Victory over all enemies is next promised in Psalms 89:23-25, and is traced to the perpetual presence with the king of God’s Faithfulness and Lovingkindness, the two attributes of which so much has been sung in the former part. The manifestation of God’s character (i.e., His Name) will secure the exaltation of David’s horn-i.e., the victorious exercise of his God-given strength. Therefore a wide extension of his kingdom is promised in Psalms 89:25, from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates and its canals, on which God will lay the king’s hand-i.e., will put them in his possession. The next pair of verses (Psalms 89:26-27) deals with the inward side of the relations of God and the king. On David’s part there will be child-like love, with all the lowliness of trust and obedience which lies in the recognition of God’s fatherhood, and on God’s part there will be the acknowledgment of the relation, and the adoption of the king as His "firstborn," and therefore, in a special sense, beloved and exalted. Israel is called by the same name in other places, in reference to its special prerogative amongst the nations. The national dignity is concentrated in the king, who stands to other monarchs as Israel to other nations, and is to them "Most High," the august Divine title, which here may possibly mean that David is to the rulers of the earth an image of God. The reciprocal relation of Father and Son is not here conceived in its full inwardness and depth as Christianity knows it, for it has reference to office rather than to the person sustaining the office, but it is approximating thereto. There is an echo of the fundamental passage in Psalms 89:26. (Compare 2 Samuel 7:14) From Psalms 89:28 onwards the psalmist turns to expand the promises to David’s line. His words are mainly a poetical paraphrase of 2 Samuel 7:14. Transgression shall indeed be visited with chastisement, which the fatherly relation requires, as the original passage indicates by the juxtaposition of the promise "I will be his Father," and the declaration "I will chasten him." But it will be chastisement only, and not rejection. The unchangeableness of God’s loving purpose is very strongly and beautifully put in Psalms 89:33, in which the twin attributes of Lovingkindness and Faithfulness are again blended as the ground of sinful men’s hope. The word rendered above "break off" occasions a difficulty, both in regard to its form and its appropriateness in this connection. The clause is a quotation from 2 Samuel 7:15, and the emendation which substitutes for break off the more natural word used there namely, withdraw-is to be preferred. In Psalms 89:33 b the paradoxical expression of being false to My faithfulness suggests the contradiction inherent in the very thought that He can break His plighted word. The same idea is again put in striking form in Psalms 89:34: "I will not profane My covenant," even though degenerate sons of David "profane" God’s statute. His word, once spoken, is inviolable. He is bound by His oath. He has given His holiness as the pledge of His word, and, till that holiness wanes, those utterances which He has sealed with it cannot be recalled. The certainty that sin does not alter God’s promise is not traced here to His placableness, but to His immutable nature, and to the obligations under which He is laid by His own word and acts. That unchangeableness is a rock foundation, on which sinful men may build their certitude. It is much to know that they cannot sin away God’s mercy nor exhaust His gentle long suffering. It is even more to know that His holiness guarantees that they cannot sin away His promises, nor by any breach of His commandments provoke Him to break His covenant. The allusions to the ancient promise are completed in Psalms 89:36-37, with the thought of the perpetual continuance of the Davidic line and kingdom, expressed by the familiar comparison of its duration to that of the sun and moon. Psalms 89:37 b is best understood as above. Some take the faithful witness to be the moon; others the rainbow, and render, as in the A.V. and R.V., "and as the faithful witness." But the designation of the moon as a witness is unexampled and almost unintelligible. It is better to take the clause as independent, and to suppose that Jehovah is His own witness, and that the psalmist here speaks in his own person, the quotation of the promises being ended. Cheyne encloses the clause in a parenthesis and compares Revelation 3:14. The third part begins with Psalms 89:38, and consists of two portions, in the first of which the psalmist complains with extraordinary boldness of remonstrance, and describes the contrast between these lofty promises and the sad reality (Psalms 89:38-45), and, in the second prays for the removal of the contradiction of God’s promise by Israel’s affliction, and bases this petition on the double ground of the shortness of life, and the dishonour done to His own Name thereby. The expostulation very nearly crosses the boundary of reverent remonstrance, when it charges God with having Himself "abhorred" or, according to another rendering, "made void" His covenant, and cast the king’s crown to the ground. The devastation of the kingdom is described, in Psalms 89:40-41, in language borrowed from Psalms 80:12. The pronouns grammatically refer to the king, but the ideas of the land and the monarch are blended. The next pair of verses (Psalms 89:42-43) ventures still further in remonstrance, by charging God with taking the side of Israel’s enemies and actively intervening to procure its defeat. The last verse pair of this part (Psalms 89:44-45) speaks more exclusively of the king, or perhaps of the monarchy. The language, especially in Psalms 89:45 a, seems most naturally understood of an individual. Delitzsch takes such to be its application, and supposes it to describe the king as having been prematurely aged by calamity; while Hupfeld, with Hengstenberg and others, prefer to regard the expression as lamenting that the early days of the monarchy’s vigour had so soon been succeeded by decrepitude like that of age. That family, which had been promised perpetual duration and dominion, has lost its lustre, and is like a dying lamp. That throne has fallen to the ground, which God had promised should stand forever. Senile weakness has stricken the monarchy and disaster, which makes it an object of contempt, wraps it like a garment, instead of the royal robe. A long, sad wail of the music fixes the picture on the mind of the hearer. Then follows prayer, which shows how consistent with true reverence and humble dependence is the outspoken vigour of the preceding remonstrance. The boldest thoughts about the apparent contradiction of God’s words and deeds are not too bold, if spoken straight to Him, and not muttered against Him, and if they lead the speaker to prayer for the removal of the anomaly. In Psalms 89:46 there is a quotation from Psalms 79:5. The question "How long" is the more imploring because life is so short. There is but a little while during which it is possible for God to manifest Himself as full of Lovingkindness and Faithfulness. The psalmist lets his feelings of longing to see for himself the manifestation of these attributes peep forth for a moment, in that pathetic sudden emergence of "I" instead of "we" or "men," in Psalms 89:47 a. His language is somewhat obscure, but the sense is clear. Literally; the words read "Remember-I, what a transitoriness." The meaning is plain enough, when it is observed that, as Perowne rightly says, "I" is placed first for the sake of emphasis. It is a tender thought that God may be moved to show forth His Lovingkindness by remembrance of the brief period within which a man’s opportunity of beholding it is restricted, and by the consideration that so soon he will have to look on a grimmer sight, and "see death." The music again comes in with a melancholy cadence, emphasising the sadness which enwraps man’s short life, if no gleams of God’s lovingkindness fall on its fleeting days. The last three verses (Psalms 89:49-51) urge yet another plea-that of the dishonour accruing to God from the continuance of Israel’s disasters. A second "Remember" presents that plea, which is preceded by the wistful question "Where are Thy former lovingkindnesses?" The psalmist looks back on the glories of early days, and the retrospect is bitter and bewildering. That these were sworn to David in God’s faithfulness staggers him, but he makes the fact a plea with God. Then in Psalms 89:50-51, he urges the insults and reproaches which enemies hurled against him and against "Thy servants," and therefore against God. Psalms 89:50 b is obscure. To "bear in the bosom" usually implies tender care, but here can only mean sympathetic participation. The psalmist again lets his own personality appear for a moment, while he identifies himself as a member of the nation with "Thy servants" and "Thine anointed." The last words of the clause are so obscure that there must apparently have been textual corruption. If the existing text is retained, the object of the verb I bear must be supplied from a, -and this clause will run, "I bear in my bosom the reproach of all the many peoples." But the collocation of all and many is harsh, and the position of many is anomalous. An ingenious conjecture, adopted by Cheyne from Bottcher and Bickell, and accepted, by Baethgen, reads for "all, many peoples, the shame of the peoples, which gives a good meaning, and may be received as at all events probable, and expressing the intent of the psalmist. Insolent conquerors and their armies triumph over the fallen Israel, and "reproach the footsteps" of the dethroned king or royal line-i.e., they pursue him with their taunts, wherever he goes. These reproaches cut deep into the singer’s heart; but they glance off from the earthly objects and strike the majesty of Heaven. God’s people cannot be flouted without His honour being touched. Therefore the prayer goes up, that the Lord would remember these jeers which mocked Him as well as His afflicted people, and would arise to action on behalf of His own Name. His Lovingkindness and Faithfulness, which the psalmist has magnified, and on which he rests his hopes, are darkened in the eyes of men and even of His own nation by the calamities, which give point to the rude gibes of the enemy. Therefore the closing petitions beseech God to think on these reproaches, and to bring into act once more His Lovingkindness, and to vindicate His Faithfulness, which He had sealed to David by His oath. Psalms 89:52 is no part of the original psalm, but is the closing doxology of Book III. Psalms 90:1-17 THE sad and stately music of this great psalm befits the dirge of a world. How artificial and poor, beside its restrained emotion and majestic simplicity, do even the most deeply felt strains of other poets on the same themes sound! It preaches man’s mortality in immortal words. In its awestruck yet trustful gaze on God’s eternal being, in its lofty sadness, in its archaic directness, in its grand images so clearly cut and so briefly expressed, in its emphatic recognition of sin as the occasion of death, and in its clinging to the eternal God who can fill fleeting days with ringing gladness, the psalm utters once for all the deepest thoughts of devout men. Like the God whom it hymns it has been "for generation after generation" an asylum. The question of its authorship has a literary interest, but little more. The arguments against the Mosaic authorship, apart from those derived from the as yet unsettled questions in regard to the Pentateuch, are weak. The favourite one, adduced by Cheyne after Hupfeld and others, is that the duration of human life was greater, according to the history, in Moses’ time than seventy years; but the prolonged lives of certain conspicuous persons in that period do not warrant a conclusion as to the average length of life; and the generation that fell in the wilderness can clearly not have lived beyond the psalmist’s limit. The characteristic Mosaic tone in regarding death as the wages of sin, the massive simplicity and the entire absence of dependence on other parts of the Psalter which separate this psalm from almost all the others of the fourth part, are strongly favourable to the correctness of the superscription. Further, the section Psalms 90:7-12 is distinctly historical, and is best understood as referring not to mankind in general, but to Israel; and no period is so likely to have suggested such a strain of thought as that when the penalty of sin was laid upon the people, and they were condemned to find graves in the wilderness. But however the question of authorship may be settled, the psalm is "not of an age, but for all time." It falls into three parts, of which the two former contain six verses each, while the last has but five. In the first section (Psalms 90:1-6), the transitoriness of men is set over against the eternity of God; in the second, (Psalms 90:7-12) that transitoriness is traced to its reason, namely sin; and in the third (Psalms 90:13-17), prayer that God would visit His servants is built upon both His eternity and their fleeting days. The short Psalms 90:1 blends both the thoughts which are expanded in the following verses, while in it the singer breathes awed contemplation of the eternal God as the dwelling place or asylum of generations that follow each other, swift and unremembered, as the waves that break on some lonely shore. God is invoked as "Lord," the sovereign ruler, the name which connotes His elevation and authority. But, though lofty, He is not inaccessible. As some ancestral home shelters generation after generation of a family, and in its solid strength stands unmoved, while one after another of its somewhile tenants is borne forth to his grave, and the descendants sit in the halls where centuries before their ancestors sat. God is the home of all who find any real home amidst the fluctuating nothings of this shadowy world. The contrast of His eternity and our transiency is not bitter, though it may hush us into wisdom, if we begin with the trust that He is the abiding abode of short-lived man. For this use of dwelling place compare Deuteronomy 33:27. What God has been to successive generations results from what He is in Himself before all generations. So Psalms 90:2 soars to the contemplation of His absolute eternity, stretching boundless on either side of "this bank and shoal of time"-"From everlasting to everlasting Thou art God"; and in that name is proclaimed His self-derived strength, which, being eternal, is neither derived from nor diminished by time, that first gives to and then withdraws from, all creatures their feeble power. The remarkable expressions for the coming forth of the material world from the abyss of Deity regard creation as a birth. The Hebrew text reads in Psalms 90:2 b as above, "Thou gavest birth to"; but a very small change in a single vowel gives the possibly preferable reading which preserves the parallelism of a passive verb in both clauses, "Or the earth and the world were brought forth." The poet turns now to the other member of his antithesis. Over against God’s eternal Being is set the succession of man’s generations, which has been already referred to in Psalms 90:1. This thought of successiveness is lost unless Psalms 90:3 b is understood as the creative fiat which replaces by a new generation those who have been turned back to dust. Death and life, decay and ever-springing growth, are in continual alternation. The leaves, which are men, drop; the buds swell and open. The ever-knitted web is being ever run down and woven together again. It is a dreary sight, unless one can say with our psalm, "Thou turnest Thou sayest, Return." Then one understands that it is not aimless or futile. If a living Person is behind the transiencies of human life, these are still pathetic and awe kindling, but not bewildering. In Psalms 90:3 a there is clear allusion to Genesis 3:19. The word rendered "dust" may be an adjective taken as neuter -that which is crushed, i.e. dust; or, as others suppose, a substantive -crushing; but is probably best understood in the former sense. The psalm significantly uses the word for man which connotes frailty, and in b the expression "sons of man" which suggests birth. The psalmist rises still higher in Psalms 90:4. It is much to say that God’s Being is endless, but it is more to say that He is raised above Time, and that none of the terms in which men describe duration have any meaning for Him. A thousand years, which to a man seem so long, are to Him dwindled to nothing, in comparison with the eternity of His being. As Peter has said, the converse must also be true, and "one day be with the Lord as a thousand years." He can crowd a fulness of action into narrow limits. Moments can do the work of centuries. The longest and shortest measures of time are absolutely equivalent, for both are entirely inapplicable, to His timeless Being. But what has this great thought to do here, and how is the "For" justified? It may be that the psalmist is supporting the representation of Psa 90:2, God’s eternity, rather than that of Psa 90:3, man’s transiency; but, seeing that this verse is followed by one which strikes the same note as Psalms 90:3, it is more probable that here, too, the dominant thought is the brevity of human life. It never seems so short, as when measured against God’s timeless existence. So, the underlying thought of Psa 90:3, namely, the brevity of man’s time, which is there illustrated by the picture of the endless flux of generations, is here confirmed by the thought that all measures of time dwindle to equal insignificance with Him. The psalmist next takes his stand on the border moment between today and yesterday. How short looks the day that is gliding away into the past! "A watch in the night" is still shorter to our consciousness, for it passes over us unnoted. The passing of mortal life has hitherto been contemplated in immediate connection with God’s permanence, and the psalmist’s tone has been a wonderful blending of melancholy and trust. But in Psalms 90:5 the sadder side of his contemplations becomes predominant. Frail man, frail because sinful, is his theme. The figures which set forth man’s mortality are grand in their unelaborated brevity. They are like some of Michaelangelo’s solemn statues. "Thou floodest them away"-bold metaphor, suggesting the rush of a mighty stream, bearing on its tawny bosom crops, household goods, and corpses, and hurrying with its spoils to the sea. "They become a sleep." Some would take this to mean falling into the sleep of death; others would regard life as compared to a sleep-"for before we are rightly conscious of being alive, we cease to live" (Luther, quoted by Cheyne); while others find the point of comparison in the disappearance, without leaving a trace behind, of the noisy generations, sunk at once into silence, and "occupying no more space on the scroll of Time than a night’s sleep" (so Kay). It is tempting to attach "in the morning" to "a sleep," but the recurrence of the expression in Psalms 90:7 points to the retention of the present division of clauses, according to which the springing grass greets the eye at dawn, as if created by a night’s rain. The word rendered "springs afresh" is taken in two opposite meanings, being by some rendered passes away, and by others as above. Both meanings come from the same radical notion of change, but the latter is evidently the more natural and picturesque here, as preserving, untroubled by any intrusion of an opposite thought, the cheerful picture of the pastures rejoicing, in the morning sunshine, and so making more impressive the sudden, sad change wrought by evening, when all the fresh green blades and bright flowers lie turned already into brown hay by the mower’s scythe and the fierce sunbeams. "So passeth, in the passing of an hour, Of mortal life, the leaf, the bud, the flower." The central portion of the psalm (Psalms 90:7-12) narrows the circle of the poet’s vision to Israel, and brings out the connection between death and sin. The transition from truths of universal application is marked by the use of we and us, while the past tenses indicate that the psalm is recounting history. That transitoriness assumes a still more tragic aspect, when regarded as the result of the collision of God’s "wrath" with frail man. How can such stubble but be wasted into ashes by such fire? And yet this is the same psalmist who has just discerned that the unchanging Lord is the dwelling place of all generations. The change from the previous thought of the eternal God as the dwelling place of frail men is very marked in this section, in which the destructive anger of God is in view. But the singer felt no contradiction between the two thoughts, and there is none. We do not understand the full blessedness of believing that God is our asylum, till we understand that He is our asylum from all that is destructive in Himself; nor do we know the significance of the universal experience of decay and death, till we learn that it is not the result of our finite being, but of sin. That one note sounds on in solemn persistence through these verses, therein echoing the characteristic Mosaic lesson, and corresponding with the history of the people in the desert. In Psalms 90:7 the cause of their wasting away is declared to be God’s wrath, which has scattered them as in panic. (Psalms 48:5) The occasion of that lightning flash of anger is confessed in Psalms 90:8 to be the sins which, however hidden, stand revealed before God. The expression, for "the light of Thy face" is slightly different from the usual one, a word being employed which means a luminary, and is used in Genesis 1:1-31 for the heavenly bodies The ordinary phrase is always used as expressing favour and blessing; but there is an illumination, as from an all-revealing light, which flashes into all dark corners of human experience, and "there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." Sin smitten by that light must die. Therefore, in Psalms 90:9, the consequence of its falling on Israel’s transgressions is set forth. Their days vanish as mists before the sun, or as darkness glides out of the sky in the morning. Their noisy years are but as a murmur, scarce breaking the deep silence, and forgotten as soon as faintly heard. The psalmist sums up his sad contemplations in Psalms 90:10, in which life is regarded as not only rigidly circumscribed within a poor seventy or, at most, eighty years, but as being, by reason of its transitoriness, unsatisfying and burdensome. The "pride" which is but trouble and vanity is that which John calls "the pride of life," the objects which, apart from God, men desire to win, and glory in possessing. The self-gratulation would be less ridiculous or tragic, if the things which evoke it lasted longer, or we lasted longer to possess them. But seeing that. they swiftly pass and we fly too, surely it is but "trouble" to fight for what is "vanity" when won, and what melts away so surely and soon. Plainly, then, things being so, man’s wisdom is to seek to know two things-the power of God’s anger, and the measure of his own days. But alas for human levity and bondage to sense, how few look beyond the external, or lay to heart the solemn truth that God’s wrath is inevitably operative against sin, and bow few have any such just conception of it as to lead to reverential awe, proportioned to the Divine character which should evoke it! Ignorance and inoperative knowledge divide mankind between them, and but a small remnant have let the truth plough deep into their inmost being and plant there holy fear of God. Therefore, the psalmist prays for himself and his people, as knowing the temptations to inconsiderate disregard and to inadequate feeling of God’s opposition to sin, that His power would take untaught hearts in hand and teach them this-to count their days. Then we shall bring home, as from a ripened harvest field, the. best fruit which life can yield, "a heart of wisdom," which, having learned the power of God’s anger, and the humber of our days, turns itself to the eternal dwelling place, and no more is sad, when it sees life ebbing away, or the generations moving in unbroken succession into the darkness. The third part (Psalms 90:13-17) gathers all the previous meditations into a prayer, which is peculiarly appropriate to Israel in the wilderness, but has deep meaning for all God’s servants. We note the invocation of God by the covenant name "Jehovah," as contrasted with the "Lord," of Psalms 90:1. The psalmist, draws nearer to God, and feels the closer bond of which that name is the pledge. His prayer is the more urgent, by reason of the brevity of life. So short is his time that he cannot afford to let God delay in coming to him and to his fellows. "How long?" comes pathetically from lips which have been declaring that their time of speech is so short. This is not impatience, but wistful yearning, which, even while it yearns, leaves God to settle His own time, and, while it submits, still longs. Night has wrapped Israel, but the psalmist’s faith "awakes the morning," and he prays that its beams may soon dawn and Israel be satisfied with the longed for lovingkindness; (compare Psalms 30:5) for life at its longest is but brief, and he would fain have what remains of it be lit with sunshine from God’s face. The only thing that will secure life-long gladness is a heart satisfied with the experience of God’s love. That will make morning in mirk midnight; that will take all the sorrow out of the transiency of life. The days which are filled with God are long enough to satisfy us; and they who have Him for their own will be "full of days," whatever the number of these may be. The psalmist believes that God’s justice has in store for His servants joys and blessings proportioned to the duration of their trials. He is not thinking of any future beyond the grave; but his prayer is a prophecy, which is often fulfilled even in this life and always hereafter. Sorrows rightly borne here are factors determining the glory that shall follow. There is a proportion between the years of affliction and the millenniums of glory. But the final prayer, based upon all these thoughts of God’s eternity and man’s transitoriness, is not for blessedness, but for vision and Divine favour on work done for Him. The deepest longing of the devout heart should be for the manifestation to itself and others of God’s work. The psalmist is not only asking that God would put forth His acts in interposition for himself and his fellow servants, but also that the full glory of these far-reaching deeds may be disclosed to their understandings as well as experienced in their lives. And since he knows that "through the ages an increasing purpose runs," he prays that coming generations may see even more glorious displays of Divine power than his contemporaries have done. How the sadness of the thought of fleeting generations succeeded by new ones vanishes when we think of them all as, in turn, spectators and possessors of God’s "work"! But in that great work we are not to be mere spectators. Fleeting as our days are, they are ennobled by our being permitted to be God’s tools; and if "the work of our hands" is the reflex or carrying on of His working we can confidently ask that, though we the workers have to pass, it may be "established." "In our embers may be" something that doth live," and that life will not all die which has done the will of God, but it and its doer will "endure forever." Only there must be the descent upon us of "the graciousness" of God before there can flow from us "deeds which breed not shame," but outlast the perishable earth and follow their doers into the eternal dwelling place. The psalmist’s closing prayer reaches further than he knew. Lives on which the favour of God has come down like a dove, and in which His will has been done, are not flooded away, nor do they die into silence like a whisper, but carry in themselves the seeds of immortality, and are akin to the eternity of God. Psalms 91:1-16 THE solemn sadness of Psa 90:1-17 is set in strong relief by the sunny brightness of this song of happy, perfect trust in the Divine protection. The juxtaposition is, however, probably due to the verbal coincidence of the same expression being used in both psalms in reference to God. In Psalms 90:1 and in Psalms 91:9, the somewhat unusual designation "dwelling place" is applied to Him. and the thought conveyed in it runs through the whole of this psalm. An outstanding characteristic of it is its sudden changes of persons; "He," "I," and "thou" alternate in a bewildering fashion, which has led to many attempts at explanation. One point is clear-that, in Psalms 91:14-16, God speaks, and that He speaks of, not to, the person who loves and clings to Him. At Psalms 91:14, then, we must suppose a change of speaker, which is unmarked by any introductory formula. Looking back over the remainder of the psalm, we find that the bulk of it is addressed directly to a person who must be the same as is spoken of in the Divine promises. The "him" of the latter is the "thee" of the mass of the psalm. But this mass is broken at two points by clauses alike in meaning, and containing expressions of trust (Psalms 91:2, Psalms 91:9 a). Obviously the unity of the psalm requires that the "I" of these two verses should be the "thou" of the great portion of the psalm, and the "he" of the last part. Each profession of trust will then be followed by assurances of safety thence resulting. Psalms 91:2 having for pendant Psalms 91:3-8, and Psalms 91:9 a being followed by Psalms 91:9-13. The two utterances of personal faith are substantially identical, and the assurances which succeed them are also in effect the same. It is by some supposed that this alternation of persons is due simply to the poet expressing partly "his own feelings as from himself, and partly as if they were uttered by another" (Perowne after Ewald). But that is not an explanation of the structure; it is only a statement of the structure which requires to be explained. No doubt the poet is expressing his own feelings or convictions all through the psalm: but why does he express them in this singular fashion? The explanation which is given by Delitzsch, Stier, Cheyne and many others takes the psalm to be antiphonal, and distributes the parts among the voices of a choir, with some variations in the allocation. But Psalms 91:1 still remains a difficulty. As it stands it sounds flat and tautological, and hence attempts have been made to amend it, which will presently be referred to. But it will fall into the general antiphonal scheme, if it is regarded as a prelude, sung by the same voice which twice answers the single singer with choral assurances that reward his trust. We, then. have this distribution of parts: Psalms 91:1, the broad statement of the blessedness of dwelling with God; Psalms 91:2, a solo, the voice of a heart encouraged thereby to exercise personal trust; Psalms 91:3-8, answers, setting forth the security of such a refuge; Psalms 91:9 a, solo, reiterating with sweet monotony the word of trust; Psalms 91:9-13, the first voice or chorus repeating with some variation the assurances of Psa 91:3-8; and Psalms 91:14-16, God’s acceptance of the trust and confirmation of the assurances. There is, no doubt, difficulty in Psalms 91:1; for, if it is taken as an independent sentence, it sounds tautological, since there is no well-marked difference between "sitting" and "lodging," nor much between "secret place" and "shadow." But possibly the idea of safety is more strongly conveyed by "shadow" than by "secret place," and the meaning of the apparently identical assertion may be, that he who quietly enters into communion with God thereby passes into His protection; or, as Kay puts it, "Loving faith on man’s part shall be met by faithful love on God’s part." The LXX changes the person of "will say" in Psalms 91:2, and connects it with Psalms 91:1 as its subject ("He that sits, that lodges shall say"). Ewald, followed by Baethgen and others, regards Psalms 91:1 as referring to the "I" of Psalms 91:2, and translates "Sitting I say." Hupfeld, whom Cheyne follows, cuts the knot by assuming that "Blessed is" has dropped out at the beginning of Psa 91:1, and so gets a smooth run of construction and thought ("Happy is he who sits who lodges who says). It is suspiciously smooth, obliterates the characteristic change of persons, of which the psalm has other instances, and has no support except the thought that the psalmist would have saved us a great deal of trouble, if he had only been wise enough to have written so. The existing text is capable of a meaning in accordance with his general drift. A wide declaration like that of Psa 91:1 fittingly preludes the body of the song, and naturally evokes the pathetic profession of faith which follows. According to the accents, Psalms 91:2 is to be read "I will say. To Jehovah [belongs] my refuge," etc. But it is better to divide as above. Jehovah is the refuge. The psalmist speaks to Him, with the exclamation of yearning trust. He can only call Him by precious names, to use which, in however broken a fashion, is an appeal that goes straight to His heart, as it comes straight from the suppliant’s. The singer lovingly accumulates the Divine names in these two first verses. He calls God "Most High," "Almighty," when he utters the general truth of the safety of souls that enter His secret place; but, when he speaks his own trust, he addresses Jehovah, and adds to the wide designation "God" the little word "my," which claims personal possession of His fulness of Deity. The solo voice does not say much, but it says enough. There has been much underground work before that clear jet of personal "appropriating faith" could spring into light. We might have looked for a Selah here, if this psalm had stood in the earlier books, but we can feel the brief pause before the choral answer comes in Psalms 91:3-8. It sets forth in lofty poetry the blessings that such a trust secures. Its central idea is that of safety. That safety is guaranteed in regard to two classes of dangers-those from enemies, and those from diseases. Both are conceived of as divided into secret and open perils. Psalms 91:3 proclaims the trustful soul’s immunity, and Psalms 91:4 beautifully describes the Divine protection which secures it. Psalms 91:5-6 expand the general notion of safety into defence against secret and open foes and secret and open pestilences; while Psalms 91:7-8 sum up the whole, in a vivid contrast between the multitude of victims and the man sheltered in God, and looking out from his refuge on the wide-rolling flood of destruction. As in Psalms 18:5, Death is represented as a "fowler" into whose snares men heedlessly flutter, unless held back by God’s delivering hand. The mention of pestilence in Psalms 91:3 somewhat anticipates the proper order, as the same idea recurs in its appropriate place in Psalms 91:6. Hence the rendering "word," which requires no consonantal change is adopted from the LXX by several moderns. But that is feeble, and the slight irregularity of a double mention of one form of peril, which is naturally suggested by the previous reference to Death, is not of much moment. The beautiful description of God sheltering the trustful man beneath his pinions recalls Deuteronomy 32:11 and Psalms 17:8; Psalms 63:7. The mother eagle, spreading her dread wingover her eaglets, is a wonderful symbol of the union of power and gentleness. It would be a bold hand which would drag the fledglings from that warm hiding place and dare the terrors of that beak and claws. But this pregnant verse (Psalms 91:4) not only tells of the strong defence which God is, but also, in a word, sets in clear light man’s way of reaching that asylum. "Thou shalt take refuge." It is the word which is often vaguely rendered "trust," but which, if we retain its original signification, becomes illuminative as to what that trust is. The flight of the soul, conscious of nakedness and peril, to the safe shelter of God’s breast is a description of faith which, in practical value, surpasses much learned dissertation. And this verse adds yet another point to its comprehensive statements, when, changing the figure, it calls God’s Troth, or faithful adherence to His promises and obligations, our "shield and target." We have not to fly to a dumb God for shelter, or to risk anything upon a Peradventure. He has spoken, and His word is inviolable. Therefore, trust is possible. And between ourselves and all evil we may lift the shield of His Troth. His faithfulness is our sure defence, and Faith is our shield only in a secondary sense, its office being but to grasp our true defence, and to keep us well behind that. The assaults of enemies and the devastations of pestilence are taken in Psalms 91:5-6 as types of all perils. These evils speak of a less artificial stage of society than that in which our experience moves, but they serve us as symbols of more complex dangers besetting outward and inward life. "The terror of the night" seems best understood as parallel with the "arrow that flies by day," in so far as both refer to actual attacks by enemies. Nocturnal surprises were favourite methods of assault in early warfare. Such an explanation is worthier than the supposition that the psalmist means demons that haunt the night. In Psalms 91:6 pestilence is personified as stalking, shrouded in darkness, the more terrible because it strikes unseen. Psalms 91:6 b has been understood, as by the Targum and LXX, to refer to demons who exercise their power in noonday. But this explanation rests upon a misreading of the word rendered "devastates." The other translated "sickness" is only found, besides this place, in Deuteronomy 32:24 ("destruction") and Isaiah 28:2 ("a destroying storm," lit. a storm of destruction), and in somewhat different form in Hosea 13:14. It comes from a root meaning to cut, and seems here to be a synonym for pestilence. Baethgen sees in "the arrow by day" the fierce sunbeams, and in "the heat (as he renders) which rages at noonday" the poisonous simoom. The trustful man, sheltered in God, looks on while thousands fall round him, as Israel looked from their homes on the Passover night, and sees that there is a God that judges and recompenses evil-doers by evil suffered. Heartened by these great assurances, the single voice once more declares its trust. Psalms 91:9 a is best separated from b, though Hupfeld here again assumes that" thou hast said" has fallen out between "For" and "Thou." This second utterance of trust is almost identical with the first. Faith has no need to vary its expression. "Thou, Jehovah, art my refuge" is enough for it. God’s mighty name and its personal possession of all which that name means, as its own hiding place, are its treasures which it does not weary of recounting. Love loves to repeat itself. The deepest emotions, like song birds, have but two or three notes, which they sing over and over again all the long day through. He that can use this singer’s words of trust has a vocabulary rich enough. The responsive assurances (Psalms 91:9-13) are, in like manner, substantially identical with the preceding ones, but differences may be discerned by which these are heightened in comparison with the former. The promise of immunity is more general. Instead of two typical forms of danger, the widest possible exemption from all forms of it is declared in Psalms 91:10. No evil shall come near, no scourge approach, the "tent" of the man whose real and permanent "dwelling place" is Jehovah. There are much beauty and significance in that contrast of the two homes in which a godly man lives, housing, as far as his outward life is concerned, in a transitory abode, which tomorrow may be rolled up and moved to another camping place in the desert, but abiding in so far as his true being is concerned, in God, the permanent dwelling place through all generations. The transitory outward life has reflected on it some light of peaceful security from that true home. It is further noteworthy that the second group of assurances is concerned with active life, while the first only represented a passive condition of safety beneath God’s wing. In Psalms 91:11-12, His angels take the place of protectors, and the sphere in which they protect is "in all thy ways"-i.e., in the activities of ordinary life. The dangers there are of stumbling, whether that be construed as referring to outward difficulties or to temptations to sin. The perils, further specified in Psalms 91:13, correspond to those of the previous part in being open and secret: the lion with its roar and leap, the adder with its stealthy glide among the herbage and its unlooked-for bite. So, the two sets of assurances, taken together, cover the whole ground of life, both in its moments of hidden communion in the secret place of the Most High, and in its times of diligent discharge of duty on life’s common way. Perils of communion and perils of work are equally real, and equally may we be sheltered from them. God Himself spreads His wing over the trustful man, and sends His messengers to keep him, in all the paths appointed for him by God. The angels have no charge to take stones out of the way. Hinderances are good for us. Smooth paths weary and make presumptuous. Rough ones bring out our best and drive us to look to God. But His messengers have for their task to lift us on their palms over difficulties, not so that we shall not feel them to be difficult, but so that we shall not strike our foot against them. Many a man remembers the elevation and buoyancy of spirit which strangely came to him when most pressed by work or trouble. God’s angels were bearing him up. Active life is full of open and secret foes as well as of difficulties. He that keeps near to God will pass unharmed through them all, and, with a foot made strong and firm by God’s own power infused into it, will be able to crush the life out of the most formidable and the most sly assailants. "The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly." Finally, God Himself speaks, and confirms and deepens the previous assurances. That He is represented as speaking of, not to, His servant increases the majesty of the utterance, by seeming to call the universe to hear, and converts promises to an individual into promises to everyone who will fulfil the requisite conditions. These are threefold. God desires that men should cling to Him, know His name, and call on Him. The word rendered "cling" includes more than "setting love upon" one. It means to bind or knit oneself to anything, and so embraces the cleaving of a fixed heart, of a "recollected" mind, and of an obedient will. Such clinging demands effort: for every hand relaxes its grasp, unless ever and again tightened. He who thus clings will come to "know" God’s "name," with the knowledge which is born of experience, and is loving familiarity, not mere intellectual apprehension. Such clinging and knowledge will find utterance in continual converse with God, not only when needing deliverance, but in perpetual aspiration after Him. The promises to such a one go very deep and stretch very far. "I will deliver him." So the previous assurance that no evil shall come nigh him is explained and brought into correspondence with the facts of life. Evil may be experienced. Sorrows will come. But they will not touch the central core of the true life, and from them God wilt deliver, not only by causing them to cease, but by fitting us to bear. Clinging to Him, a man will be "drawn out of many waters," like Peter on the stormy lake. "I will set him on high" is more than a parallel promise to that of deliverance. It includes that; for a man lifted to a height is safe from the flood that sweeps through the valley, or from the enemies that ravage the plain. But that elevation, which comes from knowing God’s name, brings more than safety, even a life lived in a higher region than that. of things seen. "I will answer him." How can He fail to hear when they who trust Him cry? Promises, especially for the troubled, follow, which do not conflict with the earlier assurances, rightly understood. "I will be with him in trouble." God’s presence is the answer to His servant’s call. God comes nearer to devout and tried souls, as a mother presses herself caressingly closer to a weeping child. So, no man need add solitude to sadness, but may have God sitting with him, like Job’s friends, waiting to comfort him with true comfort. And His presence delivers from, and glorifies after, trouble borne as becomes God’s friend. The bit of dull steel might complain, if it could feel, of the pain of being polished, but the result is to make it a mirror fit to flash back the sunlight. "With length of days will I satisfy him" is, no doubt, a promise belonging more especially to Old Testament times; but if we put emphasis on "satisfy," rather than on the extended duration, it may fairly suggest that, to the trustful soul, life is long enough, whatever its duration, and that the guest, who has sat at God’s table here, is not unwilling to rise from it, when his time comes, being "satisfied with favour, and full of the goodness of the Lord." The vision of God’s salvation, which is set last, seems from its position in the series to point, however dimly, to a vision which comes after earth’s troubles and length of days. The psalmist’s language implies not a mere casual beholding, but a fixed gaze. Delitzsch renders "revel in My salvation" (English translation). Cheyne has "feast his eyes with." Such seeing is possession. The crown of God’s promises to the man who makes God his dwelling place is a full, rapturous experience of a full salvation, which follows on the troubles and deliverances of earth, and brings a more dazzling honour and a more perfect satisfaction. Psalms 92:1-15 differ in their arrangement of this psalm. Clearly, the first three verses are a prelude; and if these are left out of account, the remainder of the psalm consists of twelve verses, which fall into two groups of six each, the former of which mainly deals with the brief prosperity and final overthrow of the wicked, while the latter paints the converse truth of the security and blessedness of the righteous. Both illustrate the depth of God’s works and purposes, which is the psalmist’s theme. A further division of each of these six verses into groups of three is adopted by Delitzsch, and may be accepted. There will then be five strophes of three verses each, of which the first is introductory; the second and third, a pair setting forth the aspect of Providence towards the wicked; and the fourth and fifth, another pair. magnifying its dealings with the righteous. Perowne takes the eighth verse, which is distinguished by containing only one clause. as the kernel of the psalm, which is preceded by seven verses, constituting the first division, and followed by seven, making the second. But this arrangement, though tempting, wrenches Psalms 92:9 from its kindred Psalms 92:7. Psalms 92:1-3 are in any case introductory. In form they are addressed to Jehovah, in thankful acknowledgment of the privilege and joy of praise. In reality they are a summons to men to taste its gladness, and to fill each day and brighten every night by music of thanksgiving. The devout heart feels that worship is "good," not only as being acceptable to God and conformable to man’s highest duty, but as being the source of delight to the worshipper. Nothing is more characteristic of the Psalter than the joy which often dances and sings through its strains. Nothing affords a surer test of the reality of worship than the worshipper’s joy in it. With much significance and beauty, "Thy lovingkindness" is to be the theme of each morning, as we rise to a new day and find His mercy, radiant as the fresh sunshine, waiting to bless our eyes, and "Thy faithfulness" is to he sung in the night seasons, as we part from another day which has witnessed to His fulfilment of all His promises. The second strophe contains the reason for praise-namely, the greatness and depth of the Divine works and purposes. The works meant are as is obvious from the whole strain of the psalm, those of God’s government of the world. The theme which exercised earlier psalmists reappears here, but the struggles of faith with unbelief, which are so profoundly and pathetically recorded in Psalms 73:1-28, are ended for this singer. He bows in trustful adoration before the greatness of the works and the unsearchable depth of the purpose of God which directs the works. The sequence of Psa 92:4-6 is noteworthy. The central place is occupied by Psalms 92:5 -a wondering and reverent exclamation, evoked by the very mysteries of Providence. On either side of it stand verses describing the contrasted impression made by these on devout and on gross minds. The psalmist and his fellows are "gladdened," though he cannot see to the utmost verge or deepest abyss of Works or Plans. What he does see is good; and if sight does not go down to the depths, it is because eyes are weak, not because these are less pellucid than the sunlit shallows. What gladdens the trustful soul, which is in sympathy with God, only bewilders the "brutish man"-i.e., the man who by immersing his faculties in sense, has descended to the animal level; and it is too grave and weighty for the "fool," the man of incurable levity and self-conceit, to trouble himself to ponder. The eye sees what it is capable of seeing. A man’s judgment of God’s dealings depends on his relation to God and on the dispositions of his soul. The sterner aspect of Providence is dealt with in the next strophe (Psalms 92:7-9). Some recent signal destruction of evil-doers seems to be referred to. It exemplifies once more the old truth which another psalmist has sung, (Psalms 37:2) that the prosperity of evil-doers is short-lived, like the blossoming herbage, and not only short-lived, but itself the occasion of their destruction. The apparent success of the wicked is as a pleasant slope that leads downward. The quicker the blossoming, the sooner the petals fall. "The prosperity of fools shall destroy them." As in the previous strophe the middle verse was central in idea as well as in place, so in this one. Psalms 92:8 states the great fact from which the overthrow of the wicked, which is declared in the verses before and after results. God’s eternal elevation above the Transitory and the Evil is not merely contrasted with these, but is assigned as the reason why what is evil is transitory. We might render "Thou, Jehovah, art high (lit. a height) for evermore," as, in effect, the LXX and other old versions do; but the application of such an epithet to God is unexampled, and the rendering above is preferable. God’s eternal exaltation "is the great pillar of the universe and of our faith" (Perowne). From it must one day result that all God’s enemies shall perish, as the psalmist reiterates, with triumphant reduplication of the designation of the foes, as if he would make plain that the very name "God’s enemies" contained a prophecy of their destruction. However closely banded, they "shall be scattered." Evil may make conspiracies for a time, for common hatred of good brings discordant elements into strange fellowship, but in its real nature it is divisive, and, sooner or later, allies in wickedness become foes, and no two of them are left together. The only lasting human association is that which binds men to one another, because all are bound to God. From the scattered fugitives the psalmist turns first to joyful contemplation of his own blessedness, and then to wider thoughts of the general wellbeing of all God’s friends. The more personal references are comprised in the fourth strophe (Psalms 92:10-12). The metaphor of the exalted horn expresses, as in Psalms 75:10; Psalms 89:17, triumph or the vindication of the psalmist by his deliverance. Psalms 92:10 b is very doubtful. The word usually rendered "I am anointed" is peculiar. Another view of the word takes it for an infinitive used as a noun, with the meaning "growing old," or, as Cheyne renders, "wasting strength." This. translation ("my wasting strength with rich oil") is that of the LXX and other ancient versions, and of Cheyne and Baethgen among moderns. If adopted, the verb must be understood as repeated from the preceding clause, and the slight incongruity thence arising can be lessened by giving a somewhat wider meaning to "exalted" such as "strengthen" or the like. The psalmist would then represent his deliverance as being like refreshing a failing old age, by anointing with fresh oil. Thus triumphant and quickened, he expects to gaze on the downfall of his foes. He uses the same expression as is found in Psalms 91:8, with a similar connotation of calm security, and possibly of satisfaction. There is no need for heightening his feelings into "desire," as in the Authorised and Revised Versions. The next clause (Psalms 92:11 b) "seems to have been expressly framed to correspond with the other; it occurs nowhere else in this sense" (Perowne). A less personal verse (Psalms 92:12) forms the transition to the last strophe, which is concerned with the community of the righteous. Here the singular number is retained. By "the righteous" the psalmist does not exactly mean himself, but he blends his own individuality with that of the ideal character, so that he is both speaking of his own future and declaring a general truth. The wicked "spring like herbage" (Psalms 92:7), but the righteous "spring like the palm." The point of comparison is apparently the gracefulness of the tree, which lifts its slender but upright stem, and is ever verdant and fruitful. The cedar in its massive strength, its undecaying vigour, and the broad shelves of its foliage, green among the snows of Lebanon, stands in strong contrast to the palm. Gracefulness is wedded to strength, and both are perennial in lives devoted to God and Right. Evil blooms quickly, and quickly dies. What is good lasts. One cedar outlives a hundred generations of the grass and flowers that encircle its steadfast feet. The last part extends the thoughts of Psa 92:12 to all the righteous. It does not name them, for it is needless to do so. Imagery and reality are fused together in this strophe. It is questionable whether there are trees planted in the courts of the Temple; but the psalmist’s thought is that the righteous will surely be found there, and that it is their native soil, in which rooted, they are permanent. The facts underlying the somewhat violent metaphor are that true righteousness is found only in the dwellers with God, that they who anchor themselves in Him as a tree in the earth, are both stayed on, and fed from Him. The law of physical decay does not enfeeble all the powers of devout men, even while they are subject to it. As aged palm trees bear the heaviest clusters, so lives which are planted in and nourished from God know no term of their fruitfulness, and are full of sap and verdant, when lives that have shut themselves off from Him are like an old stump, gaunt and dry, fit only for firewood. Such lives are prolonged and made fruitful, as standing proofs that Jehovah is upright, rewarding all cleaving to Him and doing of His will, With conservation of strength, and ever-growing power to do His will. Psalms 92:15 is a reminiscence of Deu 32:4. The last clause is probably to be taken in connection with the preceding, as by Cheyne ("And that in my Rock there is no unrighteousness"). But it may also be regarded as a final avowal of the psalmist’s faith, the last result of his contemplations of the mysteries of Providence. These but drive him to cling close to Jehovah, as his sole refuge and his sure shelter, and to ring out this as the end which shall one day be manifest as the net result of Providence-that there is no least trace of unrighteousness in Him. Psalms 93:1-5 THIS is the first of a group of psalms celebrating Jehovah as King. It is followed by one which somewhat interrupts the unity of subject in the group, but may be brought into connection with them by being regarded as hymning Jehovah’s kingly and judicial providence, as manifested in the subjugation of rebels against His throne. The remaining psalms of the group (Psalms 95:1-11; Psalms 96:1-13; Psalms 97:1-12; Psalms 98:1-9; Psalms 99:1-9; Psalms 100:1-5) rise to a height of lyric exultation in meditating on the reign of Jehovah. Psalms 93:1-5; Psalms 94:1-23 are followed by two (Psalms 95:1-11; Psalms 96:1-13) beginning with ringing calls for new songs to hail the new manifestation of Himself, by which Jehovah has, as it were, inaugurated a new stage in His visible reign on earth. Psalms 97:1-12, again breaks out into the joyful proclamation "Jehovah is King," which is followed, as if by a chorus, with a repeated summons for a new song. (Psalms 98:1-9) Once more the proclamation "Jehovah is King" is sounded out in Psalms 99:1-9, and then the group, is closed by Psalms 100:1-5, with its call to all lands to crowd round Jehovah’s throne with "tumult of acclaim." Probably the historical fact underlying this new conviction of, and triumph in, the Kingdom of Jehovah is the return from exile. But the tone of prophetic anticipation in these exuberant hymns of confident joy can scarcely fail of recognition. The psalmists sang of an ideal state to which their most glorious experiences but remotely approximated. They saw "not yet all things put under Him," but they were sure that He is King, and they were as sure. though with the certitude of faith fixed on His word and not with that of sight, that His universal dominion would one day be universally recognised and rejoiced in. This short psalm but strikes the keynote for the group. It is overture to the oratorio, prelude of the symphony. Jehovah’s reign, the stability of His throne, the consequent fixity of the natural order, His supremacy over all noisy rage of opposition and lawlessness, either in Nature or among men, are set forth with magnificent energy and brevity. But the King of the world is not a mere Nature-compelling Jove. He has spoken to men, and the stability of the natural order but faintly shadows the firmness of His "testimonies," which are worthy of absolute reliance, and which make the souls that do rely on them stable as the firm earth, and steadfast with a steadfastness derived from Jehovah’s throne. He not only reigns over, but dwells among, men, and His power keeps His dwelling place inviolate and lasting as His reign. Psalms 93:1 describes an act rather than a state. "Jehovah has become King" by some specific manifestation of His sovereignty. Not as though He had not been King before, as Psalms 93:2 immediately goes on to point out, but that He has shown the world, by a recent deed, the eternal truth that He reigns. His coronation has beet, by His own hands. No others have arrayed Him in His royal robes. The psalmist dwells with emphatic reiteration on the thought that Jehovah has clothed Himself with majesty and girded Himself with strength. All the stability of Nature is a consequence of His self-created and self-manifested power. That Strength holds a reeling world steady. The psalmist knew nothing about the fixity of natural law, but his thought goes down below that fixity, and finds its reason in the constant forth-putting of Divine power. Psalms 93:2 goes far back as well as deep down or high up, when it travels into the dim, unbounded past, and sees there, amidst its mists, one shining, solid substance, Jehovah’s throne, which stood firm before every "then." The Word rendered from of yore is literally "from then," as if to express the priority of that throne to every period of defined time. And even that grand thought can be capped by a grander climax: "From eternity art Thou." Therefore the world stands firm. But there are things in the firm "world that are not firm. There are "streams" or perhaps "floods," which seem to own no control, in their hoarse dash and devastating rush. The sea is ever the symbol of rebellious opposition and of ungoverned force. Here both the natural and symbolic meanings are present. And the picture is superbly painted. The sound of the blows of the breakers against the rocks, or as they clash with each other, is vividly repeated in the word rendered "tumult," which means rather a blow or collision, and here seems to express the thud of the waves against an obstacle. Psalms 93:4 is difficult to construe. The word rendered "mighty" is according to the accentuation, attached to "breakers," but stands in an unusual position if it is to be so taken. It seems better to disregard the accents, and to take "mighty" as a second adjective belonging to "waters." These will then be described as both multitudinous and proud in their strength, while "ocean breakers" will stand in apposition to waters. Jehovah’s might is compared with these. It would be but a poor measure of it to say that it was more than they; but the comparison means that He subdues the floods and proves His power by taming and calming them. Evidently we are to see shining through the nature picture Jehovah’s triumphant subjugation of rebellious men, which is one manifestation of His kingly power. That dominion is not such as to make opposition impossible. Antagonism of the wildest sort neither casts doubt on its reality nor impinges a hair’s breadth on its sovereignty. All such futile rebellion will be subdued. The shriek of the storm, the dash of the breakers, will be hushed when He says "Peace," and the highest toss of their spray does not wet, much less shake, His stable throne. Such was the psalmist’s faith as he looked out over a revolted world. Such may well be ours, who "hear a deeper voice across the storm." That sweet closing verse comes by its very abruptness with singular impressiveness. We pass from wild commotion into calm. Jehovah speaks, and His words are witnesses both of what He is and of what men should and may be. Power is not an object for trust to fasten on, unless it is gracious, and gives men account of its motives and ends. Words are not objects for trust to fasten on, unless they have power for fulfilment behind them. But if the King, who sets fast earth and bridles seas, speaks to us, we may utterly confide in His word, and, if we do, we shall share in His stable being, in so far as man is capable of resemblance to the changeless God. Trust in firm promises is the secret of firmness. Jehovah has not only given Israel His word, but His house, and His kingly power preserves His dwelling place from wrong. "Holiness" in Psalms 93:5 expresses an attribute of Jehovah’s house, not a quality of the worshippers therein. It cannot but be preserved from assault, since He dwells there. A king who cannot keep his own palace safe from invaders can have little power. If this psalm is, as it evidently is, post-exilic, how could the singer, remembering the destruction of the Temple, speak thus? Because he had learned the lesson of that destruction, that the earthly house in which Jehovah dwelt among men had ceased to be His, by reason of the sins of its frequenters. Therefore, it was "burned with fire." The profaned house is no longer Jehovah’s but, as Jesus said with strong emphasis on the first word, "Your house is left unto you desolate." The Kingship of Jehovah is proclaimed eloquently and tragically by the desolated shrine. Psalms 94:1-23 THE theme of God the Judge is closely allied to that of God the King, as other psalms of this group show, in which His coming to judge the world is the subject of rapturous praise. This psalm hymns Jehovah’s retributive sway, for which it passionately cries, and in which it confidently trusts. Israel is oppressed by insolent rulers, who have poisoned the fountains of justice, condemning the innocent, enacting unrighteous laws, and making a prey of all the helpless. These "judges of Sodom" are not foreign oppressors, for they are "among the people"; and even while they scoff at Jehovah’s judgments they call Him by His covenant names of "Jah" and "God of Jacob." There is no need, therefore, to look beyond Israel for the originals of the dark picture, nor does it supply data for fixing the period of the psalm. The structure and course of thought are transparent. First comes an invocation to God as the Judge of the earth (Psalms 94:1-2); then follow groups of four verses each, subdivided into pairs, -the first of these (Psalms 94:3-6) pictures the doings of the oppressors; the second (Psalms 94:7-11) quotes their delusion that their crimes are unseen by Jehovah, and refutes their dream of impunity, and it is closed by a verse in excess of the normal number. emphatically asserting the truth which the mockers denied. The third group declares the blessedness of the men whom God teaches, and the certainty of His retribution to vindicate the cause of the righteous (Psalms 94:12-15). Then follow the singer’s own cry for help in his own need, as one of the oppressed community, and a sweet reminiscence of former aid, which calms his present anxieties. The concluding group goes back to description of the lawless lawmakers and their doings, and ends with trust that the retribution prayed for in the first verses will verily be dealt out to them, and that thereby both the singer, as a member of the nation, and the community will find Jehovah, who is both "my God" and "our God," a high tower. The reiterations in the first two verses are not oratorical embellishments, but reveal intense feeling and pressing need. It is a cold prayer which contents itself with one utterance. A man in straits continues to cry for help till it comes, or till he sees it coming. To this singer, the one aspect of Jehovah’s reign which was forced on him by Israel’s dismal circumstances was the judicial. There are times when no thought of God is so full of strength as that He is "the God of recompenses," as Jeremiah calls Him, (Jeremiah 51:56) and when the longing of good men is that He would flash forth, and slay evil by the brightness of His coming. They who have no profound loathing of sin, or who have never felt the crushing weight of legalised wickedness, may shrink from such aspirations as the psalmist’s, and brand them as ferocious; but hearts longing for the triumph of righteousness will not take offence at them. The first group (Psalms 94:3-6) lifts the cry of suffering Faith, which has almost become impatience, but turns to, not from, God, and so checks complaints of His delay, and converts them into prayer. "How long, O Lord?" is the burden of many a tried heart; and the Seer heard it from the souls beneath the altar. This psalm passes quickly to dilate on the crimes of the rulers which forced out that prayer. The portrait has many points of likeness to that drawn in Psalms 73:1-28. Here, as there, boastful speech and haughty carriage are made prominent, being put before even cruelty and oppression. "They well out, they speak arrogance": both verbs have the same object. Insolent self-exaltation pours from the fountain of their pride in copious jets. "They give themselves airs like princes." The verb in this clause may mean to say among themselves or to boast, but is now usually regarded as meaning to behave like a prince-i.e., to carry oneself insolently. Vainglorious arrogance manifest in boasting speech and masterful demeanour characterises Eastern rulers, especially those who have risen from low origin. Every little village tyrant gave himself airs, as if he were a king; and the lower his rank, the greater his insolence. These oppressors were grinding the nation to powder, and what made their crime the darker was that it was Jehovah’s people and inheritance which they thus harassed. Helplessness should be a passport to a ruler’s care, but it had become a mark for murderous attack. Widow; stranger, and orphan are named as types of defencelessness. Nothing in this strophe indicates that these oppressors are foreigners. Nor does the delusion that Jehovah neither saw nor cared for their doings. which the next strophe (Psalms 94:7-11) states and confutes imply that they were so. Cheyne, indeed, adduces the name "God of Jacob," which is put into their mouths, as evidence that they are pictured as knowing Jehovah only as one among many tribal or national deities; but the name is too familiar upon the lips of Israelites, and its use by others is too conjectural, to allow of such a conclusion. Rather, the language derives its darkest shade from being used by Hebrews, who are thereby declaring themselves apostates from God as well as oppressors of His people. Their mad, practical atheism makes the psalmist blaze up in indignant rebuke and impetuous argumentation. He turns to them, and addresses them in rough, plain words, strangely contrasted with their arrogant utterances regarding themselves. They are "brutish" (cf. Psalms 73:22) and "fools." The psalmist, in his height of moral indignation, towers above these petty tyrants, and tells them home truths very profitable for such people, however dangerous to their utterer. There is no obligation to speak smooth words to rulers whose rule is injustice and their religion impiety. Ahab had his Elijah, and Herod his John Baptist. The succession has been continued through the ages. Delitzsch and others, who take the oppressors to be foreigners, are obliged to suppose that the psalmist turns in Psalms 94:8 to those Israelites who had been led to doubt God by the prosperity of the wicked; but there is nothing, except the exigencies of that mistaken supposition, to show that any others than the deniers of God’s providence who have just been quoted are addressed as "among the people." Their denial was the more inexcusable, because they belonged to the people whose history was one long proof that Jehovah did see I and recompense evil. Two considerations are urged by the psalmist, who becomes for the moment a philosophical theologian, in confutation of the error in question. First, he argues that nothing can be in the effect which is not in the cause, that the Maker of men’s eyes cannot be blind, nor the Planter of their ears deaf. The thought has wide applications. It hits the centre, in regard to many modern denials as well as in regard to these blunt, ancient ones. Can a universe plainly full of purpose have come from a purposeless source? Can finite persons have emerged from an impersonal Infinity? Have we not a right to argue upwards from man’s make to God his maker, and to find in Him the archetype of all human capacity. We may mark that, as has been long ago observed, the psalm avoids gross anthropomorphism, and infers not that the Creator of the ear has ears, but that He hears. As Jerome (quoted by Delitzsch) says, "Membra sustulit, efficientias dedit." The teaching of the strophe is gathered up in Psalms 94:11, which exceeds the normal number of four verses in each group, and asserts strongly the conclusion for which the psalmist has been arguing. The rendering of b is, "For (not That) they (i.e. men) are but a breath." "The ground of the Omniscience which sees the thoughts of men through and through is profoundly laid in the vanity, i.e. the finiteness, of men, as the correlative of the Infiniteness of God" (Hupfeld). In the strophe Psalms 94:12-15 the psalmist turns from the oppressors to their victims, the meek of the earth, and changes his tone from fiery remonstrance to gracious consolation. The true point of view from which to regard the oppressors’ wrong is to see in it part of God’s educational processes. Jehovah, who "instructs" all men by conscience, "instructs" Israel, and by the Law "teaches" the right interpretation of such afflictive providences. Happy he who accepts that higher education! A further consolation lies in considering the purpose of the special revelation to Israel, which will be realised in patient hearts that are made wise thereby-namely, calm repose of submission and trust, which are not disturbed by any stormy weather. There is possible for the harassed man "peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation." If we recognise that life is mainly educational, we shall neither be astonished nor disturbed by sorrows. It is not to be wondered at that the schoolmaster has a rod, and uses it sometimes. There is rest from evil even while in evil, if we understand the purpose of evil. Yet another consolation lies in the steadfast anticipation of its transiency and of the retribution measured to its doers. That is no unworthy source of comfort. And the ground on which it rests is the impossibility of God’s forsaking His people, His inheritance. These designations of Israel look back to Psalms 94:5, where the crushed and afflicted are designated by the same words. Israel’s relation to Jehovah made the calamities more startling; but it also makes their cessation, and retribution for them on their inflicters more certain. It is the trial and triumph of Faith to be sure, while tyrants grind and crush, that Jehovah has not deserted their victims. He cannot change His purpose; therefore, sorrows and prosperity are but divergent methods, concurring in carrying out His unalterable design. The individual sufferer may take comfort from his belonging to the community to which the presence of Jehovah is guaranteed forever. The singer puts his convictions as to what is to be the upshot of all the perplexed riddles of human affairs into epigrammatic form, in the obscure, gnome-like saying, "To righteousness shall judgment return," by which he seems to mean that the administration of justice, which at present was being trampled under foot, "shall come back to the eternal principle of all judicial action, namely, righteousness,"-in shorter words, there shall be no schism between the judgments of earthly tribunals and justice. The psalmist’s hope is that of all good men and sufferers from unjust rulers. All the upright in heart long for such a state of things and follow after it, either in the sense of delight in it ("Dem Recht mussen alle frommen Herzen zufallen"-Luther), or of seeking to bring it about. The psalmist’s hope is realised in the King of Men, whose own judgments are truth, and who infuses righteousness and the love of it into all who trust in Him. The singer comes closer to his own experience in the next strophe (Psalms 94:16-19), in which he claims his share in these general sources of rest and patience, and thankfully thinks of past times, when he found that they yielded him streams in the desert. He looks out upon the multitude of "evildoers," and, for a moment, asks the question which faithless sense is ever suggesting and pronouncing unanswerable: "Where shall I find a champion?" As long as our eyes range along the level of earth, they see none such. But the empty earth should turn our gaze to the occupied throne. There sits the Answer to our almost despairing question. Rather, there He stands, as the proto-martyr saw Him, risen to His feet in swift readiness to help His servant. Experience confirms the hope of Jehovah’s aid; for unless in the past He had been the singer’s help, he could not have lived till this hour, but must have gone down into the silent land. No man who still draws breath is without tokens of God’s sufficient care and ever-present help. The mystery of continued life is a witness for God. And not only does the past thus proclaim where a man’s help is, but devout reflection on it will bring to light many times when doubts and tremors were disappointed. Conscious weakness appeals to confirming strength. If we feel our foot giving, and fling up our hands towards Him, He will grasp them and steady us in the most slippery places. Therefore, when divided thoughts (for so the picturesque word employed in Psalms 94:19 means) hesitate between hope and fear, God’s consolations steal into agitated minds, and there is a great calm. The last strophe (Psalms 94:20-23) weaves together in the finale, as a musician does in the last bars of his composition, the main themes of the psalm-the evil deeds of unjust rulers, the trust of the psalmist, his confidence in the final annihilation of the oppressors and the consequent manifestation of God as the God of Israel. The height of crime is reached when rulers use the forms of justice as masks for injustice, and give legal sanction to "mischief." The ancient world groaned under such travesties of the sanctity of Law; and the modern world is not free from them. The question often tortures faithful hearts, "Can such doings be sanctioned by God, or in any way be allied to Him?" To the psalmist the worst part of these rulers’ wickedness was that, in his doubting moments, it raised the terrible suspicion that God was perhaps on the side of the oppressors. But when such thoughts came surging on him, he fell back, as we all have to do, on personal experience and on an act of renewed trust. He remembered what God had been to him in past moments of peril, and he claimed Him for the same now, his own refuge and fortress. Strong in that individual experience and conviction, he won the confidence that all which Jehovah had to do with the throne of destruction was, not to connive at its evil, but to overthrow it and root out the evildoers, whose own sin will be their ruin. Then Jehovah will be known, not only for the God who belongs to, and works for, the single soul, but who is "our God," the refuge of the community, who will not forsake His inheritance. Psalms 95:1-11 THIS psalm is obviously divided into two parts, but there is no reason for seeing in these two originally unconnected fragments. Rather does each part derive force from the other; and nothing is more natural than that, after the congregation has spoken its joyful summons to itself to worship, Jehovah should speak warning words as to the requisite heart preparation, without which worship is vain. The supposed fragments are fragmentary indeed, if considered apart. Surely a singer has the liberty of being abrupt and of suddenly changing his tone. Surely he may as well be credited with discerning the harmony of the change of key as some later compiler. There could be no more impressive way of teaching the conditions of acceptable worship than to set side by side a glad call to praise and a solemn warning against repeating the rebellions of the wilderness. These would be still more appropriate if this were a post-exilic hymn; for the second return from captivity would be felt to be the analogue of the first, and the dark story of former hard-heartedness would fit very close to present circumstances. The invocation to praise in Psalms 95:1-2, gives a striking picture of the joyful tumult of the Temple worship. Shrill cries of gladness, loud shouts of praise, songs with musical accompaniments, rang simultaneously through the courts, and to Western ears would have sounded as din rather than as music, and as more exuberant than reverent. The spirit expressed is, alas! almost as strange to many moderns as the manner of its expression. That swelling joy which throbs in the summons, that consciousness that jubilation is a conspicuous element in worship, that effort to rise to a height of joyful emotion, are very foreign to much of our worship. And their absence, or presence only in minute amount, flattens much devotion, and robs the Church of one of its chief treasures. No doubt; there must often be sad strains blended with praise. But it is a part of Christian duty, and certainly of Christian wisdom, to try to catch that tone of joy in worship which rings in this psalm. The three following verses (Psalms 95:3-5) give Jehovah’s creative and sustaining power, and His consequent ownership of this fair world, as the reasons for worship. He is King by right of creation. Surely it is forcing unnatural meanings on words to maintain that the psalmist believed in the real existence of the "gods" whom he disparagingly contrasts with Jehovah. The fact that these were worshipped sufficiently warrants the comparison. To treat it as in any degree inconsistent with Monotheism is unnecessary, and would scarcely have occurred to a reader but for the exigencies of a theory. The repeated reference to the "hand" of Jehovah is striking. In it are held the deeps: it is a plastic hand. "forming" the land, as a potter fashioning his clay: it is a shepherd’s hand. protecting and feeding his flock (Psalms 95:7). The same power created and sustains the physical universe, and guides and guards Israel. The psalmist has no time for details; he can only single out extremes, and leave us to infer that what is true of these is true of all that is enclosed between them. The depths and the heights are Jehovah’s. The word rendered "peaks" is doubtful. Etymologically it should mean "fatigue," but it is not found in that sense in any of the places where it occurs. The parallelism requires the meaning of heights to contrast with depths, and this rendering is found in the LXX, and is adopted by most moderns. The word is then taken to come from a root meaning "to be high." Some of those who adopt the translation summits attempt to get that meaning out of the root meaning fatigue, by supposing that the labour of getting to the top of the mountain is alluded to in the name. Thus Kay renders "the mountains’ toilsome heights," and so also Hengstenberg. But it is simpler to trace the word to the other root, to be high. The ownerless sea is owned by Him; He made both its watery waste and the solid earth. But that all-creating Hand has put forth more wondrous energies than those of which heights and depths, sea and land, witness. Therefore, the summons is again addressed to Israel to bow before "Jehovah our Maker." The creation of a people to serve Him is the work of His grace, and is a nobler effect of His power than material things. It is remarkable that the call to glad praise should be associated with thoughts of His greatness as shown in creation, while lowly reverence is enforced by remembrance of His special relation to Israel. We should have expected the converse. The revelation of God’s love, in His work of creating a people for Himself, is most fittingly adored by spirits prostrate before Him. Another instance of apparent transposition of thoughts occurs in Psalms 95:7 b, where we might have expected "people of His hand and sheep of His pasture." Hupfeld proposes to correct accordingly, and Cheyne follows him. But the correction buys prosaic accuracy at the cost of losing the forcible incorrectness which blends figure and fact. and by keeping sight of both enhances each. "The sheep of His hand" suggests not merely the creative but the sustaining and protecting power of God. It is hallowed forever by our Lord’s words, which may be an echo of it: "No man is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand." The sudden turn from jubilant praise and recognition of Israel’s prerogative as its occasion to grave warning is made more impressive by its occurring in the middle of a verse. God’s voice breaks in upon the joyful acclamations with solemn effect. The shouts of the adoring multitude die on the poet’s trembling ear, as that deeper Voice is heard. We cannot persuade ourselves that this magnificent transition, so weighty with instruction, so fine in poetic effect, is due to the after thought of a compiler. Such a one would surely have stitched his fragments more neatly together than to make the seam run through the centre of a verse-an irregularity which would seem small to a singer in the heat of his inspiration. Psalms 95:7 c may be either a wish or the protasis to the apodosis in Psalms 95:8. "If ye would but listen to His voice!" is an exclamation, made more forcible by the omission of what would happen then. But it is not necessary to regard the clause as optative. The conditional meaning, which connects it with what follows, is probably preferable, and is not set aside by the expression "His voice" instead of "My voice"; for "similar change of persons is very common in utterances of Jehovah, especially in the Prophets" (Hupfeld). "Today" stands first with strong emphasis, to enforce the critical character of the present moment. It may be the last opportunity. At all events, it is an opportunity, and therefore to be grasped and used. A doleful history of unthankfulness lay behind; but still the Divine voice sounds, and still the fleeting moments offer space for softening of heart and docile hearkening. The madness of delay when time is hurrying on, and the long-suffering patience of God, are wonderfully proclaimed in that one word, which the Epistle to the Hebrews lays hold of, with so deep insight, as all-important. The warning points Israel back to ancestral sins, the tempting of God in the second year of the Exodus, by the demand for water. (Exodus 17:1-7) The scene of that murmuring received both names, Massah (temptation) and Meribah (strife). It is difficult to decide the exact force of Psa 95:9 b. "Saw My work" is most naturally taken as referring to the Divine acts of deliverance and protection seen by Israel in the desert, which aggravated the guilt of their faithlessness. But the word rendered "and" will, in that case, have to be taken as meaning "although"-a sense which cannot be established. It seems better, therefore, to take "work" in the unusual meaning of acts of judgment-His "strange work." Israel’s tempting of God was the more indicative of hardheartedness that it was persisted in, in spite of chastisements. Possibly both thoughts are to be combined, and the whole varied stream of blessings and punishments is referred to in the wide expression. Both forms of God’s work should have touched these hard hearts. It mattered not whether He blessed or punished. They were impervious to both. The awful issue of this obstinate rebellion is set forth in terrible words. The sensation of physical loathing followed by sickness is daringly ascribed to God. We cannot but remember what John heard in Patmos from the lips into which grace was poured: "I will spue thee out of My mouth." But before He cast Israel out, He pled with them, as Psalms 95:10 b goes on to tell: "He said, ‘A people going astray in heart are they."’ He said so, by many a prophet and many a judgment, in order that they might come back to the true path. The desert wanderings were but a symbol, as they were a consequence, of their wanderings in heart. They did not know His ways; therefore they chose their own. They strayed in heart; therefore they had an ever-increasing ignorance of the right road. For the averted heart and the blind understanding produce each other. The issue of the long-protracted departure from the path which God had marked was, as it ever is, condemnation to continue in the pathless wilderness, and exclusion from the land of rest which God had promised them, and in which He Himself had said that He would make His resting place in their midst. But what befell Israel in outward fact was symbolical of universal spiritual truth. The hearts that love devious ways can never be restful. The path which leads to calm is traced by God, and only those who tread it with softened hearts, earnestly listening to His voice, will find repose even on the road, and come at last to the land of peace. For others, they have chosen the desert, and in it they will wander wearily, "forever roaming with a hungry heart." The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews is laying hold of the very kernel of the psalm, when he adduces the fact that, so many centuries after Moses, the warning was still addressed to Israel, and the possibility of entering the Rest of God, and the danger of missing it, still urged, as showing that the Rest of God remained to be won by later generations, and proclaiming the eternal truth that "we which have believed do enter into rest." Psalms 96:1-13 THE praise of Jehovah as King has, in the preceding psalms, chiefly celebrated His reign over Israel. But this grand coronation anthem takes a wider sweep, and hymns that kingdom as extending to all nations, and as reaching beyond men, for the joy and blessing of a renovated earth. It fails into four strophes, of which the first three contain three verses each, while the last extends to four. These strophes are like concentric circles, drawn round that eternal throne. The first summons Israel to its high vocation of Jehovah’s evangelist, the herald who proclaims the enthronement of the King. The second sets Him above all the "Nothings" which usurp the name of gods, and thus prepares the way for His sole monarchy. The third summons outlying nations to bring their homage, and flings open the Temple gates to all men, inviting them to put on priestly robes, and do priestly acts there. The fourth calls on Nature in its heights and depths, heaven and earth, sea, plain, and forest, to add their acclaim to the shouts which hall the establishment of Jehovah’s visible dominion. The song is to be new, because a new manifestation of Jehovah’s Kinghood has wakened once more the long-silent harps, which had been hung on the willows of Babylon. The psalm is probably a lyric echo of the Restoration, in which the prophet singer sees the beginning of Jehovah’s world wide display of His dominion. He knew not how many weary years were to pass in a weary and God-defying world, before his raptures became facts. But though His vision tarries, His song is no over-heated imagining, which has been chilled down for succeeding generations into a baseless hope. The perspective of the world’s chronology hid from him the deep valley between His standpoint and the fulfilment of his glowing words. Mankind still marches burdened, down among the mists, but it marches towards the sunlit heights. The call to sing a new song is quoted from Isaiah 42:10.The word in Psalms 96:2 b rendered "publish glad tidings" is also a favourite word with Isaiah II. (Isaiah 40:9, Isaiah 52:7, etc.). Psalms 96:3 a closely resembles Isaiah 66:19. The second strophe is full of allusions to earlier psalms and prophets. The new manifestation of Jehovah’s power has vindicated His supremacy above the vanities which the peoples call gods, and has thereby given new force to old triumphant words which magnified His exalted name. Long ago a psalmist had sung, after a signal defeat of assailants of Jerusalem, that God was "great and greatly to be praised," (Psalms 48:1) and this psalmist makes the old words new. "Dread" reminds us of Psa 47:2. The contemptuous name of the nation’s gods as "Nothings" is frequent in Isaiah. The heavens, which roof over all the earth, declare to every land Jehovah’s creative power, and His supremacy above all gods. But the singer’s eye pierces their abysses, and sees some gleams of that higher sanctuary of which they are but the floor. There stand Honour and Majesty, Strength and Beauty. The psalmist does not speak of "attributes." His vivid imagination conceives of these as servants, attending on Jehovah’s royal state. Whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever are august, are at home in that sanctuary. Strength and beauty are often separated in a disordered world, and each is maimed thereby, but, in their perfection, they are indissolubly blended. Men call many things strong and fair which have no affinity with holiness; but the archetypes of both excellences are in the Holy Place, and any strength which has not its roots there is weakness, and any beauty which is not a reflection from "the beauty of the Lord our God" is but a mask concealing ugliness. The third strophe builds on this supremacy of Jehovah, whose dwelling place is the seat of all things worthy to be admired, the summons to all nations to render praise to Him. It is mainly a variation of Psa 29:1-2, where the summons is addressed to angels. Here "the families of the peoples" are called on to ascribe to Jehovah "glory and strength," or "the glory of His name," (i.e. of His character as revealed). The call presupposes a new manifestation of His Kingship as conspicuous and earth shaking as the thunderstorm of the original psalm. As in it the "sons of God" were called to worship in priestly garb, so here still more emphatically, Gentile nations are invited to assume the priestly office, to "take an offering and come into His courts." The issue of Jehovah’s manifestation of kingly sway will be that Israel’s prerogative of priestly access to Him will be extended to all men, and that the lowly worship of earth will have characteristics which assimilate it to that of the elder brethren who ever stand before Him, and also characteristics which distinguish it from that, and are necessary while the worshippers are housed in flesh. Material offerings and places consecrated to worship belong to earth. The "sons of God" above have them not, for they need them not. The last strophe has four verses, instead of the normal three. The psalmist’s chief purpose in it is to extend his summons for praise to the whole creation; but he cannot refrain from once more ringing out the glad tidings for which praise is to be rendered. He falls back in Psalms 96:10 on Psalms 93:1 and Psalms 9:8. In his quotation from the former psalm, he brings more closely together the thoughts of Jehovah’s reign and the fixity of the world, whether that is taken with a material reference, or as predicting the calm perpetuity of the moral order established by His merciful rule and equitable judgment. The thought that inanimate nature will share in the joy of renovated humanity inspires many glowing prophetic utterances, eminently those of Isaiah-as e.g., Isaiah 35:1-10. The converse thought, that it shared in the consequences of man’s sin, is deeply stamped on the Genesis narrative. The same note is struck with unhesitating force in Romans 8:1-39, and elsewhere in the New Testament. A poet invests Nature with the hues of his own emotions, but this summons of the psalmist is more than poetry. How the transformation is to be effected is not revealed, but the consuming fires will refine, and at last man will have a dwelling place where environment will correspond to character, where the external will image the inward state, where a new form of the material will be the perpetual ally of the spiritual, and perfected manhood will walk in a "new heaven and new earth, where dwelleth righteousness." In the last verse of the psalm, the singer appears to extend his prophetic gaze from the immediate redeeming act by which Jehovah assumes royal majesty, to a still future "coming," in which He will judge the earth. "The accession is a single act; the judging is a continual process. Note that ‘judging’ has no terrible sound to a Hebrew" (Cheyne, in loc.). Psalms 96:13 c is again a verbatim quotation from Psalms 9:8. Psalms 97:1-12 THE summons to praise the King with a new song (Psalms 96:1-13) is followed by this psalm, which repeats the dominant idea of the group, "Jehovah is King," but from a fresh point of view. It represents His rule under the form of a theophany, which may possibly be regarded as the fuller description of that coming of Jehovah to judgment with which Psalms 96:1-13 closes. The structure of both psalms is the same, each being divided into four strophes, normally consisting of three verses each, though the last strophe of Psa 96:1-13 runs over into four verses. In this psalm, the first group of verses celebrates the royal state of the King (Psalms 97:1-3); the second describes His coming as a past fact (Psalms 97:4-6); the third portrays the twofold effects of Jehovah’s appearance on the heathen and on Zion (Psalms 97:7-9); and the last applies the lessons of the whole to the righteous, in exhortation and encouragement (Psalms 97:10-12). The same dependence on earlier psalms and prophets which marks others of this group is obvious here. The psalmist’s mind is saturated with old sayings, which he finds flashed up into new meaning by recent experiences. He is not "original," and does not try to be so; but he has drunk in the spirit of his predecessors, and words which to others were antiquated and cold blaze with light for him, and seem made for his lips. He who reads aright the solemn significance of today will find it no less sacred than any past, and may transfer to it all which seers and singers have said and sung of Jehovah’s presence of old. The first strophe is mosaic-work. Psalms 97:1 (lands = isles) may be compared Isaiah 42:10; Isaiah 51:5. Psalms 97:2 a-is from Exodus 19:9; Exodus 19:16, etc., and Psalms 18:9. Psalms 97:2 b is quoted from Psalms 89:14. Psalms 97:3 a recalls Psalms 1:3; Psalms 18:8. The appearance of God on Sinai is the type of all later theophanies, and the reproduction of its principal features witnesses to the conviction that that transient manifestation was the unveiling of permanent reality. The veil had dropped again, but what had been once seen continued always, though unseen; and the veil could and would be drawn aside, and the long-hidden splendour blaze forth, again. The combination of the pieces of mosaic in a new pattern here is striking. Three thoughts fill the singer’s mind. God is King, and His reign gladdens the world, even away out to the dimly seen lands that are washed by the western ocean. "The islands" drew Isaiah’s gaze. Prophecy began in him to look seawards and westwards, little knowing how the course of empire was to take its way thither, but feeling that whatever lands might lie towards the setting sun were ruled, and would be gladdened by Jehovah. Gladness passes into awe in Psalms 97:2 a, -as the seer beholds the cloud and gloom which encircle the throne. The transcending, infinitude of the Divine nature, the mystery of much of the Divine acts, are symbolised by these; but the curtain is the picture. To know that God cannot be known is a large part of the knowledge of Him. Faith, built on experience, enters into the cloud, and is not afraid, but confidently tells what it knows to be within the darkness. "Righteousness and judgment"-the eternal principle and the activity thereof in the several acts of the King-are the bases of His throne, more solid than the covering cloud. Earth can rejoice in His reign, even though darkness may make parts of it painful riddles, if the assurance is held fast that absolute righteousness is at the centre, and that the solid core of all is judgment. Destructive power, symbolised in Psalms 97:3 by fire which devours His adversaries, the fire which flashed first on Sinai, is part of the reason for the gladness of earth in His reign. For His foes are the world’s foes too; and a God who could not smite into nothingness that which lifted itself against His dominion would be no God for whom the isles could wait. These three characteristics, mystery, righteousness, power to consume, attach to Jehovah’s royalty, and should make every heart rejoice. In the second strophe, the tenses suddenly change into pure narrative. The change may be simply due, as Cheyne suggests, to the influence of the earlier passages descriptive of theophanies, and in which the same tense occurs; but more probably it points to some event fresh in the experience of Israel, such as the return from Babylon. In this strophe again, we have mosaic. Psalms 97:4 a-is quoted from Psalms 77:18. With Psalms 97:4 b may be compared Psalms 77:16. Psalms 97:5 a-is like Micah 1:4, and, in a less degree, Psalms 68:2. "The Lord of the whole earth" is an unusual designation, first found in a significant connection in Joshua 3:11; Joshua 3:13, as emphasising His triumph over heathen gods, in leading the people into Canaan, and afterwards found in Zechariah 4:14; Zechariah 6:5, and Micah 4:13. Psalms 97:6 a comes from the theophany in Psalms 1:6: and Psalms 97:6 b has parallels in both parts of Isaiah-e.g., Isaiah 35:2; Isaiah 40:5; Isaiah 52:10 -passages which refer to the restoration from Babylon. The picture is grand as a piece of word painting. The world lies wrapped in thunder-gloom, and is suddenly illumined by the fierce blaze of lightning. The awestruck silence of Nature is wonderfully given by Psalms 97:4 b: "The earth saw and trembled." But the picture is symbol, and the lightning flash is meant to set forth the sudden, swift forth-darting of God’s delivering power, which awes a gazing world, while the hills melting like wax from before His face solemnly proclaim how terrible its radiance is, and how easily the mere showing of Himself annihilates all high things that oppose themselves. Solid-seeming and august powers, which tower above His people’s ability to overcome them, vanish when He looks out from the deep darkness. The end of His appearance and of the consequent removal of obstacles is the manifestation of His righteousness and glory. The heavens are the scene of the Divine appearance, though earth is the theatre of its working. They "declare His righteousness," not because, as in Psalms 19:1-14, they are said to tell forth His glory by their myriad lights, but because in them He has shone forth, in His great act of deliverance of His oppressed people. Israel receives the primary blessing, but is blessed, not for itself alone, but that all peoples may see in it Jehovah’s glory. Thus once more the psalm recognises the world wide destination of national mercies, and Israel’s place in the Divine economy as being of universal significance. The third strophe (Psalms 97:7-9) sets forth the results of the theophany on foes and friends. The worshippers, of "the Nothings" (Psalms 96:5) are put to confusion by the demonstration by fact of Jehovah’s sovereignty over their helpless deities. Psalms 97:7 a, b, Isaiah 42:17; Isaiah 44:9. As the worshippers are ashamed, So the gods themselves are summoned to fall down before this triumphant Jehovah, as Dagon did before the Ark. Surely it is a piece of most prosaic pedantry to argue, from this lash of scorn, that the psalmist believed that the gods whom he had just called "Nothings" had a real existence, and that therefore he was not a pure Monotheist. The shame of the idolaters and the prostration of their gods heighten the gladness of Zion, which the psalm describes in old words that had once celebrated another flashing forth of Jehovah’s power. (Psalms 48:11) Hupfeld, whom Cheyne follows, would transpose Psalms 97:7 and Psalms 97:8, on the grounds that "the transposition explains what Zion heard, and brings the summons to the false gods into connection with the emphatic claim on behalf of Jehovah in Psalms 97:9." But there is no need for the change, since there is no ambiguity as to what Zion heard, if the existing order is retained, and her gladness is quite as worthy a consequence of the exaltation of Jehovah in Psalms 97:9 as the subjugation of the false gods would be. With Psalms 97:9 compare Psalms 83:18, and Psalms 47:2. The last strophe (Psalms 97:10-12) draws exhortation and promises from the preceding. There is a marked diminution of dependence on earlier passages in this strophe, in which the psalmist points for his own generation the lessons of the great deliverance which he has been celebrating. Psalms 97:12 a-is like Psalms 32:11; Psalms 97:12 b is from Psalms 30:4; but the remainder is the psalmist’s own earnest exhortation and firm faith cast into words which come warm from his own heart’s depths. Love to Jehovah necessarily implies hatred of evil, which is His antagonist, and which He hates. That higher love will not be kept in energy, unless it is guarded by wholesome antipathy to everything foul. The capacity for love of the noble is maimed unless there is hearty hatred of the ignoble. Love to God is no idle affection, but withdraws a man from rival loves. The stronger the attraction, the stronger the recoil. The closer we cleave to God, the more decided our shrinking from all that would weaken our hold of Him. A specific reference in the exhortation to temptations to idolatry is possible, though not necessary. All times have their "evil," with which God’s lovers are ever tempted to comply. The exhortation is never out of place, nor the encouragement which accompanies it ever illusory. In such firm adherence to Jehovah. many difficulties will rise, and foes be made; but those who obey it will not lack protection. Mark the alternation of names for such. They are first called "lovers of God"; they are then designated as His "favoured ones." That which is first in time is last in mention. The effect is in view before it is traced to its cause. "We love Him because He first loved us." Then follow names drawn from the moral perfecting which will ensue on recognition and reception of God’s favour, and on the cherishing of the love which fulfills the law. They who love because they are loved, become righteous and upright hearted because they love. For such the psalmist has promise as well as exhortation. Not only are they preserved in and from dangers, but "light is sown" for them. Many commentators think that the figure of light being sown. as seeds are buried in the ground to shoot up in beauty in a future springtime is too violent, and they propose to understand "sown" in the sense of scattered on, not deposited in, the earth, "so that he, the righteous, goes forward step by step in the light" (Delitzsch). Others would correct into is risen" or arises." But one is reluctant to part with the figure, the violence of which is permissible in an Eastern singer. Darkness often wraps the righteous, and it is not true to experience to say that his way is always in the sunlight. But it is consolation to know that light is sown, invisible and buried, as it were, but sure to germinate and fruit. The metaphor mingles figures and offends purists, but it fits closer to fact than the weakening of it which fits the rules of composition. If we are God’s lovers, present darkness may be quieted by hope. and we may have the "fruit of the light" in our lives now, and the expectation of a time when we shall possess in fulness and in perpetuity all that light of knowledge, purity, and gladness which Jesus the Sower went forth to sow, and which had been ripened by struggles and sorrows and hatred of evil while we were here. Therefore, because of this magnificent theophany and because of its blessed consequences for loving souls, the psalmist ends with the exhortation to the righteous to rejoice. He began with bidding the world be glad. He now bids each of us concentrate that universal gladness in our own hearts. Whether earth obeys Him or not, it is for us to clasp firmly the great facts which will feed the lamp of our joy. God’s holy memorial is His name, or His self-revealed character. He desires to be known and remembered by His acts. If we rightly retain and ponder His utterance of Himself, not in syllables, but in deeds, we shall not be silent in His praise. The righteous man should not be harsh and crabbed, but his soul should dwell in a serene atmosphere of joy in Jehovah. and his life be one thanksgiving to that mighty, never-to-be-forgotten Name. Psalms 98:1-9 THE two preceding psalms correspond in number and division of verses. The first begins with a summons to sing to Jehovah; the second, with a proclamation that He is King. A precisely similar connection exists between this and the following psalm. Psalms 98:1-9 is an echo of Psa 96:1-13 and Psalms 99:1-9 or Psalms 97:1-12. The number of verses in each of the second pair is nine, and in each there is a threefold division. The general theme of both pairs is the same, but with considerable modifications. The abundant allusions to older passages continue here, and the second part of Isaiah is especially familiar to the singer. The first strophe (Psalms 98:1-3), though modelled on the first of Psa 96:1-13, presents the theme in a different fashion. Instead of reiterating through three verses the summons to Israel to praise Jehovah, and declare His glory to the nations, this psalm passes at once from the summons to praise, in order to set forth the Divine deed which evokes the praise, and which the psalmist thinks, will shine by its own lustre to "the ends of the earth," whether it has human voices to celebrate it or not. This psalmist speaks more definitely of Jehovah’s wonders of deliverance. Israel appears rather as the recipient than as the celebrator of God’s lovingkindness. The sun shines to all nations, whether any voices say "Look," or no. Psalms 98:1 a-is from Psalms 96:1; Psalms 96:1 c-3 weave together snatches of various passages in the second part of Isaiah, especially Isaiah 52:10; Isaiah 59:16; Isaiah 63:5. The remarkable expression "brought salvation to Him" (from the second passage in Isaiah) is rendered by many "helped Him," and that rendering gives the sense but obliterates the connection with "salvation," emphatically repeated in the two following verses. The return from Babylon is naturally suggested as best corresponding to the psalmist’s words. That was "the salvation of our God," who seemed to have forgotten His people, as Isaiah 49:2 represents Israel as complaining, but now, before "the eyes of all nations," has shown how. well He remembers and faithfully keeps His covenant obligations. Israel is, indeed, Jehovah’s witness, and should ring out her grateful joy; but Jehovah’s deed speaks more loudly than Israel’s proclamation of it can ever do. The second strophe (Psalms 98:4-6) corresponds to the third of Psa 96:1-13; but whereas there the Gentiles were summoned to bring offerings into the courts of Jehovah, here it is rather the glad tumult of vocal praise, mingled with the twang of harps, and the blare of trumpets and horns, which is present to the singer’s imagination. He hears the swelling chorus echoing through the courts. which are conceived as wide enough to hold "all the earth." He has some inkling of the great thought that the upshot of God’s redeeming self-manifestation will be glad music from a redeemed world. His call to mankind throbs with emotion, and sounds like a prelude to the melodious commingling of voice and instrument which he at once enjoins and foretells. His words are largely echoes of Isaiah. Compare Isaiah 44:23; Isaiah 49:13; Isaiah 52:9, for "break forth into," and Isaiah 51:3 for "voice of melody." The final strophe is almost identical with that of Psa 96:1-13, but, in accordance with the variation found in Psalms 98:1-3, omits the summons to Israel to proclaim God’s Kinghood among the nations. It also inverts the order of clauses in Psalms 98:7, and in Psalms 98:7 b quotes from Psalms 24:1, where also "the fulness of it" precedes, with the result of having no verb expressed which suits the nouns, since "the world and the dwellers therein" cannot well be called on to "thunder." Instead of the "plain" and "trees of the forest" in the original, Psalms 98:8 substitutes streams and mountains. The bold figure of the streams clapping hands, in token of homage to the King (2 Kings 11:12 Psalms 47:1) occurs in Isaiah 55:12. The meeting waves are conceived of as striking against each other, with a sound resembling that of applauding palms. Psalms 98:9 is quoted from Psalms 96:1-13, with the omission of the second "He cometh" (which many versions of the LXX retain), and the substitution of "equity" for "His faithfulness." Psalms 99:1-9 has well called this psalm "an earthly echo of the seraphic Trisagion," the threefold proclamation of the Divine holiness, which Isaiah. (Isaiah 6:3) It is, as already noted, a pendant to Psalms 98:1-9, but is distinguished from the other psalms of this group by its greater originality, the absence of distinct allusion to the great act of deliverance celebrated in them. and its absorption in the one thought of the Divine holiness. Their theme is the event by which Jehovah manifested to the world His sovereign rule, this psalm passes beyond the event, and grasps the eternal central principle of that rule-namely, holiness. The same thought has been touched on in the other members of the group, but here it is the single subject of praise. Its exhibition in God’s dealings with Israel is here traced in ancient examples, rather than in recent instances; but the viewpoint of the other psalms is retained, in so far as the Divine dealings with Israel are regarded as the occasion for the world’s praise. The first strophe (Psalms 99:1-3) dwells in general terms on Jehovah’s holiness, by which august conception is meant, not only moral purity, but separation from. by elevation above, the finite and imperfect. Psalms 99:1 vividly paints in each clause the glory reigning in heaven, and its effect on an awestruck world. We might render the verbs in the second part of each clause as futures or as optatives (shall tremble, shall totter, or let peoples tremble, etc.), but the thought is more animated if they are taken as describing the result of the theophany. The participial clause "throned on the cherubim" adds detail to the picture of Jehovah as King. It should not, strictly speaking, be rendered with a finite verb. When that vision of Him sitting in royal state is unveiled, all people are touched with reverence, and the solid earth staggers. But the glory which is made visible to all men has its earthly seat in Zion, and shines from thence into all lands. It is by His, deeds in Israel that God’s exaltation is made known. The psalmist does not call on men to bow before a veiled Majesty, of which they only know that it is free from all creatural limitations, lowliness and imperfections; but before a God, who has revealed Himself in acts, and has thereby made Himself a name. "Great and dread" is that name, but it is a sign of His lovingkindness that it is known by men, and thanksgiving, not dumb trembling, befits men who know it. The refrain might be rendered "It is holy," referring to the name, but Psalms 99:5 and Psalms 99:9 make the rendering Holy is He more probable. The meaning is unaffected whichever translation is adopted. Jehovah is holy, not only because lifted above and separated from creatural limitations, but because of His righteousness. The second strophe therefore proclaims that all His dominion is based on uprightness, and is a continual passing of that into acts of "judgment and righteousness." The "And" at the beginning of Psa 99:4, following the refrain, is singular, and has led many commentators to link the words with Psalms 99:3 a, - and, taking the refrain as parenthetical, to render, "Let them give thanks to Thy great and dread name, [for it is holy], and [to] the strength of the King [who] loveth," etc. But the presence of the refrain is an insuperable bar to this rendering. Others, as Delitzsch and Cheyne, regard "the strength of the king" as dependent on "established" in Psalms 99:4 b, and suppose that the theocratic monarch of Israel is represented as under Jehovah’s protection, if he reigns righteously. But surely one King only is spoken of in this psalm, and it is the inmost principle and outward acts of His rule which are stated as the psalmist’s reason for summoning men to prostrate themselves at His footstool. The "And" at the beginning of the strophe links its whole thought with that of the preceding, and declares eloquently how closely knit together are Jehovah’s exaltation and His righteousness. The singer is in haste to assert the essentially moral character of infinite power. Delitzsch thinks that love cannot be predicated of "strength," but only of the possessor of strength; but surely that is applying the measuring line of prosaic accuracy to lyric fervour. The intertwining of Divine power and righteousness could not be more strongly asserted than by that very intelligible attribution to His power of the emotion of love, impelling it ever to seek union with uprightness. He is no arbitrary ruler. His reign is for the furtherance of justice. Its basis is "equity," and its separate acts are "judgment and righteousness." These have been done in and for Jacob. Therefore the call to worship rings out again. It is addressed to an undefined multitude, which, as the tone of all this group of psalms leads us to suppose, includes the whole race of man. They are summoned to lift high the praise of Him who in Himself is so high. and to cast themselves low in prostrate adoration at His footstool-i.e., at His sanctuary on Zion (Psalms 99:9). Thus again, in the centre strophe of this psalm, as in Psalms 96:1-13; Psalms 98:1-9, mankind are called to praise the God who has revealed Himself in Israel; but while in the former of these two psalms worship was represented as sacrificial, and in the second as loud music of voice and instrument, here silent prostration is the fitting praise of the holiness of the infinitely exalted Jehovah. The third strophe turns to examples drawn from the great ones of old, which at once encourage to worship and teach the true nature of worship, while they also set in clear light Jehovah’s holiness in dealing with His worshippers. Priestly functions were exercised by Moses, as in sprinkling the blood of the covenant, (Exodus 24:1-18) and in the ceremonial connected with the consecration of Aaron and his sons, (Leviticus 8:1-36) as well as at the first celebration of worship in the Tabernacle. (Exodus 40:18 sqq.) In the wider sense of the word priest, he acted as mediator and intercessor, as Exodus 17:12, in the fight against Amalek, and Exodus 32:30-32, after the worship of the golden calf. Samuel. too, interceded for Israel after their seeking a king, (1 Samuel 12:19 sqq.) and offered sacrifices. (1 Samuel 7:9) Jeremiah couples them together as intercessors with God. (Jeremiah 15:1) From these venerable examples the psalmist draws instruction as to the nature of the worship befitting the holiness of Jehovah. He goes deeper than all sacrifices, or than silent awe. To call on God is the best adoration. The cry of a soul conscious of emptiness and need, and convinced of His fulness and of the love which is the soul of His power, is never in vain. "They called, and He"-even He in all the unreachable separation of His loftiness from their lowliness-"answered them." There is a commerce of desire and bestowal between the holy Jehovah and us. But these answers come on certain conditions, which are plain consequences of His holiness - namely, that His worshippers should keep His testimonies, by which Hehas witnessed both to His own character and to their duty. The psalmist seems to lose sight of his special examples, and to extend his view to the whole people, when he speaks of answers from the pillar of cloud, which cannot apply to Samuel’s experience. The persons spoken of in Psalms 99:8 as receiving answers may indeed be Moses, Aaron, and Samuel, all of whom were punished for evil deeds, as well as answered when they cried; but more probably they are the whole community. The great principle, firmly grasped and clearly proclaimed by the singer, is that a holy God is a forgiving God, willing to hearken to men’s cry, and rich to answer with needed gifts, and that indissolubly interwoven with the pardon, which He in His holiness gives is retribution for evil. God loves too well to grant impunity. Forgiveness is something far better than escape from penalties. It cannot be worthy of God to bestow or salutary for men to receive, unless it is accompanied with such retribution as may show the pardoned man how deadly his sin was. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" is a law not abrogated by forgiveness. The worst penalty of sin, indeed-namely, separation from God-is wholly turned aside by repentance and forgiveness; but for the most part the penalties which are inflicted on earth, and which are the natural results of sin, whether in character, memory, habit, or circumstances, are not removed by pardon. Their character is changed; they become loving chastisement for our profit. Such, then, is the worship which all men are invited to render to the holy Jehovah. Prostrate awe should pass into the cry of need, desire, and aspiration. It will be heard, if it is verified as real by obedience to God’s known will. The answers will be fresh witnesses of God’s holiness, which declares itself equally in forgiveness and in retribution. Therefore, once more the clear summons to all mankind rings out, and once more the proclamation of His holiness is made. There is joyful confidence of access to the Inaccessible in the reiteration in Psalms 99:9 of Jehovah our God. "Holy is He," sang the psalmist at first, but all the gulf between Jehovah and us is bridged over when to the name which emphasises the eternal, self-existent being of the holy One we can add "our God." Then humble prostration is reconcilable with confident approach; and His worshippers have not only to lie lowly at His footstool, but to draw near with children’s frankness, to His heart. Psalms 100:1-5 THE Psalms of the King end with this full-toned call to all the earth to do Him homage. It differs from the others of the group, by making no distinct mention either of Jehovah’s royal title or of the great act of deliverance which was His visible exercise of sovereignty. But it resembles them in its jubilant tone, its urgent invitation to all men to walk in the light which shone on Israel, and its conviction that the mercies shown to the nation bad blessing in them for all the world. The structure is simple. A call to praise Jehovah is twice given, and each is followed by reasons for His praise, which is grounded, in the first instance (Psalms 100:3), on His dealings with Israel. and, in the second, on His character as revealed by all His works. Psalms 100:1 consists of but a single clause, and, as Delitzsch says, is like the signal blast of a trumpet. It rings out a summons to "all the earth," as in Psalms 98:4, which is expanded in Psalms 100:2. The service there enjoined is that of worship in the Temple, as in Psalms 100:4. Thus, the characteristic tone of this group of psalms echoes here, in its close, and all men are called and welcomed to the Sanctuary. There is no more a Court of the Gentiles. Not less striking than the universality of the psalm is its pulsating gladness. The depths of sorrow, both of that which springs from outward calamities and of that more heart-breaking sort which wells up from dark fountains in the soul, have been sounded in many a psalm. But the Psalter would not reflect all the moods of the devout soul, unless it had some strains of unmingled joy. The Christian Year has perfect days of sunlit splendour, when all the winds are still, and no cloud darkens the unbroken blue. There is no music without passages in minor keys; but joy has its rights and place too, and they know but little of the highest kind of worship who do not sometimes feel their hearts swell with gladness more poignant and exuberant than earth can minister. The reason for the world’s gladness is given in Psalms 100:3. It is Jehovah’s special relation to Israel. So far as the language of the verse is concerned, it depends on Psalms 95:7. "He hath made us" does not refer to creation, but to the constituting of Israel the people of God. "We are His" is the reading of the Hebrew margin, and is evidently to be preferred to that of the text, "Not we ourselves." The difference in Hebrew is only in one letter, and the pronunciation of both readings would be the same. Jewish text critics count fifteen passages, in which a similar mistake has been made in the text. Here, the comparison of Psa 95:1-11 and the connection with the next clause of Psa 100:3 are decidedly in favour of the amended reading. It is to be observed that this is the only and it is natural to lay stress on the opposition between "ye" in Psalms 100:3 a, -and "we" and "us" in b. The collective Israel speaks, and calls all men to rejoice in Jehovah, because of His grace to it. The psalm is, then, not, as Cheyne calls it, "a national song of thanksgiving, with which a universalistic element is not completely fused," but a song which starts from national blessings, and discerns in them a message of hope and joy for all men. Israel was meant to be a sacred hearth on which a fire was kindled, that was to warm all the house. God revealed Himself in Israel, but to the world. The call to praise is repeated in Psalms 100:4 with more distinct reference to the open Temple gates into which all the nations may now enter. The psalmist sees, in prophetic hope, crowds pouring in with glad alacrity through the portals, and then hears the joyful tumult of their many voices rising in a melodious surge of praise. His eager desire and large-hearted confidence that so it will one day be are vividly expressed by the fourfold call in Psalms 100:4. And the reason which should draw all men to bless God’s revealed character is that His self-revelation, whether to Israel or to others, shows that the basis of that character is goodness-i.e., kindness or love-and that, as older singers have sung, "His lovingkindness endures forever," and, as a thousand generations in Israel and throughout the earth have proved, His faithful adherence to His word. and discharge of all obligations under which He has come to His creatures, give a basis for trust and a perpetual theme for joyful thanksgiving. Therefore, all the world has an interest in Jehovah’s royalty, and should, and one day shall, compass His throne with joyful homage, and obey His behests with willing service. Psalms 101:1-8 THE contents of this psalm go far towards confirming the correctness of the superscription in ascribing it to David, as Ewald acknowledges. To call it an ideal description of a Jewish king, dramatically put into such a ruler’s mouth, does not do justice to the ring of earnestness in it. No doubt, subjective impressions are unreliable guides, but it is difficult to resist the impression that a kingly voice is audible here, speaking no ideal description, but his own stern resolves. It is a royal "proclamation against vice and immorality," appropriate to the beginning of a reign. If we accept the superscription, and interpret the abrupt question in Psalms 101:2. "When wilt Thou come to me?" as the utterance of David’s longing to see the Ark set in Jerusalem, we get a most fitting period for the psalm. He had but recently ascended the throne. The abuses and confusions of Saul’s last troubled years had to be reformed. The new king felt that he was God’s viceroy; and here declares what he will strive to make his monarchy-a copy of God’s. He gives evildoers fair warning, and bids all true men be sure of his favour. But he will take heed to himself, before he seeks to purge his court. So the psalm, though it has no strophical arrangement, falls into two main parts, in the first of which the king lays down the rule of his own conduct, and, in the second, declares war against the vermin that infest especially an Eastern court-slanderers, arrogant upstarts, traffickers in lies. His ambition is to have Jehovah’s city worthy of its true King, when He shall deign to come and dwell in it: Therefore his face will be gracious to all good men, and his hand heavy on evildoers. The psalm is "A mirror for Magistrates," to quote the title of an old English book. The first words of the psalm seem at first sight incongruous with its contents, which are singularly devoid of praise. But they are not meant to refer to the psalm, but declare the singer’s purpose for his whole life. If the speaker is a real character, he is a poet king. Of whom is that singular combination of royalty and minstrelsy so true as of David? If the speaker is an ideal, is it not peculiar that the first qualification of the ideal king should be that he is a poet? The suggestion that "lovingkindness and judgment" are here the monarch’s virtues, not Divine attributes, is negatived by usage and by the following clause, "To Thee, Jehovah, will I sing." But it is as a king that the psalmist vows to praise these twin characteristics of the Divine rule; and his song is to be accompanied by melodious deeds, which shape themselves after that pattern for rulers and all men. Earthly power is then strongest when, like God’s, it is informed by lovingkindness and based on righteousness. In this connection, it is significant that this psalm, describing what a king should be, has been placed immediately after the series which tells who the true King of Israel and the world is, in whom these same attributes are ever linked together. Psalms 101:2-4 outline the king’s resolves for himself. With noble self-control, this ruler of men sets before himself the narrow, thorny way of perfectness, not the broad, flowery road of indulgence. He owns a law above himself and a far-off goal of moral completeness, which, he humbly feels, is yet unattained, but which he vows will never be hidden from his undazzled eyes, by the glitter of lower earthly good, or the rank mists of sensual pleasures. He had abundant facilities for reaching lower aims, but he turns from these to "give heed" to the way of perfectness. That resolve must be clearly and strongly made by every man, prince or peasant, who would attain to the dominion over self and externals, which is man’s true royalty. The suddenly interjected question of longing, "When wilt Thou come to me?" is best explained by connecting it with David’s desire that the Ark should be permanently domiciled in Jerusalem-a desire which was checked by his reflections on his own unworthiness. (2 Samuel 6:9) Now he feels that, on the one hand, his whole-hearted desire after righteousness makes him capable of receiving such a guest; and that, on the other, his firmest resolves will be evanescent, without God’s presence to confirm his wavering and to help him to make his resolves into acts. He longed for that "coming" of the symbol of God’s dwelling with men, not with heathenish desire to have it as a magic-working charm against outward foes, but as helping his faith to grasp the fact that God was with him, as his ally in the nobler fight against his own baseness and his position’s temptations. We dare not ask God to come to us, unless we are conscious of desire to be pure; we cannot hope to realise that desire, unless He is with us. So, the natural sequel of determination to give heed to the way of perfectness is petition to Him, to come very near and take up His abode with us. After this most significant interruption, the stream of resolutions runs on again. In the comparative privacy of his house, he will "walk with a perfect heart," ever seeking to translate his convictions of right into practice, and regulating his activities by conscience. The recesses of an Eastern palace were often foul with lust, and hid extravagances of caprice and self-indulgence; but this ruler will behave there as one who has Jehovah for a guest. The language of Psa 101:3 is very energetic. "Any villainous thing" is literally "a thing of Belial"; "the doing of transgressions" is literally "doing deeds that turn aside," i.e., from the course prescribed. He will not take the former as models for imitation or objects of desire. The latter kindle wholesome hatred; and if ever he is tempted to dally with sin, he will shake it off, as a venomous reptile that has fastened on him. "A perfect heart" will expel "a perverse heart," but neither will the one be gained nor the other banished without vehement and persistent effort. This man does not trust the improvement of his character to chance or expect it to come of itself. He means to bend his strength to effect it. He cannot but "know evil," in the sense of being aware of it and conscious of its seductions; but he will not "know" it, in the sense of letting it into his inner nature or with the knowledge which is experience and love. From Psalms 101:5 onwards, the king lays down the principles of his public action, and that mainly in reference to bad men. One verse suffices to tell of his fostering care of good men. The rest describes how he means to be a terror to evildoers. The vices against which he will implacably war are not gross crimes such as ordinarily bring down the sword of public justice. This monarch has regard to more subtle evils-slander, superciliousness, inflated vanity ("proud hearted" in Psalms 101:5 is literally wide in heart, i.e., dilated with self-sufficiency or ambition). His eyes are quick to mark "the faithful in the land." He looks for those whose faithfulness to God guarantees their fidelity to men and general reliableness. His servants shall be like himself, followers of "the way of perfectness." In that court, dignity and office will go, hot to talent, or to crafty arts of servility, or to birth, but to moral and religious qualities. In the last two verses, the psalm returns to evildoers. The actors and speakers of lies shall be cleared out of the palace. Such base creatures crawl and sting about the purlieus of courts, but this prince will have his immediate entourage free from them. He longs to get rid of the stifling atmosphere of deceit, and to have honest men round him, as many a ruler before and since has longed. But not only palace, but city, has to be swept clean, and one cleansing at the beginning of a reign will not be enough. So "every morning" the work has to be done again. "Ill weeds grow apace," and the mower must not get weary of his scythe. God’s city must be pure. "Without are whatsoever worketh and maketh a lie." The psalm is a God-given vision of what a king and kingdom might and should be. If David wrote it, his early resolves were sadly falsified. "I will set no villainous things before my eyes"-yet from his "house," where he vowed to "walk with a perfect heart," he looked on Bathsheba. "He that speaks lies shall not be established in my sight"-yet Absalom, Ahithophel, and the sons of Zeruiah stood round his throne. The shortcomings of the earthly shadows of God’s rule force us to turn away to the only perfect King and Kingdom, Jesus Christ and His realm, and to the city "into which shall in no wise enter anything that defileth." Psalms 102:1-28 Psalms 102:13-14 show that the psalm was written when Zion was in ruins and the time of her restoration at hand. Sadness shot with hope, as a cloud with sunlight, is the singer’s mood. The pressure of present sorrows points to the time of the Exile; the lightening of these, by the expectation that the hour for their cessation has all but struck, points to the close of that period. There is a general consensus of opinion on this, though Baethgen is hesitatingly inclined to adopt the Maccabean date, and Cheyne prefers the time of Nehemiah, mainly because the references to the "stones" and "dust" recall to him "Nehemiah’s lonely ride round the burned walls," and "Sanballat’s mocking at the Jews for attempting to revive the stones out of heaps of rubbish" ("Orig. of Psalt.," p. 70). These references would equally suit any period of desolation; but the point of time indicated by Psalms 102:13 is more probably the eve of restoration than the completion of the begun and interrupted reestablishment of Israel in its land. Like many of the later psalms, this is largely coloured by earlier ones, as well as by Deuteronomy, Job, and the second half of Isaiah, while it has also reminiscences of Jeremiah. Some commentators have, indeed, supposed it to be his work. The turns of thought are simple. While there is no clear strophical arrangement, there are four broadly distinguished parts: a prelude, invoking God to hearken (Psalms 102:1-2); a plaintive bemoaning of the psalmist’s condition (Psalms 102:3-11); a triumphant rising above his sorrows, and rejoicing in the fair vision of a restored Jerusalem, whose Temple courts the nations tread (Psalms 102:12-22); and a momentary glance at his sorrows and brief life, which but spurs him to lay hold the more joyously on God’s eternity, wherein he finds the pledge of the fulfilment of his hopes and of God’s promises (Psalms 102:23-28). The opening invocations in Psalms 102:1-2 are mostly found in other psalms. "Let my cry come unto Thee" recalls Psalms 18:6. "Hide not Thy face" is like Psalms 27:9. "In the day of my straits" recurs in Psalms 59:16. "Bend to me Thy ear" is in Psalms 31:2. "In the day when I call "is as in Psalms 56:9. "Answer me speedily" is found in Psalms 69:17. But the psalmist is not a cold-blooded compiler, weaving a web from old threads, but a suffering man, fain to give his desires voice, in words which sufferers before him had hallowed, and securing a certain solace by reiterating familiar petitions. They are none the less his own, because they have been the cry of others. Some aroma of the answers that they drew down in the past clings to them still, and makes them fragrant to him. Sorrow and pain are sometimes dumb, but, in Eastern natures, more often eloquent; finding ease in recounting their pangs. The psalmist’s first words of self-lamentation echo familiar strains, as he bases his cry for speedy answer on the swiftness with which his days are being whirled away, and melting like smoke as it escapes from a chimney. The image suggests another. The fire that makes the smoke is that in which his very bones are smouldering like a brand. The word for bones is in the singular, the bony framework being thought of as articulated into a whole. "Brand" is a doubtful rendering of a word which the Authorised Version, following some ancient Jewish authorities, renders hearth, as do Delitzsch and Cheyne. It is used in Isaiah 33:14 as =" burning," but "brand" is required to make out the metaphor. The same theme of physical decay is continued in Psalms 102:4 with a new image struck out by the ingenuity of pain. His heart is "smitten" as by sunstroke (compare Psalms 121:6, Isaiah 49:10, and for still closer parallels Hosea 9:16, Jonah 4:7, in both of which the same effect of fierce sunshine is described as the sufferer here bewails). His heart withers like Jonah’s gourd. The "For" in Psalms 102:4 b can scarcely be taken as giving the reason for this withering. It must rather be taken as giving the proof that it was so withered as might be concluded by beholders from the fact that he refused his food (Baethgen). The psalmist apparently intends in Psalms 102:5 to describe himself as worn to a skeleton by long-continued and passionate lamentations. But his phrase is singular. One can understand that emaciation should be described by saying that the bones adhered to the skin, the flesh having wasted away, but that they stick to the flesh can only describe it, by giving a wide meaning to "flesh," as including the whole outward part of the frame in contrast with the internal framework. Lamentations 4:8 gives the more natural expression. The psalmist has groaned himself into emaciation. Sadness and solitude go well together. We plunge into lonely places when we would give voice to our grief. The poet’s imagination sees his own likeness in solitude-loving creatures. The pelican is never now seen in Palestine but on Lake Huleh. Thomson ("Land and Book," p. 260: London, 1861) speaks of having found it there only, and describes it as "the most sombre, austere bird I ever saw." "The owl of the ruins" is identified by Tristram ("Land of Israel," p. 67) with the small owl Athene meridionalis, the emblem of Minerva, which "is very characteristic of all the hilly and rocky portions of Syria." The sparrow may be here a generic term for any small song bird, but there is no need for departing from the narrower meaning. Thomson (p. 43) says: "When one of them has lost his mate-an everyday occurrence-he will sit on the housetop alone and lament by the hour." The division of Psa 102:7 is singular, as the main pause in it falls on "am become," to the disruption of the logical continuity. The difficulty is removed by Wickes ("Accentuation of the Poetical Books," p. 29), who gives several instances which seem to establish the law that, in "the musical accentuation, there is "an apparent reluctance to place the main dividing accent after the first, or before the last, word of the verse." The division is not logical, and we may venture to neglect it, and arrange as above, restoring the dividing accent to its place after the first word. Others turn the flank of the difficulty by altering the text to read, "I" am sleepless and must moan aloud" (so Cheyne, following Olshausen). Yet another drop of bitterness in the psalmist’s cup is the frantic hatred which pours itself out in voluble mockery all day long, making a running accompaniment to his wail. Solitary as he is, he cannot get beyond hearing of shrill insults. So miserable does he seem, that enemies take him and his distresses for a formula of imprecation, and can find no blacker curse to launch at other foes than to wish that they may be like him. So ashes, the token of mourning, are his food, instead of the bread which he had forgotten to eat, and there are more tears than wine in the cup he drinks. But all this only tells how sad he is. A deeper depth opens when he remembers why he is sad. The bitterest thought to a sufferer is that his sufferings indicate God’s displeasure; but it may be wholesome bitterness, which, leading to the recognition of the sin which evokes the wrath, may change into a solemn thankfulness for sorrows which are discerned to be chastisements, inflicted by that Love of which indignation is one form. The psalmist confesses sin in the act of bewailing sorrow, and sees behind all his pains the working of that hand whose interposition for him he ventures to implore. The tremendous metaphor of Psa 102:10 b pictures it as thrust forth from heaven to grasp the feeble sufferer, as an eagle stoops to plunge its talons into a lamb. It lifts him high, only to give more destructive impetus to the force with which it flings him down, to the place where he lies, a huddled heap of broken bones and wounds. His plaint returns to its beginning, lamenting the brief life which is being wasted away by sore distress. Lengthening shadows tell of approaching night. His day is nearing sunset. It will be dark soon, and, as he has said (Psalms 102:4), his very self is withering and becoming like dried-up herbage. One can scarcely miss the tone of individual sorrow in the preceding verses; but national restoration, not personal deliverance, is the theme o/the triumphant central part of the psalm. That is no reason for flattening the previous verses into the voice of the personified Israel, but rather for hearing in them the sighing of one exile, on whom the general burden weighed sorely. He lifts his tear-laden eyes to heaven, and catches a vision there which changes, as by magic, the key of his song-Jehovah sitting in royal state (compare Psalms 9:7; Psalms 29:10) forever. That silences complaints, breathes courage into the feeble and hope into the despairing. In another mood the thought of the eternal rule of God might make man’s mortality more bitter, but Faith grasps it, as enfolding assurances which turn groaning into ringing praise. For the vision is not only of an everlasting Some One who works a sovereign will, but of the age-long dominion of Him whose name is Jehovah; and since that name is the revelation of His nature, it, too, endures forever. It is the name of Israel’s covenant making and keeping God. Therefore, ancient promises have not gone to water, though Israel is an exile, and all the old comfort and confidence are still welling up from the Name. Zion cannot die while Zion’s God lives. Lamentations 5:19 is probably the original of this verse, but the psalmist has changed "throne" into "memorial," i.e. name, and thereby deepened the thought. The assurance that God will restore Zion rests not only on His faithfulness, but on signs which show that the sky is reddening towards the day of redemption. The singer sees the indication that the hour fixed in God’s eternal counsels is at hand, because he sees how God’s servants, who have a claim on Him and are in sympathy with His purposes, yearn lovingly after the sad ruins and dust of the forlorn city. Some new access of such feelings must have been stirring among the devouter part of the exiles. Many large truths are wrapped in the psalmist’s words. The desolations of Zion knit true hearts to her more closely. The more the Church or any good cause is depressed, the more need for its friends to cling to it. God’s servants should see that their sympathies go toward the same objects as God’s do. They are proved to be His servants, because they favour what He favours. Their regards, turned to existing evils, are the precursors of Divine intervention for the remedy of these. When good men begin to lay the Church’s or the world’s miseries to heart, it is a sign that God is beginning to heal them. The cry of God’s servants can "hasten the day of the Lord," and preludes His appearance like the keen morning air stirring the sleeping flowers before sunrise. The psalmist anticipates that a rebuilt Zion will ensure a worshipping world. He expresses that confidence, which he shares with Isaiah 40:1-31; Isaiah 41:1-29; Isaiah 42:1-25; Isaiah 43:1-28; Isaiah 44:1-28; Isaiah 45:1-25; Isaiah 46:1-13, in Psalms 102:15-18. The name and glory of Jehovah will become objects of reverence to all the earth, because of the manifestation of them by the rebuilding of Zion, which is a witness to all men of His power and tender regard to His people’s cry. The past tenses of Psa 102:16-17 do not indicate that the psalm is later than the Restoration. It is contemplated as already accomplished because it is the occasion of the "fear" prophesied in Psalms 102:15, and consequently prior in time to it. "Destitute," in Psalms 102:17 is literally naked or stript. It is used in Jeremiah 17:6 as the name of a desert plant, probably a dwarf juniper, stunted and dry, but seems to be employed here as simply designating utter destitution. Israel had been stripped of every beauty and made naked before her enemies. Despised, she had cried to God, and now is clothed again with the garments of salvation, "as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels." A wondering world will adore her delivering God. The glowing hopes of psalmist and prophet seem to be dreams, since the restored Israel attracted no such observance and wrought no such convictions. But the singer was not wrong in believing that the coming of Jehovah in His glory for the rebuilding of Zion would sway the world to homage. His facts were right, but he did not know their perspective, nor could he understand how many weary years lay, like a deep gorge hidden from the eye of one who looks over a wide prospect, between the rebuilding of which he was thinking, and that truer establishment of the city of God, which is again parted from the period of universal recognition of Jehovah’s glory by so many sad and stormy generations. But the vision is true. The coming of Jehovah in His glory will be followed by a world’s recognition of its light. That praise accruing to Jehovah shall Be not only universal, but shall go on sounding, with increasing volume in its tone, through coming generations. This expectation is set forth in Psalms 102:18-22 which substantially reiterate the thought of the preceding, with the addition that there is to be a new Israel, a people yet to be created. (Psalms 22:31) The psalmist did not know "the deep things he spoke." He did know that Israel was immortal, and that the seed of life was in the tree that had cast its leaves and stood bare and apparently dead. But he did not know the process by which that new Israel was to be created, nor the new elements of which it was to consist. His confidence teaches us never to despair of the future of God’s Church, however low its present state, but to look down the ages, in calm certainty that, however externals may change, the succession of God’s children will never fail, nor the voice of their praise ever fall silent. The course of God’s intervention for Israel is described in Psalms 102:19-20. His looking down from heaven is equivalent to His observance, as the all-seeing Witness and Judge, (compare Psalms 14:2; Psalms 33:13-14, etc.) and is preparatory to His hearing the sighing of the captive Israel, doomed to death. The language of Psa 102:20 is apparently drawn from Psalms 79:11. The thought corresponds to that of Psa 102:17. The purpose of His intervention is set forth in Psalms 102:21-22 as being the declaration of Jehovah’s name and praise in Jerusalem before a gathered world. The aim of Jehovah’s dealings is that all men, through all generations, may know and praise Him. That is but another way of saying that He infinitely desires, and perpetually works for, men’s highest good. For our sakes, He desires so much that we should know Him, since the knowledge is life eternal. He is not greedy of adulation nor dependent on recognition, but He loves men too well not to rejoice in being understood and loved by them, since Love ever hungers for return. The psalmist saw what shall one day be, when, far down the ages, he beheld the world gathered in the temple courts, and heard the shout of their praise borne to him up the stream of time. He penetrated to the inmost meaning of the Divine acts, when he proclaimed that they were all done for the manifestation of the Name, which cannot but be praised when it is known. If the poet was one of the exiles, on whom the burden of the general calamity weighed as a personal sorrow, it is very natural that his glowing anticipations of national restoration should be, as in. this psalm, enclosed in a setting of more individual complaint and petition. The transition from these to the purely impersonal centre Of the psalm, and the recurrence to them in Psalms 102:23-28, are inexplicable, if the "I" of the first and last parts is Israel, but perfectly intelligible if it is one Israelite. For a moment the tone of sadness is heard in Psalms 102:23; but the thought of his own afflicted and brief life is but a stimulus to the psalmist to lay hold of God’s immutability and to find rest there. The Hebrew text reads "His strength," and is followed (by, the LXX, Vulgate, Hengstenberg, and Kay He afflicted on the "way with His power"); but the reading of the Hebrew margin, adopted above and by most commentators, is preferable, as supplying an object for the verb, which is lacking in the former reading, and as corresponding to "my days" in b. The psalmist has felt the exhaustion of long sorrow and the shortness of his term. Will God do all these glorious things of which he has been singing, and he, the singer, not be there to see? That would mingle bitterness in his triumphant anticipations; for it would be little to him, lying in his grave, that Zion should be built again. The hopes with which some would console us for the loss of the Christian assurance of immortality, that the race shall march on to new power and nobleness, are poor substitutes for continuance of our own lives and for our own participation in the glories of the future. The psalmist’s prayer, which takes God’s eternity as its reason for deprecating his own premature death, echoes the inextinguishable confidence of the devout heart, that somehow even its fleeting being has a claim to be assimilated in duration to its Eternal Object of trust and aspiration. The contrast between God’s years and man’s days may be brooded on in bitterness or in hope. They who are driven by thinking of their own mortality to clutch, with prayerful faith, God’s eternity, use the one aright, and will not be deprived of the other. The solemn grandeur of Psa 102:25-26 needs little commentary, but it may be noted that a reminiscence of Isa 11:1-16 runs through them both in the description of the act of creation of heaven and earth, (Isaiah 48:13; Isaiah 44:24) and in that of their decaying like a garment. (Isaiah 51:6; Isaiah 54:10) That which has been created can be removed. The creatural is necessarily the transient. Possibly, too, the remarkable expression "changed," as applied to the visible creation, may imply the thought which had already been expressed in Isaiah, and was destined to receive such deepening by the Christian truth of the new heavens and new earth-a truth the contents of which are dim to us until it is fulfilled. But whatever may be the fate of creatures, He who receives no accession to His stable being by originating suffers no, diminution by extinguishing them. Man’s days, the earth’s ages, and the aeons of the heavens pass, and still "Thou art He," the same Unchanging Author of change. Measures of time fail when applied to His being, whose years have not that which all divisions of time have-an end. An unending year is a paradox, which, in relation to God, is a truth. It is remarkable that the psalmist does not draw the conclusion that he himself shall receive an answer to his prayer, but that "the children of Thy servants shall dwell" i.e., in the land, and that there will always be an Israel "established before Thee." He contemplates successive generations as in turn dwelling in the promised land (and perhaps in the ancient "dwelling place to all generations," even in God); but of his own continuance he is silent. Was he not assured of that? or was he so certain of the answer to his prayer that he had forgotten himself in the vision of the eternal God and the abiding Israel? Having regard to the late date of the psalm, it is hard to believe that silence meant ignorance, while it may well be that it means a less vivid and assured hope of immortality, and a smaller space occupied by that hope than with us. But the other explanation is not to be left out of view, and the psalmist’s oblivion of self in rapt gazing on God’s eternal being-the pledge of His servant’s perpetuity-may teach us that we reach the summit of Faith when we lose ourselves in God. The Epistle to the Hebrews quotes Psalms 102:25-27 as spoken of "the Son." Such an application of the words rests on the fact that the psalm speaks of the coming of Jehovah for redemption, who is none other than Jehovah manifested fully in the Messiah. But Jehovah whose coming brings redemption and His recognition by the world is also Creator. Since, then, the Incarnation is, in truth, the coming of Jehovah, which the psalmist, like all the prophets, looked for as the consummation, He in whom the redeeming Jehovah was manifested is He in whom Jehovah the Creator "made the worlds." The writer of the Epistle is not asserting that the psalmist consciously spoke of the Messiah, but he is declaring that his words, read in the light of history, point to Jesus as the crowning manifestation of the redeeming, and therefore necessarily of the creating, God. Psalms 103:1-22 THERE are no clouds in the horizon, nor notes of sadness in the music, of this psalm. No purer outburst of thankfulness enriches the Church. It is well that, amid the many psalms which give voice to mingled pain and trust, there should be one of unalloyed gladness, as untouched by sorrow as if sung by spirits in heaven. Because it is thus purely an outburst of thankful joy, it is the more fit to be pondered in times of sorrow. The psalmist’s praise flows in one unbroken stream. There are no clear marks of division, but the river broadens as it runs, and personal benefits and individual praise open out into gifts which are seen to fill the universe, and thanksgiving which is heard from every extremity of His wide dominion of lovingkindness. In Psalms 103:1-5 the psalmist sings of his own experience. His spirit, or ruling sell calls on his "soul," the weaker and more feminine part, which may be cast down (Psalms 42:1-11 and Psalms 43:1-5) by sorrow, and needs stimulus and control, to contemplate God’s gifts and to praise Him. A good man will rouse himself to such exercise, and coerce his more sensuous and sluggish faculties to their noblest use. Especially must memory be directed, for it keeps woefully short-lived records of mercies, especially of continuous ones. God’s gifts are all "benefits," whether they are bright or dark. The catalogue of blessings lavished on the singer’s soul begins with forgiveness and ends with immortal youth. The profound consciousness of sin, which it was one aim of the Law to evoke, underlies the psalmist’s praise; and he who does not feel that no blessings could come from heaven, unless forgiveness cleared the way for them, has yet to learn the deepest music of thankfulness. It is followed by "healing" of "all thy diseases," which is no cure of merely bodily ailments, any more than redeeming of life "from the pit" is simply preservation of physical existence. In both there is at least included, even if we do not say that it only is in view, the operation of the pardoning God in delivering from the sicknesses and death of the spirit. The soul thus forgiven and healed is crowned with "lovingkindness and compassions," wreathed into a garland for a festive brow, and its adornment is not only a result of these Divine attributes, but the very things themselves, so that an effluence from God beautifies the soul. Nor is even this all, for the same gifts which are beauty are also sustenance, and God satisfies the soul with good, especially with the only real good, Himself. The word rendered above "mouth" is extremely difficult. It is found in Psalms 32:9, where it seems best taken in the meaning of trappings or harness. That meaning is inappropriate here, though Hupfeld tries to retain it. The LXX renders "desire," which fits well, but can scarcely be established. Other renderings, such as "age" or "duration"-i.e., the whole extent of life-have been suggested. Hengstenberg and others regard the word as a designation of the soul, somewhat resembling the other term applied to it, "glory"; but the fact that it is the soul which is addressed negatives that explanation. Graetz and others resort to a slight textual alteration, resulting in the reading "thy misery." Delitzsch, in his latest editions, adopts this emendation doubtingly, and supposes that with the word misery or affliction there is associated the idea "of beseeching and therefore of longing," whence the LXX rendering would originate. "Mouth" is the most natural word in such connection, and its retention here is sanctioned by "the interpretation of the older versions in Psalms 32:9 and the Arabic cognate" (Perowne). It is therefore retained above, though with some reluctance. How should a man thus dealt with grow old? The body may, but not the soul. Rather it will drop powers that can decay, and for each thus lost will gain a stronger-moulting, and not being stripped of its wings, though it changes their feathers. There is no need to make the psalmist responsible for the fables of the eagle’s renewal of its youth. The comparison with the monarch of the air does not refer to the process by which the soul’s wings are made strong, but to the result in wings that never tire, but bear their possessor far up in the blue and towards the throne. In Psalms 103:6-18 the psalmist sweeps a greater circle, and deals with God’s blessings to mankind. He has Israel specifically in view in the earlier verses. but passes beyond Israel to all "who fear Him." It is very instructive that he begins with the definite fact of God’s revelation through Moses. He is not spinning a filmy idea of a God out of his own consciousness, but he has learned all that he knows of Him from His historical self-revelation. A hymn of praise which has not revelation for its basis will have many a quaver of doubt. The God of men’s imaginations, consciences, or yearnings is a dim shadow. The God to whom love turns undoubting and praise rises without one note of discord is the God who has spoken His own name by deeds which have entered into the history of the world. And what has He revealed Himself to be? The psalmist answers almost in the words of the proclamation made to Moses (Psalms 103:8-9). The lawgiver had prayed, "I beseech Thee show me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee"; and the prayer had been granted, when "the Lord passed by before him," and proclaimed His name as "full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth." That proclamation fills the singer’s heart, and his whole soul leaps up in him, as he meditates on its depth and sweetness. Now, after so many centuries of experience, Israel can repeat with full assurance the ancient self-revelation, which has been proved true by many "mighty deeds." The psalmist’s thoughts are still circling round the idea of forgiveness, with which he began his contemplations. He and his people equally need it; and all that revelation of God’s character bears directly on His relation to sin. Jehovah is "long of anger"-i.e., slow to allow it to flash out in punishment-and as lavish of lovingkindness as sparing of wrath. That character is disclosed by deeds. Jehovah’s graciousness forces Him to "contend" against a man’s sins for the man’s sake. But it forbids Him to be perpetually chastising and condemning, like a harsh taskmaster. Nor does He keep His anger ever burning, though He does keep His lovingkindness aflame for a thousand generations. Lightning is transitory: sunshine, constant. Whatever His chastisements, they have been less than our sins. The heaviest is "light," and "for a moment," when compared with the "exceeding weight of" our guilt. The glorious metaphors in Psalms 103:11-12 traverse heaven to the zenith, and from sunrise to sunset, to find distances distant enough to express the towering height of God’s mercy and the completeness of His removal from us of our sins. That pure arch, the top stone of which nor wings nor thoughts can reach, sheds down all light and heat which make growth and cherish life. It is high above us, but it pours blessings on us and it bends down all round the horizon to kiss the low, dark earth. The lovingkindness of Jehovah is similarly lofty, boundless, all-fructifying. In Psalms 103:11 b the parallelism would be more complete if a small textual alteration were adopted, which would give "high" instead of "great"; but the slight departure which the existing text makes from precise correspondence with a-is of little moment, and the thought is sufficiently intelligible as the words stand. Between East and West all distances lie. To the eye they bound the world. So far does God’s mercy bear away our sins. Forgiveness and cleansing are inseparably united. But the song drops-or shall we say rises?-from these magnificent measures of the immeasurable to the homely image of a father’s pity. We may lose ourselves amid the amplitudes of the lofty, wide-stretching sky, but this emblem of paternal love goes straight to our hearts. A pitying God! What can be added to that? But that fatherly pity is decisively limited to "them that fear Him." It is possible, then, to put oneself outside the range of that abundant dew, and the universality of God’s blessings does not hinder self-exclusion from them. In Psalms 103:14-16 man’s brief life is brought in, not as a sorrow or as a cloud darkening the sunny joy of the song, but as one reason for the Divine compassion. "He, He knows our frame." The word rendered "frame" is literally. "formation" or "fashioning," and comes from the same root as the verb employed in Genesis 2:7 to describe man’s creation. "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground." It is also used for the potter’s action in moulding earthen vessels. (Isaiah 29:16, etc.) So, in the next clause, "dust" carries on the allusion to Genesis, and the general idea conveyed is that of frailty. Made from dust and fragile as an earthen vessel, man by his weakness appeals to Jehovah’s compassion. A blow, delivered with the full force of that almighty hand, would "break him as a potter’s vessel is broken." Therefore God handles us tenderly, as mindful of the brittle material with which He has to deal. The familiar figure of fading vegetation, so dear to the psalmists, recurs here; but it is touched with peculiar delicacy, and there is something very sweet and uncomplaining in the singer’s tone. The image of the fading flower, burned up by the simoom, and leaving one little soot in the desert robbed" of its beauty, veils much of the terror of death, and expresses no shrinking, though great pathos. Psalms 103:16 may either describe the withering of the flower, or the passing away of frail man. In the former case, the pronouns would be rendered by "it" and "its"; in the latter, by "he," "him," and "his." The latter seems the preferable explanation. Psalms 103:16 b is verbally the same as Job 7:10. The contemplation of mortality tinges the song with a momentary sadness, which melts into the pensive, yet cheerful, assurance that mortality has an accompanying blessing, in that it makes a plea for pity from a Father’s heart. But another, more triumphant thought springs up. A devout soul, full charged with thankfulness based on faith in God’s name and ways, cannot but be led by remembering man’s brief life to think of God’s eternal years. So, the key changes at Psalms 103:17 from plaintive minors to jubilant notes. The psalmist pulls out all the stops of his organ, and rolls along his music in a great crescendo to the close. The contrast of God’s eternity with man’s transitoriness is like the similar trend of thought in Psalms 90:1-17 and Psalms 102:1-28. The extension of His lovingkindness to children’s children and its limitation to those who fear Him and keep His covenant in obedience, rest upon Exodus 20:6; Exodus 34:7; and Deuteronomy 7:9. That limitation has been laid down twice already (Psalms 103:11-13). All men share in that lovingkindness and receive the best gifts from it of which they are capable; but those who cling to God in loving reverence, and who are moved by that blissful "fear" which has no torment, to yield their wills to Him in inward submission and outward obedience, do enter into the inner recesses of that lovingkindness, and are replenished with good, of which others are incapable. If God’s lovingkindness is "from everlasting to everlasting," will not His children share in it for as long? The psalm has no articulate doctrine of a future life; but is there not in that thought of an eternal outgoing of God’s heart to its objects some (perhaps half-conscious) implication that these will continue to exist? May not the psalmist have felt that, though the flower of earthly life "passed in the passing of an hour," the root would be somehow transplanted to the higher "house of the Lord," and "flourish in the courts of our God," as long as His everlasting mercy poured its sunshine? We, at all events, know that His eternity is the pledge of ours. "Because I live, ye shall live also." From Psalms 103:19 to the end, the psalm takes a still wider sweep. It now embraces the universe. But it is noticeable that there is no more about "lovingkindness" in these verses. Man’s sin and frailty make him a fit recipient of it, but we do not know that in all creation another being, capable of and needing it, is found. Amid starry distances, amid heights and depths, far beyond sunrise and sunset, God’s all-including kingdom stretches and blesses all. Therefore, all creatures are called on to Bless Him, since all are blessed by Him, each according to its nature and need. If they have consciousness, they owe Him praise. If they have not, they praise Him by being. The angels, "heroes of strength," as the words literally read, are "His," and they not only execute His behests, but stand attent before Him, listening to catch the first whispered indication of His will. "His hosts" are by some taken to mean the stars; but surely it is more congruous to suppose that beings who are His "ministers" and perform His "will" are intelligent beings. Their praise consists in hearkening to and doing His word. But obedience is not all their praise; for they too, bring Him tribute of conscious adoration in more melodious music than ever sounded on earth. That "choir invisible" praises the King of heaven; but later revelation has taught us that men shall teach a new song to "principalities and powers in heavenly places," because men only can praise Him whose lovingkindness to them, sinful and dying, redeemed them by His blood. Therefore, it is no drop from these heavenly anthems, when the psalm circles round at last to its beginning, and the singer calls on his soul to add its "little human praise" to the thunderous chorus. The rest of the universe praises the mighty Ruler; he blesses the forgiving, pitying Jehovah. Nature and angels, stars and suns, seas and forests, magnify their Maker and Sustainer; we can bless the God who pardons iniquities and heals diseases which our fellow choristers never knew. Psalms 104:1-35 LIKE the preceding psalm, this one begins and ends with the psalmist’s call to his soul to bless Jehovah. The inference has been drawn that both psalms have the same author, but that is much too large a conclusion from such a fact. The true lesson from it is that Nature, when looked at by an eye that sees it to be full of God. yields material for devout gratitude no less than do His fatherly "mercies to them that fear Him." The keynote of the psalm is struck in Psalms 104:24, which breaks into an exclamation concerning the manifoldness of God’s works and the wisdom that has shaped them all. The psalm is a gallery of vivid Nature pictures, touched with Wonderful grace and sureness of hand. Clearness of vision and sympathy with every living thing make the swift outlines inimitably firm and lovely. The poet’s mind is like a crystal mirror, in which the Cosmos is reflected. He is true to the uniform Old Testament point of view, and regards Nature neither from the scientific nor aesthetic standpoint. To him it is the garment of God, the apocalypse of a present Deity, whose sustaining energy is but the prolongation of His creative act. All creatures depend on Him; His continuous action is their life. He rejoices in His works. The Creation narrative in Genesis underlies the psalm, and is in the main followed, though not slavishly. Psalms 104:1 would be normal in structure if the initial invocation were omitted, and as Psalms 104:35 would also be complete without it, the suggestion that it is, in both verses, a liturgical addition is plausible. The verse sums up the whole of the creative act in one grand thought. In that act the invisible God has arrayed Himself in splendour and glory, making visible these inherent attributes. That is the deepest meaning of Creation. The Universe is the garment of God. This general idea lays the foundation for the following picture of the process of creation which is coloured by reminiscences of Genesis. Here, as there, Light is the firstborn of Heaven; but the influence of the preceding thought shapes the language, and Light is regarded as God’s vesture. The Uncreated Light, who is darkness to our eyes, arrays Himself in created light, which reveals while it veils Him. Everywhere diffused, all-penetrating, all-gladdening, it tells of the Presence in which all creatures live. This clause is the poetic rendering of the work of the first creative day. The next clause in like manner deals with that of the second. The mighty arch of heaven is lifted and expanded over earth as easily as a man draws the cloth or skin sides and canopy of his circular tent over its framework. But our roof is His floor; and, according to Genesis, the firmament (lit. expanse) separates the waters above from those beneath. So the psalm pictures the Divine Architect as laying the beams of His upper chambers (for so the word means) in these waters, above the tent roof. The fluid is solid at His will, and the most mobile becomes fixed enough to be the foundation of His royal abode. The custom of having chambers on the roof, for privacy and freshness, suggests the image. In these introductory verses the poet is dealing with the grander instances of creative power, especially as realised in the heavens. Not till Psalms 104:5 does he drop to earth. His first theme is God’s dominion over the elemental forces, and so he goes on to represent the clouds as His chariot, the wind as bearing Him on its swift pinions, and, as the parallelism requires, the winds as His messengers, and devouring fire as His servants. The rendering of Psa 104:4 adopted in Hebrews from the LXX is less relevant to the psalmist’s purpose of gathering all the forces which sweep through the wide heavens into one company of obedient servants of God, than that adopted above, and now generally recognised. It is to be observed that the verbs in Psalms 104:2-4 are participles, which express continuous action. These creative acts were not done once for all, but are going on still and always. Preservation is continued creation. With Psalms 104:6 we pass to the work of the third of the Genesis days, and the verb is in the form which describes a historical fact. The earth is conceived of as formed, and already moulded into mountains and valleys, but all covered with "the deep" like a vesture-a sadly different one from the robe of Light which He wears. That weltering deep is bidden back to its future appointed bounds; and the process is grandly described, as if the waters were sentient, and, panic struck at God’s voice took to flight. Psalms 104:8 a throws in a vivid touch, to the disturbance of grammatical smoothness. The poet has the scene before his eye, and as the waters flee he sees the earth emerging, the mountains soaring, and the vales sinking, and he breaks his sentence, as if in wonder at the lovely apparition, but returns, in Psalms 104:8 b, to tell whither the fugitive waters fled-namely, to the ocean depths. There they are hemmed in by God’s will, and, as was promised to Noah, shall not again run wasting over a drowned world. The picture of the emerging earth, with its variations of valleys and mountains, remains before the psalmist’s eye throughout Psalms 104:10-18, which describe how it is clothed and peopled. These effects are due to the beneficent ministry of the same element, when guided and restrained by God, which swathed the world with desolation. Water runs through the vales, and rain falls on the mountains. Therefore the former bear herbs and corn, vines and olives, and the latter are clothed with trees not planted by human hand, the mighty cedars which spread their broad shelves of steadfast green high up among the clouds. "Everything lives whithersoever water cometh," as Easterns know. Therefore round the drinking places in the vales thirsty creatures gather, birds flit and sing; up among the cedars are peaceful nests, and inaccessible cliffs have their sure-footed inhabitants. All depend on water, and water is God’s gift. The psalmist’s view of Nature is characteristic in the direct ascription of all its processes to God. He makes the springs flow, and sends rain on the peaks. Equally characteristic is the absence of any expression of a sense of beauty in the sparkling streams tinkling down the gloomy wadies, or in the rainstorms darkening the hills, or in the green mantle of earth, or in the bright creatures. The psalmist is thinking of use, not of beauty. And yet it is a poet’s clear and kindly eye which looks upon all, and sees the central characteristic of each, -the eager drinking of the wild ass; the music of the birds blending with the brawling, of the stream, and sweeter because the singers are hidden among the branches; the freshly watered earth, "satisfied" with "the fruit of Thy works" (i.e., the rain which God has sent from His "upper chambers"), the manifold gifts which by His wondrous alchemy are produced from the ground by help of one agency, water; the forest trees with their foliage glistening, as if glad for the rain; the stork on her nest; the goats on the mountains; the "conies" (for which we have no popular name) hurrying to their holes in the cliffs. Man appears as depending, like the lower creatures, on the fruit of the ground; but he has more varied supplies, bread and wine and oil, and these not only satisfy material wants, but "gladden" and "strengthen" the heart. According to some. the word rendered "service" in Psalms 104:14 means "tillage," a meaning which is supported by Psalms 104:23, where the same word is rendered "labour," and which fits in well with the next clause of Psa 104:14, "to bring forth bread from the earth," which would describe the purpose of the tillage. His prerogative of labour is man’s special differentia in creation. It is a token of his superiority to the happy, careless creatures who toil not nor spin. Earth does not yield him its best products without his cooperation. There would thus be an allusion to him as the only worker in creation similar to that in Psalms 104:23, and to the reference to the "ships" in Psalms 104:26. But probably the meaning of "service," which is suggested by the parallelism, and does not introduce the new thought of cooperation with Nature or God, is to be preferred. The construction is somewhat difficult, but the rendering of Psa 104:14-15 given above seems best. The two clauses with infinitive verbs (to bring forth and to cause to shine) are each followed by a clause in which the construction is varied into that with a finite verb, the meaning remaining the same; and all four clauses express the Divine purpose in causing vegetation to spring. Then the psalmist looks up, once more to the hills. "The trees of Jehovah" are so called, not so much because they are great, as because, unlike vines and olives, they have not been planted or tended by man, nor belong to him. Far above the valleys, where men and the cattle dependent on him live on earth’s cultivated bounties, the unowned woods stand and drink God’s sift of rain, while wild creatures lead free lives amid mountains and rocks. With Psalms 104:19 the psalmist passes to the fourth day, but thinks of moon and sun only in relation to the alternation of day and night as affecting creatural life on earth. The moon is named first, because the Hebrew day began with the evening. It is the measurer, by whose phases seasons (or, according to some, festivals) are reckoned. The sun is a punctual servant, knowing the hour to set and duly keeping it. "Thou appointest darkness and it is night." God wills, and His will effects material changes. He says to His servant Night, "Come," and she "comes." The psalmist had peopled the vales and mountains of his picture. Everywhere he had seen life fitted to its environment; and night is populous too. He had outlined swift sketches of tame and wild creatures, and now he half shows us beasts of prey stealing through the gloom. He puts his finger on two characteristics-their stealthy motions, and their cries which made night hideous. Even their roar was a kind of prayer, though they knew it not; it was God from whom they sought their food. It would not have answered the purpose to have spoken of "all the loves, Now sleeping in those quiet groves." The poet desired to show how there were creatures that found possibilities of happy life in all the variety of conditions fashioned by the creative Hand, which was thus shown to be moved by Wisdom and Love. The sunrise sends these nocturnal animals back to their dens. and the world is ready for man. "The sun looked over the mountain’s rim," and the beasts of prey slunk to their lairs, and man’s day of toil began-the mark of his preeminence, God’s gift for his good, by which he uses creation for its highest end and fulfils God’s purpose. Grateful is the evening rest when the day has been filled with strenuous toil. The picture of earth and its inhabitants is now complete, and the dominant thought which it leaves on the psalmist’s heart is cast into the exultant and wondering exclamation of Psa 104:24. The variety as well as multitude of the forms in which God’s creative idea is embodied, the Wisdom which shapes all, His ownership of all, are the impressions made by the devout contemplation of Nature. The scientist and the artist are left free to pursue their respective lines of investigation and impression, but scientist and artist must rise to the psalmist’s point of view, if they are to learn the deepest lesson from the ordered kingdoms of Nature and from the beauty which floods the world. With the exclamation in Psalms 104:24 the psalmist has finished his picture of the earth, which he had seen as if emerging from the abyss, and watched as it was gradually clothed "with fertility and peopled with happy life. He turns, in Psalms 104:25-26, to the other half of his Vision of Creation, and portrays the gathered and curbed waters which he now calls the "sea." As always in Scripture, it is described as it looks to a landsman, gazing out on it from the safe shore. The characteristics specified betray unfamiliarity with maritime pursuits. The far-stretching roll of the waters away out to the horizon, the mystery veiling the strange lives swarming in its depths, the extreme contrasts in the magnitude of its inhabitants, strike the poet. He sees "the stately ships go on." The introduction of these into the picture is unexpected. We should have looked for an instance of the "small" creatures, to pair off with the "great" one, Leviathan, in the next words. "A modern poet," says Cheyne, in loc., " would have joined the mighty whale to the fairy nautilus." It has been suggested that "ship" here is a name for the nautilus, which is common in the Eastern Mediterranean. The suggestion is a tempting one, as fitting in more smoothly with the antithesis of small and great in the previous clause. But, in the absence of any proof that the word has any other meaning than "ship," the suggestion cannot be taken as more than a probable conjecture. The introduction of "ships" into the picture is quite in harmony with the allusions to man’s works in the former parts of the psalm, such as Psalms 104:23, and possibly Psalms 104:14. The psalmist seems to intend to insert such reference to man, the only toiler, in all his pictures. "Leviathan" is probably here the whale. Ewald, Hitzig, Baethgen, Kay, and Cheyne follow the LXX and Vulgate in reading "Leviathan whom Thou hast formed to sport with him," and take the words to refer to Job 41:5. The thought would then be that God’s power can control the mightiest creature’s plunges; but "the two preceding ‘there’s’ are in favour of the usual interpretation, ‘therein" (Hupfeld), and consequently of taking the "sporting" to be that of the unwieldy gambols of the sea monster. Psalms 104:27-30 mass all creatures of earth and sea, including man, as alike dependent on God for sustenance and for life. Dumbly these look expectant to Him, though man only knows to whom all living eyes are directed. The swift clauses in Psalms 104:28-30, without connecting particles, vividly represent the Divine acts as immediately followed by the creatural consequences. To this psalmist the links in the chain were of little consequence. His thoughts were fixed on its two ends-the Hand that sent its power thrilling through the links, and the result realised in the creature’s life. All natural phenomena are issues of God’s present will. Preservation is as much His act, as inexplicable without Him, as creation. There would be nothing to "gather" unless He "gave." All sorts of supplies, which make the "good" of physical life, are in His hand, whether they be the food of the wild asses by the streams, or of the conies among the cliffs, or of the young lions in the night, or of Leviathan tumbling amidst the waves, or of toiling man. Nor is it only the nourishment of life which comes straight from God to all, but life itself depends on His continual inbreathing. His face is creation’s light; breath from Him is its life. The withdrawal of it is death. Every change in creatural condition is wrought by Him. He is the only Fountain of Life, and the reservoir of all the forces that minister to life or to inanimate being. But the psalmist will not end his contemplations with the thought of the fair creation returning to nothingness. Therefore he adds another verse (Psalms 104:30); which tells of "life reorient out of dust." Individuals pass; the type remains. New generations spring. The yearly miracle of Spring brings greenness over the snow-covered or brown pastures and green shoots from stiffened boughs. Many of last year’s birds are dead, but there are nests in the cypresses, and twitterings among the branches in the wadies. Life, not, death, prevails in God’s world. So the psalmist gathers all up into a burst of praise. He desires that the glory of God, which accrues to Him from His works, may ever be rendered through devout recognition of Him as working them all by man, the only creature who can be the spokesman of creation. He further desires that, as God at first saw that all was "very good," He may ever continue thus to rejoice in His works, or, in other words, that these may fulfil His purpose. Possibly His rejoicing in His works is regarded as following upon man’s giving glory to Him for them. That rejoicing, which is the manifestation both of His love and of His satisfaction, is all the more desired, because, if His works do not please Him, there lies in Him a dread abyss of destructive power, which could sweep them into nothingness. Superficial readers may feel that the tone of Psa 104:32 strikes a discord, but it is a discord which can be resolved into deeper harmony. One frown from God, and the solid earth trembles, as conscious to its depths of His displeasure. One touch of the hand that is filled with good, and the mountains smoke. Creation perishes if He is displeased. Well then may the psalmist pray that He may forever rejoice in His works, and make them live by His smile. Very beautifully and profoundly does the psalmist ask, in Psalms 104:33-34, that some echo of the Divine joy may gladden his own heart, and that his praise may be coeval with God’s glory and his own life. This is the Divine purpose in creation-that God may rejoice in it and chiefly in man its crown, and that man may rejoice in Him. Such sweet commerce is possible between heaven and earth; and they have learned the lesson of creative power and love aright who by it have been led to share in the joy of God. The psalm has been shaped in part by reminiscences of the creative days of creation. It ends with the Divine Sabbath, and with the prayer, which is also a hope, that man may enter into God’s rest. But there is one discordant note in creation’s full-toned hymn, "the fair music that all creatures made." There are sinners on earth: and the last prayer of the psalmist is that that blot may be removed, and so nothing may mar the realisation of God’s ideal, nor be left to lessen the completeness of His delight in His work. And so the psalm ends, as it began, with the singer’s call to his own soul to bless Jehovah. This is the first psalm which closes with Hallelujah (Praise Jehovah). It is appended to the two following psalms, which close Book 4, and is again found in Book 5, in Psalms 111:1-10; Psalms 112:1-10; Psalms 113:1-9; Psalms 115:1-18; Psalms 116:1-19; Psalms 117:1-2, and in the final group, Psalms 146:1-10; Psalms 147:1-20; Psalms 148:1-14; Psalms 149:1-9; Psalms 150:1-6. It is probably a liturgical addition. Psalms 105:1-45 IT is a reasonable conjecture that the Hallelujah at the end of Psa 104:1-35, where it is superfluous, properly belongs to this psalm, which would then be assimilated to Psalms 106:1-48, which is obviously a companion psalm. Both are retrospective and didactic; but Psalms 105:1-45 deals entirely with God’s unfailing faithfulness to Israel, while Psalms 106:1-48 sets forth the sad contrast presented by Israel’s continual faithlessness to God. Each theme is made more impressive by being pursued separately, and then set over against the other. The long series of God’s mercies massed together here confronts the dark uniformity of Israel’s unworthy requital, of them there. Half of the sky is pure blue and radiant sunshine; half is piled with unbroken clouds. Nothing drives home the consciousness of sin so surely as contemplation of God’s loving acts. Probably this psalm, like others of similar contents, is of late date. The habit of historical retrospect for religious purposes is likely to belong to times remote from the events recorded. Psalms 105:1-15 are found in 1 Chronicles 16:1-43 as part of the hymn at David’s setting up of the Ark on Zion. But that hymn is unmistakably a compilation from extant psalms, and cannot be taken as decidedly the Davidic authorship of the psalm. Psalms 105:1-6 are a ringing summons to extol and contemplate God’s great deeds for Israel. They are full of exultation, and, in their reiterated short clauses, are like the joyful cries of a herald bringing good tidings to Zion. There is a beautiful progress of thought in these verses. They begin with the call to thank and praise Jehovah and to proclaim His doings among the people. That recognition of Israel’s office as the world’s evangelist does not require the supposition that the nation was dispersed in captivity, but simply shows that the singer understood the reason for the long series of mercies heaped on it. It is significant that God’s "deeds" are Israel’s message to the world. By such deeds His "name" is spoken. What God has done is the best revelation of what God is. His messengers are not to speak their own thoughts about Him, but to tell the story of His acts and let these speak for Him. Revelation is not a set of propositions, but a history of Divine facts. The foundation of audible praise and proclamation is contemplation. Therefore the exhortation in Psalms 105:2 b follows, which means not merely "speak," but may be translated, as in margin of the Revised Version, "meditate," and is probably best rendered so as to combine both ideas, "musingly speak." Let not the words be mere words, but feel the great deeds which you proclaim. In like manner, Psalms 105:3 calls upon the heralds to "glory" for themselves in the name of Jehovah, and to make efforts to possess Him more fully and to rejoice in finding Him. Aspiration after clearer and closer knowledge and experience of God should ever underlie glad pealing forth of His name. If it does not, eloquent tongues will fall silent, and Israel’s proclamation will be cold and powerless. To seek Jehovah is to find His strength investing our feebleness. To turn our faces towards His in devout desire is to have our faces made bright by reflected light. And one chief way of seeking Jehovah is the remembrance of His merciful wonders of old, "He hath made His wonderful works to be remembered," (Psalms 111:4) and His design in them is that men should have solid basis for their hopes, and be thereby encouraged to seek Him, as well as be taught what He is Thus the psalmist reaches his main theme, which is to build a memorial of these deeds for an everlasting possession. The "wonders" referred to in Psalms 105:5 are chiefly those wrought in Egypt, as the subsequent verses show. Psalms 105:6 contains, in the names given to Israel, the reason for their obeying the preceding summonses. Their hereditary relation to God gives them the material, and imposes on them the obligation and the honour of being "secretaries of God’s praise." In Psalms 105:6 a "His servant" may be intended to designate the nation, as it often does in Isaiah 40:1-31; Isaiah 41:1-29; Isaiah 42:1-25; Isaiah 43:1-28; Isaiah 44:1-28; Isaiah 45:1-25; Isaiah 46:1-13. "His chosen ones" in Psalms 105:6 b would then be an exact parallel; but the recurrence of the expression in Psalms 105:42, with the individual reference, makes that reference more probable here. The fundamental fact underlying all Israel’s experience of God’s care is His own loving will, which, self-moved, entered into covenant obligations, so that thereafter His mercies are ensured by His veracity, no less than by His kindness. Hence the psalm begins its proper theme by hymning the faithfulness of God to His oath, and painting the insignificance of the beginnings of the nation, as showing that the ground of God’s covenant relation was laid in Himself, not in them. Israel’s consciousness of holding a special relation to God never obscured, in the, minds of psalmists and prophets, the twin truth that all the earth waited on Him, and was the theatre of His manifestations. Baser souls might hug themselves on their prerogative. The nobler spirits ever confessed that it laid on them duties to the world, and that God had not left Himself without witness in any land. These two truths have often been rent asunder, both in Israel and in Christendom, but each needs the other for its full comprehension. "Jehovah is our God" may become the war cry of bitter hostility to them that are without, or of contempt, which is quite as irreligious. "In all the earth are His judgments" may lead to a vague theism, incredulous of special revelation. He who is most truly penetrated with the first will be most joyfully ready to proclaim the second of these sister thoughts, and will neither shut up all God’s mercies within the circle of revelation, nor lose sight of His clearest utterances while looking on His more diffused and less perfect ones. The obligations under which God has come to Israel are represented as a covenant, a word and an oath. In all the general idea of explicit declaration of Divine purpose, which henceforth becomes binding on God by reason of His faithfulness, is contained; but the conception of a covenant implies mutual obligation, failure to discharge which on one side relieves the other contracting party from his promise, while that of a word simply includes the notion of articulate utterance, and that of an oath adds the thought of a solemn sanction and a pledge given. God swears by Himself-that is, His own character is the guarantee of His promise. These various designations are thus heaped together, in order to heighten the thought of the firmness of His promise. It stands "forever," "to a thousand generations"; if is an "everlasting covenant." The psalmist triumphs, as it were, in the manifold repetition of it. Each of the fathers of the nation had it confirmed to himself, -Abraham; Isaac when, ready to flee from the land in famine, he had renewed to him (Genesis 26:3) the oath which he had first heard as he stood, trembling but unharmed, by the rude altar where the ram lay in his stead; (Genesis 22:16) Jacob as he lay beneath the stars of Bethel. With Jacob (Israel) the singer passes from the individuals to the nation, as is shown by the alternation of "thee" and "you" in Psalms 105:11. The lowly condition of the recipients of the promise not only exalts the love which chose them, but the power which preserved them and fulfilled it. And if, as may be the case, the psalm is exilic or post-exilic, its picture of ancient days is like a mirror, reflecting present depression and bidding the downcast be of good cheer. He who made a strong nation out of that little horde of wanderers must have been moved by His own heart, not by anything in them; and what He did long ago He can do today. God’s past is the prophecy of God’s future. Literally rendered, Psalms 105:12 a runs "Whilst they were men of number," i.e., easily numbered. (Genesis 34:30, where Jacob uses the same phrase) "Very few" in b is literally "like a little," and may either apply to number or to worth. It is used in the latter sense, in reference to "the heart of the wicked," in Proverbs 10:20, and may have the same meaning here. That little band of wanderers, who went about as sojourners among the kinglets of Canaan and Philistia, with occasional visits to Egypt, seemed very vulnerable; but God was, as He had promised to the first of them at a moment of extreme peril, their "shield," and in their lives there were instances of strange protection afforded them, which curbed kings, as in the case of Abram in Egypt (Genesis 12:1-20) and Gerar, (Genesis 20:1-18) and of Isaac in the latter place. (Genesis 26:1-35) The patriarchs were not, technically speaking, "anointed," but they had that of which anointing was but a symbol. They were Divinely set apart and endowed for their tasks, and, as consecrated to God’s service, their persons were inviolable. In a very profound sense all God’s servants are thus anointed, and are "immortal till their work is done." "Prophets" in the narrower sense of the word the patriarchs were not, but Abraham is called so by God in one of the places already referred to. (Genesis 20:7) Prior to prophetic utterance is prophetic inspiration: and these men received Divine communications, and were, in a special degree, possessed of the counsels of Heaven. The designation is equivalent to Abraham’s name of the "friend of God." Thus both titles, which guaranteed a charmed, invulnerable life to their bearers, go deep into the permanent privileges of God-trusting souls. All such "have an anointing from the Holy One," and receive whispers from His lips. They are all under the aegis of His protection, and for their sakes kings of many a dynasty and age have been rebuked. In Psalms 105:16-22 the history of Joseph is poetically and summarily treated, as a link in the chain of providences which brought about the fulfilment of the Covenant. Possibly the singer is thinking about a captive Israel in the present, while speaking about a captive Joseph in the past. In God’s dealings humiliation and affliction are often, he thinks, the precursors of glory and triumph. Calamities prepare the way for prosperity. So it was in that old time; and so it is still. In this resume of the history of Joseph, the points signalised are God’s direct agency in the whole-the errand on which Joseph was sent ("before them") as a forerunner to "prepare a place for them," the severity of his sufferings, the trial of his faith by the contrast which his condition presented to what God had promised, and his final exaltation. The description of Joseph’s imprisonment adds some dark touches to the account in Genesis, whether these are due to poetic idealising or to tradition. In Psalms 105:18 b some would translate "Iron came over his soul." So Delitzsch, following the Vulgate ("Ferrum pertransiit animam ejus"), and the picturesque Prayer Book Version, "The iron entered into his soul." But the original is against this, as the word for iron is masculine and the verb is feminine, agreeing with the feminine noun soul. The clause is simply a parallel to the preceding. "His soul" is best taken as mere periphrasis for he, though it may be used emphatically to suggest that "his soul entered, whole and entire, in its resolve to obey God, into the cruel torture" (Kay). The meaning is conveyed by the free rendering above. Psalms 105:19 is also ambiguous, from the uncertainty as to whose word is intended in a. It may be either God’s or Joseph’s. The latter is the more probable, as there appears to be an intentional contrast between "His word," in a, -and "the promise of Jehovah" in b. If this explanation is adopted, a choice is still possible between Joseph’s interpretation of his fellow prisoners’ dreams, the fulfilment of which led to his liberation, and his earlier word recounting his own dreams, which led to his being sold by his brethren. In any case, the thought of the verse is a great and ever true one, that God’s promise, while it remains unfulfilled, and seems contradicted by present facts, serves as a test of the genuineness and firmness of a man’s reliance on Him and it. That promise is by the psalmist almost personified, as putting Joseph to the test. Such testing is the deepest meaning of all afflictions. Fire will burn off a thin plating of silver from a copper coin and reveal the base metal beneath, but it will only brighten into a glow the one which is all silver. There is a ring of triumph in the singer’s voice as he tells of the honour and power heaped on the captive, and of how the king and many nations "sent," as the mightier King in heaven had done (Psalms 105:20 and Psalms 105:17), and not only liberated but exalted him, giving him, whose soul had been bound in fetters, power to "bind princes according to his soul," and to instruct and command the elders of Egypt. Psalms 105:23-27 carry on the story to the next step in the evolution of God’s purposes. The long years of the sojourn in Egypt are summarily dealt with, as they are in the narrative in Genesis and Exodus, and the salient points of its close alone are touched-the numerical growth of the people, the consequent hostility of the Egyptians, and the mission of Moses and Aaron. The direct ascription to God of all the incidents mentioned is to be noted. The psalmist sees only one hand moving, and has no hesitation in tracing to God the turning of the Egyptians’ hearts to hatred. Many commentators, both old and new, try to weaken the expression, by the explanation that the hatred was "indirectly the work of God, inasmuch as He lent increasing might to the people" (Delitzsch). But the psalmist means much more than this, just as Exodus does in attributing the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart to God. Psalms 105:27, according to the existing text, breaks the series of verses beginning with a singular verb of which God is the subject, which stretch with only one other interruption from Psalms 105:24 to Psalms 105:37. It seems most probable, therefore, that the LXX is right in reading He instead of They. The change is but the omission of one letter, and the error supposed is a frequent one. The word literally means set or planted, and did is an explanation rather than a rendering. The whole expression is remarkable. Literally, we should translate "He" (or "They") "set among them words" (or "matters") "of His signs"; but this would be unintelligible, and we must have recourse to reproduction of the meaning rather than of the words. If "words of His signs" is not merely pleonastic, it may be rendered as by Kay, "His long record of signs," or as by Cheyne, "His varied signs." But it is better to take the expression as suggesting that the miracles were indeed words, as being declarations of God’s will and commands to let His people go. The phrase in Psalms 105:5, "the judgments of His mouth," would then be roughly parallel. God’s deeds are words. His signs have tongues. "He speaks and it is done"; but also, "He does and it is spoken." The expression, however, may be like Psalms 65:4, where the same form of phrase is applied to sins, and where it seems to mean "deeds of iniquity." It would then mean here "His works which were signs." The following enumeration of the "signs" does not follow the order in Exodus, but begins with the ninth plague, perhaps because of its severity, and then in the main adheres to the original sequence, though it inverts the order of the third and fourth plagues (flies and gnats or mosquitoes, not "lice") and omits the fifth and sixth. The reason for this divergence is far from clear, but it may be noted that the first two in the psalmist’s order attack the elements; the next three. (frogs, flies, gnats) have to do with animal life; and the next two (hail and locusts), which embrace both these categories, are considered chiefly as affecting vegetable products. The emphasis is laid in all on God’s direct act. He sends darkness, He turns the waters into blood, and so on. The only other point needing notice in these verses is the statement in Psalms 105:28 b. "They rebelled not against His word," which obviously is true only in reference to Moses and Aaron, who shrank not from their perilous embassage. The tenth plague is briefly told for the psalm is hurrying on to the triumphant climax of the Exodus, when, enriched with silver and gold, the tribes went forth, strong for their desert march, and Egypt rejoiced to see the last of them, "for they said, We be all dead men". (Exodus 12:33) There may be a veiled hope in this exultant picture of the Exodus, that present oppression will end in like manner. The wilderness sojourn is so treated in Psalms 105:39 sqq. as to bring into sight only the leading instances, sung in many psalms, of God’s protection, without one disturbing reference to the sins and failures which darkened the forty years. These are spread out at length, without flattery or minimising, in the next psalm; but here the theme is God’s wonders. Therefore, the pillar of cloud which guided, covered, and illumined the camp, the miracles which provided food and water, are touched on in Psalms 105:39-41, and then the psalmist gathers up the lessons which he would teach in three great thoughts. The reason for God’s merciful dealings with His people is His remembrance of His covenant, and of, His servant Abraham, whose faith made a claim on God, for the fulfilment which would vindicate it. That covenant: has been amply fulfilled, for Israel came forth with ringing songs, and took possession of lands which they had not tilled, and houses which they had not built. The purpose of covenant and fulfilment is that the nation, thus admitted into special relations with God, should by His mercies be drawn to keep His commandments, and in obedience find rest and closer fellowship with its God. The psalmist had learned that God gives before He demands or commands, and that "Love," springing from grateful reception of His benefits, "is the fulfilling of the Law." He anticipates the full Christian exhortation, "I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice." Psalms 106:1-48 THE history of God’s past is a record of continuous mercies, the history of man’s, one of as continuous sin. The memory of the former quickened the psalmist into his sunny song of thankfulness in the previous psalm. That of the latter moves him to the confessions in this one. They are complements of each other, and are connected not only as being both retrospective, but by the identity of their beginnings and the difference of their points of view. The parts of the early history dealt with in the one are lightly touched or altogether omitted in the other. The keynote of Psa 105:1-45 is, "Remember His mighty deeds," that of Psa 106:1-48 is, "They forgot His mighty deeds." Surely never but in Israel has patriotism chosen a nation’s sins for the themes of song, or, in celebrating its victories, written but one name, the name of Jehovah, on its trophies. But in the Psalter we have several instances of such hymns of national confession; and, in other books, there are the formulary at the presentation of the first fruits (, Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple, (1 Kings 8:1-66) Nehemiah’s prayer, (Nehemiah 9:1-38) and Daniel’s. (Daniel 9:1-27) An exilic date is implied by the prayer of Psa 106:47, for the gathering of the people from among the nations. The occurrence of Psa 106:1 and Psalms 106:47-48 in the compilation in 1 Chronicles 16:1-43 shows that this psalm, which marks the close of the Fourth Book, was in existence prior to the date of 1 Chronicles. No trace of strophical arrangement is discernible. But, after an introduction in some measure like that in Psalms 105:1-45, the psalmist plunges into his theme, and draws out the long, sad story of Israel’s faithlessness. He recounts seven instances during the wilderness sojourn (Psalms 106:7-33), and then passes to those occurring in the Land (Psalms 106:34-39), with which he connects the alternations of punishment and relenting on God’s part and the obstinacy of transgression on Israel’s, even down to the moment in which he speaks (Psalms 106:40-46). The whole closes with a prayer for restoration to the Land (Psalms 106:47); to which is appended the doxology (Psalms 106:48), the mark of the end of Book 4, and not a part of the psalm. The psalmist preludes his confession and contemplation of his people’s sins by a glad remembrance of God’s goodness and enduring lovingkindness and by a prayer for himself. Some commentators regard these introductory verses as incongruous with the tone of the psalm, and as mere liturgical commonplace, which has been tacked on without mush heed to fitness. But surely the thought of God’s unspeakable goodness most appropriately precedes the psalmist’s confession, for nothing so melts a heart in penitence as the remembrance of God’s love, and nothing so heightens the evil of sin as the consideration of the patient goodness which it has long flouted. The blessing pronounced in Psalms 106:3 on those who righteousness and keep the law is not less natural, before a psalm which sets forth in melancholy detail the converse truth of the misery that dogs breaking the law. In Psalms 106:4-5 the psalmist interjects a prayer for himself, the abruptness of which strongly reminds us of similar jets of personal supplication in Nehemiah. The determination to make the "I" of the Psalter the nation perversely insists on that personification here, in spite of the clear distinction thrice drawn in Psalms 106:5 between the psalmist and his people. The "salvation" in which he desires to share is the deliverance from exile for which he prays in the closing verse of the psalm. There is something very pathetic in this momentary thought of self. It breathes wistful yearning, absolute confidence in the unrealised deliverance, lowly humility which bases its claim with God on that of the nation. Such a prayer stands in the closest relation to the theme of the psalm, which draws out the dark record of national sin, in order to lead to that national repentance which, as all the history shows, is the necessary condition of "the prosperity of Thy chosen ones." Precisely because the hope of restoration is strong, the delineation of sin is unsparing. With Psalms 106:6 the theme of the psalm is given forth, in language which recalls Solomon’s and Daniel’s similar confessions. (1 Kings 8:47; Daniel 9:5) The accumulation of synonyms for sin witnesses at once to the gravity and manifoldness of the offences, and to the earnestness and comprehensiveness of the acknowledgment. The remarkable expression "We have sinned with our fathers" is not to be weakened to mean merely that the present generation had sinned like their ancestors, but gives expression to the profound sense of national solidarity, which speaks in many other places of Scripture, and rests on very deep facts in the life of nations and their individual members. The enumeration of ancestral sin begins with the murmurings of the faint-hearted fugitives by the Red Sea. In Psalms 105:1-45 the wonders in Egypt were dilated on and the events at the Red Sea unmentioned. Here the signs in Egypt are barely referred to and treated as past at the point where the psalm begins, while the incidents by the Red Sea fill a large space in the song. Clearly, the two psalms supplement each other. The reason given for Israel’s rebellion in Psalms 106:1-48 is its forgetfulness of God’s mighty deeds (Psalms 106:7 a, b), while in Psalms 105:1-45 the remembrance of these is urgently enjoined. Thus, again, the connection of thought in the pair of psalms is evident. Every man has experiences enough of God’s goodness stored away in the chambers of his memory to cure him of distrust, if he would only look at them. But they lie unnoticed, and so fear has sway over him. No small part of the discipline needed for vigorous hope lies in vigorous exercise of remembrance. The drying up of the Red Sea is here poetically represented, with omission of Moses’ outstretched rod and the strong east wind, as the immediate consequence of God’s omnipotent rebuke. Psalms 106:9 b is from Isaiah 63:13, and picturesquely describes the march through that terrible gorge of heaped-up waters as being easy and safe, as if it had been across some wide-stretching plain, with springy turf to tread on The triumphant description of the completeness of the enemies’ destruction in Psalms 106:11 b is Exodus 14:28, and "they believed on His words" is in part quoted Exodus 14:31, while Miriam’s song is referred to in Psalms 106:12 b. The next instance of departure is the lusting for food (Psalms 106:13-15). Again the evil is traced to forgetfulness of God’s doings, to which in Psalms 106:13 b is added impatient disinclination to wait the unfolding of His counsel or plan. These evils cropped up with strange celerity. The memory of benefits was transient, as if they had been written on the blown sands of the desert. "They hasted, they forgot His works." Of how many of us that has to be said! We remember pain and sorrow longer than joy and pleasure. It is always difficult to bridle desires and be still until God discloses His purposes. We are all apt to try to force His hand open, and to impose our wishes on Him, rather than to let His will mould us. So, on forgetfulness and impatience there followed then, as there follow still, eager longings after material good, and a tempting of God. "They lusted a lust is from Numbers 11:4. "Tempted God" is found in reference to the same incident in the other psalm of historical retrospect. (Psalms 78:18) He is "tempted" when unbelief demands proofs of His power, instead of waiting patiently for Him. In Numbers 11:33, Jehovah is said to have smitten the people "with a very great plague." The psalm specifies more, particularly the nature of the stroke by calling it "wasting sickness," which invaded the life of the sinners. The words are true in a deeper sense, though not so meant. For whoever sets his hot desires in self-willed fashion on material good, and succeeds in securing their gratification, gains with the satiety of his lower sense the loss of a shrivelled spiritual nature. Full-fed flesh makes starved souls. The third instance is the revolt headed by Korah, Dathan, and Abiram against the exclusive Aaronic priesthood (Psalms 106:16-18). It was rebellion against God, for He had set apart Aaron as His own, and therefore the unusual title of "the holy one of Jehovah" is here given to the high priest. The expression recalls the fierce protest of the mutineers, addressed to Moses and Aaron, "Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy"; (Numbers 16:3) and also Moses’ answer, "Jehovah will show who is holy." Envy often masquerades as the champion of the rights of the community, when it only wishes to grasp these for itself. These aristocratic democrats cared nothing for the prerogatives of the nation, though they talked about them. They wanted to pull down Aaron, not to lift up Israel. Their end is described with stern brevity, in language coloured by the narrative in Numbers, from which the phrases "opened" (i.e., her mouth) and "covered" are drawn. Korah is not mentioned here, in which the psalm follows Numbers 16:1-50 and Deuteronomy 11:6, whereas Numbers 26:10 includes Korah in the destruction. The difficulty does not seem to have received any satisfactory solution. But Cheyne is too peremptory when he undertakes to divine the reason for the omission of Korah here and in Deuteronomy 11:6, "because he was a Levite and his name was dear to temple poets." Such clairvoyance as to motives is beyond ordinary vision. In Psalms 106:18 the fate of the two hundred and fifty "princes of Israel" who took part in the revolt is recorded as in Numbers 16:35. The worship of the calf is the fourth instance (Psalms 106:19-23) in the narrative of which the psalmist follows Exodus 32:1-35, but seems also to have Deuteronomy 9:8-12 floating in his mind, as appears from the use of the name "Horeb," which is rare in Exodus and frequent in Deuteronomy. Psalms 106:20 is apparently modelled on Jeremiah 2:11: "My people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit." Compare also Paul’s "changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness, " etc. (Romans 1:23) "His glory" is read instead "their glory by Noldeke, Graetz, and Cheyne, following an old Jewish authority. The LXX, in Codd. Alex. and Sin. (second hand), has this reading, and Paul seems to follow it in the passage just quoted. It yields a worthy meaning, but the existing text is quite appropriate. It scarcely means that God was the source of Israel’s glory or their boast, for the word is not found in that sense. It is much rather the name for the collective attributes of the revealed Godhead, and is here substantially equivalent to "their God," that lustrous Light which, in a special manner, belonged to the people of revelation, on whom its first and brightest beams shone. The strange perverseness which turned away from such a radiance of glory to bow down before an idol is strikingly set forth by the figure of bartering it for an image and that of an ox that ate grass. The one true Substance given away for a shadow! The lofty Being whose light filled space surrendered: and for what? A brute that had to feed, and that on herbage! Men usually make a profit, or think they do, on their barter: but what do they gain by exchanging God for anything? Yet we keep making the same mistake of parting with Substance for shadows. And the reason which moved Israel is still operative. As before, the psalmist traces their mad apostasy to forgetfulness of God’s deeds. The list of these is now increased by the addition of those at the Red Sea. With every step new links were added to the chain that should have bound the recipients of so many mercies to God. Therefore each new act of departure was of a darker hue of guilt, and drew on the apostates severer punishment, which also, rightly understood, was greater mercy. "He said that He would annihilate them" is quoted from Deuteronomy 9:25. Moses’ intercession for the people is here most vividly represented under the figure of a champion, who rushes into the breach by which the enemy is about to pour into some beleaguered town, and with his own body closes the gap and arrests the assault. (cf. Ezekiel 22:30) The fifth instance is the refusal to go up to the land, which followed on the report of the spies (Psalms 106:24-27). These verses are full of reminiscences of the Pentateuch and other parts of Scripture. "The delightsome, land" (lit. "land of desire) is found in Jeremiah 3:19 and Zechariah 7:14. "They despised" is from Numbers 14:31. "They murmured in their tents" is Deuteronomy 1:27 (the only other place in which the word for murmuring occurs in this form). Lifting up the hand is used, as here, not in the usual sense of threatening to strike, but in that of swearing, in Exodus 6:8, and the oath itself is given in Numbers 14:28 sqq., while the expression "lifted up My hand" occurs in that context, in reference to God’s original oath to the patriarch. The threat of exile (Psalms 106:27) does not occur in Numbers, but is found as the punishment of apostasy Leviticus 26:33 and Deuteronomy 28:64. The verse, however, is found almost exactly in Ezekiel 20:23, with the exception that there "scatter" stands in a instead of make to fall. The difference in the Hebrew is only in the final letter of the words, and the reading in Ezekiel should probably be adopted here. So the LXX and other ancient authorities and many of the moderns. The sixth instance is" the participation in the abominable Moabitish worship of "Baal-Peor," recorded in Numbers 25:1-18. The peculiar phrase "yoked themselves to" is taken from that chapter, and seems to refer to "the mystic, quasi-physical union supposed to exist between a god and his worshippers, and to be kept up by sacrificial meals" (Cheyne). These are called sacrifices of the dead, inasmuch as idols are dead in contrast with the living God. The judicial retribution inflicted according to Divine command by the judges of Israel slaying "everyone his man" is here called a "plague," as in the foundation passage, Numbers 25:9. The word (lit. "a stroke," i.e., from God) is usually applied to punitive sickness; but God smites when He bids men smite. Both the narrative in Numbers and the psalm bring out vividly the picture of the indignant Phinehas springing to his feet from the midst of the passive crowd. He "rose up," says the former; he "stood up," says the latter. And his deed is described in the psalm in relation to its solemn judicial character, without particularising its details. The psalmist would partially veil both the sin and the horror of its punishment. Phinehas’ javelin was a minister of God’s justice, and the death of the two culprits satisfied that justice and stayed the plague. The word rendered "did judgment" has that meaning only, and such renderings as mediated or appeased give the effect of the deed and not the description of it contained in the word. "It was reckoned to him for righteousness" as Abraham’s faith was (Genesis 15:6) It was indeed an act which had its origin "In the faithfulness that had its root in faith, and which, for the sake of this its ultimate ground, gained him the acceptation of a righteous man, inasmuch as it proved him to be such" (Delitzsch, Eng. Trans.). He showed himself a true son of Abraham in the midst of these degenerate descendants, and it was the same impulse of faith which drove his spear, and which filled the patriarch’s heart when he gazed into the silent sky and saw in its numberless lights the promise of his seed. Phinehas’ reward was the permanence of the priesthood in his family. The seventh instance is the rebellion at the waters of Meribah (Strife), in the fortieth year. (Numbers 20:2-13) The chronological order is here set aside, for the events recorded in Psalms 106:28-31 followed those dealt with in Psalms 106:32-33. The reason is probably that here Moses himself is hurried into sin, through the people’s faithlessness, and so a climax is reached. The leader, long tried, fell at last, and was shut out from entering the land. That was in some aspects the masterpiece and triumph of the nation’s sin. "It fared ill with Moses on their account," as in Deuteronomy 1:37; Deuteronomy 3:26, "Jehovah was angry with me for your sakes." "His Spirit," in Psalms 106:33, is best taken as meaning the Spirit of God. The people’s sin is repeatedly specified in the psalm as being rebellion against God. and the absence of a more distinct definition of the person referred to is like the expression in Psalms 106:32, where "indignation" is that of God, though His name is not mentioned. Isaiah 63:10 is a parallel to this clause, as other parts of the same chapter are to other parts of the psalm. The question which has been often raised, as to what was Moses’ sin, is solved in Psalms 106:33 b, which makes his passionate words, wherein he lost his temper and arrogated to himself the power of fetching water from the rock, the head and front of his offending. The psalmist has finished his melancholy catalogue of sins in the wilderness with this picture of the great leader dragged down by the prevailing tone, and he next turns to the sins done in the land. Two flagrant instances are given-disobedience to the command to exterminate the inhabitants, and the adoption of their bloody worship. The conquest of Canaan was partial; and, as often is the case, the conquerors were conquered and the invaders caught the manners of the invaded. Intermarriage poured a large infusion of alien blood into Israel; and the Canaanitish strain is perceptible today in the fellahin of the Holy Land. The proclivity to idolatry, which was natural in that stage of the world’s history, and was intensified by universal example, became more irresistible, when reinforced by kinship and neighbourhood, and the result foretold was realised-the idols "became a snare". (Judges 2:1-3) The poet dwells with special abhorrence on the hideous practice of human sacrifices, which exercised so strong and horrible a fascination over the inhabitants of Canaan. The word in Psalms 106:37 demons is found only here and in Deuteronomy 32:17. The above rendering is that of the LXX. Its literal meaning seems to be "lords." It is thus a synonym for "Baalim." The epithet "Shaddai" exclusively applied to Jehovah may be compared. In Psalms 106:40-46 the whole history of Israel is summed up as alternating periods of sin, punishment, deliverance, recurring in constantly repeated cycles, in which the mystery of human obstinacy is set over against that of Divine long suffering, and one knows not whether to wonder most at the incurable levity which learned nothing from experience, or the inexhaustible long suffering which wearied not in giving wasted gifts. Chastisement and mercies were equally in vain. The outcome of God’s many deliverances was, "they rebelled in their counsel"-i.e., went on their own stiff-necked way, instead of waiting for and following God’s merciful plan, which would have made them secure and blessed. The end of such obstinacy of disobedience can only be, "they were brought low through their iniquity." The psalmist appears to "be quoting Leviticus 26:39, "they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity"; but he intentionally slightly alters the word, substituting one of nearly the same sound, but with the meaning of being brought low instead of fading away. To follow one’s own will is to secure humiliation and degradation. Sin weakens the true strength and darkens the true glory, of men. In Psalms 106:44-46 the singer rises from these sad and stern thoughts to recreate his spirit with the contemplation of the patient lovingkindness of God. It persists through all man’s sin and God’s anger. The multitude of its manifestations far outnumbers that of our sins. His eye looks on Israel’s distress with pity, and every sorrow on which He looks He desires to remove. Calamities melt away beneath His gaze, like damp stains in sunlight. His merciful "look" swiftly follows the afflicted man’s cry. No voice acknowledges sin and calls for help in vain. The covenant forgotten by men is none the less remembered by Him. The numberless number of His lovingkindnesses, greater than that of all men’s sins, secures forgiveness after the most repeated transgressions. The law and measure of His "repenting" lie in the endless depths of His own heart. As the psalmist had sung at the beginning, that lovingkindness endures forever; therefore none of Israel’s many sins went unchastised, and no chastisement outlasted their repentance. Solomon had prayed that God would "give them compassion before those who carried them captive"; (1 Kings 8:50) and thus has it been, as the psalmist joyfully sees. He may have written when the Babylonian captivity was near an end, and such instances as those of Daniel or Nehemiah may have been in his mind. In any case, it is beautifully significant that a psalm, which tells the doleful story of centuries of faithlessness, should end with God’s faithfulness to His promises, His inexhaustible forgiveness, and the multitude of His lovingkindnesses. Such will be the last result of the world’s history no less than of Israel’s. The psalm closes with the prayer in Psalms 106:47, which shows that it was written in exile. It corresponds in part with the closing words of Psa 105:1-45. Just as there the purpose of God’s mercies to Israel was said to be that they might be thereby moved to keep His statutes, so here the psalmist hopes and vows that the issue of his people’s restoration will be thankfulness to God’s holy name, and triumphant pealing forth from ransomed lips of His high praises. Psalms 106:48 is the concluding doxology of the Fourth Book. Some commentators suppose it an integral part of the psalm, but it is more probably an editorial addition. Psalms 107:1-43 the division of Books which separates Psalm evil from the two preceding, it is a pendant to these. The "gathering from among the heathen" prayed for in Psalms 106:41 has here come to pass (Psalms 107:3). The thanksgiving which there is regarded as the purpose of that restoration is here rendered for it. Psalms 105:1-45 had for theme God’s mercies to the fathers. Psalms 106:1-48 confessed the hereditary faithlessness of Israel and its chastisement by calamity and exile. Psalms 107:1-43 begins with summoning Israel as "the redeemed of Jehovah," to praise Him for His enduring lovingkindness in bringing them back from bondage, and then takes a wider flight, and celebrates the loving Providence which delivers, in all varieties of peril and calamity, those who cry to God. Its vivid pictures of distress and rescue begin, indeed, with one which may fairly be supposed to have been suggested by the incidents of the return from exile; and the second of these, that of the liberated prisoners, is possibly coloured by similar reminiscences; but the great restoration is only the starting point, and the bulk of the psalm goes further afield. Its instances of Divine deliverance, though cast into narrative form, describe not specific acts, but God’s uniform way of working. Wherever there are trouble and trust, there will be triumph and praise. The psalmist is propounding a partial solution of the old problem-the existence of pain and sorrow. They come as chastisements. If terror or misery drive men to God, God answers, and deliverance is assured, from which fuller-toned praise should spring. It is by no means a complete vindication of Providence, and experience does not bear out the assumption of uniform answers to prayers for deliverance from external calamities, which was more warranted before Christ than it is now; but the essence of the psalmist’s faith is ever true-that God hears the cry of a man driven to cry by crushing burdens, and will give him strength to bear and profit by them, even if He does not take them away. The psalm passes before us a series of pictures, all alike in the disposition of their parts, and selected from the sad abundance of troubles which attack humanity. Travellers who have lost their way, captives, sick men, storm-tossed sailors, make a strangely miscellaneous company, the very unlikenesses of which suggest the width of the ocean of human misery. The artistic regularity of structure in all the four strophes relating to these cannot escape notice. But it is more than artistic. Whatever be a man’s trouble, there is but one way out of it-to cry to God. That way is never vain. Always deliverance comes, and always the obligation of praise lies on the "redeemed of Jehovah." With Psalms 107:33 the psalm changes its structure. The refrains, which came in so strikingly in the preceding strophes are dropped. The complete pictures give place to mere outline sketches. These diversities have suggested to some that Psalms 107:33-43 are an excrescence; but they have some points of connection with the preceding, such as the peculiar phrase for "inhabited city" (Psalms 107:4, Psalms 107:5, Psalms 107:36), "hungry" (Psalms 107:5, Psalms 107:36), and the fondness for references to Isaiah and Job. In these latter verses the psalmist does not describe deliverances from peril or pain, but the sudden alternations effected by Providence on lands and men, which pass from fertility and prosperity to barrenness and trouble, and again from these to their opposites. Lovingkindness, which hears and rescues, is the theme of the first part; lovingkindness, which "changes all things and is itself unchanged," is the theme of the second. Both converge on the final thought (Psalms 107:43), that the observance of God’s ways is the part of true wisdom, and will win the clear perception of the all-embracing "lovingkindness of Jehovah." New mercies give new meaning to old praises. Fresh outpourings of thankfulness willingly run in well-worn channels. The children can repeat the fathers’ doxology, and words hallowed by having borne the gratitude of many generations are the best vehicles for today’s praise. Therefore, the psalm begins with venerable words, which it bids the recipients of God’s last great mercy ring out once more. They who have yesterday been "redeemed from captivity" have proof that "His lovingkindness endures forever," since it has come down to them through centuries. The characteristic fondness for quotations, which marks the psalm, is in full force in the three introductory verses. Psalms 107:1 is, of course, quoted from several psalms. "The redeemed of Jehovah" is from Isaiah 62:12."gathered out of the lands" looks back to Psalms 106:47, and to many prophetic passages. The word rendered above "distress" may mean oppressor, and is frequently rendered so here, which rendering fits better the preceding word "hand." But the recurrence of the same word in the subsequent refrains (Psalms 107:6, Psalms 107:13, Psalms 107:19, Psalms 107:28) makes the rendering distress preferable here. To ascribe to distress a "hand" is poetical personification, or the latter word may be taken in a somewhat wider sense as equivalent to a grasp or grip, as above. The return from Babylon is evidently in the poet’s thoughts, but he widens it out into a restoration from every quarter. His enumeration of the points from which the exiles flock is irregular, in that he says "from north and from the sea, " which always means the Mediterranean, and stands for the west. That quarter has, however, already been mentioned, and, therefore, it has been supposed that sea here means, abnormally, the Red Sea, or "the southern portion of the Mediterranean." A textual alteration has also been proposed, which, by the addition of two letters to the word for sea, gives that for south. This reading would complete the enumeration of cardinal points; but possibly the psalmist is quoting Isaiah 49:12, where the same phrase occurs, and the north is set over against the sea-i.e., the west. The slight irregularity does not interfere with the picture of the streams of returning exiles from every quarter. The first scene, that of a caravan lost in a desert, is probably suggested by the previous reference to the return of the "redeemed of Jehovah," but is not to be taken as referring only to that. It is a perfectly general sketch of a frequent incident of travel. It is a remarkable trace of a state of society very unlike modem life, that two of the four instances of "distress" are due to the perils of journeying. By land and by sea men took their lives in their hands, when they left their homes. Two points are signalised in this description, -the first, the loss of the track; the second, the wanderers’ hunger and thirst. "A waste of a way" is of singular expression, which has suggested various unnecessary textual emendations. It is like "a wild ass of a man," (Genesis 16:12) which several commentators quote as a parallel, and means a way which is desert. (compare Acts 8:26) The bewildered, devious march leads nowhither. Vainly the travellers look for some elevation, "From whence the lightened spirit sees That shady city of Palm Trees." No place where men dwell appears in the wide expanse of pathless wilderness. The psalmist does not think of a particular city, but of any inhabited spot, where rest and shelter might be found. The water skins are empty; food is finished; hopelessness follows physical exhaustion, and gloom wraps their souls; for Psalms 107:5 b, literally translated, is, "Their soul covered itself"-i.e., with despondency. (Psalms 77:3) The picture is not an allegory or a parable, but a transcript of a common fact. Still, one can scarcely help seeing in it a vivid representation of the inmost reality of a life apart from God. Such a life ever strays from the right road. "The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to come to the city." The deepest needs of the soul are unsatisfied; and however outward good abounds, gnawing hunger and fierce thirst torment at times; and however mirth and success seem to smile, joys are superficial, and but mask a central sadness, as vineyards which clothe the outside of a volcano and lie above sulphurous fires. The travellers are driven to God by their "distress." Happy they who, when lost in a desert, bethink themselves of the only Guide. He does not reject the cry which is forced out by the pressure of calamity; but, as the structure of Psa 107:6-7, shows, His answer is simultaneous with the appeal to Him, and it is complete, as well as immediate. The track appears as suddenly as it had faded. God Himself goes at the head of the march. The path is straight as an arrow’s flight, and soon they are in the city. Psalms 107:6 is the first instance of the refrain, which, in each of the four pictures, is followed by a verse (or, in the last of the four, by two verses) descriptive of the act of deliverance, which again is followed by the second refrain, calling on those who have experienced such a mercy to thank Jehovah. This is followed in the first two groups by a verse reiterating the reason for praise-namely, the deliverance just granted; and, in the last two, by a verse expanding the summons. Various may be the forms of need. But the supply of them all is one, and the way to get it is one, and one is the experience of the suppliants, and one should be their praise. Life’s diversities have underlying them identity of soul’s wants. Waiters on God have very different outward fortunes, but the broad outlines of their inward history are identical. This is the law of His providence-they cry, He delivers. This should be the harvest from His sowing of benefits-"Let them give thanks to Jehovah." Some would translate Psalms 107:8, "Let them thankfully confess to Jehovah His lovingkindness, and to the children of men [confess] His wonders"; but the usual rendering as above is better, as not introducing a thought which, however important, is scarcely in the psalmist’s view here, and as preserving the great thought of the psalm-namely, that of God’s providence to all mankind. The second scene, that of captives, probably retains some allusion to Babylon, though an even fainter one than in the preceding strophe. It has several quotations and references to Isaiah, especially to the latter half (Isaiah 40:1-31; Isaiah 41:1-29; Isaiah 42:1-25; Isaiah 43:1-28; Isaiah 44:1-28; Isaiah 45:1-25; Isaiah 46:1-13). The deliverance is described in Psalms 107:16 in words borrowed from the prophecy as to Cyrus, the instrument of Israel’s restoration. (Isaiah 45:2) The gloom of the prison house is described in language closely resembling Isaiah 42:7; Isaiah 49:9. The combination of "darkness and the shade of deepest gloom" is found in Isaiah 9:2. The cause of the captivity described is rebellion against God’s counsel and word. These things point to Israel’s Babylonian bondage; but the picture in the psalm draws its colour rather than its subject from that event and is quite general. The psalmist thinks that such bondage, and deliverance on repentance and prayer, are standing facts in Providence, both as regards nations and individuals. One may see, too, a certain parabolic aspect hinted at, as if the poet would have us catch a half-revealed intention to present calamity of any kind under this image of captivity. We note the slipping in of words that are not required for the picture, as when the fetters are said to be "affliction" as well as "iron." Psalms 107:12, too, is not specially appropriate to the condition of prisoners; persons in fetters and gloom do not stumble, for they do not move. There may, therefore, be a half-glance at the parabolic aspect of captivity, such as poetic imagination, and especially Oriental poetry, loves. At most it is a delicate suggestion, shyly hiding while it shows itself, and made too much of if drawn out in prosaic exposition. We may perceive also the allegorical pertinence of this second picture, though we do not suppose that the singer intended such a use. For is not godless life ever bondage? and is not rebellion against God the sure cause of falling under a harsher dominion? and does He not listen to the cry of a soul that feels the slavery of subjection to self and sin? and is not true enlargement found in His free service? and does He not give power to break the strongest chains of habit? The synagogue at Nazareth, where the carpenter’s Son stood up to read and found the place where it was written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me. He hath sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives." warrants the symbolical use of the psalmist’s imagery, which is, as we have seen, largely influenced by the prophet whose words Jesus quoted. The first scene taught that devout hearts never lack guidance from God. The second adds to their blessings freedom, the true liberty which comes with submission and acceptance of His law. Sickness, which yields the third type of suffering, is a commoner experience than the two preceding. The picture is lightly sketched, emphasis being laid on the cause of the sickness, which is sin, in accordance with the prevailing view in the Old Testament. The psalmist introduces the persons of whom he is to speak by the strongly condemnatory term "foolish ones," which refers not to intellectual feebleness, but to moral perversity. All sin is folly. Nothing is so insane as to do wrong. An ingenious correction has been suggested and is accepted by Cheyne in the wake of Dyserinck, Graetz, and others, by which "sick men" is read for "foolish men." But it does not appear to the present writer to be so impossible as Cheyne thinks to "conceive the psalmist introducing a fresh tableau by an ethical term such as fools." The whole verse (Psalms 107:17) lays more stress on the sin than on the sickness, and the initial designation of the sufferers as "fools" is quite in harmony with its tone. They are habitual evildoers, as is expressed by the weighty expression "the way (or course) of their transgression." Not by one or two breaches of moral law, but by inveterate, customary sins, men ruin their physical health. So the psalmist uses a form of the verb in Psalms 107:17 b which expresses that the sinner drags down his punishment with his own hands. That is, of course, eminently true in such gross forms of sin as sow to the flesh, and of the flesh reap corruption. But it is no less really true of all transgression, since all brings sickness to the soul. Psalms 107:18 is apparently quoted from Job 33:20-22. It paints with impressive simplicity the failing appetite and consequent ebbing strength. The grim portals, of which Death keeps the keys, have all but received the sick men; but, before they pass into their shadow, they cry to Jehovah, and, like the other men in distress, they too are heard, feeble as their sick voice may be. The manner of their deliverance is strikingly portrayed. "He sent His word and healed them." As in Psalms 105:19, God’s word is almost personified. It is the channel of the Divine power. God’s uttered will has power on material things. It is the same great thought as is expressed in "He spake and it was done." The psalmist did not know the Christian teaching that the personal Word of God is the agent of all the Divine energy in the realm of nature and of history, and that a far deeper sense than that which he attached to them would one day be found in his words, when the Incarnate Word was manifested, as Himself bearing and bearing away the sicknesses of humanity, and rescuing not only the dying from going down to the grave, but bringing up the dead who had long lain there. God, who is Guide and Emancipator, is also Healer and Life-giver, and He is all these in the Word, which has become flesh, and dwelt and dwells among men. Another travel scene follows. The storm at sea is painted as a landsman would do it; but a landsman who had seen, from a safe shore, what he so vividly describes. He is impressed with the strange things that the bold men who venture to sea must meet, away out there beyond the point where sea and sky touch. With sure poetic instinct, he spends no time on trivial details, but dashes on his canvas the salient features of the tempest, -the sudden springing up of the gale; the swift response of the waves rolling high, with new force in their mass and a new voice in their breaking; the pitching craft, now on the crest, now in the trough; the terror of the helpless crew; the loss of steering power; the heavy rolling of the unmanageable, clumsy ship; and the desperation of the sailors, whose wisdom or skill was "swallowed up," or came to nothing. Their cry to Jehovah was heard above the shriek of the storm, and the tempest fell as suddenly as it rose. The description of the deliverance is extended beyond the normal single verse, just as that of the peril had been prolonged. It comes like a benediction after the hurly burly of the gale. How gently the words echo the softness of the light air into which it has died down, and the music which the wavelets make as they lap against the ship’s sides! With what sympathy the poet thinks of the glad hearts on board, and of their reaching the safe harbour, for which they had longed when they thought they would never see it more! Surely it is a permissible application of these lovely words to read into them the Christian hope of preservation amid life’s tempests, - "Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last." God the guide, the emancipator, the healer, is also the stiller of the storm, and they who cry to Him from the unquiet sea will reach the stable shore. "And so it came to pass, they all came safe to land." As already observed, the tone changes with Psalms 107:33, from which point onwards the psalmist adduces instances of Providential working of a different kind from those in the four vivid pictures preceding, and drops the refrains. In Psalms 107:33-38 he describes a double change wrought on a land. The barrenness which blasts fertile soil is painted in language largely borrowed from Isaiah." Psalms 107:33 a recalls Isaiah 1:2 b; Psalms 107:33 b is like Isaiah 35:7 a" (Delitzsch). The opposite change of desert into fertile ground is pictured as in Isaiah 41:18. The references in Psalms 107:36 to "the hungry" and to "an inhabited city" connect with the previous part of the psalm, and are against the supposition that the latter half is not originally part of it. The incidents described refer to no particular instance, but are as general as those of the former part. Many a land, which has been blasted by the vices of its inhabitants, has been transformed into a garden by new settlers. "Where the Turk’s horse has trod, no grass will grow." Psalms 107:39 introduces the reverse, which often befalls prosperous communities, especially in times when it is dangerous to seem rich for fear of rapacious rulers. "The pressure" referred to in Psalms 107:39 is the oppression of such. If so, Psalms 107:40, which is quoted from Job 12:21; Job 12:24, though introduced abruptly, does not disturb the sequence of thought. It grandly paints the judgment of God on such robber princes, who are hunted from their seats by popular execration, and have to hide themselves in the pathless waste, from which those who cry to God were delivered (Psalms 107:41 b and 4 a). On the other hand, the oppressed are lifted, as by His strong arm, out of the depths and set on high, like a man perched safely on some crag above high-water mark. Prosperity returning is followed by large increase and happy, peaceful family life, the chief good of man on earth. The outcome of the various methods of God’s unvarying purpose is that all which is good is glad, and all which is evil is struck dumb. The two clauses of Psa 107:42 which describe this double fect, are quoted from two passages in Job-a from Job 22:19, and b from Job 5:16. The psalm began with hymning the enduring lovingkindness of Jehovah. It ends with a call to all who would be wise to give heed to the various dealings of God, as exemplified in the specimens chosen in it, that they may comprehend how in all these one purpose rules, and all are examples of the manifold lovingkindnesses of Jehovah. This closing note is an echo of the last words of Hosea’s prophecy. It is the broad truth which all thoughtful observance of Providence brings home to a man, notwithstanding many mysteries and apparent contradictions. "All things work together for good to them that love God"; and the more they love Him, the more clearly will they see, and the more happily will they feel, that so it is. How can a man contemplate the painful riddle of the world, and keep his sanity, without that faith? He who has it for his faith will have it for his experience. Psalms 108:1-13 Two fragments of Davidic psalms are here tacked together with slight variations. Psalms 108:1-5 are from Psalms 57:7-11; Psalms 108:6-13 from Psalms 60:5-12. The return from Babylon would be an appropriate occasion for thus revivifying ancient words. We have seen in preceding psalms that Israel’s past drew the thoughts of the singers of that period, and the conjecture may be hazarded that the recent deliverance suggested to some devout man, whose mind was steeped in the songs of former days, the closeness with which old strains suited new joys. If so, there is pathetic meaning in the summons to the "psaltery and harp," which had hung silent on the willows of Babylon so long, to wake their ancient minstrelsy once more, as well as exultant Confidence that the God who had led David to victory still leads His people. The hopes of conquest in the second part, the consciousness that while much has been achieved by God’s help, much still remains to be won before Israel can sit secure, the bar or two in the minor key in Psalms 108:11, which heighten the exultation of the rest of the song, and the cry for help against adversaries too strong for Israel’s unassisted might, are all appropriate to the early stages of the return. The variations from the original psalms are of slight moment. In Psalms 108:1 the reduplication of the clause "Steadfast is my heart" is omitted, and "my glory" is detached from Psalms 108:2, where it stands in Psalms 57:1-11, and is made a second subject, equivalent to "I". In Psalms 108:3 a Jehovah is substituted for Lord, and the copula "and" prefixed to b. Psalms 108:4 is not improved by the change of "unto the heavens" to "above the heavens," for an anticlimax is produced by following "above the heavens" with "unto the clouds." In the second part, the only change affecting the sense is in Psalms 108:9, where the summons to Philistia to "shout aloud because of me," which is probably meant in sarcasm, is transformed into the plain expression of triumph, "Over Philistia will I shout aloud." The other changes are "me" for "us" in Psalms 108:6, the omission of "and" before "mine Manasseh" in Psalms 108:8, the substitution of a more usual synonym for "fenced" in Psalms 108:10, and the omission of the pronoun "Thou" in Psalms 108:11. Psalms 109:1-31 THIS is the last and the most terrible of the imprecatory psalms. Its central portion (Psalms 109:6-20) consists of a series of wishes, addressed to God, for the heaping of all miseries on the heads of one "adversary" and of all his kith and kin. These maledictions are enclosed in prayers, which make the most striking contrast to them; Psalms 109:1-5 being the plaint of a loving soul, shrinkingly conscious of an atmosphere of hatred, and appealing gently to God; while Psalms 109:21-31 expatiate in the presentation to Him of the suppliant’s feebleness and cries for deliverance, but barely touch on the wished for requital of enemies. The combination of devout meekness and trust with the fiery imprecations in the core of the psalm is startling to Christian consciousness, and calls for an effort of "historical imagination" to deal with it fairly. The attempts to attenuate the difficulty, either by making out that the wishes are not wishes, but prophecies of the fate of evildoers, or that Psalms 109:6-20 are the psalmist’s quotation of his enemies’ wishes about him, or that the whole is Messianic prediction of the fate of Judas or of the enemies of the Christ, are too obviously makeshifts. It is far better to recognise the discordance between the temper of the psalmist and that enjoined by Christ than to try to cover it over. Our Lord Himself has signalised the difference between His teaching and that addressed to "them of old time" on the very point of forgiveness of enemies, and we are but following His guidance when we recognise that the psalmist’s mood is distinctly inferior to that which has now become the law for devout men. Divine retribution for evil was the truth of the Old Testament, as forgiveness is that of the New. The conflict between God’s kingdom and its enemies was being keenly and perpetually waged, in most literal fashion. Devout men could not but long for the triumph of that with which all good was associated, and therefore for the defeat and destruction of its opposite. For no private injuries, or for these only in so far as the suffering singer is a member of the community which represents God’s cause, does he ask the descent of God’s vengeance, but for the insults and hurts inflicted on righteousness. The form of these maledictions belongs to a lower stage of revelation; the substance of them, considered as passionate desires for the destruction of evil, burning zeal for the triumph of Truth, which is God’s cause, and unquenchable faith that He is just, is a part of Christian perfection. The usual variety of conjectures as to authorship exists. Delitzsch hesitatingly accepts the superscription as correct in assigning the psalm to David. Olshausen, as is his custom, says, "Maccabean"; Cheyne inclines to "the time of Nehemiah (in which case the enemy might be Sanballat), or even perhaps the close of the Persian age" ("Orig. of Psalt.," 65). He thinks that the "magnanimous David" could not have uttered "these laboured imprecations," and that the speaker is "not a brave and bold warrior, but a sensitive poet." Might he not be both? To address God as the "God of my praise," even at such a moment of dejection, is a triumph of faith. The name recalls to the psalmist past mercies, and expresses his confidence that he will still have cause to extol his Deliverer, while it also pleads with God what He has done as a reason for doing the like in new circumstances of need. The suppliant speaks in praise and prayer; he asks God to speak in acts of rescuing power. A praying man cannot have a dumb God. And His mighty Voice, which hushes all others and sets His suppliants free from fears and foes, is all the more longed for and required, because of those cruel voices that yelp and snarl round the psalmist. The contrast between the three utterances-his, God’s, and his enemies’-is most vivid. The foes have come at him with open mouths. "A wicked man’s mouth" would read, by a slight alteration, "a mouth of wickedness": but the recurrence of the word "wicked man" in Psalms 109:6 seems to look back to this verse, and to make the rendering above probable. Lies and hatred ring the psalmist round, but his conscience is clear. "They have hated me without a cause" is the experience of this ancient sufferer for righteousness’ sake, as of the Prince of all such. This singer, who is charged with pouring out a flood of "unpurified passion," had, at any rate, striven to win over hatred by meekness; and if he is bitter, it is the pain and bitterness of love flung back with contumely, and only serving to exacerbate enmity. Nor had he met with evil the first returns of evil for good, but, as he says, "I was [all] prayer". (compare Psalms 120:7, "I am-peace") Repelled, his whole being turned to God, and in calm communion with Him found defence and repose. But his patient meekness availed nothing, for his foes still "laid evil" on him in return for good. The prayer is a short record of a long martyrdom. Many a foiled attempt of patient love preceded the psalm. Not till the other way had been tried tong enough to show that malignity was beyond the reach of conciliation did the psalmist appeal to the God of recompenses. Let that be remembered in judging the next part of the psalm. The terrible maledictions (Psalms 109:6-20) need little commentary. They may be left in all their awfulness, which is neither to be extenuated nor degraded into an outburst of fierce personal vindictiveness. It is something far more noble than that. These terrible verses are prophecy, but they are prayers too; and prayers which can only be accounted for by remembering the spirit of the old dispensation. They are the more intense, because they are launched against an individual, probably the chief among the foes. In Psalms 109:6-15 we have imprecations pure and simple, and it is noteworthy that so large a part of these verses refers to the family of the evildoer. In Psalms 109:16-20 the grounds of the wished for destruction are laid in the sinner’s perverted choice, and the automatic action of sin working its own punishment is vividly set forth. Psalms 109:6-8 are best taken in close connection, as representing the trial and condemnation of the object of the psalmist’s imprecations, before a tribunal. He prays that the man may be haled before a wicked judge. The word rendered "set" is the root from which that rendered "office" in Psalms 109:8 comes, and here means to set in a position of authority-i.e., in a judicial one. His judge is to be "a wicked man" like himself, for such have no mercy on each other. An accuser is to stand at his right hand. The word rendered adversary (the verb cognate with which is used in Psalms 109:4) is "Satan"; but the general meaning of hostile accuser is to be preferred here. With such a judge and prosecutor the issue of the cause is certain-"May he go out [from the judgment hall] guilty." A more terrible petition follows, which is best taken in its most terrible sense. The condemned man cries for mercy, not to his earthly judge, but to God, and the psalmist can ask that the last despairing cry to Heaven may be unanswered, and even counted sin. It could only be so, if the heart that framed it was still an evil heart, despairing, indeed, but obdurate. Then comes the end: the sentence is executed. The criminal dies and his office fails to another: his wife is a widow, and his children fatherless. This view of the connection gives unity to what is otherwise a mere heap of unconnected maledictions. It also brings out more clearly that the psalmist is seeking not merely the gratification of private animosity, but the vindication of public justice, even if ministered by an unjust judge. Peter’s quotation of Psa 109:8 b in reference to Acts 1:20 does not involve the Messianic character of the psalm. Psalms 109:10-15 extend the maledictions to the enemy’s children and parents, in accordance with the ancient strong sense of family solidarity, which was often expressed in practice by visiting the kindred of a convicted criminal with ruin, and levelling his house with the ground. The psalmist wishes these consequences to fall in all their cruel severity, and pictures the children as vagabonds, driven from the desolation which had, in happier days, been their home, and seeking a scanty subsistence among strangers. The imprecations of Psa 109:11 at first sight seem to hark back to an earlier stage in the wicked man’s career, contemplating him as still in life. But the wish that his wealth may be "ensnared" by creditors and stolen by strangers is quite appropriate as a consequence of his sentence and execution; and the prayer in Psalms 109:12, that there may be no one to "draw out lovingkindness" to him, is probably best explained by the parallel clause. A dead man lives a quasi-life in his children, and what is done to them is a prolongation of what was done to him. Thus helpless, beggars, homeless, and plundered, "the seed of evildoers" would naturally be short-lived, and the psalmist desires that they may be cut off, and the world freed from an evil race. His wishes go backwards too, and reach to the previous as well as the subsequent generation. The foe had come of a bad stock-parents, son, and son’s sons are to be involved in a common doom, because partakers of a common sin. The special reason for the terrible desire that the iniquity of his father and mother may never be blotted out seems to be, the desire that the accumulated consequences of hereditary sin may fall on the heads of the third generation-a dread wish, which experience shows is often tragically fulfilled, even when the sufferers are far less guilty than their ancestors. "Father, forgive them" is the strongest conceivable contrast to these awful prayers. But the psalmist’s petition implies that the sins in question were unrepented sins, and is, in fact, a cry that, as such, they should be requited in the "cutting off the memory" of such a brood of evildoers "from the earth." In Psalms 109:16 a new turn of thought begins, which is pursued till Psalms 109:20 -namely, that of the self-retributive action of a perverted choice of evil. "He remembered not" to be gracious to him who needed compassion; therefore it is just that he should not be remembered on earth, and that his sin should be remembered in heaven. He deliberately chose cursing rather than blessing as his attitude and act towards others; therefore cursing comes to him and blessing remains far from him. as others’ attitude and act to him. The world is a mirror which, on the whole, gives back the smile or the frown which we present to it. Though the psalmist has complained that he had loved and been hated in return, he does not doubt that, in general, the curser is cursed back again and the blesser blessed. Outwardly and inwardly, the man is wrapped in and saturated with "cursing." Like a robe or a girdle, it encompasses him; like a draught of water, it passes into his inmost nature; like anointing oil oozing into the bones, it steals into every corner of his soul. His own doings come back to poison him. The kick of the gun which he fires is sure to hurt his own shoulder, and it is better to be in front of the muzzle than behind the trigger. The last word of these maledictions is not only a wish. but a declaration of the Law of Divine Retribution. The psalmist could not have found it in his heart to pray such a prayer unless he had been sure that Jehovah paid men’s wages punctually in full. and that conviction is the kernel of his awful words. He is equally sure that his cause is God’s-because he is sure that God’s cause is his, and that he suffers for righteousness and for the righteous Jehovah. The final part (Psalms 109:21-31) returns to lowly, sad petitions for deliverance, of the kind common to many psalms. Very pathetically, and as with a tightening of his grasp, does the singer call on his helper by the double name "Jehovah, Lord," and plead all the pleas with God which are hived n these names. The prayer in Psalms 109:21 b resembles that in Psalms 69:16, another of the psalms of imprecation. The image of the long, drawn out shadow recurs in Psalms 102:11. The word rendered "am I gone" occurs here only, and implies compulsory departure. The same idea of external force hurrying one out of life is picturesquely presented in the parallel clause. "I am shaken out," as a thing which a man wishes to get rid of is shaken out of the folds of a garment. The psalmist thinks of himself as being whirled away, helpless, as a swarm of locusts blown into the sea. The physical feebleness in Psalms 109:24 is probably to be taken literally, as descriptive of the havoc wrought on him by his persecutions and trouble of soul, but may be, as often, metaphor for that trouble itself. The expression in Psalms 109:24 b rendered above "falls away from fatness" is literally "has become a liar," or faithless, which is probably a picturesque way of saying that the psalmist’s flesh had, as it were, become a renegade from its former well-nourished condition, and was emaciated by his sorrow. Others would keep the literal meaning of the word rendered "fatness"-i.e. oil-and translate "My flesh has shrunk up for lack of oil" (so Baethgen and Kay). One more glance at the enemies, now again regarded as many, and one more flash of confidence that his prayer is heard, close the psalm. Once again God is invoked by His name Jehovah, and the suppliant presses close to him as "my God"; once again he casts himself on that lovingkindness, whose measure is wider than his thoughts and will ensure him larger answers than his desires; once again he builds all his hope on it, and pleads no claims of his own. He longs for personal deliverance: but not only for personal ends, but rather that it may be an undeniable manifestation of Jehovah’s power. That is a high range of feeling which subordinates self to God even while longing for deliverance, and wishes more that He should be glorified than that self should be blessed. There is almost a smile on the psalmist’s face as he contrasts his enemies’ curses with God’s blessing, and thinks how ineffectual are these and how omnipotent is that. He takes the issue of the strife between cursing men and a blessing God to be as good as already decided. So he can look with new equanimity on the energetic preparations of his foes; for he sees in faith their confusion and defeat, and already feels some springing in his heart of the joy of victory, and is sure of already clothing themselves with shame. It is the prerogative of Faith to behold things that are not as though they were, and to live as in the hour of triumph even while in the thick of the fight. The psalm began with addressing "the God of my praise"; it ends with the confidence and the vow that the singer will yet praise Him. It painted an adversary standing at the right hand of the wicked to condemn him; it ends with the assurance that Jehovah stands at the right hand of His afflicted servant, as his advocate to protect him. The wicked man was to "go out guilty"; he whom God defends shall come forth from all that would judge his soul. "If God be for us, who can be against us? It is God that justifieth: who is he that condemneth?" Psalms 110:1-7 Does our Lord’s attribution of this psalm to David foreclose the question of its authorship for those who accept His authority? Many, who fully recognise and reverently bow to that authority, think that it does not, and appeal for support of their view to the unquestionable limitations of His earthly knowledge. It is urged that His object in His argument with the Pharisees, in which this psalm is quoted by Him, (Matthew 22:41-46 and parallels) is not to instruct them on the authorship of the psalm, but to argue from its contents; and though He assumes the Davidic authorship, accepted generally at the time, yet the cogency of His argument is unimpaired, so long as it is recognised that the psalm is a Messianic one, and that the august language used in it of the Messiah is not compatible with the position of One who was a mere human son of David (Driver, "Introd.," p. 363, note). So also Dr. Sanday ("Inspiration," p. 420) says that "the Pharisees were taken upon their own ground, and the fallacy of their conclusion was shown on their own premises." But our Lord’s argument is not drawn from the "august language" of the psalm, but from David’s relationship to the Messiah, and crumbles to pieces if he is not the singer. It may freely be admitted that there are instances in our Lord’s references to the Old Testament in which He speaks from the point of view of His hearers in regard to it; but these are cases in which nothing turned on the question whether that point of view was correct or not. Here everything turns on it; and to maintain that, in so important a crisis, He based His arguments on an error comes perilously near to imputing fallibility to Him as our teacher. Most of recent writers who advocate the view in question would recoil from such a consequence; but their position is divided from it by a thin line. Whatever the limitations of our Lord’s human knowledge, they did not affect His authority in regard to what He did teach; and the present writer ventures to believe that He did teach that David in this psalm calls Messiah his Lord. If so, the psalm stands alone, as not having primary reference to an earthly king. It is not, like other Messianic psalms, typical, but directly prophetic of Messiah, and of Him only. We are not warranted in denying the possibility of such direct prophecy; and the picture drawn in this psalm, so far transcending any possible original among the sons of men, has not full justice done to its majestic lines, unless it is recognised as setting forth none other than the personal Messiah. True, it is drawn with colours supplied from earthly experiences, and paints a warrior-monarch. The prophet-psalmist, no doubt, conceived of literal warfare; but a prophet did not always understand the oracles which he spoke. The psalm falls into two parts: the Vision of the Priest-King and His army (Psalms 110:1-4); the King’s Warfare and Victory (Psalms 110:5-7). "The oracle of Jehovah" introduces a fresh utterance of God’s, heard by the psalmist, who thus claims to be the mouthpiece of the Divine will. It is a familiar prophetic phrase, but usually found at the close-not, as here, at the beginning of the utterance to which it refers (see, however, Isaiah 56:8; Zechariah 12:1). The unusual position makes the Divine origin of the following words more emphatic. "My Lord" is a customary title of respect in addressing a superior, but not in speaking of him. Its use here evidently implies that the psalmist regards Messiah as his king. and the best comment on it is Matthew 22:43: "How then doth David in spirit call Him Lord?" The substance of the oracle follows. He who is exalted to sit at the right hand of a king is installed there by as his associate in rule. He who is seated by God at His right hand is received into such mystery of participation in Divine authority and power, as cannot be imposed on frail humanity. The rigid monotheism of the Jewish singers makes this tremendous "oracle" the more remarkable. Greek gods might have their assessors from among mortals, but who shall share Jehovah’s throne? "Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord as king"; (1 Chronicles 29:23) but that is no parallel, nor does it show that the oracle of this psalm simply states the dignity of the theocratic king. Solomon’s throne was Jehovah’s, as being established by Him and since he represented Jehovah on earth; but to sit at Jehovah’s right hand means far more than this. That session of Messiah is represented as the prelude to the exercise of Divine power for His triumph over His foes; and that apparent repose, while Jehovah fights for him, is singularly contrasted with his activity as described in Psalms 110:6-7. The singer speaks riddles about a union of undisturbed tranquility and of warlike strenuousness, which are only solved when we see their fulfilment in Him who sitteth at the right hand of God, and who yet goes with His armies where they go. "He was received up, and sat on the right hand of God the Lord also working with them" (Mark 16:19-20) The opened heavens showed to Stephen his Master, not sitting, but standing in the posture of readiness to help him dying, and to receive him made more alive by death. His foot shall be on the neck of His foes, as Joshua bade the men of Israel put theirs on the conquered kings’. Opposition shall not only be subdued, but shall become subsidiary to Messiah’s dominion, "a stepping stone to higher things." The Divine oracle is silent, and the strain is taken up by the psalmist himself, who speaks "in the spirit," in the remainder of the psalm, no less than he did when uttering Jehovah’s word. Messiah’s dominion has a definite earthly centre. From Zion is this King to rule. His mighty sceptre, the symbol and instrument of His God-given power, is to stretch thence. How far? No limit is named to the sweep of His sway. But since Jehovah is to extend it, it must be conterminous with the reach of His omnipotence. Psalms 110:2 b may be taken as the words of Jehovah, but more probably they are the loyal exclamation of the psalmist, moved to his heart’s depths by the vision which makes the bliss of his solitude. The word rendered "rule" is found also in Balaam’s prophecy of Messiah (Numbers 24:19) and in the Messianic Psalms 72:8. The kingdom is to subsist in the midst of enemies. The normal state of the Church on earth is militant. Yet the enemies are not only a ring of antagonists round a centre of submission, but into their midst His power penetrates, and Messiah dominates them too, for all their embattled hostility. A throne round which storms of rebellion rage is an insecure seat. But this throne is established through enmity, because it is upheld by Jehovah. The kingdom in relation to its subjects is the theme of Psa 110:3, which accords with the warlike tone of the whole psalm, by describing them as an army. The period spoken of is "the day of Thy host," or array-the time when the forces are mustered and set in order for battle. The word rendered free-will offerings may possibly mean simply "willingnesses," and the abstract noun may he used as in "I am-prayer" (Psalms 109:4) -i.e., most willing; but it is better to retain the fuller and more picturesque meaning of glad, spontaneous sacrifices, which corresponds with the priestly character afterwards ascribed to the people, and goes very deep into the essence of Christian service. There are to be no pressed men or mercenaries in that host. As Deborah sang of her warriors, these "offer themselves willingly." Glad consecration of self, issuing in spontaneous enlisting for the wars of the King, is to characterise all His subjects. The army is the nation. These soldiers are to be priests. They are clad in holy attire, "fine linen, clean and white." That representation goes as deep into the nature of the warfare they have to wage and the weapons they have to wield, as the former did into the impulse which sends them to serve under Messiah’s flag. The priestly function is to bring God and man near to one another. Their warfare can only be for the carrying out of their office. Their weapons are sympathy, gentleness, purity. Like the Templars, the Christian soldier must bear the cross on his shield and the hilt of his sword. Another reading of this phrase is "on the holy mountains," which is preferred by many, among whom are Hupfeld and Cheyne. But the great preponderance of evidence is against the change, which obliterates a very striking and profound thought. Psalms 110:3 c, d gives another picture of the host. The usual explanation of the clause takes "youth" as meaning, not the young vigour of the King, but, in a collective sense, the assembled warriors, whom it paints as in the bloom of early manhood. The principal point of comparison of the army with the dew is probably its multitude. (2 Samuel 17:12) The warriors have the gift of unaging youth, as all those have who renew their strength by serving Christ. And it is permissible to take other characteristics of the dew than its abundance, and to think of the mystery of its origin, of the tiny mirrors of the sunshine hanging on every cobweb, of its power to refresh, as well as of the myriads of its drops. But this explanation, beautiful and deep as it is, is challenged by many. The word rendered "dawn" is unusual. "Youth" is not found elsewhere in the sense thus assigned to it. "Dew" is thought to be an infelicitous emblem. "From a linguistic point of view" Cheyne pronounces both "dawn" and "dew" to be intolerable. Singularly enough, in the next sentence, he deprecates a previous opinion of his own as premature "until we know something certain of the Hebrew of the Davidic age" ("Orig. of Psalt.," p. 482). But if such certainty is lacking, why should these two words be "intolerable"? He approves Bickell’s conjectural emendation, "From the womb, from the dawn [of life], Thy youthful band is devoted to Thee." Psalms 110:4 again enshrines a Divine utterance, which is presented in an even more solemn manner than that of Psa 110:1. The oath of Jehovah by Himself represents the thing sworn as guaranteed by the Divine character. God, as it were, pledges His own name, with its fulness of unchanging power, to the fulfilment of the word; and this irrevocable and omnipotent decree is made still more impressive by the added assurance that He "will not repent." Thus inextricably intertwined with the augustness of God’s nature, the union of the royal and priestly offices in the person of Messiah shall endure forever. Some commentators contend that every theocratic king of Israel was a priest, inasmuch as he was king of a priestly nation. But since the national priestliness did not hinder the appointment of a special order of priests, it is most natural to assume that the special order is here referred to. Why should the singer have gone back into the mists of antiquity, in order to find the type of a priest-king, if the union of offices belonged, by virtue of his kinghood, to every Jewish monarch? Clearly the combination was unexampled; and such an incident as that of Uzziah’s leprosy shows how carefully the two great offices were kept apart. Their opposition has resulted in many tragedies: probably their union would be still more fatal, except in the case of One whose priestly sacrifice of Himself as a willing offering is the basis of His royal sway. The "order of Melchizedek" has received unexpected elucidation from the Tel-el-Amarna tablets, which bring to light, as a correspondent of the Pharaoh, one Ebed-tob, king of Uru-salim (the city of Salim, the god of peace). In one of his letters he says, "Behold, neither my father nor my mother have exalted me in this place; the prophecy [or perhaps, arm] of the mighty King has caused me to enter the house of my father." By the mighty King is meant the god whose sanctuary stood on the summit of Mount Moriah. He was king of Jerusalem, because he was priest of its god (Sayce, "Criticism and the Monuments." p. 175). The psalm lays stress on the eternal duration of the royalty and priesthood of Messiah; and although in other Messianic psalms the promised perpetuity may be taken to refer to the dynasty rather than the individual monarch, that explanation is impossible here, where a person is the theme. Many attempts have been made to fit the language of the psalm to one or other of the kings of Israel; but, not to mention other difficulties, this Psalms 110:4 remains as an insuperable obstacle. In default of Israelite kings, one or other of the Maccabean family has been thought of. Cheyne strongly pronounces for Simon Maccabaeus, and refers, as others have done, to a popular decree in his favour, declaring him "ruler and high priest forever" ("Orig. of Psalt.," p. 26). On this identification, Baethgen asks if it is probable that the singer should have taken his theme from a popular decree, and have transformed it (umgestempelt) into a Divine oath. It may be added that Simon was not a king, and that he was by birth a priest. The second part of the psalm carries the King into the battlefield. He comes forth from the throne, where He sat at Jehovah’s right hand, and now Jehovah stands at His right hand. The word rendered Lord in Psalms 110:5 is never used of any but God, and it is best to take it so here, even though to do so involves the necessity of supposing a change in the subject either in Psalms 110:6 or Psalms 110:7, which latter verse can only refer to the Messiah. The destructive conflict described is said to take place "in the day of His wrath" - i.e., of Jehovah’s. If this is strictly interpreted, the period intended is not that of "the day of Thine army," when by His priestly warriors the Priest-King wages a warfare among His enemies, which wins them to be His lovers, but that dread hour when He comes forth from His ascended glory to pronounce doom among the nations and to crush all opposition. Such a final apocalypse of the wrath of the Lamb is declared to us in clearer words, which may well be permitted to cast a light back on this psalm. (Revelation 19:11) "He has crushed kings" is the perfect of prophetic certainty or intuition, the scene being so vividly bodied before the singer that he regards it as accomplished. "He shall judge" or give doom "among the nations,"-the future of pure prediction. Psalms 110:6 b is capable of various renderings. It may be rendered as above, or the verb may be intransitive and the whole clause translated, It becomes full of corpses (so Delitzsch); or the word may be taken as an adjective, in which case the meaning would be the same as if it were an intransitive verb. "The head over a wide land" is also ambiguous. If "head" is taken as a collective noun, it means rulers. But it may be also regarded as referring to a person, the principal antagonist of the Messiah. This is the explanation of many of the older interpreters, who think of Death or "the prince of this world," but is too fanciful to be adopted. Psalms 110:7 is usually taken as depicting the King as pausing in His victorious pursuit of the flying foe to drink, like Gideon’s men, from the brook, and then with renewed vigour pressing on. But is not the idea of the Messiah needing refreshment in that final conflict somewhat harsh?-and may there not be here a certain desertion of the order of sequence, so that we are carried back to the time prior to the enthronement of the King? One is tempted to suggest the possibility of this closing verse being a full parallel with Philippians 2:7-9. Christ on the way to His throne drank of "waters of affliction," and precisely therefore is He "highly exalted." The choice for every man is being crushed beneath His foot, or being exalted to sit with Him on His throne. "He that overcometh, to him will I give to sit down with Me on My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father on His throne." It is better to sit on His throne than to be His footstool. Psalms 111:1-10 ANOTHER series of psalms headed with Hallelujah begins here and includes the two following psalms. The prefix apparently indicates liturgical use. The present psalm is closely allied to the next. Both are acrostic and correspond verse to verse, as will appear in the exposition. Together they represent God and the godly, this psalm magnifying the Divine character and acts, the other painting the ideal godly man as, in some real fashion, an "imitator of God as a beloved child." Both are gnomic, and built up by accumulation of slightly connected particulars, rather than flowing continuously in a sequence which springs from one pregnant thought. Both have allusions to other psalms and to the Book of Proverbs, and share with many of the psalms of Book 5 the character of being mainly working over of old materials. The psalmist begins by a vow to thank Jehovah with his whole heart, and immediately proceeds to carry it out. "The upright" is by some understood as a national designation, and "council" taken as equivalent to "congregation." But it is more in accordance with usage to regard the psalmist as referring first to a narrower circle of like-minded lovers of good, to whose congenial ears be rejoices to sing. There was an Israel within Israel, who would sympathise with his song. The "congregation" is then either the wider audience of the gathered people, or, as Delitzsch takes it, equivalent to "their congregation"-i.e., of the upright. The theme of thanksgiving is as ever, God’s works for Israel; and the first characteristic of these which the psalmist sings is their greatness. He will come closer presently, and discern more delicate features, but now, the magnitude of these colossal manifestations chiefly animates his song. Far stretching in their mass and in their consequences, deep rooted in God’s own character, His great deeds draw the eager search of "those who delight in them." These are the same sympathetic auditors to whom the song is primarily addressed. There were indolent beholders in Israel, before whom the works of God were passed without exciting the faintest desire to know more of their depth. Such careless onlookers, who see and see not, are rife in all ages. God shines out in His deeds, and they will not give one glance of sharpened interest. But the test of caring for His doings is the effort to comprehend their greatness, and plunge oneself into their depths. The more one gazes, the more one sees. What was at first but dimly apprehended as great resolves itself, as we look; and, first, "Honour and majesty," the splendour of His reflected character, shine out from His deeds, and then, when still more deeply they are pondered, the central fact of their righteousness, their conformity to the highest standard of rectitude, becomes patent. Greatness and majesty, divorced from righteousness, would be no theme for praise. Such greatness is littleness, such splendour is phosphorescent corruption. These general contemplations are followed in Psalms 111:4-6 by references to Israel’s history as the greatest example of God’s working. "He has made a memorial for His wonders." Some find here a reference to the Passover and other feasts commemorative of the deliverance from Egypt. But it is better to think of Israel itself as the "memorial," or of the deeds themselves, in their remembrance by men, as being, as it were, a monument of His power. The men whom God has blessed are standing evidences of His wonders. "Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord." And the great attribute, which is commemorated by that "memorial," is Jehovah’s gracious compassion. The psalmist presses steadily towards the centre of the Divine nature. God’s works become eloquent of more and more precious truth as he listens to their voice. They spoke of greatness, honour, majesty, righteousness, but tenderer qualities are revealed to the loving and patient gazer. The two standing proofs of Divine kindness are the miraculous provision of food in the desert and the possession of the promised land. But to the psalmist these are not past deeds to be remembered only, but continually repeated operations. "He remembers His covenant forever," and so the experiences of the fathers are lived over again by the children, and today is as full of God as yesterday was. Still He feeds us, still He gives us our heritage. From Psalms 111:7 onwards a new thought comes in. God has spoken as well as wrought. His very works carry messages of "truth and judgment," and they are interpreted further by articulate precepts, which are at once a revelation of what He is and a law for what we should be. His law stands as fast as His righteousness (Psalms 111:3, Psalms 111:8). A man may utterly trust His commandments. They abide eternally, for Duty is ever Duty, and His Law, "while it has a surface of temporary ceremonial, has a core of immutable requirement. His commandments are done-i.e., appointed by Him-"in truth and uprightness." They are tokens of His grace and revelations of His character. The two closing verses have three clauses each, partly from the exigencies of the acrostic structure, and partly to secure a more impressive ending. Psalms 111:9 sums up all God’s works in the two chief manifestations of His goodness which should ever live in Israel’s thanks, His sending redemption and His establishing His everlasting covenant-the two facts which are as fresh today, under new and better forms, as when long ago this unknown psalmist sang. And he gathers up the total impression which God’s dealings should leave, in the great saying, "Holy and dread is His name." In Psalms 111:10 he somewhat passes the limits of his theme, and trenches on the territory of the next psalm, which is already beginning to shape itself in his mind. The designation of the fear of the Jehovah as "the beginning of wisdom" is from Proverbs 1:7; Proverbs 9:10. "Beginning" may rather mean "principal part" Proverbs 4:7, principal thing). The them of Psa 111:10 b is best referred, though the expression is awkward, to "commandments" in Psalms 111:7. Less probably it is taken to allude to the "fear" and "wisdom" of the previous clause. The two clauses of this verse descriptive of the godly correspond in structure to a-and b of Psa 111:9, and the last clause corresponds to the last of that verse, expressing the continual praise which should rise to that holy and dread Name. Note that the perpetual duration, which has been predicated of God’s attributes, precepts, and covenant (Psalms 111:3, Psalms 111:5, Psalms 111:8, Psalms 111:9), is here ascribed to His praise. Man’s songs cannot fall dumb, so long as God pours out Himself in such deeds. As long as that Sun streams across the desert, stony lips will part in music to hail its beams. Psalms 112:1-10 "BE ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect," might be inscribed on this picture of a godly man, which, in structure and substance, reflects the contemplation of God’s character and works contained in the preceding psalm. The idea that the godly man is, in some real sense, an image of God runs through the whole, and comes out strongly, at several points, in the repetition of the same expressions in reference to both. The portrait of the ideal good man, outlined in this psalm, may be compared with those in Psalms 15:1-5; Psalms 24:1-10. Its most characteristic feature is the prominence given to beneficence, which is regarded as eminently a reflection of God’s. The foundation of righteousness is laid in Psalms 112:1 in devout awe and inward delight in the commandments. But the bulk of the psalm describes the blessed consequences, rather than the essential characteristics, of godliness. The basis of righteousness and beneficence to men must be laid in reverence and conformity of will towards God. Therefore the psalm begins with proclaiming that, apart from all external consequences, these dispositions carry blessedness in themselves. The close of the preceding psalm had somewhat overpassed its limits, when it declared that "the fear of Jehovah" was the beginning of wisdom and that to do His commandments was sound discretion. This psalm echoes these sayings, and so links itself to the former one. It deepens them by pointing out that the fear of Jehovah is a fountain of joy as well as of wisdom, and that inward delight in the Law must precede outward doing of it. The familiar blessing attached in the Old Testament to godliness, namely, prosperous posterity, is the first of the consequences of righteousness which the psalm holds out. That promise belongs to another order of things from that of the New Testament; but the essence of it is true still, namely, that the only secure foundation for permanent prosperity is in the fear of Jehovah. "The generation of the upright" (Psalms 112:2) does not merely mean the natural descendants of a good man-"It is a moral rather than a genealogical term" (Hupfeld)-as is usually the case with the word "generation." Another result of righteousness is declared to be "wealth and riches" (Psalms 112:3), which again, must be taken as applying more fully to the Old Testament system of Providence than to that of the New. A parallelism of the most striking character between God and the godly emerges in Psalms 112:3 b, where the same words are applied to the latter as were used of the former, in the corresponding verse of Psa 111:1-10. It would be giving too great evangelical definiteness to the psalmist’s words, to read into them the Christian teaching that man’s righteousness is God’s gift through Christ, but it unwarrantably eviscerates them of their meaning, if we go to the other extreme, and, with Hupfeld, suppose that the psalmist put in the clause under stress of the exigencies of the acrostic structure, and regard it as a "makeshift" and "stop gap." The psalmist has a very definite and noble thought. Man’s righteousness is the reflection of God’s; and has in it some kindred with its original, which guarantees stability not all unlike the eternity of that source. Since Psalms 112:3 b thus brings into prominence the ruling thought of the two psalms, possibly we may venture to see a fainter utterance of that thought, in the first clause of the verse, in which the "wealth and riches" in the righteous man’s house may correspond to the "honour and majesty" attendant on God’s works (Psalms 111:3 a). Psalms 112:4 blends consequences of righteousness and characterisation of it, in a remarkable way. The construction is doubtful. In a, "upright" is in the plural, and the adjectives in b are in the singular number. They are appended abruptly to the preceding clause; and the loose structure has occasioned difficulty to expositors, which has been increased by the scruples of some, who have not given due weight to the leading thought of correspondence between the human and Divine, and have hesitated to regard Psalms 112:4 b, as referring to the righteous man, seeing that in Psalms 111:4 b refers to God. Hence efforts have been made to find other renderings. Delitzsch would refer the clause to God, whom he takes to be meant by "light" in the previous clause, while Hitzig, followed by Baethgen, would translate, "As a light, he (the righteous) rises in darkness for the upright," and would then consider "gracious," etc., as in apposition with "light," and descriptive of the righteous man’s character as such. But the very fact that the words are applied to God in the corresponding verse of the previous psalm suggests their application here to the godly man, and the sudden change of number is not so harsh as to require the ordinary translation to be abandoned. However dark may be a good man’s road, the very midnight blackness is a prophecy of sunrise; or, to use another figure, "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" (Compare Psalms 97:11) The fountain of pity in human hearts must be fed from the great source of compassion in God’s, if it is to gush out unremittingly and bless the deserts of sorrow and misery. He who has received "grace" will surely exercise grace. "Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful". (Luke 6:36) Psalms 112:5 blends characteristics and consequences of goodness in reverse order from that in Psalms 112:4. The compassionate man of Psa 112:4 b does not let pity evaporate, but is moved by it to act and to lend (primarily money, but secondarily) any needful help or solace. Benevolence which is not translated into beneficence is a poor affair. There is no blessing in it or for it; but it is well with the man who turns emotions into deeds. Lazy compassion hurts him who indulges in it, but that which "lends" gets joy in the act of bestowing aid. The result of such active compassion is stated in Psalms 112:5 b as being that such a one will "maintain his causes in judgment," by which seems to be meant the judgment of earthly tribunals. If compassion and charity guide a life, it will have few disputes, and will contain nothing for which a judge can condemn. He who obeys the higher law will not break the lower. Psalms 112:6-8 dwell mainly on one consequence of righteousness, namely, the stability which it imparts. While such a man lives, he shall be unmoved by shocks, and after he dies, his memory will live, like a summer evening’s glow which lingers in the west till a new morning dawns. In Psalms 112:7 the resemblance of the godly to God comes very beautifully to the surface. Psalms 111:7 deals with God’s commandments as "trustworthy." The human parallel is an established heart. He who has learned to lean upon Jehovah! (for such is the literal force of "trusting" here), and has proved the commandments utterly reliable as basis for his life, will have his heart steadfast. The same idea is repeated in Psalms 112:8 with direct quotation of the corresponding verse of Psa 111:1-10. In both the word for "established" is the same. The heart that delights in God’s established commandments is established by them, and, sooner or later, will look in calm security on the fading away of all evil things and men, while it rests indeed, because it rests in God. He who builds his transient life on and into the Rock of Ages wins rocklike steadfastness, and some share in the perpetuity of his Refuge. Lives rooted in God are never uprooted. The two final verses are elongated, like the corresponding ones in Psalms 111:1-10. Again, beneficence is put in the forefront, as a kind of shorthand summing up of all virtues. And, again, in Psalms 112:9 the analogy is drawn out between God and the godly. "He has sent redemption to His people"; and they, in their degree, are to be communicative of the gifts of which they have been made recipient. Little can they give, compared with what they have received; but what they have they hold in trust for those who need it, and the sure test of having obtained "redemption" is a "heart open as day to melting charity." In the former psalm, Psalms 112:9 b declared that God has "ordained His covenant forever" and here the corresponding clause reaffirms that the good man’s righteousness endures forever. The final clauses of both verses also correspond, in so far as, in the former psalm, God’s Name is represented as "holy and dread"-i.e., the total impression made by His deeds exalts Him-and in the latter, the righteous man’s "horn" is represented as "exalted in glory" or honour-i.e., the total impression made by his deeds exalts him. Paul quotes the two former clauses of Psa 112:9 in 2 Corinthians 9:9 as involving the truth that Christian giving does not impoverish. The exercise of a disposition strengthens it; and God takes care that the means of beneficence shall not be wanting to him who has the spirit of it. The later Jewish use of "righteousness" as a synonym for alms giving has probably been influenced by this psalm, in which beneficence is the principal trait in the righteous man’s character, but there is no reason for supposing that the psalmist uses the word in that restricted sense. Psalms 112:10 is not parallel with the last verse of Psa 111:1-10, which stands, as we have seen, somewhat beyond the scope of the rest of that psalm. It gives one brief glimpse of the fate of the evildoer, in opposition to the loving picture of the blessedness of the righteous. Thus it too is rather beyond the immediate object of the psalm of which it forms part. The wicked sees, in contrast with the righteous man’s seeing in Psalms 112:8. The one looks with peace on the short duration of antagonistic power, and rejoices that there is a God of recompenses; the other grinds his teeth in envious rage, as he beholds the perpetuity of the righteous. He "shall melt away," i.e., in jealousy or despair. Opposition to goodness, since it is enmity towards God, is self-condemned to impotence and final failure. Desires turned for satisfaction elsewhere than to God are sure to perish. The sharp contrast between the righteousness of the good man, which endures forever, in his steadfast because trustful heart, and the crumbling schemes and disappointed hopes which gnaw the life of a man whose aims go athwart God’s will, solemnly proclaims an eternal truth. This Psalm, like Psalms 1:1-6, touches the two poles of possible human experience, in its first and last words, beginning with "happy the man" and ending with "shall perish." Psalms 113:1-9 THIS pure burst of praise is the first of the psalms composing the Hallel, which was sung at the three great feasts (Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles), as well as at the festival of Dedication and at the new moons. "In the domestic celebration of the Passover night ‘the Hallel’ is divided into two parts; the one half, Psalms 113:1-9 and Psalms 114:1-8, being sung before the repast, before the emptying of the second festal cup, and the other half, Psalms 115:1-18; Psalms 116:1-19; Psalms 117:1-2; Psalms 118:1-29, after the repast, after the filling of the fourth cup, to which the having sung a hymn in Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26 may refer" (Delitzsch, in loc.). Three strophes of three verses each may be recognised, of which the first (Psalms 113:1-3) summons Israel to praise Jehovah, and reaches out through all time and over all space, in longing that God’s name may be known and praised. The second strophe (Psalms 113:4-6) magnifies God’s exalted greatness; while the third (Psalms 113:7-9) adores His condescension, manifested in His stooping to lift the lowly. The second and third of these strophes, however, overlap in the song, as the facts which they celebrate do. God’s loftiness can never be adequately measured, unless His condescension is taken into account; and His condescension never sufficiently wondered at, unless His loftiness is felt. The call to praise is addressed to Israel, whose designation "servants of Jehovah" recalls Isaiah 11:1-16’s characteristic use of that name in the singular number for the nation. With strong emphasis, the name of Jehovah is declared as the theme of praise. God’s revelation of His character by deed and word must precede man’s thanksgiving. They, to whom that Name has been entrusted, by their reception of His mercies are bound to ring it out to all the world. And in the Name itself, there lies enshrined the certainty that through all ages it shall be blessed, and in every spot lit by the sun shall shine as a brighter light, and be hailed with praises. The psalmist has learned the world wide significance of Israel’s position as the depository of the Name, and the fair vision of a universal adoration of it fills his heart. Psalms 113:3 b may be rendered "worthy to be praised is the name," but the context seems to suggest the rendering above. The infinite exaltation of Jehovah above all dwellers on this low earth and above the very heavens does not lift Him too high for man’s praise, for it is wedded to condescension as infinite. Incomparable is He; but still adoration can reach Him, and men do not clasp mist, but solid substance, when they grasp His Name. That incomparable uniqueness of Jehovah is celebrated in Psalms 113:5 a in strains borrowed from Exodus 15:11, while the striking description of loftiness combined with condescension in Psalms 113:5 b and Psalms 113:6 resembles Isaiah 57:15. The literal rendering of Psa 113:5 b and Psalms 113:6 a is, "Who makes high to sit, Who makes low to behold," which is best understood as above. It may be questioned whether "On the heavens and on the earth" designates the objects on which His gaze is said to be turned; or whether, as some understand the construction, it is to be taken with "Who is like Jehovah our God?" the intervening clauses being parenthetical; or whether, as others prefer, "in heaven" points back to "enthroned on high," and "on earth" to "looks far below." But the construction which regards the totality of created things, represented by the familiar phrase "the heavens and the earth," as being the objects on which Jehovah looks down from His inconceivable loftiness, accords best with the context and yields an altogether worthy meaning. Transcendent elevation, condescension, and omniscience are blended in the poet’s thought. So high is Jehovah that the highest heavens are far beneath Him, and, unless His gaze were all-discerning, would be but a dim speck. That He should enter into relations with creatures, and that there should be creatures for Him to enter into relations with, are due to His stooping graciousness. These "far-darting looks are looks of tenderness, and signify care as well as knowledge. Since all things lie in His sight, all receive from His hand. The third strophe pursues the thought of the Divine condescension as especially shown in stooping to the dejected and helpless and lifting them. The effect of the descent of One so high must be to raise the lowliness to which He bends. The words in Psalms 113:7-8 are quoted from Hannah’s song. (1 Samuel 2:8) Probably the singer has in his mind Israel’s restoration from exile, that great act in which Jehovah had shown His condescending loftiness, and had lifted His helpless people as from the ash heap, where they lay as outcasts. The same event seems to be referred to in Psalms 113:9 under a metaphor suggested by the story of Hannah whose words have just been quoted. The "barren" is Israel. (comp. Isaiah 54:1) The expression in the original is somewhat obscure. It stands literally "the barren of the house," and is susceptible of different explanations; but probably the simplest is to regard it as a contracted expression for the unfruitful wife in a house, "a housewife, but yet not a mother. Such a one has in her husband’s house no sure position, If God bestows children upon her, He by that very fact makes her for the first time thoroughly at home and rooted in her husband’s house" (Delitzsch, in loc.). The joy of motherhood is tenderly touched in the closing line, in which the definite article is irregularly prefixed to "sons," as if the poet "points with his finger to the children with whom God blesses her" (Delitzsch, u.s.). Thus Israel, with her restored children about her, is secure in her home. That restoration was the signal instance of Jehovah’s condescension and delight in raising the lowly. It was therefore the great occasion for world wide and age-long praise. The stager did not know how far it would be transcended by a more wonderful, more heart-touching manifestation of stooping love, when "The Word became flesh." How much more exultant and world filling should be the praises from the lips of those who do know how low that Word has stooped, and how high He has risen, and how surely all who hold His hand will be lifted from any ash heap and set on His throne, sharers in the royalty of Him who has been partaker of their weakness! Psalms 114:1-8 It is possible that in this psalm Israel, restored from Babylon, is looking back to the earlier Exodus, and shrilling with the great thought that that old past lives again in the present. Such a historical parallel would minister courage and hope. But the eyes of psalmists were ever turning to the great days when a nation was born, and there are no data in this psalm which connect it with a special period, except certain peculiarities in the form of the words "turns" and "fountain" in Psalms 114:8, both of which have a vowel appended (i in the former, o in the latter word), which is probably an archaism, used by a late poet for ornament’s sake. The same peculiarity is found in Psalms 113:5-9, where it occurs five times. A familiar theme is treated here with singular force and lyric fervour. The singer does not heap details together but grasps one great thought. To him there are but two outstanding characteristics of the Exodus: one, its place and purpose as the beginning of Israel’s prerogative, and another, its apocalypse of the Majesty of Jehovah, the Ruler of Nature in its mightiest forms. These he hymns, and then leaves them to make their own impression. He has no word of "moral," no application, counsel, warning, or encouragement to give. Whoso will can draw these. Enough for him to lift his soaring song, and to check it into silence in the midst of its full music. He would be a consummate artist, if he were not something much better. The limpid clearness, the eloquent brevity of the psalm are not more obvious than its masterly structure. Its four pairs of verses, each laden with one thought, the dramatic vividness of the sudden questions in the third pair, the skilful suppression of the Divine name till the close, where it is pealed out in full tones of triumph, make this little psalm a gem. In Psalms 114:1-2 the slighting glance at the land left by the ransomed people is striking. The Egyptians are to this singer "a stammering people," talking a language which sounded to him barely articulate. The word carries a similar contempt to that in the Greek "barbarian," which imitates the unmeaning babble of a foreign tongue. To such insignificance in the psalmist’s mind had the once dreaded oppressors sunk! The great fact about the Exodus was that it was the birthday of the Nation, the beginning of its entrance on its high prerogatives. If the consecration of Judah as "His sanctuary" took place when Israel went forth from Egypt, there can be no reference to the later erection of the material sanctuary in Jerusalem, and the names of Judah and Israel must both apply to the people, not to the land, which it would be an anachronism to introduce here. That deliverance from Egypt was in order to God’s dwelling in Israel, and thereby sanctifying or setting it apart to Himself, "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Dwelling in the midst of them, He wrought wonders for them, as the psalm goes on to hymn; but this is the grand foundation fact, that Israel was brought out of bondage to be God’s temple and kingdom. The higher deliverance of which that Exodus is a foreshadowing is, in like manner, intended to effect a still more wonderful and intimate indwelling of God, in His Church. Redeemed humanity is meant to be God’s temple and realm. The historical substratum for Psalms 114:3-4, is the twin miracles of drying up the Red Sea and the Jordan, which began and closed the Exodus, and the "quaking" of Sinai at the Theophany accompanying the giving of the Law. These physical facts are imaginatively conceived as the effects of panic produced by some dread vision; and the psalmist heightens his representation by leaving unnamed the sight which dried the sea, and shook the steadfast granite cliffs. In the third pair of verses he changes his point of view from that of narrator to that of a wondering spectator, and asks what terrible thing, unseen by him, strikes such awe? All is silent now, and the wonders long since past. The sea rolls its waters again over the place where Pharaoh’s host lie. Jordan rushes down its steep valley as of old, the savage peaks of Sinai know no tremors; -but these momentary wonders proclaimed an eternal truth. So the psalmist answers his own question, and goes beyond it in summoning the whole earth to tremble, as sea, river, and mountain had done, for the same Vision before which they had shrunk is present to all Nature. Now the psalmist can peal forth the Name of Him, the sight of whom wrought these wonders. It is "the Lord," the Sovereign Ruler, whose omnipotence and plastic power over all creatures were shown when His touch made rock and flint forget their solidity and become fluid, even as His will made the waves solid as a wall, and His presence shook Sinai. He is still Lord of Nature. And, more blessed still, the Lord of Nature is the God of Jacob. Both these names were magnified in the two miracles (which, like those named in Psalms 114:3, are a pair) of giving drink to the thirsty pilgrims. With that thought of omnipotence blended with gracious care, the singer ceases. He has said enough to breed faith and hearten courage, and he drops his harp without a formal close. The effect is all the greater, though some critics prosaically insist that the text is defective and put a row or two of asterisks at the end of Psa 114:8, "since it is not discernible what purpose the representation [i.e., the whole psalm] is to serve" (Graetz)! Psalms 115:1-18 ISRAEL is in straits from heathen enemies, and cries to Jehovah to vindicate His own Name by delivering it. Strengthened by faith, which has been stung into action by taunts aimed at both the nation and its Protector, the psalmist triumphantly contrasts Jehovah in the heavens, moving all things according to His will, with idols which had the semblance of powers the reality of which was not theirs. Sarcastic contempt, indignation, and profound insight into the effect of idolatry in assimilating the worshipper to his god, unite in the picture (Psalms 115:3-8). The tone swiftly changes into a summons to withdraw trust from such vanities, and set it on Jehovah, who can and will bless His servants (Psalms 115:9-15); and the psalm closes with recognition of Jehovah’s exaltation and beneficence, and with the vow to return blessing to Him for the blessings, already apprehended by faith, which He bestows on Israel. Obviously the psalm is intended for temple worship, and was meant to be sung by various voices. The distribution of its parts may be doubtful. Ewald would regard Psalms 115:1-11 as the voice of the congregation while the sacrifice was being offered; Psalms 115:12-15 as that of the priest announcing its acceptance; and Psalms 115:16-18 as again the song of the congregation. But there is plainly a change of singer at Psalms 115:9; and the threefold summons to trust in Jehovah in the first clauses of Psa 115:9, Psalms 115:10, Psalms 115:11, may with some probability be allotted to a ministering official, while the refrain; in the second clause of each of these verses, may be regarded as pealed out with choral force. The solo voice next pronounces the benediction on the same three classes to whom it had addressed the call to trust. And the congregation, thus receiving Jehovah’s blessing, sends back its praise, as sunshine from a mirror, in Psalms 115:16-18. The circumstances presupposed in the psalm suit many periods of Israel’s history. But probably this, like the neighboring psalms, is a product of the early days after the return from Babylon, when the feeble settlers were ringed round by scoffing foes, and had brought back from exile a more intimate knowledge and contemptuous aversion for idols and idolatry than had before been felt in Israel. Cheyne takes the psalm to be Maccabean, but acknowledges that there is nothing in it to fix that date, which he seeks to establish for the whole group mainly because he is sure of it for one member of the group, namely, Psalms 118:1-29. ("Orig. of Psalt.," 18 sq.). The prayer in Psalms 115:1-2, beautifully blends profound consciousness of demerit and confidence that, unworthy as Israel is, its welfare is inextricably interwoven with Jehovah’s honour. It goes very deep into the logic of supplication, even though the thing desired is but deliverance from human foes. Men win their pleas with God, when they sue in forma pauperis. There must be thorough abnegation of all claims based on self before there can be faithful urging of the one prevalent motive, God’s care for His own fair fame. The under side of faith is self-distrust, the upper side is affiance on Jehovah. God has given pledges for His future by His past acts of self-revelation, and cannot but be true to His Name. His lovingkindness is no transient mood, but rests on the solid basis of His faithfulness, like flowers rooted in the clefts of a rock. The taunts that had tortured another psalmist long before (Psalms 42:3) have been flung now from heathen lips, with still more bitterness, and call for Jehovah’s thunderous answer. If Israel goes down before its foes, the heathen will have warrant to scoff. But from their bitter tongues and his own fears, the singer turns, in the name of the sorely harassed congregation, to ring out the proclamation which answers the heathen taunt, before God answers it by deeds. "Our God is in heaven"-that is where He is; and He is not too far away to make His hand felt on earth. He is no impotent image; He does what He wills, executing to the last tittle His purposes; and conversely, He wills what He does, being constrained by no outward force, but drawing the determinations of His actions from the depths of His being. Therefore, whatever evil has befallen Israel is not a sign that it has lost Him, but a proof that He is near. The brief, pregnant assertion of God’s omnipotence and sovereign freedom, which should tame the heathens’ arrogance and teach the meaning of Israel’s disasters, is set in eloquent opposition to the fiery indignation which dashes off the sarcastic picture of an idol. The tone of the description is like that of the manufacture of an image in Isaiah 44:9-20. Psalms 135:15-18 repeats it verbatim. The vehemence of scorn in these verses suggests a previous, compelled familiarity with idolatry such as the exiles had. It corresponds with the revolution which that familiarity produced, by extirpating forever the former hankering after the gods of the nations. No doubt, there are higher weapons than sarcasm; and, no doubt, a Babylonian wise man could have drawn distinctions between the deity and its image, but such cobwebs are too fine spun for rough fingers to handle, and the idolatry both of pagans and of Christians identifies the two. But a deeper note is struck in Psalms 115:8 in the assertion that, as is the god, so becomes the worshipper. The psalmist probably means chiefly, if not exclusively, in respect to the impotence just spoken of. So the worshipper and his idol are called by the same name, (Isaiah 44:9, vanity) and, in the tragic summary of Israel’s sins and punishment in 2 Kings 17:15, it is said, that "they followed after vanity and became vain." But the statement is true in a wider sense. Worship is sure to breed likeness. A lustful, cruel god will make his devotees so. Men make gods after their own image, and, when made, the gods make men after theirs. The same principle which degrades the idolater lifts the Christian to the likeness of Christ. The aim and effect of adoration is assimilation. Probably the congregation is now silent, and a single voice takes up the song, with the call, which the hollowness of idolatry makes so urgent and reasonable, to trust in Jehovah, not in vanities. It is thrice repeated, being first addressed to the congregation, then to the house of Aaron, and finally to a wider circle, those who "fear Jehovah." These are most naturally understood as proselytes, and, in the prominence given to them we see the increasing consciousness in Israel of its Divine destination to be God’s witness to the world. Exile had widened the horizon, and fair hopes that men who were not of Israel’s blood would share Israel’s faith and shelter under the wings of Israel’s God stirred in many hearts. The crash of the triple choral answer to the summons comes with magnificent effect, in the second clauses of Psa 115:9, Psalms 115:10, Psalms 115:11, triumphantly telling how safe are they who take refuge behind that strong buckler. The same threefold division into Israel, house of Aaron, and they who fear Jehovah occurs in Psalms 118:2-4, and, with the addition of "house of Levi," in Psalms 135:1-21. Promises of blessing occupy Psalms 115:12 and Psalms 115:15, which may probably have been sung by priests, or rather by Levites, the musicians of the Temple service. In any case, these benedictions are authoritative assurances from commissioned lips, not utterances of hopeful faith. They are Jehovah’s response to Israel’s obedience to the preceding summons; swiftly sent, as His answers ever are. Calm certainty that He will bless comes at once into the heart that deeply feels that He is its shield, however His manifestation of outward help may be lovingly delayed. The blessing is parted among those who had severally been called to trust, and had obeyed the call. Universal blessings have special destinations. The fiery mass breaks up into cloven tongues and sits on each. Distinctions of position make no difference in its reception. Small vessels are filled, and great ones can be no more than full. Cedars and hyssop rejoice in impartial sunshine. Israel, when blessed increases in number, and there is an inheritance of good from generation to generation. The seal of such hopes is the Name of Him who blesses, "the Maker of heaven and earth," to whose omnipotent, universal sway these impotent gods in human form are as a foil. Finally, we may hear the united voices of the congregation thus blessed breaking into full-throated praise in Psalms 115:16-18. As in Psalms 115:3 God’s dwelling in heaven symbolised His loftiness and power, so here the thought that "the heavens are Jehovah’s heavens" implies both the worshippers’ trust in His mighty help and their lowliness even in trust. The earth is man’s, but by Jehovah’s gift. Therefore its inhabitants should remember the terms of their tenure, and thankfully recognise His giving love. But heaven and earth do not include all the universe. There is another region, the land of silence, whither the dead descend. No voice of praise wakes its dumb sleep. (Isaiah 38:18-19) That pensive contemplation, on which the light of the New Testament assurance of Immortality has not shone, gives keener edge to the bliss of present ability to praise Jehovah. We who know that to die is to have a new song put into immortal lips may still be stimulated to fill our brief lives here with the music of thanksgiving, by the thought that, so far as our witness for God to men is concerned, most of us will "descend into silence" when we pass into the grave. Therefore we should shun silence, and bless Him while we live here. Psalms 116:1-19 THIS psalm is intensely individual. "I," "me," or "my" occurs in every verse but two (Psalms 116:5, Psalms 116:19). The singer is but recently delivered from some peril, and his song heaves with a groundswell of emotion after the storm. Hupfeld takes offence at its "continual alternation of petition and recognition of the Divine beneficence and deliverance, or vows of thanksgiving," but surely that very blending is natural to one just rescued and still panting from his danger. Certain grammatical forms indicate a late date, and the frequent allusions to earlier psalms point in the same direction. The words of former psalmists were part of this singer’s mental furniture, and came to his lips, when he brought his own thanksgivings. Hupfeld thinks it "strange" that "such a patched up (zusammengestoppelter) psalm," has "imposed" upon commentators, who speak of its depth and tenderness; it is perhaps stranger that its use of older songs has imposed upon so good a critic and hid these characteristics from him. Four parts may be discerned, of which the first (Psalms 116:1-4) mainly describes the psalmist’s peril; the second (Psalms 116:5-9), his deliverance; the third glances back to his alarm and thence draws reasons for his vow of praise (Psalms 116:10-14); and the fourth (Psalms 116:15-19) bases the same vow on the remembrance of Jehovah’s having loosed his bonds. The early verses of Psa 18:1-50 obviously colour the psalmist’s description of his distress. That psalm begins with an expression of love to Jehovah, which is echoed here, though a different word is employed. "I love" stands in Psalms 116:1 without an object, just as "I will call" does in Psalms 116:2, and "I believed" and "I spoke" in Psalms 116:10. Probably "Thee" has fallen out, which would be the more easy, as the next word begins with the letter which stands for it in Hebrew. Cheyne follows Graetz in the conjectural adoption of the same beginning as in Psalms 116:10, "I am confident." This change necessitates translating the following "for" as "that," whereas it is plainly to be taken, like the "for" at the beginning of Psa 116:2, as causal. Psalms 116:3 is moulded on Psalms 18:5, with a modification of the metaphors by the unusual expression "the narrows of Sheol." The word rendered narrows may be employed simply as distress or straits, but it is allowable to take it as picturing that gloomy realm as a confined gorge, like the throat of a pass, from which the psalmist could find no escape. He is like a creature caught in the toils of the hunter Death. The stern rocks of a dark defile have all but closed upon him, but, like a man from the bottom of a pit, he can send out one cry before the earth falls in and buries him. He cried to Jehovah, and the rocks flung his voice heavenwards. Sorrow is meant to drive to God. When cries become prayers, they are not in vain. The revealed character of Jehovah is the ground of a desperate man’s hope. His own Name is a plea which Jehovah will certainly honour. Many words are needless when peril is sore and the suppliant is sure of God. To name Him and to cry for deliverance are enough. "I beseech Thee" represents a particle which is used frequently in this psalm, and by some peculiarities in its use here indicates a late date. The psalmist does not pause to say definitely that he was delivered, but breaks into the celebration of the Name on which he had called, and from which the certainty of an answer followed. Since Jehovah is gracious, righteous (as strictly adhering to the conditions He has laid down), and merciful (as condescending in love to lowly and imperfect men), there can be no doubt how He will deal with trustful suppliants. The psalmist turns for a moment from his own experience to sun himself in the great thought of the Name, and thereby to come into touch with all who share his faith. The cry for help is wrung out by personal need, but the answer received brings into fellowship with a great multitude. Jehovah’s character leads up in Psalms 116:6 to a broad truth as to His acts, for it ensures that He cannot but care for the "simple," whose simplicity lays them open to assailants, and whose single-hearted adhesion to God appeals unfailingly to His heart. Happy the man who, like the psalmist, can give confirmation from his own experience to the broad truths of God’s protection to ingenuous and guileless souls! Each individual may, if he will, thus narrow to his own use the widest promises, and put "I" and "me" wherever God has put "whosoever." If he does he will be able to turn his own experience into universal maxims, and encourage others to put "whosoever" where his grateful heart has put "I" and "me." The deliverance, which is thus the direct result of the Divine character, and which extends to all the simple, and therefore included the psalmist, leads to calm repose. The singer does not say so in cold words, but beautifully wooes his "soul," his sensitive nature, which had trembled with fear in death’s net, to come back to its rest. The word is in the plural, which may be only another indication of late date, but is more worthily understood as expressing the completeness of the repose, which in its fulness is only found in God, and is made the more deep by contrast with previous "agitation." Psalms 116:8-9, are quoted from Psalms 56:13 with slight variations, the most significant of which is the change of "light" into "lands." It is noticeable that the Divine deliverance is thus described as surpassing the psalmist’s petition. He asked, "Deliver my soul." Bare escape was all that he craved, but he received, not only the deliverance of his soul from death, but, over and above, his tears were wiped away by a loving hand, his feet stayed by a strong arm. God over answers trustful cries, and does not give the minimum consistent with safety, but the maximum of which we are capable. What shall a grateful heart do with such benefits? "I will walk before Jehovah in the lands of the living," joyously and unconstrainedly (for so the form of the word "walk" implies), as ever conscious of that presence which brings blessedness and requires holiness. The paths appointed may carry the traveller far, but into whatever lands he goes, he will have the same glad heart within to urge his feet and the same loving eye above to beam guidance on him. The third part (Psalms 116:10-14) recurs to the psalmist’s mood in his trouble, and bases on the retrospect of that and of God’s mercy the vow of praise. Psalms 116:10 may be variously understood. The "speaking" may be taken as referring to the preceding expressions of trust or thanksgivings for deliverance. The sentiment would then be that the psalmist was confident that he should one day thus speak. So Cheyne; or the rendering may be "I believed in that I spake thus"-i.e., that he spake those trustful words of Psa 116:9 was the result of sheer faith (so Kay). The thing spoken may also be the expressions which follow, and this seems to yield the most satisfactory meaning. "Even when I said, I am afflicted and men fail me, I had not lost my faith." He is recalling the agitation which shook him, but feels that, through it all, there was an unshaken centre of rest in God. The presence of doubt and fear does not prove the absence of trust. There may live a spark of it, though almost buried below masses of cold unbelief. What he said was the complaint that he was greatly afflicted, and the bitter wail that all men deceive or disappoint. He said so in his agitation. (Psalms 31:22) But even in recognising the folly of trusting in men, he was in some measure trusting God, and the trust, though tremulous, was rewarded. Again he hurries on to sing the issues of deliverance, without waiting to describe it. That little dialogue of the devout soul with itself (Psalms 116:12-13) goes very deep. It is an illuminative word as to God’s character, an emancipating word as to the true notion of service to Him, a guiding word as to common life. For it declares that men honour God most by taking His gifts with recognition of the Giver, and that the return which He in His love seeks is only our thankful reception of His. mercy. A giver who desires but these results is surely Love. A religion which consists first in accepting God’s gift and then in praising by lip and life Him who gives banishes the religion of fear, of barter, of unwelcome restrictions and commands. It is the exact opposite of the slavery which says, "Thou art an austere man, reaping where thou didst not sow." It is the religion of which the initial act is faith, and the continual activity, the appropriation of God’s spiritual gifts. In daily life there would be less despondency and weakening regrets over vanished blessings, if men were more careful to take and enjoy thankfully all that God gives. But many of us have no eyes for other blessings, because some one blessing is withdrawn or denied. If we treasured all that is given, we should be richer than most of us are. In Psalms 116:14 the particle of beseeching is added to "before," a singular form of expression which seems to imply desire that the psalmist may come into the temple with his vows. He may have been thinking of the "sacrificial meal in connection with the peace offerings." In any case, blessings received in solitude should impel to public gratitude. God delivers His suppliants that they may magnify Him before men. The last part (Psalms 116:15-19) repeats the refrain of Psa 116:14, but with a different setting. Here the singer generalises his own experience, and finds increase of joy in the thought of the multitude who dwell safe under the same protection. The more usual form of expression for the idea in Psalms 116:15 is "their blood is precious". (Psalms 72:14) The meaning is that the death of God’s saints is no trivial thing in God’s eyes, to be lightly permitted. (Compare the contrasted thought, (Psalms 44:12) Then, on the basis of that general truth, is built Psalms 116:16, which begins singularly with the same beseeching word which has already occurred in Psalms 116:4 and Psalms 116:14. Here it is not followed by an expressed petition, but is a yearning of desire for continued or fuller manifestation of God’s favour. The largest gifts, most fully accepted and most thankfully recognised, still leave room for longing which is not pain, because it is conscious of tender relations with God that guarantee its fulfilment. "I am Thy servant." Therefore the longing which has no words needs none. "Thou hast loosed my bonds." His thoughts go back to "the cords of death" (Psalms 116:3), which had held him so tightly. God’s hand has slackened them, and, by freeing him from that bondage, has bound him more closely than before to himself. "Being made free from sin, ye became the slaves of righteousness." So, in the full blessedness of received deliverance, the grateful heart offers itself to God, as moved by His mercies to become a living sacrifice, and calls on the Name of Jehovah, in its hour of thankful surrender, as it had called on that Name in its time of deep distress. Once more the lonely suppliant, who had waded such deep waters without companion but Jehovah, seeks to feel himself one of the glad multitude in the courts of the house of Jehovah, and to blend his single voice in the shout of a nation’s praise. We suffer and struggle for the most part alone. Grief is a hermit, but Joy is sociable; and thankfulness desires listeners to its praise. The perfect song is the chorus of a great "multitude which no man can number." Psalms 117:1-2 THIS shortest of the psalms is not a fragment, though some MSS attach it to the preceding and some to the following psalm. It contains large "riches in a narrow room," and its very brevity gives force to it. Paul laid his finger on its special significance, when he quoted it in proof that God meant His salvation to be for the whole race. Jewish narrowness was an after growth and a corruption. The historical limitations of God’s manifestation to a special nation were means to its universal diffusion. The fire was gathered in a grate, that it might warm the whole house. All men have a share in what God does for Israel. His grace was intended to fructify through it to all. The consciousness of being the special recipients of Jehovah’s mercy was saved from abuse, by being united with the consciousness of being endowed with blessing that they might diffuse blessing. Nor is the psalmist’s thought of what Israel’s experience proclaimed concerning God’s character less noteworthy. As often, lovingkindness is united with troth or faithfulness as twin stars which shine out in all God’s dealings with His people. That lovingkindness is "mighty over us"-the word used for being mighty has the sense of prevailing, and so "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." The permanence of the Divine Lovingkindness is guaranteed by God’s Troth, by which the fulfilment of every promise and the prolongation of every mercy are sealed to men. These two fair messengers have appeared in yet fairer form than the psalmist knew, and the world has to praise Jehovah for a world wide gift, first bestowed on and rejected by a degenerate Israel, which thought that it owned the inheritance, and so lost it. Psalms 118:1-29 THIS is unmistakably a psalm for use in the Temple worship, and probably meant to be sung antiphonally, on some day of national rejoicing (Psalms 118:24). A general concurrence of opinion points to the period of the Restoration from Babylon as its date, as in the case of many psalms in this Book 5 but different events connected with that restoration have been selected. The psalm implies the completion of the Temple, and therefore shuts out any point prior to that. Delitzsch fixes on the dedication of the Temple as the occasion; but the view is still more probable which supposes that it was sung on the great celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, recorded in Nehemiah 8:14-18. In later times Psalms 118:25 was the festal cry raised while the altar of burnt offering was solemnly compassed, once on each of the first six days of the Feast of Tabernacles, and seven times on the seventh. This seventh day was called the "Great Hosanna; and not only the prayers at the Feast of Tabernacles, but even the branches of osiers (including the myrtles), which are bound to the palm branch (Lulab), were called Hosannas" (Delitzsch). The allusions in the psalm fit the circumstances of the time in question. Stier, Perowne, and Baethgen concur in preferring this date: the last named critic, who is very slow to recognise indications of specific dates, speaks with unwonted decisiveness, when he writes, "I believe that I can say with certainty, Psalms 118:1-29 was sung for the first time at the Feast of Tabernacles in the year 444 B.C." Cheyne follows his usual guides in pointing to the purification and reconstruction of the Temple by Judas Maccabaeus as "fully adequate to explain alike the tone and the expressions." He is "the terrible hero," to whose character the refrain, "In the name of Jehovah I will cut them down," corresponds. But the allusions in the psalm are quite as appropriate to any other times of national jubilation and yet of danger, such as that of the Restoration, and Judas the Maccabee had no monopoly of the warrior trust which flames in that refrain. Apparently the psalm falls into two halves, of which the former (Psalms 118:1-16) seems to have been sung as a processional hymn while approaching the sanctuary, and the latter (Psalms 118:17-29), partly at the Temple gates, partly by a chorus of priests within, and partly by the procession when it had entered. Every reader recognises traces of antiphonal singing; but it is difficult to separate the parts with certainty. A clue may possibly be found by noting that verses marked by the occurrence of "I," "me," and "my" are mingled with others more impersonal. The personified nation is clearly the speaker of the former class of verses, which tells a connected story of distress, deliverance, and grateful triumph; while the other less personal verses generalise the experience of the first speaker, and sustain substantially the part of the chorus in a Greek play. In the first part of the psalm we may suppose that a part of the procession sang the one and another portion the other series; while in the second part (Psalms 118:17-29) the more personal verses were sung by the whole cortege arrived at the Temple, and the more generalised other part was taken by a chorus of priests or Levites within the sanctuary. This distribution of verses is occasionally uncertain, but on the whole is clear, and aids the understanding of the psalm. First rings out from the full choir the summons to praise, which peculiarly belonged to the period of the Restoration. (Ezra 3:11; Psalms 106:1; Psalms 107:1) As in Psalms 115:1-18, three classes are called on: the whole house of Israel, the priests, and "those who fear Jehovah"-i.e., aliens who have taken refuge beneath the wings of Israel’s God. The threefold designation expresses the thrill of joy in the recovery of national life; the high estimate of the priesthood as the only remaining God-appointed order, now that the monarchy was swept away; and the growing desire to draw the nations into the community of God’s people. Then, with Psalms 118:5, the single voice begins. His experience, now to be told, is the reason for the praise called for in the previous verses. It is the familiar sequence reiterated in many a psalm and many a life, -distress, or "a strait place," (Psalms 116:3) a cry to Jehovah, His answer by enlargement, and a consequent triumphant confidence, which has warrant in the past for believing that no hand can hurt him whom Jehovah’s hand helps. Many a man passes through the psalmist’s experience without thereby achieving the psalmist’s settled faith and power to despise threatening calamities. We fail both in recounting clearly to ourselves our deliverances and in drawing assurance from them for the future. Psalms 118:5 b is a pregnant construction. He "answered me in [or, into] an open place"-i.e., by bringing me into it The contrast of a narrow gorge and a wide plain picturesquely expresses past restraints and present freedom of movement. Psalms 118:6 is taken from Psalms 56:9; Psalms 56:11; and Psalms 118:7 is influenced by Psalms 54:4, and reproduces the peculiar expression occurring there, "Jehovah is among my helpers,"-on which compare remarks on that passage. Psalms 118:8-9 are impersonal, and generalise the experience of the preceding verses. They ring out loud, like a trumpet, and are the more intense for reiteration. Israel was but a feeble handful. Its very existence seemed to depend on the caprice of the protecting kings who had permitted its return. It had had bitter experience of the unreliableness of a monarch’s whim. Now, with superb reliance, which was felt by the psalmist to be the true lesson of the immediate past, it peals out its choral confidence in Jehovah with a "heroism of faith which may well put us to the blush." These verses surpass the preceding in that they avow that faith in Jehovah makes men independent of human helpers, while the former verses declared that it makes superior to mortal foes. Fear of and confidence in man are both removed by trust in God. But it is perhaps harder to be weaned from the confidence than to rise above the fear. The individual experience is resumed in Psalms 118:10-14. The energetic reduplications strengthen the impression of multiplied attacks, corresponding with the facts of the Restoration period. The same impression is accentuated by the use in Psalms 118:11 a of two forms of the same verb, and in Psalms 118:12 a by the metaphor of a swarm of angry bees. (Deuteronomy 1:44) Numerous, venomous, swift, and hard to strike at as the enemies were, buzzing and stinging around, they were but insects after all, and a strong hand could crush them. The psalmist does not merely look to God to interpose for him, as in Psalms 118:6-7, but expects that God will give him power to conquer by the use of his own strengthened arm. We are not only objects of Divine protection, but organs of Divine power. Trusting in the revealed character of Jehovah, we shall find conquering energy flowing into us from Him, and the most fierce assaults will die out as quickly as a fire of dry thorn twigs, which sinks into ashes the sooner the more it crackles and blazes. Then the psalmist individualises the multitude of foes, just as the collective Israel is individualised, and brings assailants and assailed down to two antagonists, engaged in desperate duel. But a third Person intervenes. "Jehovah helped me" (Psalms 118:13); as in old legends, the gods on their immortal steeds charged at the head of the hosts of their worshippers. Thus delivered, the ginger breaks into the ancient strain, which had gone up on the shores of the sullen sea that rolled over Pharaoh’s army, and is still true after centuries have intervenel: "Jah is my strength and song, and He is become my salvation." Miriam sang it, the restored exiles sang it, tried and trustful men in every age have sung and will sing it, till there are no more foes; and then, by the shores of the sea of glass mingled with fire, the calm victors will lift again the undying "song of Moses and of the Lamb." Psalms 118:15-16 are probably best taken as sung by the chorus, generalising and giving voice to the emotions excited by the preceding verses. The same reiteration which characterised Psalms 118:8-9 reappears here. Two broad truths are built on the individual voice’s autobiography: namely, that trust in Jehovah and consequent conformity to His law are never in vain, but always issue in joy; and that God’s power, when put forth, always conquers. "The tents of the righteous" may possibly allude to the "tabernacles" constructed for the feast, at which the song was probably sung. Psalms 118:17-19 belong to the individual voice. The procession has reached the Temple. Deeper thoughts than before now mark the retrospect of past trial and deliverance. Both are recognised to be from Jehovah. It is He who has corrected, severely indeed, but still "in measure, not to bring to nothing, but to make capable and recipient of fuller life." The enemy thrust sore, with intent to make Israel fall; but God’s strokes are meant to make us stand the firmer. It is beautiful that all thought of human foes has faded away, and God only is seen in all the sorrow. But His chastisement has wider purposes than individual blessedness. It is intended to make its objects the heralds of His name to the world. Israel is beginning to lay to heart more earnestly its world wide vocation to "tell forth the works of Jehovah." The imperative obligation of all who have received delivering help from Him is to become missionaries of His name. The reed is cut and pared thin and bored with hot irons, and the very pith of it extracted, that it may be fit to be put to the owner’s lips, and give out music from his breath. Thus conscious of its vocation and eager to render its due of sacrifice and praise, Israel asks that "the gates of righteousness" may be opened for the entrance of the long procession. The Temple doors are so called, because Righteousness is the condition of entrance. (Isaiah 26:2 compare Psalms 24:1-10) Psalms 118:20 may belong to the individual voice, but is perhaps better taken as the answer from within the Temple, of the priests or Levites who guarded the closed doors, and who now proclaim what must be the character of those who would tread the sacred courts. The gate (not as in Psalms 118:19, gates) belongs to Jehovah, and therefore access by it is permitted to none but the righteous. That is an everlasting truth. It is possible to translate, "This is the gate to Jehovah"-i.e., by which one comes to His presence; and that rendering would bring out still more emphatically the necessity of the condition laid down: "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord." The condition is supposed to be met; for in Psalms 118:21 the individual voice again breaks into thanksgiving, for being allowed once more to stand in the house of Jehovah. "Thou hast answered me": the psalmist had already sung that Jah had answered him (Psalms 118:5). "And art become my salvation": he had already hailed Jehovah as having become such (Psalms 118:14). God’s deliverance is not complete till full communion with Him is enjoyed. Dwelling in His house is the crown of all His blessings. We are set free from enemies, from sins and fears and struggles, that we may abide forever with Him, and only then do we realise the full sweetness of His redeeming hand, when we stand in His presence and commune evermore with Him. Psalms 118:22, Psalms 118:23, Psalms 118:24, probably belong to the priestly chorus. They set forth the great truth made manifest by restored Israel’s presence in the rebuilt Temple. The metaphor is suggested by the incidents connected with the rebuilding. The "stone" is obviously Israel, weak, contemptible, but now once more laid as the very foundation stone of God’s house in the world. The broad truth taught by its history is that God lays as the basis of His building-i.e., uses for the execution of His purposes that which the wisdom of man despises and tosses aside. There had been abundant faintheartedness among even the restored exiles. The nations around had scoffed at these "feeble Jews," and the scoffs had not been without echoes in Israel itself. Chiefly, the men of position and influence, who ought to have strengthened drooping courage, had been infected with the tendency to rate low the nation’s power, and to think that their enterprise was destined to disaster. But now the Temple is built, and the worshippers stand in it. What does that teach but that all has been God’s doing? So wonderful is it, so far beyond expectation, that the very objects of such marvellous intervention are amazed to find themselves where they stand. So rooted is our tendency to unbelief that, when God does what He has sworn to do, we are apt to be astonished with a wonder which reveals the greatness of our past incredulity. No man who trusts God ought to be surprised at God’s answers to trust. The general truth contained here is that of Paul’s great saying, "God hath chosen the weak things of the world that He might put to shame the things that are strong." It is the constant law, not because God chooses unfit instruments, but because the world’s estimates of fitness are false, and the qualities which it admires are irrelevant with regard to His designs, while the requisite qualities are of another sort altogether. Therefore, it is a law which finds its highest exemplification in the foundation for God’s true temple, other than which can no man lay. "Israel is not only a figure of Christ-there is an organic unity between Him and them. Whatever, therefore, is true of Israel in a lower sense is true in its highest sense of Christ. If Israel is the rejected stone made the head of the corner, this is far truer of Him who was indeed rejected of men, but chosen of God and precious, the corner stone of the one great living temple of the redeemed" (Perowne). Psalms 118:24 is best regarded as the continuation of the choral praise in Psalms 118:22-23. "The day" is that of the festival now in process, the joyful culmination of God’s manifold deliverances. It is a day in which joy is duty, and no heart has a right to be too heavy to leap for gladness. Private sorrows enough many of the jubilant worshippers no doubt had, but the sight of the Stone laid as the head of the corner should bring joy even to such. If sadness was ingratitude and almost treason then, what sorrow should now be so dense that it cannot be pierced by the Light which lighteth every man? The joy of the Lord should float, like oil on stormy waves, above our troublous sorrows, and smooth their tossing. Again the single voice rises, but not now in thanksgiving, as might have been expected, but in plaintive tones of earnest imploring (Psalms 118:25). Standing in the sanctuary, Israel is conscious of its perils, its need, its weakness, and so with pathetic reiteration of the particle of entreaty, which occurs twice in each clause of the verse, cries for continued deliverance from continuing evils, and for prosperity in the course opening before it. The "day" in which unmingled gladness inspires our songs has not yet dawned, fair as are the many days which Jehovah has made. In the earthly house of the Lord thanksgiving must ever pass into petition. An unending day comes, when there will be nothing to dread, and no need for the sadder notes occasioned by felt weakness and feared foes. Psalms 118:26-27 come from the chorus of priests, who welcome the entering procession, and solemnly pronounce on them the benediction of Jehovah. They answer, in His name, the prayer of Psa 118:25, and bless the single leader of the procession and the multitudes following. The use of Psa 118:26 a and of the "Hosanna" (an attempted transliteration of the Hebrew "Save, I beseech") from Psalms 118:25 at Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem probably shows that the psalm was regarded as Messianic. It is so, in virtue of the relation already referred to between Israel and Christ. He "cometh in the name of Jehovah" in a deeper sense than did Israel, the servant of the Lord. Psalms 118:27 a recalls the priestly benediction, (Numbers 6:25) and thankfully recognises its ample fulfilment in Israel’s history, and especially in the dawning of new prosperity now. Psalms 118:27 b, c, is difficult. Obviously it should be a summons to worship, as thanksgiving for the benefits acknowledged in a. But what is the act of worship intended is hard to say. The rendering "Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar," has against it the usual meaning of the word rendered sacrifice, which is rather festival, and the fact that the last words of the verse cannot possibly be translated "to the horns," etc., but must mean "as far as" or "even up to the horns," etc. There must therefore be a good deal supplied in the sentence; and commentators differ as to how to fill the gap. Delitzsch supposes that "the number of the sacrificial animals is to be so great that the whole space of the courts of the priests becomes full of them, and the binding of them has therefore to take place even up to the horns of the altar." Perowne takes the expression to be a pregnant one for, "till [the victim] is sacrificed and its blood sprinkled on the horns of the altar." So Hupfeld, following Chaldee and some Jewish interpreters. Others regard the supposed ellipsis as too great to be natural, and take an entirely different view. The word rendered sacrifice in the former explanation is taken to mean a procession round the altar, which is etymologically justifiable, and is supported by the known custom of making such a circuit during the Feast of Tabernacles. For "cords" this explanation would read branches or boughs, which is also warranted. But what does "binding a procession with boughs" mean? Various answers are given. Cheyne supposes that the branches borne in the hands of the members of the procession were in some unknown way used to bind or link them together before they left the Temple. Baethgen takes "with boughs" as " bearing boughs," with which he supposes that the bearers touched the altar horns, for the purpose of transferring to themselves the holiness concentrated there. Either explanation has difficulties, -the former in requiring an unusual sense for the word rendered sacrifice; the latter in finding a suitable meaning for that translated bind. In either c is but loosely connected with b, and is best understood as an exclamation. The verb rendered bind is used in 1 Kings 20:14, 2 Chronicles 13:3, in a sense which fits well with "procession" here-i.e., that of marshalling an army for battle. If this meaning is adopted, b will be the summons to order the bough-bearing procession, and c a call to march onwards, so as to encircle the altar. This meaning of the obscure verse may be provisionally accepted, while owning that our ignorance of the ceremonial referred to prevents complete understanding of the words. Once more Miriam’s song supplies ancient language of praise for recent mercies, and the personified Israel compasses the altar with thanksgiving (Psalms 118:28). Then the whole multitude, both of those who had come up to the Temple and of those who had welcomed them there, join in the chorus of praise with which the psalm begins and ends, and which was so often pealed forth in those days of early joy for the new manifestations of that Lovingkindness which endures through all days, both those of past evil and those of future hoped for good. Psalms 119:1-176 IT is lost labour to seek for close continuity or progress in this psalm. One thought pervades it-the surpassing excellence of the Law; and the beauty and power of the psalm lie in the unwearied reiteration of that single idea. There is music in its monotony, which is subtilely varied. Its verses are like the ripples on a sunny sea, alike and impressive in their continual march, and yet each catching the light with a difference, and breaking on the shore in a tone of its own. A few elements are combined into these hundred and seventy-six gnomic sentences. One or other of the usual synonyms for the Law-viz., word, saying, statutes, commandments, testimonies, judgments-occurs in every verse, except Psalms 119:122 and Psalms 119:132. The prayers "Teach me, revive me, preserve me-according to Thy word," and the vows "I will keep, observe, meditate on, delight in-Thy law," are frequently repeated. There are but few pieces in the psalmist’s kaleidoscope, but they fall into many shapes of beauty; and though all his sentences are moulded after the same general plan, the variety within such narrow limits is equally a witness of poetic power which turns the fetters of the acrostic structure into helps, and of devout heartfelt love for the Law of Jehovah. The psalm is probably of late date; but its allusions to the singer’s circumstances, whether they are taken as autobiographical or as having reference to the nation, are too vague to be used as clues to the period of its composition. An early poet is not likely to have adopted such an elaborate acrostic plan, and the praises of the Law naturally suggest a time when it was familiar in an approximately complete form. It may be that the rulers referred to in Psalms 119:23, Psalms 119:46, were foreigners, but the expression is too general to draw a conclusion from. It may be that the double-minded (Psalms 119:113), who err from God’s statutes (Psalms 119:118), and forsake His law (Psalms 119:53), are Israelites who have yielded to the temptations to apostatise, which came with the early Greek period, to which Baethgen, Cheyne, and others would assign the psalm. But these expressions, too, are of so general a nature that they do not give clear testimony of date. The first three verses are closely connected. They set forth in general terms the elements of the blessedness of the doers of the Law. To walk in it-i.e., to order the active life in conformity with its requirements-ensures perfectness. To keep God’s testimonies is at once the consequence and the proof of seeking Him with whole-hearted devotion and determination. To walk in His ways is the preservative from evil doing. And such men cannot but be blessed with a deep sacred blessedness, which puts to shame coarse and turbulent delights, and feeds its pure fires from God Himself. Whether these verses are taken as exclamation or declaration, they lead up naturally to Psalms 119:4, which reverently gazes upon the loving act of God in the revelation of His will in the Law, and bethinks itself of the obligations bound on us by that act. It is of God’s mercy that He has commanded, and His words are meant to sway our wills, since He has broken the awful silence, not merely to instruct us, but to command; and nothing short of practical obedience will discharge our duties to his revelation. So the psalmist betakes himself to prayer, that he may be helped to realise the purpose of God in giving the Law. His contemplation of the blessedness of obedience and of the Divine act of declaring His will moves him to longing, and his consciousness of weakness and wavering makes the longing into prayer that his wavering may be consolidated into fixity of purpose and continuity of obedience. When a man’s ways are established to observe, they will be established by observing, God’s statutes. For nothing can put to the blush one whose eye is directed to these. "Whatever record leap to light, He never shall be shamed." Nor will he cherish hopes that fail, nor desires that, when accomplished, are bitter of taste. To give heed to the commandments is the condition of learning them and recognising how righteous they are; and such learning makes the learner’s hear righteous like them, and causes it to run over in thankfulness for the boon of knowledge of God’s will. By all these thoughts the psalmist is brought to his fixed resolve in Psalms 119:8, to do what God meant him to do when He gave the Law; and what the singer had just longed that he might be able to do-namely, to observe the statutes. But in his resolve he remembers his weakness, and therefore he glides into prayer for that Presence without which resolves are transient and abortive. The inference drawn from Psalms 119:9, that the psalmist was a young man, is precarious. The language would be quite as appropriate to an aged teacher desirous of guiding impetuous youth to sober self-control. While some verses favour the hypothesis of the author’s youth (Psalms 119:141, and perhaps Psalms 119:99-100), the tone of the whole, its rich experience and comprehensive grasp of the manifold relations of the Law to life imply maturity of years and length of meditation. The psalm is the ripe fruit of a life which is surely past its spring. But it is extremely questionable whether these apparently personal traits are really so. Much rather is the poet "thinking of the individuals of different ages and spiritual attainments who may use his works" (Cheyne, in loc.). The word rendered "By taking heed" has already occurred in Psalms 119:4-5 ("observe’). The careful study of the Word must be accompanied with as careful study of self. The object observed there was the Law; here, it is the man himself. Study God’s law, says the psalmist, and study Thyself in its light; so shall youthful impulses be bridled, and the life’s path be kept pure. That does not sound so like a young man’s thought as an old man’s maxim, in which are crystallised many experiences. The rest of the section intermingles petitions, professions, and vows, and is purely personal. The psalmist claims that he is one of those whom he has pronounced blessed, inasmuch as he has "sought" God with his "whole heart." "Such longing is no mere idle aspiration, but must be manifested in obedience, as Psalms 119:2 has declared. If a man longs for God, he will best find Him by doing His will. But no heart desire is so rooted as to guarantee that it shall not die, nor is past obedience a certain pledge of a like future. Wherefore the psalmist prays, not in reliance on his past, but in dread that he may falsify it, "Let me not wander." He had not only sought God in his heart, but had there hid God’s law, as its best treasure, and as an inward power controlling and stimulating. Evil cannot flow from a heart in which God’s law is lodged. That is the tree which sweetens the waters of the fountain. But the cry "Teach me Thy statutes" would be but faltering, if the singer could not rise above himself, and take heart by gazing upon God, whose own great character is the guarantee that He will not leave a seeking soul in ignorance. Professions and vows now take the place of petitions. "From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," and the word hid in it will certainly not be concealed. It is buried deep, that it may grow high. It is hidden, that it may come abroad. Therefore Psalms 119:13 tells of bold utterance, which is as incumbent on men as obedient deeds. A sane estimate of earthly good will put it decisively below the knowledge of God and of His will. Lives which despise what the world calls riches, because they are smitten with the desire of any sort of wisdom, are ever nobler than those which keep the low levels. And highest of all is the life which gives effect to its conviction that man’s true treasure is to know God’s mind and will to rejoice in His testimonies is to have wealth that cannot be lost and pleasures that cannot wither. That glad estimate will surely lead to happy meditation on them, by which their worth shall be disclosed and their sweep made plain. The miser loves to tell his gold; the saint, to ponder his wealth in God. The same double direction of the mind, already noted, reappears in Psalms 119:15, where quiet meditation on God’s statutes is associated with attention to the ways which are called His, as being pointed out by, and pleasing to, Him, but are ours, as being walked in by us. Inward delight in, and practical remembrance of, the Law are vowed in Psalms 119:16, which covers the whole field of contemplative and active life. In Psalms 119:17 the psalmist desires continued life, mainly because it affords the opportunity of continued obedience. He will "observe Thy Word," not only in token of gratitude, but because to him life is precious chiefly because in its activities he can serve God. Such a reason for wishing to live may easily change to a willingness to die, as it did with Paul, who had learned that a better obedience was possible when he had passed through the dark gates, and therefore could say, "To die is gain." Psalms 119:18-19 are connected in so far as the former desires subjective illumination and the latter objective revelation. Opened eyes are useless, if commandments are hidden; and the disclosure of the latter is in vain unless there are eyes to see them. Two great truths lie in the former petition-namely, that scales cover our spiritual vision which only God can take away, and that His revelation has in its depths truths and treasures which can only be discerned by His help. The cognate petition in Psalms 119:19 is based upon the pathetic thought that man is a stranger on earth, and therefore needs what will take away his sense of homelessness and unrest. All other creatures are adapted to their environments, but he has a consciousness that he is an exile here, a haunting, stinging sense, which vaguely feels after repose in his native land. "Thy commandments" can still it. To know God’s will, with knowledge which is acceptance and love, gives rest, and makes every place a mansion in the Father’s house. There may possibly be a connection between Psalms 119:20 and Psalms 119:21 -the terrible fate of those who wander from the commandments, as described in the latter verse, being the motive for the psalmist’s longing expressed in the former. The "judgments" for which he longed, with a yearning which seemed to bruise his soul, are not, as might be supposed, God’s judicial acts, but the word is a synonym for "commandments," as throughout the psalm. The last three verses of the section appear to be linked together. They relate to the persecutions of the psalmist for his faithfulness to God’s law. In Psalms 119:22 he prays that reproach and shame, which wrapped him like a covering, may be lifted from him; and his plea in Psalms 119:22 b declares that he lay under these because he was true to God’s statutes. In Psalms 119:23 we see the source of the reproach and shame, in the conclave of men in authority, whether foreign princes or Jewish rulers, who were busy slandering him and plotting his ruin; while, with wonderful beauty, the contrasted picture in b shows the object of that busy talk, sitting silently absorbed in meditation on the higher things of God’s statutes. As long as a man can do that, he has a magic circle drawn round him, across which fears and cares cannot step. Psalms 119:24 heightens the impression of the psalmist’s rest. Also Thy testimonies are my delight"-not only the subjects of his meditation, but bringing inward sweetness, though earth is in arms against him; and not only are they his delights, but "the men of his counsel," in whom he, solitary as he is, finds companionship that arms him with resources against that knot of whispering enemies. The exigencies of the acrostic plan are very obvious in this section, five of the verses of which begin with "way" or "ways," and two of the remaining three with "cleaves." The variety secured under such conditions is remarkable. The psalmist’s soul cleaves to the dust-i.e., is bowed in mourning; (cf. Psalms 44:25) but still, though thus darkened by sorrow and weeping itself away for grief (Psalms 119:28), it cleaves to "Thy testimonies" (Psalms 119:31). Happy in their sorrow are they who, by reason of the force which bows their sensitive nature to the dust, cling the more closely in their true selves to the declared will of God! Their sorrow appeals to God’s heart, and is blessed if it dictates the prayer for His quickening (Psalms 119:25). Their cleaving to His law warrants their hope that He will not put them to shame. The first pair of verses in which "way" is the acrostic word (Psalms 119:26-27) sets "my ways" over against "the way of Thy precepts." The psalmist has made God his confidant, telling Him all his life’s story, and has found continual answers, in gifts of mercy and inward whispers. He asks, therefore, for further illumination, which will be in accordance with these past mutual communications. Tell God thy ways and He will teach thee His statutes. The franker our confession, the more fervent our longing for fuller knowledge of His will. "The way of Thy precepts" is the practical life according to these, the ideal which shall rebuke and transform "my ways." The singer’s crooked course is spread before God, and he longs to see clearly the straight path of duty, on which he vows that he will meditate, and find wonders in the revelation of God’s will. Many a sunbeam is wasted for want of intent eyes. The prayer for understanding is vain without the vow of pondering. The next pair of "way-" verses (Psalms 119:29-30) contrasts ways of "lying" and of "faithfulness"-i.e., sinful life which is false towards God and erroneous in its foundation maxims, and life which is true in practice to Him and to man’s obligations. The psalmist prays that the former may be put far from him; for he feels that it is only too near, and his unhelped feet too ready to enter on it. He recognises the inmost meaning of the Law as an outcome of God’s favour. It is not harsh, but glowing with love, God’s best gift. The prayer in Psalms 119:29 has the psalmist’s deliberate choice in Psalms 119:30 as its plea. That choice does not lift him above the need of God’s help, and it gives him a claim thereon. Our wills may seem fixed, but the gap between choice and practice is wide, and our feebleness will not bridge it, unless He strengthens us. So the last verse of this section humbly vows to transform meditation and choice into action, and to "run the way of God’s commandments," in thanksgiving for the joy with which, while the psalmist prays, he feels that his heart swells. Psalms 119:33 and Psalms 119:34 are substantially identical in their prayer for enlightenment and their vow of obedience. Both are based on the conviction that outward revelation is incomplete without inward illumination. Both recognise the necessary priority of enlightened reason as condition of obedient action, and such action as the test and issue of enlightenment. Both vow that knowledge shall not remain barren. They differ in that the former verse pledges the psalmist to obedience unlimited in time and the latter to obedience without reservation. But even in uttering his vow the singer remembers his need of God’s help to keep it, and turns it, in Psalms 119:35, into petition, which he very significantly grounds on his heart’s delight in the Law. Warm as that delight may be, circumstances and flesh will cool it, and it is ever a struggle to translate desires into deeds. Therefore we need the sweet constraint of our Divine Helper to make us walk in the right way. Again, in Psalms 119:36 the preceding profession is caught up and modulated into petition. "Incline my heart" stands to "In it I delight," just as "Make me walk" does to "I will observe it." Our purest joys in God and in His Will depend on Him for their permanence and increase. Our hearts are apt to spill their affection on the earth, even while we would bear the cup filled to God. And one chief rival of "Thy testimonies" is worldly gain, from which there must be forcible detachment in order to, and as accompaniment of, attachment to God. All possessions which come between us and Him are "plunder," unjust gain. The heart is often led astray by the eyes. The senses bring fuel to its unholy flames. Therefore, the next petition (Psalms 119:37) asks that they may be made, as it were, to pass on one side of tempting things, which are branded as being "vanity," without real substance or worth, however they may glitter and solicit the gaze. To look longingly on earth’s good makes us torpid in God’s ways; and to be earnest in the latter makes us dead to the former. There is but one real life for men, the life of union with God and of obedience to His commandments. Therefore, the singer prays to be revived in God’s ways. Experience of God’s faithfulness to His plighted word will do much to deliver from earth’s glamour, as Psalms 119:38 implies. The second clause is elliptical in Hebrew, and is now usually taken as above, meaning that God’s promise fulfilled leads men to reverence Him. But the rendering "who is [devoted] to Thy fear" is tenable and perhaps better. The "reproach" in Psalms 119:39 is probably that which would fall on the psalmist if he were unfaithful to God’s law. This interpretation gives the best meaning to Psalms 119:39 b, which would then contain the reason for his desire to keep the "judgments"-i.e., the commandments, not the judicial acts-which he feels to be good. The section ends with a constantly recurring strain. God’s righteousness, His strict discharge of all obligations, guarantees that no longing, turned to Him, can be left unsatisfied. The languishing desire will be changed into fuller joy of more vigorous life. The necessary precursor of deeper draughts from the Fountain of Life is thirst for it, which faithfully turns aside from earth’s sparkling but drugged potions. There are practically no Hebrew words beginning with the letter required as the initial in this section, except the copula "and." Each verse begins with it, and it is best to retain it in translation, so as to reproduce in some measure the original impression of uniformity. The verses are aggregated rather than linked. "And" sometimes introduces a consequence, as probably in Psalms 119:42, and sometimes is "superfluous in regard to the sense. A predominant reference to the duty of bearing witness to the Truth runs through the section. The prayer in Psalms 119:41 for the visits of God’s lovingkindnesses which, in their sum, make salvation, and are guaranteed by His word of promise, is urged on the ground that, by experience of these, the psalmist will have his answer ready for all carpers who scoff at him and his patient faith. Such a prayer is entirely accordant with the hypothesis that the speaker is the collective Israel, but not less so with the supposition that he is an individual. "Whereas I was blind, now I see" is an argument that silences sarcasm. Psalms 119:43 carries on the thought of witnessing and asks that "the word of truth"-i.e., the Law considered as disclosure of truth rather than of duty-may not be snatched from the witness’s mouth, as it would be if God’s promised lovingkindnesses failed him. The condition of free utterance is rich experience. If prayers had gone up in vain from the psalmist’s lips, no glad proclamation could come from them. The verbs at the beginnings of Psa 119:44-46 are best taken as optatives, expressing what the psalmist would fain do, and, to some extent, has done. There is no true religion without that longing for unbroken conformity with the manifest will of God. Whoever makes that his deepest desire, and seeks after God’s precepts, will "walk at liberty," or at large, for restraints that are loved are not bonds, and freedom consists not in doing as I would, but in willing to do as I ought. Strong in such emancipation from the hindrances of one’s own passions, and triumphant over external circumstances which may mould, but not dominate, a God-obeying life, the psalmist would fain open his mouth unabashed before rulers. The "kings" spoken of in Psalms 119:46 may be foreign rulers, possibly the representatives of the Persian monarch, or later alien sovereigns, or the expression may be quite general and the speaker be a private person, who feels his courage rising as he enters into the liberty of perfect submission. Psalms 119:47-48 are general expressions of delight in the Law. Lifting the hands towards the commandments seems to be a figure for reverent regard, or longing, as one wistfully stretches them out towards some dear person or thing that one would fain draw closer. The phrase "which I love" in Psalms 119:48 overweights the clause, and is probably a scribe’s erroneous repetition of Psa 119:47 b. This section has only one verse of petition, the others being mainly avowals of adherence to the Law in the face of various trials. The single petition (Psalms 119:49) pleads the relation of servant, as giving a claim on the great Lord of the household, and adduces God’s having encouraged hope as imposing on Him an obligation to fulfil it. Expectations fairly deduced from His word are prophets of their own realisation. In Psalms 119:50, "This" points to the fact stated in b-namely, that the Word had already proved its power in the past by quickening the psalmist to new courage and hope-and declares that that remembered experience solaces his present sorrow. A heart that has been revived by life-giving contact with the Word has a hidden warmth beneath the deepest snows, and cleaves the more to that Word. Psalms 119:51-53 describe the attitude of the lover of the Law in presence of the ungodly. He is as unmoved by shafts of ridicule as by the heavier artillery of slander and plots (Psalms 119:23). To be laughed out of one’s faith is even worse than to be terrified out of it. The lesson is not needless in a day when adherence and obedience to the Word are smiled at in so many quarters as indicating inferior intelligence. The psalmist held fast by it, and while laughter, with more than a trace of bitterness, rung about him, threw himself back on God’s ancient and enduring words, which made the scoffs sound very hollow and transient (Psalms 119:52). Righteous indignation, too, rises in a devout soul at sight of men’s departure from God’s law (Psalms 119:53). The word rendered "fiery anger" is found in Psalms 11:6 ("a wind of burning"), and is best taken as above, though some would render horror. The wrath was not unmingled with compassion (Psalms 119:136), and, whilst it is clearly an emotion belonging to the Old Testament rather than to the Christian type of devotion, it should be present, in softened form, in our feelings towards evil. In Psalms 119:54 the psalmist turns from gainsayers. He strikes again the note of Psa 119:19, calling earth his place of transitory abode, or, as we might say, his inn. The brevity of life would be crushing, if God had not spoken to us. Since He has, the pilgrims can march "with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads," and all about their moving camp the sound of song may echo. To its lovers, God’s law is not "harsh and crabbed but musical as is Apollo’s lute." This psalm is one of the poet’s songs. Even those of us who are not singers can and should meditate on God’s law, till its melodious beauty is disclosed and its commandments, that sometimes sound stern, set themselves to rhythm and harmony. As God’s words took bitterness out of the thought of mortality, so His name remembered in the night brought light into darkness, whether physical or other. We often lose our memory of God and our hold of His hand when in sorrow, and grief sometimes thinks that it has a dispensation from obedience. So we shall be the better for remembering the psalmist’s experience, and should, like him, cling to the Name in the dark, and then we shall have light enough to "observe Thy law." Psalms 119:56 looks back on the mingled life of good and evil, of which some of the sorrows have just been touched, and speaks deep contentment with its portion. Whatever else is withheld or withdrawn, that lot is blessed which has been helped by God to keep His precepts, and they are happy and wise who deliberately prefer that good to all beside. Psalms 119:57 goes to the root of the matter in setting forth the resolve of obedience as the result of the consciousness of possessing God. He who feels, in his own happy heart, that Jehovah is his portion will be moved thereby to vow to keep His words. This psalmist had learned the evangelical lesson that he did not win God by keeping the Law, but that he was moved to keep the Law because he had won God; and he had also learned the companion truth, that the way to retain that possession is obedience. Psalms 119:58 corresponds in some measure to Psalms 119:57, but the order of clauses is inverted, a stating the psalmist’s prayer, as Psalms 119:57 b did his resolve, and b building on his cry the hope that God would be truly his portion and bestow His favour on him. But the true ground of our hope is not our most whole-hearted prayers, but God’s promise. The following five verses change from the key of petition into that of profession of obedience to, and delight in, the Law. The fruit of wise consideration of one’s conduct is willing acceptance of God’s law as His witness of what is right for us. The only "ways" which sober consideration will approve are those marked out in mercy by Him, and meditation on conduct is worthless if it does not issue in turning our feet into these. Without such meditation we shall wander on byways and lose ourselves. Want of thought ruins men (Psalms 119:59). But such turning of our feet to the right road has many foes, and chief among them is lingering delay. Therefore resolve must never be let cool, but be swiftly carried into action (Psalms 119:60). The world is full of snares, and they lie thick round our feet whenever these are turned towards God’s ways. The only means of keeping clear of them is to fix heart and mind on God’s law. Then we shall be able to pick our steps among traps and pits (Psalms 119:61). Physical weariness limits obedience, and needful sleep relaxes nervous tension, so that many a strenuous worker and noble aspirant fails beneath his daylight self in wakeful night seasons. Blessed they who in the night see visions of God and meditate on His law, not on earthly vanities or aims (Psalms 119:62). Society has its temptations as solitude has. The man whose heart has fed in secret on God and His law will naturally gravitate towards like minded people. Our relation to God and His uttered will should determine our affinities with men, and it is a bad sign when natural impulses do not draw us to those who fear God. Two men who have that fear in common are liker each other in their deepest selves, however different they may be in other respects, than either of them is to those to whom he is likest in surface characteristics and unlike in this supreme trait. (Psalms 119:63). One pathetic petition closes the section. In Psalms 119:19 the psalmist had based his prayer for illumination on his being a stranger on earth; here he grounds it on the plentitude of God’s lovingkindness, which floods the world. It is the same plea in another form. All creatures bask in the light of God’s love, which fails on each in a manner appropriate to its needs. Man’s supreme need is the knowledge of God’s statutes; therefore, the same all-embracing Mercy, which cares for these happy, careless creatures, will not be implored in vain, to satisfy his nobler and more pressing want. All beings get their respective boons unasked; but the preeminence of ours is partly seen in this, that it cannot be given without the cooperation of our desire. It will be given wherever that condition is fulfilled (Psalms 119:64). The restrictions of the acrostic structure are very obvious in this section, five of the eight verses of which begin with "Good." The epithet is first applied in Psalms 119:65 to the whole of God’s dealings with the psalmist. To the devout soul all life is of one piece, and its submission and faith exercise transmuting power on pains and sorrows, so that the psalmist can say- "Let one more attest, I have lived, seen God’s hand through a lifetime, And all was for best." The epithet is next applied (Psalms 119:66) to the perception (lit. taste) or faculty of discernment of good and evil, for which the psalmist prays, basing his petition on his belief of God’s word. Swift, sure, and delicate apprehension of right and wrong comes from such belief. The heart in which it reigns is sensitive as a goldsmith’s scales or a thermometer which visibly sinks when a cloud passes before the sun. The instincts of faith work surely and rapidly. The settled judgment that life had been good includes apparent evil (Psalms 119:67), which is real evil in so far as it pains, but is, in a deeper view, good, inasmuch as it scourges a wandering heart back to true obedience and therefore to well-being. The words of Psa 119:67 are specially appropriate as the utterance of the Israel purified from idolatrous tendencies by captivity, but may also be the expression of individual experience. The epithet is next applied to God Himself (Psalms 119:68). How steadfast a gaze into the depths of the Divine nature and over the broad field of the Divine activity is in that short, all-including clause, containing but three words in the Hebrew, "Good art Thou and doing good"! The prayer built on it is the one which continually recurs in this psalm, and is reached by many paths. Every view of man’s condition, whether it is bright or dark, and every thought of God, bring the psalmist to the same desire. Here God’s character and beneficence, widespread and continual, prompt to the prayer, both because the knowledge of His will is our highest good, and because a good God cannot but wish His servants to be like Himself, in loving righteousness and hating iniquity. Psalms 119:69 and Psalms 119:70 are a pair, setting forth the antithesis, frequent in the psalm, between evil men’s conduct to the psalmist and his tranquil contemplation of, and delight in, God’s precepts. False slanders buzz about him, but he cleaves to God’s Law, and is conscious of innocence. Men are dull and insensible, as if their hearts were waterproofed with a layer of grease, through which no gentle rain from heaven could steal; but the psalmist is all the more led to open his heart to the gracious influences of that law, because others close theirs. If a bad man is not made worse by surrounding evil, he is made better by it. Just as in Psalms 119:65 and Psalms 119:68 the same thought of God’s goodness is expressed, Psalms 119:71 repeats the thought of Psa 119:67, with a slight deepening. There the beneficent influence of sorrow was simply declared as a fact; here it is thankfully accepted, with full submission and consent of the will. "Good for me" means not only good in fact, but in my estimate. The repetition of the phrase at the beginning of the next verse throws light on its meaning in Psalms 119:71. The singer thinks that he has two real goods, preeminent among the uniform sequence of such, and these are, first, his sorrows, which he reckons to be blessings, because they have helped him to a firmer grasp of the other, the real good for every man, the Law which is sacred and venerable, because it has come from the very lips of Deity. That is our true wealth. Happy they whose estimate of it corresponds to its real worth, and who have learned, by affliction or anyhow, that material riches are dross, compared with its solid preciousness! Prayer for illumination is confined to the first: and last verses of this section, the rest of which is mainly occupied with petitions for gracious providences, based upon the grounds of the psalmist’s love of the Law, and of the encouragement to others to trust, derivable from his experience. Psalms 119:73 puts forcibly the thought that man is evidently an incomplete fragment, unless the gift of understanding is infused into his material frame. God has begun by shaping it, and therefore is pledged to go on to bestow spiritual discernment, when His creature asks it. But that prayer wilt only be answered if the suppliant intends to use the gift for its right purpose of learning God’s statutes. Psalms 119:74 prays that the psalmist may be a witness that hope in His word is never vain, and so that his deliverances may be occasions of widespread gladness. God’s honour is involved in answering His servant’s trust. Psalms 119:75-77 are linked together. "Judgments" (Psalms 119:75) seem to mean here providential acts, not, as generally in this Psalm, the Law. The acknowledgment of the justice and faithfulness which send sorrows precedes the two verses of petition for "lovingkindness" and "compassions." Sorrows stilt sting and burn, though recognised as sent in love, and the tried heart yearns for these other messengers to come from God to sustain and soothe. God’s promise and the psalmist’s delight in God’s law are the double ground of the twin petitions. Then follow three verses which are discernibly connected, as expressing desires in regard to "the proud," the devout, and the psalmist himself. He prays that the first may be shamed-i.e., that their deceitful or causeless hostility may be balked-and, as in several other verses, contrasts his own peaceful absorption in the Law with their machinations. He repeats the prayer of Psa 119:74 with a slight difference, asking that his deliverance may draw attention to him, and that others may, from contemplating his security, come to know the worth of God’s testimonies. In Psalms 119:79 b the text reads they shall know (as the result of observing the psalmist), which the Hebrew margin needlessly alters into "those who know." For himself he prays that his heart may be sound, or thoroughly devoted to keep the law, and then he is sure that nothing shall ever put him to shame. "Who is he who will harm you, if ye be zealous for that which is good?" This section has more than usual continuity. The psalmist is persecuted, and in these eight verses pours out his heart to God. Taken as a whole, they make a lovely picture of patient endurance and submissive longing. Intense and protracted yearning for deliverance has wasted his very soul, but has not merged in impatience or unbelief, for he has "waited for Thy word." His eyes have ached with straining for the signs of approaching comfort, the coming of which he has not doubted, but the delay of which has tried his faith. This longing has been quickened by troubles, which have wrapped him round like pungent smoke wreaths eddying among the rafters, where disused wine skins hang and get blackened and wrinkled. So has it been with him, but, through all, he has kept hold of God’s statutes. So he plaintively reminds God of the brevity of his life, which has so short a tale of days that judgment on his persecutors must be swift, if it is to be of use. Psalms 119:85-87 describe the busy hostility of his foes. It is truculently contrary to God’s law, and therefore, as is implied, worthy of God’s counter working. Psalms 119:85 b is best taken as a further description of the "proud," which is spread before God as a reason for His judicial action. The antithesis in Psalms 119:86 between the "faithfulness" of the Law and the "lying" persecutors, is the ground of the prayer, "Help Thou me." Even in extremest peril, when he was all but made away with, the psalmist still clung to God’s precepts (Psalms 119:87), and therefore he is heartened to pray for reviving, and to vow that then, bound by new chains of gratitude, he will, more than ever, observe God’s testimonies. The measure of the new "wine poured into the shrivelled wine skin is nothing less than the measureless lovingkindness of God; and nothing but experience of His benefits melts to obedience. The stability of nature witnesses to the steadfastness of the Word which sustains it. The Universe began and continues, because God puts forth His will. The heavens with their pure depths would collapse, and all their stars would flicker into darkness, if that uttered Will did not echo through their overwhelming spaces. The solid earth would not be solid, but for God’s power immanent in it. Heaven and earth are thus His servants. Psalms 119:91 a may possibly picture them as standing waiting "for Thine ordinances," but the indefinite preposition is probably better regarded as equivalent to in accordance with. The psalmist has reached the grand conceptions of the universal reign of God’s law, and of the continuous forth-putting of God’s will as the sustaining energy of all things. He seeks to link himself to that great band of God’s servants, to be in harmony with stars and storms, with earth and ocean, as their fellow servant; but yet he feels that his relation to God’s law is closer than theirs, for he can delight in that which they unconsciously obey. Such delight in God’s uttered will changes affliction from a foe, threatening life, to a friend, ministering strength (Psalms 119:92). Nor does that Law when loved only avert destruction; it also increases vital power (Psalms 119:93) and reinvigorates the better self. There is a sense in which the law can give life, (Galatians 3:21) but it must be welcomed and enshrined in the heart, in order to do so. The frequently recurring prayer for "salvation" has a double plea in Psalms 119:94. The soul that has yielded itself to God in joyful obedience thereby establishes a claim on Him. He cannot but protect His own possession. Ownership has its obligations, which He recognises. The second plea is drawn from the psalmist’s seeking after God’s precepts, without which seeking there would be no reality in his profession of being God’s. To seek them is the sure way to find both them and salvation (Psalms 119:94). Whom God saves, enemies will vainly try to destroy, and, while they lurk in waiting to spring on the psalmist, his eyes are directed, not towards them, but to God’s testimonies. To give heed to these is the sure way to escape snares (Psalms 119:95). Lifelong experience has taught the psalmist that there is a flaw in every human excellence, a limit soon reached and never passed to all that is noblest in man; but high above all achievements, and stretching beyond present vision, is the fair ideal bodied forth in the Law. Since it is God’s commandment, it will not always be an unreached ideal, but may be indefinitely approximated to; and to contemplate it will be joy, when we learn that it is prophecy because it is commandment. One thought pervades this section, that the Law is the fountain of sweetest wisdom. The rapture of love with which it opens is sustained throughout. The psalmist knows that he has not merely more wisdom of the same sort as his enemies, his teachers, and the aged have, but wisdom of a better kind. His foes were wise in craft, and his teachers drew their instructions from earthly springs, and the elders had learned that bitter, worldly wisdom, which has been disillusioned of youth’s unsuspectingness and dreams, without being thereby led to grasp that which is no illusion. But a heart which simply keeps to the Law reaches, in its simplicity, a higher truth than these know, and has instinctive discernment of good and evil. Worldly wisdom is transient. "Whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away," but the wisdom that comes with the commandment is enduring as it (Psalms 119:98). Meditation must be accompanied with practice, in order to make the true wisdom one’s own. The depths of the testimonies must be sounded by patient brooding on them, and then the knowledge thus won must be carried into act. To do what we know is the sure way to know it better, and to know more (Psalms 119:99-100). And that positive obedience has to be accompanied by abstinence from evil ways; for in such a world as this "Thou shalt not" is the necessary preliminary to "Thou shalt." The psalmist has a better teacher than those whom he has outgrown, even God Himself, and His instruction has a graciously constraining power, which keeps its conscious scholars in the right path (Psalms 119:102). These thoughts draw another exclamation from the poet, who feels, as he reflects on his blessings, that the law beloved ceases to be harsh and is delightsome as well as health giving. It is promise as well as law, for God will help us to be what He commands us to be. They who love the Lawgiver find sweetness in the law (Psalms 119:103). And this is the blessed effect of the wisdom which it gives, that it makes us quick to detect sophistries which tempt into forbidden paths, and fills us with wholesome detestation. A lamp is for night; light shines in the day. The Word is both, to the psalmist. His antithesis may be equivalent to a comprehensive declaration that the Law is light of every sort, or it may intend to lay stress on the varying phases of experience, and turn our thoughts to that Word which will gleam guidance in darkness, and shine, a better sun, on bright hours. The psalmist’s choice, not merely the inherent power of the Law, is expressed in Psalms 119:105. He has taken it for his guide, or, as Psalms 119:106 says, has sworn and kept his oath, that he would observe the righteous decisions, which would point to his foot the true path. The affliction bemoaned in Psalms 119:107 is probably the direct result of the conduct professed in Psalms 119:106. The prayer for reviving, which means deliverance from outward evils rather than spiritual quickening, is, therefore, presented with confidence, and based upon the many promises in the Word of help to sufferers for righteousness. Whatever our afflictions, there is ease in telling God of them, and if our desires for His help are "according to Thy word," they will be as willing to accept help to bear as help which removes the sorrow and thus will not be offered unanswered. That cry for reviving is best understood as being "the free-will offerings" which the psalmist prays may be accepted. Happy in their afflictions are they whose chief desire even then is to learn more of God’s statutes! They will find that their sorrows are their best teachers. If we wish most to make advances in His school, we shall not complain of the guides to whom He commits us. Continual alarms and dangers tend to foster disregard of Duty, as truly as does the opposite state of unbroken security. A man absorbed in keeping himself alive is apt to think he has no attention to spare for God’s law (Psalms 119:109), and one ringed about by traps is apt to take a circuit to avoid them, even at the cost of divergence from the path marked out by God (Psalms 119:110). But, even in such circumstances, the psalmist did what all good men have to do, deliberately chose his portion, and found God’s law better than any outward good, as being able to diffuse deep, sacred, and perpetual joy through all his inner nature. The heart thus filled with serene gladness is thereby drawn to perform God’s statutes with lifelong persistency, and the heart thus inclined to obedience has tapped the sources of equally enduring joy. This section is mainly the expression of firm resolve to cleave to the Law. Continuity may be traced in it, since Psalms 119:113-115 breathe love and determination, which pass in Psalms 119:116-117, into prayer, in view of the psalmist’s weakness and the strength of temptation, while in Psalms 119:118-120 the fate of the despisers of the Law intensifies the psalmist’s clinging grasp of awe-struck love. Hatred of "double minded" who waver between God and idols, and are weak accordingly, rests upon, and in its turn increases, whole-hearted adherence to the Law. It is a tepid devotion to it which does not strongly recoil from lives that water down its precepts and try to walk on both sides of the way at once. Whoever has taken God for his defence can afford to bide God’s time for fulfilment of His promises (Psalms 119:114). And the natural results of such love to, and waiting for, His word are resolved separation from the society of those whose lives are moulded on opposite principles, and the ordering of external relations in accordance with the supreme purpose of keeping the commandments of Him whom love and waiting claim as "my God" (Psalms 119:115). But resolves melt in the fire of temptation, and the psalmist knows life and himself too well to trust himself. So he betakes himself to prayer for God’s upholding, without which he cannot live. A hope built on God’s promise has a claim on Him, and its being put to shame in disappointment would be dishonour to God (Psalms 119:116). The psalmist knows that his wavering will can only be fixed by God, and that experience of His sustaining hand will make a stronger bond between God and him than anything besides. The consciousness of salvation must precede steadfast regard to the precepts of the God who saves (Psalms 119:117). To stray from the Law is ruin, as is described in Psalms 119:118-119. They who wander are despised or made light of, "for their deceit is a lie"-i.e., the hopes and plans with which they deceive themselves are false. It is a gnarled way of saying that all godless life is a blunder as well as a sin, and is fed with unrealisable promises. Dross is flung away when the metal is extracted. Slag from a furnace is hopelessly useless, and this psalmist thinks that the wicked of the earth are "thrown as rubbish to the void." He is not contemplating a future life, but God’s judgments as manifested here in providence, and his faith is assured that, even here, that process is visible. Therefore, gazing upon the fate of evil-doers, his flesh creeps and every particular hair stands on end (as the word means). His dread is full of love, and love is full of dread. Profoundly are the two emotions yoked together in Psalms 119:119 b and Psalms 119:120 b, " I love Thy testimonies of Thy judgments I am afraid." Another explanation fixes on the literal meaning of the word-i.e., "goings up"-and points to its use in the singular for the Return from Babylon, (Ezra 7:9) as supporting the view that these were psalms sung by the returning exiles. There is much in the group of songs to favour this view; but against it is the fact that Psalms 122:1-9; Psalms 134:1-3, imply the existence of the Temple, and the fully organised ceremonial worship. A third solution is that the name refers to the structure of these psalms, which have a "step-like, progressive rhythm." This is Gesenius’ explanation, adopted by Delitzsch. But the peculiar structure in question, though very obvious in several of these psalms, is scarcely perceptible in others, and is entirely absent from Psalms 132:1-18. The remaining explanation of the title is the most probable-that the "goings up" were those of the worshippers travelling to Jerusalem for the feasts. This little collection is, then, "The Song Book of the Pilgrims," a designation to which its contents well correspond. The thought of evil-doers tinges most of this section. It opens with a triplet of verses, occasioned by their oppressions of the psalmist, and closes with a triplet occasioned by their breaches of the Law. In the former, he is conscious that he has followed the "judgment" or law of God, and hence hopes that he will not be abandoned to his foes. The consciousness and the hope equally need limitation, to correspond with true estimates of ourselves and with facts; for there is no absolute fulfilment of the Law, and good men are often left to be footballs for had ones. But in its depths the confidence is true. Precisely because he has it, the psalmist prays that it may be Vindicated by facts. "Be surety for Thy servant"-a profound image, drawn from legal procedure, in which one man becomes security for another and makes good his deficiencies. Thus God will stand between the hunted man and his foes, undertaking for him. "Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me." How much the fulfilment in Christ has exceeded the desire of the psalmist! "The oppressors’ wrong" had lasted long, and the singer’s weary eyes had been strained in looking for the help which seemed to tarry (compare Psalms 119:82), and that fainting gaze humbly appeals to God. Will He not end the wistful watching speedily? Psalms 119:124-125 are a pair, the psalmist’s relation of servant being adduced in both as the ground of his prayer for teaching. But they differ, in that the former verse lays stress on the consonance of such instruction with God’s lovingkindness, and the latter, on its congruity with the psalmist’s position and character as His servant. God’s best gift is the knowledge of His will, which He surely will not withhold from spirits willing to serve, if they only knew how. Psalms 119:126-128 are closely linked. The psalmist’s personal wrongs melt into the wider thought of wickedness which does its little best to make void that sovereign, steadfast law. Delitzsch would render "It is time to work for Jehovah"; and the meaning thus obtained is a worthy one. But that given above is more in accordance with the context. It is bold-and would be audacious if a prayer did not underlie the statement-to undertake to determine when evil has reached such height as to demand God’s punitive action. But, however slow we should be to prescribe to Him the when or the how of His intervention, we may learn from the psalmist’s emphatic "Therefores," which stand coordinately at the beginnings of Psa 119:127-128, that the more men make void the Law, the more should God’s servants prize it, and the more should they bind its precepts on their moral judgment, and heartily loathe all paths which, specious as they may be, are "paths of falsehood," though all the world may avow that they are true. Devout souls do not take offence at the depths and difficulties of God’s word, but are thereby drawn to intenser contemplation of them. We weary of the Trivial and Obvious. That which tasks and outstrips our powers attracts. But the obscurity must not be arbitrary, but inherent, a clear obscure, like the depths of a pure sea. These wonderful testimonies give light, notwithstanding, or rather because of, their wonderfulness, and it is the simple heart, not the sharpened intellect, that penetrates furthest into them and finds light most surely (Psalms 119:130). Therefore the psalmist longs for God’s commandments, like a "wild creature panting open mouthed for water. He puts to shame our indifference. If his longing was not excessive, how defective is ours! Psalms 119:132, like Psalms 119:122, has no distinct allusion to the Law, though the word rendered in it "right" is that used in the psalm for the Law considered as "judgments." The prayer is a bold one, pleading what is justly, due to the lovers of God’s name. Kay appropriately quotes "God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have showed towards His name". (Hebrews 6:10) One would have expected "Law" instead of "name “in the last word of the verse, and possibly the conception of Law may be, as it were, latent in "name," for the latter does carry in it imperative commandments and plain revelations of duty. God’s Name holds the Law in germ. The Law is but the expansion of the meaning of the Name. "Promise" in Psalms 119:133 (lit. saying) must be taken in a widened sense, as including all God’s revealed will. The only escape from the tyranny of sin is to have our steps established by God’s word, and His help is needed for such establishment. Rebellion against sin’s dominion is already victory over it, if the rebel summons God’s heavenly reinforcements to his help. It is a high attainment to desire deliverance from men, chiefly in order to observe, unhindered, God’s commandments (Psalms 119:134). And it is as high a desire to seek the light of God’s face mainly as the means of seeing His will more clearly. The psalmist did not merely wish for outward prosperity or inward cheer and comfort, but that these might contribute to fulfilling his deepest wish of learning better what God would have him to do (Psalms 119:135). The moods of indignation (Psalms 119:53) and of hatred (Psalms 119:104, Psalms 119:113, Psalms 119:128) have given place to softer emotions, as they ever should (Psalms 119:136). Tears and dewy pity should mingle with righteous anger, as when Jesus "looked round about on them with anger, being with the anger grieved at the hardening of their heart". (Mark 3:5) The first word suggested to the psalmist under this letter is Righteousness. That august conception was grasped by devout Israelites with a tenacity, and assumed a prominence in their thoughts, unparalleled elsewhere. It is no mere yielding to the requirements of the acrostic scheme which sets that great word in four of the eight. verses of this section (Psalms 119:137, Psalms 119:138, Psalms 119:142, Psalms 119:144). Two thoughts are common to them all, that Righteousness has its seat in the bosom of God, and that the Law is a true transcript of that Divine righteousness. These things being so, it follows that the Law is given to men in accordance with the Divine "faithfulness"-i.e., in remembrance and discharge of the obligations which God has undertaken towards them. Nor less certainly does it follow that that Law, which is the "eradiation" of God’s righteousness, is eternal as its fontal source (Psalms 119:142, Psalms 119:144). The beam must last as long as the sun. No doubt, there are transient elements in the Law which the psalmist loved, but its essence is everlasting, because its origin is God’s everlasting Righteousness. So absorbed is he in adoring contemplation of it, that he even forgets to pray for help to keep it, and not till Psalms 119:144 does he ask for understanding that he may live. True life is in the knowledge of the Law by which God is known, as Jesus has taught us that to know the only true God is life eternal. A faint gleam of immortal hope perhaps shines in that prayer, for if the "testimonies" are forever, and the knowledge of them is life, it cannot be that they shall outlast the soul that knows and lives by them. One more characteristic of God’s righteous testimonies is celebrated in Psalms 119:140 -namely, that they have stood sharp tests, and, like metal in the furnace, have not been dissolved but brightened by the heat. They have been tested, when the psalmist was afflicted and found them to hold true. The same fire tried him and them, and he does not glorify his own endurance, but the promise which enabled him to stand firm. The remaining verses of the section describe the psalmist’s afflictions and clinging to the Law. Psalms 119:139 recurs to his emotions on seeing men’s neglect of it. "Zeal" here takes the place of grief (Psalms 119:136) and of indignation and hatred. Friction against widespread godlessness generates a flame of zeal. as it should always do. "Small and despised" was Israel among the great powers of the ancient world, but he who meditates on the Law is armed against contempt and contented in insignificance (Psalms 119:141). "Distress and anguish" may surround him, but hidden springs of "delight" well up in the heart that cleaves to the Law, like outbursts of fresh water rising to the surface of a salt sea (Psalms 119:144). The first two verses are a pair, in which former prayers for deliverance and vows of obedience are recalled and repeated. The tone of supplication prevails through the section. The cries now presented are no new things. The psalmist’s habit has been prayer, whole hearted, continued, and accompanied with the resolve to keep by obedience and to observe with sharpened watchfulness the utterances of God’s will. Another pair of verses follows (Psalms 119:147-148), which recall the singer’s wakeful devotion. His voice rose to God ere the dim morning broke, and his heart kept itself in submissive expectance. His eyes saw God’s promises shining in the nightly darkness, and making meditation better than sleep. The petitions in Psalms 119:149 may be taken as based upon the preceding pairs. The psalmist’s patient continuance gives him ground to expect an answer. But the true ground is God’s character, as witnessed by His deeds of lovingkindness and His revelation of His "judgments" in the Law. Another pair of verses follows (Psalms 119:150-151), in which the hostile nearness of the psalmist’s foes, gathering round him with malignant purpose, is significantly contrasted, both with their remoteness in temper from the character enjoined in the Law, and with the yet closer proximity of the assailed man’s defender. He who has God near him, and who realises that His "commandments are truth," can look untrembling on mustering masses of enemies. This singer had learned that before danger threatened. The last verse of the section breathes the same tone of long-continued and habitual acquaintance with God and His Law as the earlier pairs of verses do. The convictions of a lifetime were too deeply rooted to be disturbed by such a passing storm. There is, as it were, a calm smile of triumphant certitude in that "Long ago." Experience teaches that the foundation, laid for trust as well as for conduct in the Law, is too stable to be moved, and that we need not fear to build our all on it. Let us build rock on that rock, and answer God’s everlasting testimonies with our unwavering reliance and submission. The prayer "revive me" occurs thrice in this section. It is not a petition for spiritual quickening so much as for removal of calamities, which restrained free, joyous life. Its repetition accords with other characteristics of this section, which is markedly a cry from a burdened heart. The psalmist is in affliction; he is, as it were, the defendant in a suit, a captive needing a strong avenger (Psalms 119:154), compassed about by a swarm of enemies (Psalms 119:157), forced to endure the sight of the faithless and to recoil from them (Psalms 119:158). His thoughts vibrate between his needs and God’s compassions, between his own cleaving to the Law and its grand comprehensiveness and perpetuity. His prayer now is not for fuller knowledge of the Law, but for rescue from his troubles. It is worth while to follow his swift turns of thought, which, in their windings, are shaped by the double sense of need and of Divine fulness. First come two plaintive cries for rescue, based in one case on his adherence to the Law, and in the other on God’s promise. Then his eye turns on those who do not, like him, seek God’s statutes, and these he pronounces, with solemn depth of insight, to be far from the salvation which he feels is his, because they have no desire to know God’s will. That is a pregnant word. Swiftly he turns from these unhappy ones to gaze on the multitude of God’s compassions, which hearten him to repeat his prayer for revival, according to God’s "judgments"-i.e., His decisions contained in the Law. But, again, his critical position among enemies forces itself into remembrance, and he can only plead that, in spite of them, he has held fast by the Law, and, when compelled to see apostates, has felt no temptation to join them, but a wholesome loathing of all departure from God’s word. That loathing was the other side of his love. The more closely we cleave to God’s precepts, the more shall we recoil from modes of thought and life which flout them. And then the psalmist looks wistfully up once more and asks that his love may receive what God’s lovingkindness emboldens it to look for as its result-namely, the reviving, which he thus once more craves. That love or the Law has led him into the depths of understanding God’s Word, and so his lowly petitions swell into the declaration, which he has verified in life, that its sum-total is truth, and a perpetual possession for loving hearts, however ringed round by enemies and "weighed upon by sore distress." The tone of this section is in striking contrast with that of the preceding. Here, with the exception of the first clause of the first verse, all is sunny, and the thunderclouds are hull down on the horizon. Joy, peace, and hope breathe through the song. Beautifully are reverential awe and exuberant gladness blended as contemporaneous results of listening to God’s word. There is rapture in that awe; there is awe in that bounding gladness. To possess that law is better than to win rich booty. The spoils of the conflict, which we wage with our own negligence or disobedience, are our best wealth. The familiar connection between love of the Law and hatred of lives which depart from it, and are therefore lies and built on lies, reappears, yet not as the ground of prayer for help, but as part of the blessed treasures which the psalmist is recounting. His life is accompanied by music of perpetual praise. Seven times a day-i.e., unceasingly-his glad heart breaks into song, and "the o’er come of his song" is ever God’s righteous judgments. His own experience gives assurance of the universal truth that the love of God’s law secures peace, inasmuch as such love brings the heart into contact with absolute good, inasmuch as submission to God’s will is always peace, inasmuch as the fountain of unrest is dried up, inasmuch as all outward things are allies of such a heart and serve the soul that serves God. Such love saves from falling over stumbling blocks, and enables a man "to walk firmly and safely on the clear path of duty." Like the dying Jacob, such a man waits for God’s salvation, patiently expecting that each day will bring its own form of help and deliverance, and his waiting is no idle anticipation, but full of strenuous obedience (Psalms 119:166), and of watchful observance, such as the eyes of a servant direct to his master (Psalms 119:167 a). Love makes such a man keen to note the slightest indications of God’s will, and eager to obey them all (Psalms 119:167 b, Psalms 119:168 a). All this joyous profession of the psalmist’s happy experience he spreads humbly before God, appealing to Him whether it is true. He is not flaunting his self-righteousness in God’s face, but gladly recounting to God’s honour all the "spoil" that he has found. as he penetrated into the Law and it penetrated into his inmost being. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/eb/ Psalms 120:1-7 THE collection of pilgrim songs is appropriately introduced by one expressive of the unrest arising from compulsory association with uncongenial and hostile neighbours. The psalmist laments that his sensitive "soul" has been so long obliged to be a "sojourner" where he has heard nothing but lying and strife. Weary of these, his soul stretches her wings towards a land of rest. His feeling ill at ease amidst present surroundings stings him to take the pilgrim’s staff. "In" this singer’s "heart are the ways." The simplicity of this little song scarcely admits of separation into parts; but one may note that an introductory verse is followed by two groups of three verses each, -the former of which is prayer for deliverance from the "deceitful tongue," and prediction that retribution will fall on it (Psalms 120:2-4); while the latter bemoans the psalmist’s uncongenial abode among enemies (Psalms 120:5-7). The verbs in Psalms 120:1 are most naturally referred to former experiences of the power of prayer, which encourage renewed petition. Devout hearts argue that what Jehovah has done once He will do again. Since His mercy endureth forever, He will not weary of bestowing, nor will former gifts exhaust His stores. Men say, "I have given so often that I can give no more"; God says, "I have given, therefore I will give." The psalmist was not in need of defence against armed foes, but against false tongues. But it is not plain whether these were slanderous, flattering, or untrustworthy in their promises of friendship. The allusions are too general to admit of certainty. At all events, he was surrounded by a choking atmosphere of falsehood, from which he longed to escape into purer air. Some commentators would refer the allusions to the circumstances of the exiles in Babylon; others to the slanders of the Samaritans and others who tried to hinder the rebuilding of the Temple; others think that his own hostile fellow countrymen are the psalmist’s foes. May we not rather hear in his plaint the voice of the devout heart, which ever painfully feels the dissonance between its deep yearnings and the Babel of vain words which fills every place with jangling and deceit? To one who holds converse with God, there is nothing more appalling or more abhorrent than the flood of empty talk which drowns the world. If there was any specific foe in the psalmist’s mind, he has not described him so as to enable us to identify him. Psalms 120:3 may be taken in several ways, according as "deceitful tongue" is taken as a vocative or as the nominative of the verb "give," and as that verb is taken in a good or a bad sense, and as "thee" is taken to refer to the tongue or to some unnamed person. It is unnecessary to enter here on a discussion of the widely divergent explanations given. They fall principally into two classes. One takes the words "deceitful tongue" as vocative, and regards the question as meaning, "What retribution shall God give to thee, O deceitful tongue?" while the other takes it as asking what the tongue shall give unto an unnamed person designated by "thee." That person is by some considered to be the owner of the tongue, who is asked what profit his falsehood will be to him; while others suppose the "thee" to mean Jehovah, and the question to be like that of Job. (Job 10:3) Baethgen takes this view, and paraphrases, "What increase of Thy riches canst Thou expect therefrom, that Thou dost permit the godless to oppress the righteous?" Grammatically either class of explanation is warranted; and the reader’s feeling of which is most appropriate must decide. The present writer inclines to the common interpretation, which takes Psalms 120:3 as addressed to the deceitful tongue, in the sense, "What punishment shall God inflict upon thee?" Psalms 120:4 is the answer, describing the penal consequences of falsehood, as resembling the crimes which they avenge. Such a tongue is likened to sharp arrows and swords in Psalms 57:4; Psalms 64:3, etc. The punishment shall be like the crime. For the sentiment compare Psalms 140:9-10. It is not necessary to suppose that the "Mighty" is God, though such a reference gives force to the words. "The tongue which shot piercing arrows is pierced by the sharpened arrows of an irresistibly strong One; it, which set its neighbour in a fever of anguish, must endure a lasting heat of broom coals, which consumes it surely" (Delitzsch). In the group of Psa 120:5-7, the psalmist bemoans his compulsory association with hostile companions, and longs to "flee away and be at rest." Meshech was the name of barbarous tribes who, in the times of Sargon and Sennacherib inhabited the highlands to the east of Cilicia, and in later days retreated northwards to the neighbourhood of the Black Sea (Sayce, "Higher Criticism and Monuments," p. 130). Kedar was one of the Bedawin tribes of the Arabian desert. The long distance between the localities occupied by these two tribes requires an allegorical explanation of their names. They stand as types of barbarous and truculent foes-as we might say, Samoyeds and Patagonians. The psalmist’s plaint struck on Cromwell’s heart, and is echoed, with another explanation of its meaning which he had, no doubt, learned from some Puritan minister: "I live, you know where, in Meshech, which they say signifies prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies blackness; yet the Lord forsaketh me not" (Carlyle, "Letters and Speeches," 1:127: London, 1846). The peace-loving psalmist describes himself as stunned by the noise and quarrelsomeness of those around him. "I am peace". (compare Psalms 109:4) But his gentlest word is like a spark on tinder. If he but speaks, they fly to their weapons, and are ready without provocation to answer with blows. So the psalm ends as with a long-drawn sigh. It inverts the usual order of similar psalms, in which the description of need is wont to precede the prayer for deliverance. It thus sets forth most pathetically the sense of discordance between a man and his environment, which urges the soul that feels it to seek a better home. So this is a true pilgrim psalm. Psalms 121:1-8 How many timid, anxious hearts has this sweet outpouring of quiet trust braced and lifted to its own serene height of conscious safety! This psalmist is so absorbed in the thought of his Keeper that he barely names his dangers. With happy assurance of protection, he says over and over again the one word which is his amulet against foes and fears. Six times in these few verses does the thought recur that Jehovah is the Keeper of Israel or of the single soul. The quietness that comes of confidence is the singer’s strength. Whether he is an exile, looking across the plains of Mesopotamia towards the blue hills. which the eye cannot discern, or a pilgrim catching the first sight of the mountain on which Jehovah sits enshrined, is a question which cannot be decisively answered; but the power and beauty of this little breathing of peaceful trust are but slightly affected by any hypothesis as to the singer’s circumstances. Psalms 121:1 and Psalms 121:2 stand apart from the remainder, in so far as in them the psalmist speaks in the first person, while in the rest of the psalm he is spoken to in the second. But this does not necessarily involve the supposition of an antiphonal song. The two first verses may have been sung by a single voice, and the assurances of the following ones by a chorus or second singer. But it is quite as likely that, as in other psalms, the singer is in Psalms 121:3-8 himself the speaker of the assurances which confirm his own faith. His first words describe the earnest look of longing. He will lift his eyes from all the coil of troubles and perils to the heights. Sursum corda expresses the true ascent which these psalms enjoin and exemplify. If the supposition that the psalmist is an exile on the monotonous levels of Babylon is correct, one feels the pathetic beauty of his wistful gaze across the dreary flats towards the point where he knows that the hills of his fatherland rise. To look beyond the low levels where we dwell, to the unseen heights where we have our home, is the condition of all noble living amid these lower ranges of engagement with the visible and transient. "Whence comes my help?" is a question which may be only put in order to make the assured answer more emphatic, but may also be an expression of momentary despondency, as the thought of the distance between the gazer and the mountains chills his aspirations. "It is easy to look, but hard to journey thither, How shall I reach that goal? I am weak; the way is long and beset with foes." The loftier the ideal, the more needful, if it is ever to be reached, that our consciousness of its height and of our own feebleness should drive us to recognise our need of help in order to attain it. Whoever has thus high longings sobered by lowly estimates of self is ready to receive the assurance of Divine aid. That sense of impotence is the precursor of faith. We must distrust ourselves, if we are ever to confide in God. To know: that we need His aid is a condition of obtaining it. Bewildered despondency asks, "Whence comes my help?" and scans the low levels in vain. The eye that is lifted to the hills is sure to see Him coming to succour; for that question on the lips of one whose looks are directed thither is a prayer, rather than a question; and the assistance he needs sets out towards him from the throne, like a sunbeam from the sun, as soon as he looks up to the light. The particle of negation in Psalms 121:3 is not that used in Psalms 121:4, but that which is employed in commands or wishes. The progress from subjective desire in Psalms 121:3, to objective certainty of Divine help as expressed in Psalms 121:4 and the remainder of the psalm, is best exhibited if the verbs in the former verse are translated as expressions of wish "May He not," etc. Whether the speaker is taken to be the psalmist or another makes little difference to the force of Psa 121:3 which lays hold in supplication of the truth just uttered in Psalms 121:2, and thereby gains a more assured certainty that it is true, as the following verses go on to declare. It is no drop to a lower mood to pass from assertion of God’s help to prayer for it. Rather it is the natural progress of faith. Both clauses of Psa 121:2 become specially significant if this is a song for pilgrims. Their daily march and their nightly encampment will then be placed under the care of Jehovah, who will hold up their feet unwearied on the road and watch unslumbering over their repose. But such a reference is not necessary. The language is quite general. It covers the whole ground of toil and rest, and prays for strength for the one and quiet security in the other. The remainder of the psalm expands the one thought of Jehovah the Keeper, with sweet reiteration, and yet comprehensive variation. First, the thought of the last clause of the preceding verse is caught up again. Jehovah is the keeper of the community, over which He watches with unslumbering care. He keeps Israel so long as Israel keeps His law; for the word so frequently used here is the same as is continually employed for observance of the commandments. He had seemed to slumber while Israel was in exile, and had been prayed to awake, in many a cry from the captives. Now they have learned that He never slumbers: His power is unwearied, and needs no recuperation; His watchfulness is never at fault. But universal as is His care it does not overlook the single defenceless suppliant. He is "thy Keeper," and will stand at thy right hand, where helpers stand, to shield thee from all dangers. Men lose sight of the individual in the multitude, and the wider their benevolence or beneficence, the less it takes account of units; but God loves all because He loves each, and the aggregate is kept because each member of it is. The light which floods the universe gently illumines every eye. The two conceptions of defence and impartation of power are smelted together in the pregnant phrase of Psa 121:5 b, " thy shade at thy right hand." The notion of shelter from evils predominates in the remainder of the psalm. It is applied in Psalms 121:6 to possible perils from physical causes: the fierce sunlight beat down on the pilgrim band, and the moon was believed, and apparently with correctness, to shed malignant influences on sleepers. The same antithesis of day and night, work and rest, which is found in Psalms 121:3 appears again here. The promise is widened out in Psalms 121:7 so as to be all-inclusive. "All evil" will be averted from him who has Jehovah for his keeper; therefore, if any so called Evil comes, he may be sure that it is Good with a veil on. We should apply the assurances of the psalm to the interpretation of life, as well as take them for the antidote of fearful anticipations. Equally comprehensive is the designation of that which is to be kept. It is "thy soul," the life or personal being. Whatever may be shorn away by the sharp shears of loss, that will be safe; and if it is, nothing else matters very much. The individual soul is of large account in God’s sight: He keeps it as a deposit entrusted to Him by faith. Much may go; but His hand closes round us when we commit ourselves into it, and none is able to pluck us thence. In the final verse, the psalmist recurs to his favourite antithesis of external toil and repose in the home, the two halves of the pilgrim life for every man; and while thus, in the first clause of the verse, he includes all varieties of circumstance, in the second he looks on into a future of which he does not see the bounds, and triumphs over all possible foes that may lurk in its dim recesses, in the assurance that, however far it may extend, and whatever strange conditions it may hide, the Keeper will be there, and all will be well. Whether or not he looked to the last "going out," our exodus from earth, (Luke 9:31; 2 Peter 1:15) or to that abundant entrance (2 Peter 1:11) into the true home which crowns the pilgrimage here; we cannot but read into his indefinite words their largest meaning, and rejoice that we have One who "is able to keep that which we have committed to Him against that day." Psalms 122:1-9 THIS is very distinctly a pilgrim psalm. But there is difficulty in determining the singer’s precise point of view, arising from the possibility of understanding the phrase in Psalms 122:2, "are standing," as meaning either "are" or "were standing" or "have stood." If it is taken as a present tense, the psalm begins by recalling the joy with which the pilgrims began their march, and in Psalms 122:2 rejoices in reaching the goal. Then, in Psalms 122:3, Psalms 122:4, Psalms 122:5 the psalmist paints, the sight of the city which gladdened the gazer’s eyes, remembers ancient glories when Jerusalem was the rallying point for united worship and the seat of the Davidic monarchy, and finally pours out patriotic exhortations to love Jerusalem and prayers for her peace and prosperity. This seems the most natural construing of the psalm. If, on the other hand, Psalms 122:2 refers to a past time, "the poet, now again returning home or actually returned, remembers the whole pilgrimage from its beginning onwards." This is possible; but the warmth of emotion in the exclamation in Psalms 122:3 is more appropriate to the moment of rapturous realisation of a long-sought joy than to the paler remembrance of it. Taking, then, the former view of the verse, we have the beginning and end of the pilgrimage brought into juxtaposition in Psalms 122:1 and Psalms 122:2. It was begun in joy; it ends in full attainment and a satisfied rapture, as the pilgrim finds the feet which have traversed many a weary mile planted at last within the city. How fading the annoyances of the road! Happy they whose life’s path ends where the psalmist’s did! The joy of fruition will surpass that of anticipation, and difficulties and dangers will be forgotten. Psalms 122:3-5 give voice to the crowding thoughts and memories waked by that moment of supreme joy, when dreams and hopes have become realities, and the pilgrim’s happy eyes do actually see the city. It stands "built," by which is best understood built anew, rising from the ruins of many years. It is "compact together," the former breaches in the walls and the melancholy gaps in the buildings being filled up. Others take the reference to be to the crowding of its houses, which its site, a narrow peninsula of rock with deep ravines on three sides, made necessary. But fair to his eyes as the Jerusalem of today looked, the poet-patriot sees auguster forms rising behind it, and recalls vanished glories, when all the twelve tribes came up to worship, according to the commandment, and there was yet a king in Israel. The religious and civil life of the nation had their centres in the city; and Jerusalem had become the seat of worship because it was the seat of the monarchy. These days were past; but though few in number, the tribes still were going up; and the psalmist does not feel the sadness but the sanctity of the vanished past. Thus moved to the depths of his soul, he breaks forth into exhortation to his companion pilgrims to pray for the peace of the city. There is a play on the meaning of the name in Psalms 122:6 a; for, as the Tel-el-Amarna tablets have told us, the name of the city of the priest-king was Uru Salim-the city of [the god of] peace. The prayer is that the no men may become omen, and that the hope that moved in the hearts that had so long ago and in the midst of wars given so fair a designation to their abode, may be fulfilled now at last. A similar play of words lies in the interchange of "peace" and "prosperity," which are closely similar in sound in the Hebrew. So sure is the psalmist that God will favour Zion, that he assures his companions that individual well-being will be secured by loyal love to her. The motive appealed to may be so put as to be mere selfishness, though, if any man loved Zion not for Zion’s sake but for his own, he could scarcely be deemed to love her at all. But rightly understood, the psalmist proclaims an everlasting truth, that the highest good is realised by sinking self in a passion of earnest love for and service to the City of God. Such love is in itself well-being; and while it may have no rewards appreciable by sense, it cannot fail of sharing in the good of Zion and the prosperity of God’s chosen. The singer puts forth the prayers which he enjoins on others, and rises high above all considerations of self. His desires are winged by two great motives-on the one hand, his self-oblivious wish for the good of those who are knit to him by common faith and worship; on the other, his loving reverence for the sacred house of Jehovah. That house hallowed every stone in the city. To wish for the prosperity of Jerusalem, forgetting that the Temple was in it, would have been mere earthly patriotism, a very questionable virtue. To wish and struggle for the growth of an external organisation called a Church, disregarding the Presence which gives it all its sanctity, is no uncommon fault in some who think that they are actuated by "zeal for the Lord," when it is a much more earthly flame that burns in them. Psalms 123:1-4 A SIGH and an upward gaze and a sigh! No period is more appropriate, as that of this psalm, than the early days after the return from exile, when the little community, which had come back with high hopes, found themselves a laughingstock to their comfortable and malicious neighbours. The contrast of tone with the joy of the preceding psalm is very striking. After the heights of devout gladness have been reached, it is still needful to come down to stern realities of struggle, and these can only be faced when the eye of patient dependence and hope is fixed on God. That attitude is the great lesson of this brief and perfect expression of wistful yet unfaltering trust joined with absolute submission. The upward look here is like. but also unlike, that in Psalms 121:1-8, in that this is less triumphant, though not less assured, and has an expression of lowly submission in the appealing gaze. Commentators quote illustrations of the silent observance of the master’s look by his rows of slaves; but these are not needed to elucidate the vivid image. It tells its own story. Absolute submission to God’s hand, whether it wields a rod or lavishes gifts or points to service, befits those whose highest honour is to be His slaves. They should stand where they can see Him; they should have their gaze fixed upon Him; they should look with patient trust, as well as with eager willingness to start into activity when He indicates His commands. The sigh for deliverance, in the second half of the psalm, is no breach of that patient submission. Trust and resignation do not kill natural shrinking from contempt and scorn. It is enough that they turn shrinking into supplication and lamentations into appeals to God. He lets His servants make their moan to Him, and tell how full their souls have long been of men’s scorn. As a plea with Him the psalmist urges the mockers’ "ease." In their security and full-fed complacency, they laughed at the struggling band, as men gorged with material good ever do at enthusiasts; but it is better to be contemned for the difficulties which cleaving to the ruins of God’s city brings, than to be the contemners in their selfish abundance. They are further designated as "haughty," by a word which the Hebrew margin reads as two words, meaning "proud ones of the oppressors"; but this is unnecessary, and the text yields a good meaning as it stands, though the word employed is unusual. This sweet psalm, with all its pained sense of the mockers’ gibes and their long duration, has no accent of impatience. Perfect submission, fixed observance, assured confidence that, "till He is gracious," it is best to bear what He sends, befit His servants, and need not hinder their patient cry to Him, nor their telling Him how long and hard their trial has been. Psalms 124:1-8 A may be traced connecting this with the two adjacent psalms. In Psalms 123:1-4, patient resignation sighed for deliverance, which here has been received and has changed the singer’s note into jubilant and wondering praise; while, in the next little lyric, we have the escaped Israel established in Jerusalem, and drawing omens of Divine guardianship from its impregnable position, on a mountain girt by mountains. This psalm is an outgush of the first rapture of astonishment and joy for deliverance so sudden and complete. It is most naturally taken as the expression of the feelings of the exiles on their restoration from Babylon. One thought runs through it all, that the sole actor in their deliverance has been Jehovah. No human arm has been bared for them; no created might could have rescued them from the rush of the swelling deluge. Like a bird in a net panting with fear and helplessness, they waited the fowler’s grasp; but, lo, by an unseen Power the net was broken, and they are free to wing their flight to their nest. So. triumphantly they ring out at last the Name which has been their help, abjuring any share in their own rescue, and content to owe it all to Him. The step-like structure is very obvious in this psalm. As Delitzsch puts it, "In order to take a step forward, it always goes back half a step." But the repetitions are not mere artistic embellishments; they beautifully correspond to the feelings expressed. A heart running over with thankful surprise at its own new security and freedom cannot but reiterate the occasion of its joy. It is quite as much devotion as art which says twice over that Jehovah was on the singers’ side. which twice recalls how nearly they had been submerged in the raging torrent, and twice remembers their escape from the closely wrapping but miraculously broken snare. A suppliant is not guilty of vain repetitions though he asks often for the same blessing, and thanksgiving for answered petitions should be as persistent as the petitions were. That must be a shallow gratitude which can be all poured out at one gush. The psalmist’s metaphors for Israel’s danger are familiar ones. "They had swallowed us alive" may refer to the open jaws of Sheol, as in other psalms, but more probably is simply a figure drawn from beasts of prey, as in Psalms 124:6. The other image of a furious swollen torrent sweeping over the heads (or, as here, over the soul) recalls the grand contrast drawn by Isaiah between the gently flowing "waters of Siloam" and the devastating rush of the "river," symbolising the King of Assyria, which, like some winter torrent swollen by the rains, suddenly rises and bears on its tawny bosom to the sea the ruins of men’s works and the corpses of the workers. The word rendered "proud" is a rare word, coming from a root meaning to boil over, and may be used here in its literal sense, but is more probably to be taken in its metaphorical meaning of haughty, and applied rather to the persons signified by the waters than to the flood itself. Psalms 124:6 and Psalms 124:7 are an advance on the preceding inasmuch as those described rather the imminence of danger, and these magnify the completeness of Jehovah’s delivering mercy. The comparison of the soul to a bird is beautiful. (Psalms 11:1) It hints at tremors and feebleness, at alternations of feeling like the flutter of some weak-winged songster, at the utter helplessness of the panting creature in the toils. One hand only could break the snare, and then the bruised wings were swiftly spread for flight once more, and up into the blue went the ransomed joy, with a song instead of harsh notes of alarm. "We-we are escaped." That is enough: we are out of the net. Whither the flight may be directed does not concern the singer in the first bliss of recovered freedom. All blessedness is contained in the one word "escaped," which therefore he reiterates, and with which the song closes, but for that final ascription of the glory of the escape to the mighty Name of Him who made heaven and earth. Psalms 125:1-5 THE references to the topography of Jerusalem in Psalms 125:1-2 do not absolutely require, though they recommend, the supposition, already mentioned. that this psalm completes a triad which covers the experience of the restored Israel from the time just prior to its deliverance up till the period of its return to Jerusalem. The strength of the city perched on its rocky peninsula, and surrounded by guardian heights, would be the more impressive to eyes accustomed to the plains of Babylon, where the only defence of cities was artificial. If this hypothesis as to the date of the psalm is accepted, its allusions to a foreign domination and to halfhearted members of the community, as distinguished from manifest workers of evil, fall in with the facts of the period. The little band of faithful men was surrounded by foes, and there were faint hearts among themselves, ready to temporise and "run with the hare," as well as "hunt with the hounds." In view of deliverance accomplished and of perils still to be faced, the psalmist sings this strong brief song of commendation of the excellence of Trust, anticipates as already fulfilled the complete emancipation of the land from alien rule, and proclaims, partly in prayer and partly in prediction, the great law of retribution-certain blessedness for those who are good, and destruction for the faithless. The first of the two grand images in Psalms 125:1-2, sets forth the stability of those who trust in Jehovah. The psalmist pictures Mount Zion somewhat singularly as "sitting steadfast," whereas the usual expression would be "stands firm." But the former conveys still more forcibly the image and impression of calm effortless immobility. Like some great animal couched at ease, the mountain lies there, in restful strength. Nothing can shake it, except One Presence, before which the hills "skip like young rams." Thus quietly steadfast and lapped in repose, not to be disturbed by any external force, should they be who trust in Jehovah, and shall be in the measure of their trust. But trust could not bring such steadfastness, unless the other figure in Psalms 125:2 represented a fact. The steadfastness of the trustful soul is the consequence of the encircling defence of Jehovah’s power. The mountain fortress is girdled by mountains; not, indeed, as if it was ringed about by an unbroken circle of manifestly higher peaks; but still Olivet rises above Zion on the east, and a spur of higher ground runs out thence and overlooks it on the north, while the levels rise to the west, and the so called Hill of Evil Counsel is on the south. They are not conspicuous summits, but they hide the city from those approaching, till their tops are reached. Perhaps the very inconspicuousness of these yet real defences suggested to the poet the invisible protection which to purblind eyes looked so poor, but was so valid. The hills of Bashan might look scornfully across Jordan to the humble heights round Jerusalem; but they were enough to guard the city. The psalmist uses no words of comparison, but lays his two facts side by side: the mountains round Jerusalem-Jehovah round His people. That circumvallation is their defence. They who have the everlasting hills for their bulwark need not trouble themselves to build a wall such as Babylon needed. Man’s artifices for protection are impertinent when God flings His hand round His people. Zechariah, the prophet of the Restoration, drew that conclusion from the same thought, when he declared that Jerusalem should be "inhabited as villages without walls," because Jehovah would be "unto her a wall of fire round about". (Zechariah 2:4-5) Psalms 125:3 seems at first sight to be appended to the preceding in defiance of logical connection, for its "for" would more naturally have been "therefore," since the deliverance of the land from foreign invaders is a consequence of Jehovah’s protection. But the psalmist’s faith is so strong that he regards that still further deliverance as already accomplished, and adduces it as a confirmation of the fact that Jehovah ever guards His people. In the immediate historical reference this verse points to a period when the lot of the righteous-i.e., the land of Israel-was, as it were, weighed down by the crushing sceptre of some alien power that had long lain on it. But the psalmist is sure that that is not going to last, because his eyes are lifted to the hills whence his aid comes. With like tenacity and longsightedness, Faith ever looks onward to the abolition of present evils, however stringent may be their grip, and however heavy may be the sceptre which Evil in possession of the heritage of God wields. The rod of the oppressor shall be broken, and one more proof given that they dwell safely who dwell encircled by God. The domination of evil, if protracted too long, may tempt good men, who are righteous because they trust, to lose their faith and so to lose their righteousness, and make common cause with apparently triumphant iniquity. It needs Divine wisdom to determine how long a trial must last in order that it may test faith, thereby strengthening it, and may not confound faith, thereby precipitating feeble souls into sin. He knows when to say, "It is enough." So the psalm ends with prayer and prediction, which both spring from the insight into Jehovah’s purposes which trust gives. The singer asks that the good may receive good, in accordance with the law of retribution. The expressions describing these are very noticeable, especially when connected with the designation of the same persons in Psalms 125:1 as those who trust in Jehovah. Trust makes righteous and good and upright in heart. If these characteristics are to be distinguished, righteous may refer to action in conformity with the law of God, good to the more gentle and beneficent virtues, and upright in heart to inward sincerity. Such persons will get "good" from Jehovah, the God of recompenses, and that good will be as various as their necessities and as wide as their capacities. But the righteous Protector of those who trust in Him is so, partly because He smites as well as blesses, and therefore the other half of the law of retribution comes into view, not as a petition, but as prediction. The psalmist uses a vivid image to describe half-hearted adherents to the people of Jehovah: "they bend their ways," so as to make them crooked. Sometimes the tortuous path points towards one direction, and then it swerves to almost the opposite. "Those crooked, wandering ways," in which irresolute men, who do not clearly know whether they are for Jehovah or for the other side, live lives miserable from vacillation, can never lead to steadfastness or to any good. The psalmist has taken his side. He knows whom he is for; and he knows, too, that there is at bottom little to choose between the coward who would fain be in both camps and the open antagonist. Therefore they shall share the same fate. Finally the poet, stretching out his hands over all Israel, as if blessing them like a priest, embraces all his hopes, petitions, and wishes in the one prayer "Peace be upon Israel!" He means the true Israel of God, (Galatians 6:16) upon whom the Apostle, with a reminiscence possibly of this psalm, invokes the like blessing, and whom he defines in the same spirit as the psalmist does, as those who walk according to this rule, and not according to the crooked paths of their own devising. Psalms 126:1-6 As in Psalms 85:1-13, the poet’s point of view here is in the midst of a partial restoration of Israel. In Psalms 126:1-3 he rejoices over its happy beginning, while in Psalms 126:4-6 he prays for and confidently expects its triumphant completion. Manifestly the circumstances fit the period to which most of these pilgrim psalms are to be referred-namely, the dawn of the restoration from Babylon. Here the pressure of the difficulties and hostility which the returning exiles met is but slightly expressed. The throb of wondering gratitude is still felt; and though tears mingle with laughter, and hard work which bears no immediate result has to be done, the singer’s confidence is unfaltering. His words set a noble example of the spirit in which inchoate deliverances should be welcomed, and toil for their completion encountered with the lightheartedness which is folly if it springs from self-trust, but wisdom and strength if its ground is the great things which Jehovah has begun to do. The word in Psalms 126:1 rendered captives is capable of other meanings. It is an unusual form, and is probably an error for the more common word which occurs in Psalms 126:4. It is most probable that the expressions should be identical in both instances, though small changes in a refrain are not infrequent. But if this correction is adopted, there is room for difference of opinion as to the meaning of the phrase. Cheyne, with the support of several other commentators, takes the phrase to mean "turn the fortunes" (lit., a turning), but allows that the "debate is not absolutely closed." (Critical Note Psalms 14:7) The ordinary rendering is, however, more natural "captivity" being the mass of captives. Others would regard the two words in Psalms 126:1 and Psalms 126:4 as different, and render the former "those who return" (Delitzsch) or "the returned" (Perowne). Sudden and great revolutions for the better have for their first effect bewilderment and a sense of unreality. Most men have some supreme moment of blessedness in their memories with which they were stunned; but, alas! it is oftener the rush of unexpected miseries that makes them wonder whether they are awake or dreaming. It is not lack of faith, but slowness in accommodating oneself to surprising new conditions, which makes these seem unreal at first. "The sober certainty of waking bliss" is sweeter than the first raptures. It is good to have had such experience of walking, as it were, on air: but it is better to plant firm feet on firm ground. The mood of the first part of this little psalm is momentary; but the steadfast toil amid discouragements, not uncheered by happy confidence, which is pictured in the second part, should be the permanent temper of those who have once tasted the brief emotion. The jubilant laughter and ringing cries with which the exiles streamed forth from bondage, and made the desert echo as they marched, witnessed to the nations that Jehovah had magnified His dealings with them. Their extorted acknowledgment is caught up triumphantly by the singer. He, as it were, thanks the Gentiles for teaching him that word. There is a world of restrained feeling, all the more impressive for the simplicity of the expression, in that quiet "We became glad." When the heathen attested the reality of the deliverance, Israel became calmly conscious of it. These exclamations of envious onlookers sufficed to convince the returning exiles that it was no dream befooling them. Tumultuous feeling steadied itself into conscious joy. There is no need to say more. The night of weeping was past, and Joy was their companion in the fresh morning light. But the work was but partly done. Difficulties and hardships were not abolished from the world, as Israel had half expected in the first flush of joy. We all are apt to think so, when some long wished and faintly hoped for good is ours at last. But not such is the Divine purpose for any life here. He gives moments of untroubled joy, when no cloud stains the blue and all the winds are still, in order to prepare us for toil amid tempests and gloomy skies. So the second half of the psalm breathes petitions for the completion of the Restoration, and animates the returned exiles with assurances that, whatever may be their toils, and however rough the weather in which they have to sow the seed, and however heavy the hearts with which they do it, "the slow result of winter showers" is sure. Lessons of persevering toil, of contented doing of preparatory work, of confidence that no such labour can fail to be profitable to the doer and to the world, have been drawn for centuries from the sweet words of this psalm. Who can tell how many hearts they have braced, how much patient toil they have inspired? The psalmist was sowing seed, the fruit of which he little dreamed of, when he wrote them, and his sheaves will be an exceeding weight indeed. The metaphor in Psalms 126:4 brings before the imagination the dried torrent beds in the arid Negeb, or Southland, which runs out into the Arabian desert. Dreary and desolate as these dried wadies lie bleaching in the sunshine, so disconsolate and lonely had the land been without inhabitants. The psalmist would fain see, not the thin trickle of a streamlet, to which the returned captives might be compared, but a full, great rush of rejoicing fellow countrymen coming back, like the torrents that fill the silent watercourses with flashing life. He prays, and he also prophesies "They who sow with tears" are the pioneers of the return, to whom he belonged. Psalms 126:6-6 merely expand the figure of Psa 126:5 with the substitution of the image of a single husbandman for the less vivid, clear cut plural. The expression rendered "handful of seed" means literally a "draught of seed"-i.e., the quantity taken out of the basket or cloth at one grasp, in order to be sown. It is difficult to convey the force of the infinitives in combination with participles and the finite verb in Psalms 126:6. But the first half of the verse seems to express repeated actions on the part of the husbandman, who often goes forth to sow, and weeps as he goes; while the second half expresses the certainty of his glad coming in with his arms full of sheaves. The meaning of the figure needs no illustration. It gives assurances fitted to animate to toil in the face of dangers without, and in spite of a heavy heart-namely, that no seed sown and watered with tears is lost; and further, that, though it often seems to be the law for earth that one soweth and another reapeth, in deepest truth "every man shall receive his own reward, according to his own labour," inasmuch as, hereafter, if not now, whatsoever of faith and toil and holy endeavour a man soweth, trusting to God to bless the springing thereof, that shall he also reap, In the highest sense and in the last result the prophet’s great words are ever true: "They shall not plant, and another eat, for My chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands". (Isaiah 65:22) Psalms 127:1-5 THIS pure expression of conscious dependence on God’s blessing for all well-being may possibly have special reference to the Israel of the Restoration. The instances of vain human effort and care would then have special force, when the ruins of many generations had to be rebuilt and the city to be guarded. But there is no need to seek for specific occasion, so general is this psalm. It sings in a spirit of happy trust the commonplace of all true religion, that God’s blessing prospers all things, and that effort is vain without it. There is no sweeter utterance of that truth anywhere, till we come to our Lord’s parallel teaching, lovelier still than that of our psalm, when He points us to the flowers of the field and the fowls of the air, as our teachers of the joyous, fair lives that can be lived, when no carking care mars their beauty. In Psalms 127:1 the examples chosen by the singer are naturally connected. The house when built is one in the many that make the city. The owner’s troubles are not over when it is built, since it has to be watched. It is as hard to keep as to acquire earthly goods. The psalmist uses the past tenses in describing the vanity of building and watching unblessed by God. "They" have built in vain, and watched in vain. He, as it were, places us at the point of time when the failure is developed, -the half-built house a ruin, the city sacked and in flames. Psalms 127:2 deals with domestic life within the built house and guarded city. It is vain to eke out the laborious day by early beginning and late ending. Long hours do not mean prosperous work. The evening meal may be put off till a late hour; and when the toil-worn man sits down to it, he may eat bread made bitter by labour. But all is in vain without God’s blessing. The last clause of the verse must be taken as presenting a contrast to the futile labour reprehended in the former clauses; and therefore the beautiful rendering of the A.V. must be abandoned, though it has given many sweet thoughts to trustful souls, and none sweeter than in Mrs. Browning’s pathetic lines. But clearly the contrast is between labour which effects nothing, but is like spinning ropes out of sea sand, and God’s gift of the good which the vain toil had aimed at, and which He gives to His beloved in their sleep. "So" seems here to be equivalent to "Even so," and the thought intended is probably that God’s gift to His beloved secures to them the same result as is ineffectually sought by godless struggles. This is no preaching of laziness masquerading as religious trust. The psalmist insists on one side of the truth. Not work, but self-torturing care and work, without seeking God’s blessing, are pronounced vanity. The remainder of the psalm dwells on one special instance of God’s gifts, that of a numerous family, which in accordance with the Hebrew sentiment, is regarded as a special blessing. But the psalmist is carried beyond his immediate purpose of pointing out that that chief earthly blessing, as he and his contemporaries accounted it, is God’s gift, and he lingers on the picture of a father surrounded in his old age by a band of stalwart sons born unto him in his vigorous youth, and so now able to surround him with a ring of strong protectors of his declining days. "They shall speak with their enemies in the gate." Probably "they" refers to the whole band, the father in the midst and his sons about him. The gate was the place where justice was administered, and where was the chief place of concourse. It is therefore improbable that actual warfare is meant; rather, in the disputes which might arise with neighbours, and in the intercourse of city life, which would breed enmities enough, the man with his sons about him could hold his own. And such blessing is God’s gift. The lesson of the psalm is one that needs to be ever repeated. It is so obvious that it is unseen by many, and apt to be unnoticed by all. There are two ways of going to work in reference to earthly good. One is that of struggling and toiling, pushing and snatching, fighting and envying, and that way comes to no successful issue; for if it nets what it has wriggled and wrestled for, it generally gets in some way or other an incapacity to enjoy the good won, which makes it far less than the good pursued. The other way is the way of looking to God and doing the appointed tasks with quiet dependence on Him, and that way always succeeds; for, with its modest or large outward results, there is given likewise a quiet heart set on God, and therefore capable of finding water in the desert and extracting honey from the rock. The one way is that of "young lions," who, for all their claws and strength, "do lack and suffer hunger"; the other is that of "them that seek the Lord," who "shall not want any good." Psalms 128:1-6 THE preceding psalm traced all prosperity and domestic felicity to God’s giving hand. It painted in its close the picture of a father surrounded by his sons able to defend him. This psalm presents the same blessings as the result of a devout life, in which the fear of Jehovah leads to obedience and diligence in labour. It presents the inner side of domestic happiness. It thus doubly supplements the former, lest any should think that God’s gift superseded man’s work, or that the only blessedness of fatherhood was that it supplied a corps of sturdy defenders. The first four verses describe the peaceful, happy life of the God-fearing man, and the last two invoke on him the blessing which alone makes such a life his. Blended with the sweet domesticity of the psalm is glowing love for Zion. However blessed the home, it is not to weaken the sense of belonging to the nation. No purer, fairer idyll was ever penned than this miniature picture of a happy home life. But its calm simple beauty has deep foundations. The poet sets forth the basis of all noble, as of all tranquil, life when he begins with the fear of Jehovah, and thence advances to practical conformity with His will, manifested by walking in the paths which He traces for men. Thence the transition is easy to the mention of diligent labour, and the singer is sure that such toil done on such principles and from such a motive cannot go unblessed. Outward prosperity does not follow good men’s work so surely as the letter of the psalm teaches, but the best fruits of such work are not those which can be stored in barns or enjoyed by sense; and the labourer who does his work "heartily, as to the Lord," will certainly reap a harvest in character and power and communion with God, whatever transitory gain may be attained or missed. The sweet little sketch of a joyous home in Psalms 128:3 is touched with true grace and feeling. The wife is happy in her motherhood, and ready, in the inner chambers (literally sides) of the house, where she does her share of work, to welcome her husband returning from the field. The family gathers for the meal won and sweetened by his toil; the children are in vigorous health, and growing up like young "layered" olive plants. It may be noted that this verse exhibits a home in the earlier stages of married life. and reflects the happy hopes associated with youthful children, all still gathered under the father’s roof; while, in the latter part of the psalm, a later stage is in view, when the father sits as a spectator rather than a worker, and sees children born to his children. Psalms 128:4 emphatically dwells once more on the foundation of all as laid in the fear of Jehovah. Happy a nation whose poets have such ideals and sing of such themes! How wide the gulf separating this "undisturbed song" of pure home joys from the foul ideals which baser songs try to adorn! Happy the man whose ambition is bounded by its limits, and whose life is "True to the kindred points of heaven and home"! Israel first taught the world how sacred the family is; and Christianity recognises "a church in the house" of every wedded pair whose love is hallowed by the fear of Jehovah. In Psalms 128:5-6, petitions take the place of assurances, for the singer knows that none of the good which he has been promising will come without that blessing of which the preceding psalm had spoken. All the beautiful and calm joys just described must flow from God, and be communicated from that place which is the seat of His self-revelation. The word rendered above "mayest thou look" is in the imperative form, which seems here to be intended to blend promise, wish, and command. It is the duty of the happiest husband and father not to let himself be so absorbed in the sweets of home as to have his heart beat languidly for the public weal. The subtle selfishness which is but too commonly the accompaniment of such blessings is to be resisted. From his cheerful hearth the eyes of a lover of Zion are to look out, and be gladdened when they see prosperity smiling on Zion. Many a Christian is so happy in his household that his duties to the Church, the nation, and the world are neglected. This ancient singer had a truer conception of the obligations flowing from personal and domestic blessings. He teaches us that it is not enough to "see children’s children," unless we have eyes to took for the prosperity of Jerusalem, and tongues which pray not only for those in our homes, but for "peace upon Israel." Psalms 129:1-8 THE point of view here is the same as in Psalms 124:1-8, with which the present psalm has much similarity both in subject and in expression. It is a retrospect of Israel’s past, in which the poet sees a uniform exemplification of two standing facts-sore affliction and wonderful deliverance. The bush burned, nec tamen consumebatur. "Cast down but not destroyed," is the summary of the Church’s history. No doubt the recent deliverance from captivity underlies this, as most of the pilgrim psalms. The second part (Psalms 129:5-8) blends confidence and wish, founded on the experience recorded in the first part, and prophesies and desires the overthrow of Israel’s foes. The right use of retrospect is to make it the ground of hope. They who have passed unscathed through such afflictions may well be sure that any tomorrow shall be as the yesterdays were, and that all future assaults will fail as all past ones have failed. The words which Israel is called upon to say twice with triumphant remembrance are the motto of the Ecclesia pressa in all ages. Ever there is antagonism; never is there overthrow. Israel’s "youth" was far back in the days of Egyptian bondage; and many an affliction has he since met, but he lives still, and his existence proves that "they have not prevailed against" him. Therefore the backward look is gladsome, though it sees so many trials. Survived sorrows yield joy and hope, as gashes in trees exude precious gums. Psalms 129:3 expresses Israel’s oppressions by a strong metaphor, in which two figures are blended-a slave under the lash, and a field furrowed by ploughing. Cruel lords had laid on the whip, till the victim’s back was scored with long wounds, straight and parallel, like the work of a ploughman. The Divine deliverance follows in Psalms 129:4. The first words of the verse do not stand in the usual order, if rendered "Jehovah is righteous," and are probably to be taken as above; "righteous" standing in apposition to "Jehovah," and expressing the Divine characteristic which guaranteed and in due time accomplished Israel’s deliverance. God could not but be true to His covenant obligations. Therefore He cut the "cord of the wicked." The figure is here changed to one occasioned by the former. Israel is now the draught ox harnessed to the plough; and thus both sides of his bondage are expressed-cruel treatment by the former, and hard toil by the latter, figure. The same act which, in the parallel 124th Psalm, is described as breaking the fowler’s snare, is in view here; and the restoration from Babylon suits the circumstances completely. The story of past futile attempts against Israel animates the confidence and vindicates the wish breathed in the latter half of the psalm. To hate Zion, which Jehovah so manifestly loves and guards, must be suicidal. It is something far nobler than selfish vengeance which desires and foresees the certain failure of attempts against it. The psalmist is still under the influence of his earlier metaphor of the ploughed field, but now has come to think of the harvest. The graphic image of the grass on flat housetops of clay, which springs quickly because it has no depth of earth, and withers as it springs, vividly describes the short-lived success and rapid extinction of plots against Zion and of the plotters. The word rendered above "shoots forth" is by some translated "is plucked up," and that meaning is defensible, but grass on the housetops would scarcely be worth plucking, and the word is used elsewhere for unsheathing a sword. It may, therefore, be taken here to refer to the shooting out of the spikelets from their covering. The psalmist dilates upon his metaphor in Psalms 129:7 which expresses the fruitlessness of assaults on God’s chosen. No harvest is to be reaped from such sowing. The enemies may plot and toil, and before their plans have had time to bud they are smitten into brown dust; and when the contrivers come expecting success, there is nothing to mow or gather. "They look for much, and behold little." So it has been; so it shall be; so it should be; so may it be, wishes the psalmist; and true hearts will say amen to his aspiration. Such reapers have no joy in harvest, and no man can invoke Jehovah’s blessing on their bad work. Psalms 129:8 brings up a lovely little picture of a harvest field, where passers-by shout their good wishes to the glad toilers, and are answered by these with like salutations. It is doubtful whether Psalms 129:8 c is spoken by the passers-by or is the reapers’ responsive greeting. The latter explanation gives animation to the scene. But in any case the verse suggests by contrast the gloomy silence of Israel’s would be destroyers, who find, as all who set themselves against Jehovah’s purposes do find, that He blasts their plans with His breath, and makes their "harvest a heap in the day of grief and desperate sorrow." Psalms 130:1-8 IN a very emphatic sense this is a song of ascents, for it climbs steadily from the abyss of penitence to the summits of hope. It falls into two divisions of four verses each, of which the former breathes the prayer of a soul penetrated by the consciousness of sin, and the latter the peaceful expectance of one that has tasted God’s forgiving mercy. These two parts are again divided into two groups of two verses, so that there are four stages in the psalmist’s progress from the depths to the sunny heights. In the first group we have the psalmist’s cry. He has called, and still calls. He reiterates in Psalms 130:2 the prayer that he had long offered and still presents. It is not only quotation, but is the cry of present need. What are these "depths" from which his voice sounds, as that of a man fallen into a pit and sending up a faint call? The expression does not merely refer to his creatural lowliness, nor even to his troubles, nor even to his depression of spirit. There are deeper pits than these-those into which the spirit feels itself going down, sick and giddy, when it realises its sinfulness. Unless a man has been down in that black abyss, he has scarcely cried to God as he should do. The beginning of true personal religion is the sense of personal sin. A slight conception of the gravity of that fact underlies inadequate conceptions of Christ’s nature and work, and is the mother of heresies in creed and superficialities and deadnesses in practice. A religion that sits lightly upon its professor, impelling to no acts of devotion, flashing out in no heroisms, rising to no heights of communion-that is to say, the average Christianity of great masses of so called Christians-bears proof, in its languor, that the man knows nothing about the depths, and has never cried to God from them. Further, if out of the depths we cry, we shall cry ourselves out of the depths. What can a man do who finds himself at the foot of a beetling cliff, the sea in front, the wall of rock at his back, without foothold for a mouse, between the tide at the bottom and the grass at the top? He can do but one thing: he can shout, and perhaps may be heard, and a rope may come dangling down that he can spring at and clutch. For sinful men in the miry pit the rope is already let down. and their grasping it is the same act as the psalmist’s cry. God has let down His forgiving love in Christ, and we need but the faith which accepts while it asks, and then we are swung up into the light and our feet set on a rock. Psalms 130:3-4 are the second stage. A dark fear shadows the singer’s soul, and is swept away by a joyful assurance. The word rendered above "mark" is literally keep or watch, as in Psalms 130:6, and here seems to mean to take account of, or retain in remembrance, in order to punish. If God should take man’s sin into account in His dispositions and dealings, "O Lord, who shall stand?" No man could sustain that righteous judgment. He must go down before it like a flimsy but before a whirlwind, or a weak enemy before a fierce charge. That thought comes to the psalmist like a blast of icy air from the north, and threatens to chill his hope to death and to blow his cry back into his throat. But its very hypothetical form holds a negation concealed in it. Such an implied negative is needed in order to explain the "for" of Psalms 130:4. The singer springs, as it were, to that confidence by a rebound from the other darker thought. We must have tremblingly entertained the contrary dread possibility before we can experience the relief and gladness of its counter truth. The word rendered "forgiveness" is a late form, being found only in two other late passages. (Nehemiah 9:17; Daniel 9:9) It literally means cutting off, and so suggests the merciful surgery by which the cancerous tumour is taken out of the soul. Such forgiveness is "with God," inherent in His nature. And that forgiveness lies at the root of true godliness. No man reverences, loves, and draws near to God so rapturously and so humbly as he who has made experience of His pardoning mercy, lifting a soul from its abysses of sin and misery. Therefore the psalmist taught by what pardon has done for him in drawing him lovingly near to God, declares that its great purpose is "that Thou mayest be feared," and that not only by the recipient, but by beholders. Strangely enough, many commentators have found a difficulty in this idea, which seems sun-clear to those whose own history explains it to them. Gratz, for instance, calls it "completely unintelligible." It has been very intelligible to many a penitent who has been by pardon transformed into a reverent lover of God. The next stage in the ascent from the depths is in Psalms 130:5-6, which breathe peaceful, patient hope. It may be doubtful whether the psalmist means to represent that attitude of expectance as prior to and securing forgiveness or as consequent upon it. The latter seems the more probable. A soul which has received God’s forgiveness is thereby led into tranquil, continuous, ever-rewarded waiting on Him, and hope of new gifts springs ever fresh in it. Such a soul sits quietly at His feet, trusting to His love, and looking for light and all else needed, to flow from Him. The singleness of the object of devout hope, the yearning which is not impatience, characterising that hope at its noblest, are beautifully painted in the simile of the watchers for morning. As they who have out watched the long night look eagerly to the flush that creeps up in the east, telling that their vigil is past, and heralding the stir and life of a new day with its wakening birds and fresh morning airs, so this singer’s eyes had turned to God and to Him only. Psalms 130:6 does not absolutely require the supplement "hopes." It may read simply "My soul is towards Jehovah"; and that translation gives still more emphatically the notion of complete turning of the whole being to God. Consciousness of sin was as a dark night; forgiveness flushed the Eastern heaven with prophetic twilight. So the psalmist waits for the light, and his soul is one aspiration towards God. In Psalms 130:7-8 the psalmist becomes an evangelist, inviting Israel to unite in his hope, that they may share in his pardon. In the depths he was alone, and felt as if the only beings in the universe were God and himself. The consciousness of sin isolates, and the sense of forgiveness unites. Whoever has known that "with Jehovah is pardon" is impelled thereby to invite others to learn the same lesson in the same sweet way. The psalmist has a broad gospel to preach, the generalisation of his own history. He had said in Psalms 130:4 that "with Jehovah is forgiveness" (lit. the forgiveness, possibly meaning the needed forgiveness), and he thereby had animated his own hope. Now he repeats the form of expression, only that he substitutes for "forgiveness" the lovingkindness which is its spring, and the redemption which is its result; and these he presses upon his fellows as reasons and encouragements for their hope. It is "abundant redemption," or "multiplied," as the word might be rendered. "Seventy times seven"-the perfect numbers seven and ten being multiplied together and their sum increased seven-fold-make a numerical symbol for the unfailing pardons which we are to bestow; and the sum of the Divine pardon is surely greater than that of the human. God’s forgiving grace is mightier than all sins, and able to conquer them all. "He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities"; not only from their consequences in punishment, but from their power, as well as from their guilt and their penalty. The psalmist means something a great deal deeper than deliverance from calamities which conscience declared to be the chastisement of sin. He speaks New Testament language. He was sure that God would redeem from all iniquity; but he lived in the twilight dawn, and had to watch for the morning. The sun is risen for us; but the light is the same in quality, though more in degree: "Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins." Psalms 131:1-3 A QUIET, because self-quieted, heart speaks here in quiet accents, not unlike the "crooning" of the peaceful child on its mother’s bosom, to which the sweet singer likens his soul. The psalm is the most perfect expression of the child-like spirit, which, as Christ has taught, is characteristic of the subjects of the kingdom of heaven. It follows a psalm of penitence, in which a contrite soul waited on Jehovah for pardon, and, finding it, exhorted Israel to hope in His redemption from all iniquity. Consciousness of sin and conscious reception of redemption therefrom precede true lowliness, and such lowliness should follow such consciousness. The psalmist does not pray; still less does he contradict his lowliness in the very act of declaring it, by pluming himself on it. He speaks in that serene and happy mood, sometimes granted to lowly souls, when fruition is more present than desire, and the child, folded to the Divine heart, feels its blessedness so satisfyingly that fears and hopes, wishes and dreams, are still. Simple words best speak tranquil joys. One note only is sounded in this psalm, which might almost be called a lullaby. How many hearts it has helped to hush! The haughtiness which the psalmist disclaims has its seat in the heart and its manifestation in supercilious glances. The lowly heart looks higher than the proud one does, for it lifts its eyes to the hills, and fixes them on Jehovah, as a slave on his lord. Lofty thoughts of self naturally breed ambitions which seek great spheres and would intermeddle with things above reach. The singer does not refer to questions beyond solution by human faculty, but to worldly ambitions aiming at prominence and position. He aims low, as far as earth is concerned; but he aims high, for his mark is in the heavens. Shaking off such ambitions and loftiness of spirit, he has found repose, as all do who clear their hearts of that perilous stuff. But it is to be noted that the calm which he enjoys is the fruit of his own self-control, by which his dominant self has smoothed and stilled the sensitive nature with its desires and passions. It is not the tranquillity of a calm nature which speaks here, but that into which the speaker has entered, by vigorous mastery of disturbing elements. How hard the struggle had been, how much bitter crying and petulant resistance there had been before the calm was won, is told by the lovely image of the weaned child. While being weaned it sobs and struggles, and all its little life is perturbed. So no man comes to have a quiet heart without much resolute self-suppression. But the figure tells of ultimate repose, even more plainly than of preceding struggle. For, once the process is accomplished, the child nestles satisfied on the mother’s warm bosom, and wishes nothing more than to lie there. So the man who has manfully taken in hand his own weaker and more yearning nature, and directed its desires away from earth by fixing them on God, is freed from the misery of hot desire, and passes into calm. He that ceases from his own works enters into rest. If a man thus compels his "soul" to cease its cravings for what earth can give, he will have to disregard its struggles and cries, but these will give place to quietness; and the fruition of the blessedness of setting all desires on God will be the best defence against the recurrence of longings once silenced. The psalmist would fain have all Israel share in his quietness of heart, and closes his tender snatch of song with a call to them to hope in Jehovah, whereby they, too, may enter into peace. The preceding psalm ended with the same call; but there God’s mercy in dealing with sin was principally in question, while here His sufficiency for all a soul’s wants is implied. The one secret of forgiveness and deliverance from iniquity is also the secret of rest from tyrannous longings and disturbing desires. Hope in Jehovah brings pardon, purity, and peace. Psalms 132:1-18 THE continuance of "the sure mercies of David" to his descendants for his sake is first besought from God, and is then promised, for his sake, by God Himself, speaking in the singer’s spirit. The special blessing sought for is Jehovah’s dwelling in His house, which is here contemplated as reared after long toil. Expositors differ, as usual, in regard to the date and occasion of this psalm. Its place among the pilgrim psalms raises a presumption in favour of a post-exilic date, and one class of commentators refers it confidently to the period of the rebuilding of the Temple. But the mention of the Ark (which disappeared after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple) can be reconciled with that supposed date only by a somewhat violent expedient. Nor is it easy to suppose that the repeated references to David’s descendants as reigning in accordance with God’s promise could have been written at a time when there was no king in Israel. Zerubbabel has indeed been suggested as "the anointed" of this psalm; but he was not king, and neither in fact nor in idea was he anointed. And could a singer in Israel, in the post-exilic period, have recalled the ancient promises without some passing sigh for their apparent falsification in the present? Psalms 89:1-52, is often referred to as the "twin" of this psalm. Its wailings over the vanished glories of the Davidic monarchy have nothing corresponding to them here. These considerations are against a post-exilic date, for which the chief argument is the inclusion of the psalm in the collection of pilgrim songs. If, on the other hand, we disregard its place in the Psalter and look at its contents, it must be admitted that they perfectly harmonise with the supposition that its occasion was the completion of Solomon’s Temple. The remembrance of David’s long-cherished purpose to build the House, of the many wanderings of the Ark, the glad summons to enter the courts to worship, the Divine promises to David, which were connected with his design of building a Temple, all fit in with this view of the occasion of the psalm. Singularly enough, some advocates of later dates than even the building of the second Temple catch in the psalm tones of depression, and see indications of its having been written when the glowing promises which it quotes appeared to have failed. It is not in reference to "Nature" only that "we receive but what we give." To other ears, with perhaps equal though opposite bias, glad confidence in a promise, of which the incipient fulfilment was being experienced, sounds in the psalm. To some it is plain that it was written when Ark and king had been swept away; to others it is equally clear that it presupposes the existence of both. The latter view is to the present writer the more probable. The psalm is not divided into regular strophes. There is, however, a broad division into two parts, of which Psalms 132:1-10 form the first, the pleading of Israel with Jehovah; and Psalms 132:11-18 the second, the answer of Jehovah to Israel. The first part is further divided into two: Psalms 132:1-5 setting forth David’s vow; Psalms 132:6-10 the congregation’s glad summons to enter the completed sanctuary and its prayer for blessings on the worshipping nation with its priests and king. The second part is Jehovah’s renewed promises, which take up and surpass the people’s prayer. It is broken by a single verse (Psalms 132:13), which is an interjected utterance of Israel’s. "One remembers anything to another, when one requites him for what he has done, or when one performs for him what one has promised him" (Delitzsch). David’s earnest longing to find a fixed place for the Ark, his long-continued and generous amassing of treasure for the purpose of building the Temple, are regarded as a plea with God. The solidarity of the family, which was so vividly realised in old times, reaches its highest expression in the thought that blessings to David’s descendants are as if given to him, sleeping in the royal tomb. Beautifully and humbly the singer, as representing the nation, has nothing to say of the toil of the actual builders. Not the hand which executes, but the heart and mind which conceived and cherished the plan, are its true author. The psalmist gives poetic version of David’s words in 2 Samuel 7:2. "See now, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the Ark of God dwelleth in curtains," contains in germ all which the psalmist here draws out of it. He, the aged king, was almost ashamed of his own ease. "God gave him rest from his enemies," but he will not "give sleep to his eyes" till he finds out a place for Jehovah. Wearied with a stormy life, he might well have left it to others to care for the work which the prophet had told him that he was not to be permitted to begin. But not so does a true man reason. Rather, he will consecrate to God his leisure and his old age, and will rejoice to originate work which he cannot hope to see completed, and even to gather materials which happier natures and times may turn to account. He will put his own comfort second, God’s service first. Such devotedness does make a plea with God. The psalmist’s prayer goes on that supposition, and God’s answer endorses it as valid. He does not require perfect faithfulness in His servants ere He prospers their work with His smile. Stained offerings, in which much of the leaven of earthly motives may be fermenting, are not therefore rejected. Psalms 132:6-10 are the petitions grounded on the preceding plea, and asking that Jehovah would dwell in the sanctuary and bless the worshippers. Psalms 132:6 offers great difficulties. It seems clear, however, that it and the next verse are to be taken as very closely connected (note the "we" and "us" occurring in them for the only time in the psalm). They seem to describe continuous actions, of which the climax is entrance into the sanctuary. The first question as to Psalms 132:6 is what the "it" is, which is spoken of in both clauses; and the most natural answer is-the Ark, alluded to here by anticipation, though not mentioned till Psalms 132:8. The irregularity is slight and not unexampled. The interpretation of the verse mainly depends on the meaning of the two designations of locality, "Ephrathah" and "the fields of the Wood." Usually the former is part of the name of Bethlehem, but the Ark in all its wanderings is never said to have been there. Most probably Shiloh, in which the Ark did remain for a time, is intended. But why should Shiloh be called Ephrathah? The answer usually given, but not altogether satisfactory, is that Shiloh lay in the territory of Ephraim, and that we have instances in which an Ephraimite is called an "Ephrathite," (Judges 12:5; 1 Samuel 1:1; 1 Kings 11:26) and therefore it may be presumed that the territory of Ephraim was called Ephrathah. "The fields of the Wood," on the other hand, is taken to be a free poetic variation of the name of Kirjath-jearim (the city of the woods), where the Ark long lay, and whence it was brought up to Jerusalem by David. In this understanding of the verse, the two places where it remained longest are brought together and the meaning of the whole verse is, "We heard that it lay long at Shiloh, but we found it in Kirjath-jearim." Delitzsch, followed by Cheyne, takes a different view, regarding "Ephrathah" as a name for the district in which Kirjath-jearim lay. He founds this explanation on the genealogies in 1 Chronicles 2:19; 1 Chronicles 2:50, according to which Caleb’s wife, Ephrath, was the mother of Hur, the ancestor of the Bethlehemites, and whose son Shobal was the ancestor of the people of Kirjath-jearim; Ephrathah was thus a fitting name for the whole district, which included both Bethlehem and Kirjath-jearim. In this understanding of the names, the verse means, "We heard that the Ark was at Kirjath-jearim, and there we found it." Psalms 132:7 must be taken as immediately connected with the preceding. If the same persons who found the Ark still speak, the "tabernacle" into which they encourage each other to enter must be the tent within which, as David said, it dwelt "in curtains"; and the joyful utterance of an earlier age will then be quoted by the still happier generation who, at the moment while they sing, see the sacred symbol of the Divine Presence enshrined within the Holy Place of the Temple. At all events, the petitions which follow are most naturally regarded as chanted forth at that supreme moment, though it is possible that the same feeling of the solidity of the nation in all generations, which, as applied to the reigning family, is seen in Psalms 132:1, may account for the worshippers in the new Temple identifying themselves with the earlier ones who brought up the Ark to Zion. The Church remains the same, while its individual members change. The first of the petitions is partly taken from the invocation in Numbers 10:35, when "the Ark set forward"; but there it was a prayer for guidance on the march; here, for Jehovah’s continuance in His fixed abode. It had wandered far and long. It had been planted in Shiloh, but had deserted that sanctuary which He had once loved. It had tarried for awhile at Mizpeh and at Bethel. It had been lost on the field of Aphek, been borne in triumph through Philistine cities, and sent back thence in terror. It had lain for three months in the house of Obed-edom, and for twenty years been hidden at Kirjath-jearim, It had been set with glad acclaim in the tabernacle provided by David, and now it stands in the Temple. There may it abide and go no more out! Solomon and Hiram and all their workmen may have done their best, and the result of their toils may stand gleaming in the sunlight in its fresh beauty; but something more is needed. Not till the Ark is in the Shrine does the Glory fill the house. The lesson is for all ages. Our organisations and works are incomplete without that quickening Presence. It will surely be given if we desire it. When His Church prays, "Arise, O Lord, into Thy rest, Thou and the Ark of Thy strength," His answer is swift and sure, "Lo, I am with you always." From this petition all the others flow. If "the Ark of Thy strength" dwells with us, we too shall be strong, and have that Might for our inspiration as well as our shield. "Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness." The pure vestments of the priests were symbols of stainless character, befitting the ministers of a holy God. The psalmist prays that the symbol may truly represent the inner reality. He distinguishes between priests and the mass of the people; but in the Church today, as indeed in the original constitution of Israel, all are priests, and must be clothed in a righteousness which they receive from above. They do not weave that robe, but they must "put on" the garment which Christ gives them. Righteousness is no hazy, theological virtue, having little to do with everyday life and small resemblance to secular morality. To be good, gentle, and just, self-forgetting and self-ruling, to practise the virtues which all men call "lovely and of good report," and to consecrate them all by reference to Him in whom they dwell united and complete, is to be righteous; and that righteousness is the garb required of, and given by God to, all those who seek it and minister in His Temple. "Let Thy favoured ones utter shrill cries of joy." Surely, if they dwell in the Temple, gladness will not fail them. True religion is joyful. If a man has only to lift his eyes to see the Ark, what but averted eyes should make him sad? True, there are enemies, but we are close to the fountain of strength. True, there are sins, but we can receive the garment of righteousness. True, there are wants, but the sacrifice whereof "the meek shall eat and be satisfied" is at hand. There is much unreached as yet, but there is a present God. So we may "walk all the day in the light of His countenance," and realise the truth of the paradox of always rejoicing, though sometimes we sorrow. The final petition is for the anointed king, that his prayers may be heard. To "turn away the face" is a graphic expression, drawn from the attitude of one who refuses to listen to a suppliant. It is harsh in the extreme to suppose that the king referred to is David himself, though Hupfeld and others take that view. The reference to Solomon is natural. Such are the psalmist’s petitions. The answers follow in the remainder of the psalm, which, as already noticed, is parted in two by an interjected verse (Psalms 132:13), breaking the continuity of the Divine Voice. The shape of the responses is determined by the form of the desires, and in every case the answer is larger than the prayer. The Divine utterance begins with a parallel between the oath of David and that of God. David "sware to Jehovah." Yes, but "Jehovah has sworn to David." That is grander and deeper. With this may be connected the similar parallel in Psalms 132:13 and Psalms 132:14 with Psalms 132:5. David had sought to "find a habitation" for Jehovah. But He Himself had chosen His habitation long ago. He is throned there now, not because of David’s choice or Solomon’s work, but because His will had settled the place of His feet. These correspondences of expression point to the great truth that God is His own all-sufficient reason. He is not won to dwell with men by their importunity, but in the depths of His unchangeable love lies the reason why He abides with us unthankful. The promise given in Psalms 132:12, which has respect to the closing petition of the preceding part, is substantially that contained in 2 Samuel 7:1-29. Similar references to that fundamental promise to David are found in Psalms 89:1-52, with which this psalm is sometimes taken to be parallel; but that psalm comes from a time when the faithful promise seemed to have failed for evermore, and breathes a sadness which is alien to the spirit of this song. Psalms 132:13 appears to be spoken by the people. It breaks the stream of promises. God has been speaking, but now, for a moment, He is spoken of. His choice of Zion for His dwelling is the glad fact, which the congregation feels so borne in on its consciousness that it breaks forth into speech. The "For" at the beginning of the verse gives a striking sequence, assigning, as it does, the Divine selection of Zion for His abode, as the reason for the establishment of the Davidic monarchy. If the throne was set up in Jerusalem, because there God would dwell, how solemn the obligation thereby laid on its occupant to rule as God’s viceroy, and how secure each in turn might feel, if he discharged the obligations of his office, that God would grant to the kingdom an equal date with the duration of His own abode! Throne and Temple are indissolubly connected. With Psalms 132:14 the Divine Voice resumes, and echoes the petitions of the earlier part. The psalmist asked God to arise into His rest, and He answers by granting the request with the added promise of perpetuity: "Here will I dwell forever." He adds a promise which had not been asked-abundance for all, and bread to fill even the poor. The psalmist asked that the priests might be clothed in righteousness, and the answer promises robes of salvation, which is the perfecting and most glorious issue of righteousness. The psalmist asked that God’s favoured ones might utter shrill cries of joy, and God replies with an emphatic reduplication of the word, which implies the exuberance and continuance of the gladness. The psalmist asked for favour to the anointed, and God replies by expanded and magnificent promises. The "horn" is an emblem of power. It shall continually "sprout"-i.e., the might of the royal house shall continually increase. The "lamp for Mine anointed" may be simply a metaphor for enduring prosperity and happiness, but many expositors take it to be a symbol of the continuance of the Davidic house, as in 1 Kings 15:4, where, however, the word employed is not the same as that used here, though closely connected with it. The promise of perpetuity to the house of David does not fit into the context as well as that of splendour and joy, and it has already been given in Psalms 132:12. Victory will attend the living representative of David, his foes being clothed by Jehovah with shame-i.e., being foiled in their hostile attempts-while their confusion is as a dark background, against which the radiance of his diadem sparkles the more brightly. These large promises are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, of the seed of David; and the psalm is Messianic, as presenting the ideal which it is sure shall be realised. and which is so in Him alone. The Divine promises teach the great truth that God over answers our desires, and puts to shame the poverty of our petitions by the wealth of His gifts. He is "able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think," for the measure of His doing is none other than "according to the Power that worketh in us," and the measure of that Power is none other than "the working of the strength of His might, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places." Psalms 133:1-3 IT is natural to suppose that this psalm was occasioned by, or at least refers to, the gathering of the pilgrims or restored exiles in Jerusalem. The patriot-poet’s heart glows at the sight of the assembled multitudes, and he points with exultation to the good and fair sight. Like the other short psalms in this group, this one is the expression of a single thought-the blessing of unity, and that not merely as shown in the family, but in the church state of the restored Israel. The remembrance of years of scattering among the nations, and of the schism of the Northern tribes, makes the sight of a united Israel the more blessed, even though its numbers are small. The psalm begins with a "Behold," as if the poet would summon others to look on the goodly spectacle which, in reality or in imagination, is spread before him. Israel is gathered together, and the sight is good, as securing substantial benefits, and "pleasant," as being lovely. The original in Psalms 133:1 b runs, "That brethren dwell also together." The "also" suggests that, in addition to local union, there should be heart harmony, as befits brothers. To speak in modern dialect, the psalmist cares little for external unity, if the spirit of oneness does not animate the corporate whole. His two lovely metaphors or parables set forth the same thought-namely, the all-diffusive, all-blessing nature of such inward concord. The repetition in both figures of the same word, "flows down," is not merely due to the "step-like" structure common to this with other of the pilgrim psalms, but is the key to its meaning. In the first emblem, the consecrating oil, poured on Aaron’s head, represents the gracious spirit of concord between brethren. The emblem is felicitous by reason of the preciousness, the fragrance, and the manifold uses of oil; but these are only to be taken into account in a subordinate degree, if at all. The one point of comparison is the flow of the oil from the priestly head on to the beard and thence to the garments. It is doubtful whether Psalms 133:2 d refers to the oil or to the beard of the high priest. The latter reference is preferred by many, but the former is more accordant with the parallelism, and with the use of the word "flows down," which can scarcely be twice used in regard to oil and dew, the main subjects in the figures, and be taken in an entirely different reference in the intervening clause. The "opening" (lit. mouth) of the robe is the upper edge or collar, the aperture through which the wearer’s head was passed. The second figure illustrates the same thought of the diffusive blessing of concord, but it presents some difficulty. How can the dew of Hermon in the far north fall on the mountains of Zion? Some commentators, as Delitzsch, try to make out that "an abundant dew in Jerusalem might rightly be accounted for by the influence of the cold current of air sweeping down from the north over Hermon." But that is a violent supposition; and there is no need to demand meteorological accuracy from a poet. It is the one dew which falls on both mountains; and since Hermon towers high above the lower height of Zion, and is visited with singular abundance of the nightly blessing, it is no inadmissible poetic licence to say that the loftier hill transmits it to the lesser. Such community of blessing is the result of fraternal concord, whereby the high serve the lowly, and no man grudgingly keeps anything to himself, but all share in the good of each. Dew, like oil, is fitted for this symbolic use, by reason of qualities which, though they do not come prominently into view, need not be wholly excluded. It refreshes the thirsty ground and quickens vegetation; so fraternal concord, falling gently on men’s spirits, and linking distant ones together by a mysterious chain of transmitted good, will help to revive failing strength and refresh parched places. That brotherly unity is blessed, not only because it diffuses itself, and so blesses all in whose hearts it dwells, but also because it is the condition on which still higher gifts are spread among brethren by their brethren’s mediation. God Himself pours on men the sacred anointing of His Divine Spirit and the dew of His quickening influences. When His servants are knit together, as they should be, they impart to one another the spiritual gifts received from above. When Christians are truly one as brethren, God’s grace will fructify through each to all. Psalms 133:3 b, c, seem to assign the reason why the dew of Hermon will descend on Zion-i.e., why the blessings of brotherly concord should there especially be realised. There God has appointed to be stored His blessing of life; therefore it becomes those who, dwelling there, receive that blessing, to be knit together in closest bonds, and to impart to their brethren what they receive from the Fountain of all good. That Zion should not be the home of concord, or that Jerusalem should not be the city of peace, contradicts both the name of the city and the priceless gift which Jehovah has placed there for all its citizens. Psalms 134:1-3 THIS fragment of song closes the pilgrim psalms after the manner of a blessing. It is evidently antiphonal, Psalms 134:1-2 being a greeting, the givers of which are answered in Psalms 134:3 by a corresponding salutation from the receivers. Who are the parties to the little dialogue is doubtful. Some have thought of two companies of priestly watchers meeting as they went their rounds in the Temple; others, more probably, take Psalms 134:1-2, to be addressed by the congregation to the priests, who had charge of the nightly service in the Temple, while Psalms 134:3 is the response of the latter, addressed to the speakers of Psa 134:1-2. 1 Chronicles 9:33 informs us that there was such a nightly service, of the nature of which, however, nothing is known. The designation "servants of Jehovah" here denotes not the people, but the priests, for whose official ministrations "stand" is a common term. They are exhorted to fill the night with prayer as well as watchfulness, and to let their hearts go up in blessing to Jehovah. The voice of praise should echo through the silent night and float over the sleeping city. The congregation is about to leave the crowed courts at the close of a day of worship, and now gives this parting salutation and charge to those who remain. The answer in Psalms 134:3 is addressed to each individual of the congregation-"Jehovah bless thee!" and it invokes on each a share in the blessing which, according to the preceding psalm, "Jehovah has commanded" in Zion. The watchers who remain in the sanctuary do not monopolise its blessings. These stream out by night, as by day, to all true hearts; and they are guaranteed by the creative omnipotence of Jehovah, the thought of which recurs so often in these pilgrim psalms, and may be due to the revulsion from idolatry consequent on the Captivity and Restoration. With this sweet interchange of greeting and exhortation to continual worship, this group of psalms joyously ends. Psalms 135:1-21 LIKE Psalms 97:1-12; Psalms 98:1-9, this is a cento, or piece of mosaic work, apparently intended as a call to worship Jehovah in the Temple. His greatness, as manifested in Nature, and especially in His planting Israel in its inheritance, is set forth as the reason for praise; and the contemptuous contrast of the nothingness of idols is repeated from Psalms 115:1-18, and followed, as there, by an exhortation to Israel to cleave to Him. We have not here to do with a song which gushed fresh from the singer’s heart, but with echoes of many strains which a devout and meditative soul had made its own. The flowers are arranged in a new bouquet, because the poet had long delighted in their fragrance. The ease with which he blends into a harmonious whole fragments from such diverse sources tells how familiar he was with these, and how well he loved them. Psalms 135:1-4 are an invocation to praise Jehovah, and largely consist of quotations or allusions. Thus Psalms 134:1 underlies Psalms 135:1-2. But here the reference to nightly praises is omitted, and the summons is addressed not only to those who stand in the house of Jehovah, but to those who stand in its courts. That expansion may mean that the call to worship is here directed to the people as well as to the priests (so in Psalms 135:19). Psalms 135:3 closely resembles Psalms 147:1, but the question of priority may be left undecided. Since the act of praise is said to be "pleasant" in Psalms 147:1, it is best to refer the same word here to the same thing, and not, as some would do, to the Name, or to take it as an epithet of Jehovah. To a loving soul praise is a delight. The songs which are not winged by the singer’s joy in singing will not rise high. True worship pours out its notes as birds do theirs-in order to express gladness which, unuttered, loads the heart. Psalms 135:4 somewhat passes beyond the bounds of the invocation proper, and anticipates the subsequent part of the psalm. Israel’s prerogative is so great to this singer that it forces utterance at once, though "out of season," as correct critics would say. But the throbs of a grateful heart are not always regular. It is impossible to keep the reasons for praise out of the summons to praise. Psalms 135:4 joyfully and humbly accepts the wonderful title given in Deuteronomy 7:6. In Psalms 135:5-7 God’s majesty as set forth in Nature is hymned. The psalmist says emphatically in Psalms 135:5 "I-I know," and implies the privilege which he shared, in common with his fellow Israelites (who appear in the "our" of the next clause), of knowing what the heathen did not know-how highly Jehovah was exalted above all their gods. Psalms 135:6 is from Psalms 115:3, with the expansion of defining the all-inclusive sphere of God’s sovereignty. Heaven, earth, seas, and depths cover all space. The enumeration of the provinces of His dominion prepares for that of the phases of His power in Nature, which is quoted with slight change from Jeremiah 10:13; Jeremiah 51:16. The mysterious might which gathers from some unknown region the filmy clouds which grow, no man knows how, in the clear blue; the power which weds in strange companionship the fire of the lightning flash and the torrents of rain; the controlling hand which urges forth the invisible wind, -these call for praise. But while the psalmist looks on physical phenomena with a devout poet’s eye, he turns from these to expatiate rather on what Jehovah has done for Israel. Psalmists are never weary of drawing confidence and courage for today from the deeds of the Exodus and the Conquest. Psalms 135:8 is copied Exodus 13:15, and the whole section is saturated with phraseology drawn from Deuteronomy. Psalms 135:13 is from Exodus 3:15, the narrative of the theophany at the Bush. That Name, proclaimed then as the basis of Moses’ mission and Israel’s hope, is now, after so many centuries and sorrows, the same, and it will endure forever. Psalms 135:14 is from Deuteronomy 32:36. Jehovah will right His people-i.e., deliver them from oppressors-which is the same thing as "relent concerning His servants," since His wrath was the reason of their subjection to their foes. That judicial deliverance of Israel is at once the sign that His Name, His revealed character, continues the same, unexhausted and unchanged forever, and the reason why the Name shall continue as the object of perpetual adoration and trust. Psalms 135:15-20 are taken bodily from Psalms 115:1-18, to which the reader is referred. Slight abbreviations and one notable difference occur. In Psalms 135:17 b, " Yea, there is no breath at all in their mouths," takes the place of "A nose is theirs-and they cannot smell." The variation has arisen from the fact that the particle of strong affirmation (yea) is spelt like the noun "nose," and that the word for "breath" resembles the verb "smell." The psalmist plays upon his original, and by his variation makes the expression of the idols’ lifelessness stronger. The final summons to praise, with which the end of the psalm returns to its beginning, is also moulded on Psalms 115:9-11, with the addition of "the house of Levi" to the three groups mentioned there, and the substitution of a call to "bless" for the original invitation to "trust." Psalms 135:21 looks back to the last verse of the preceding psalm, and significantly modifies it. There, as in Psalms 118:1-29, Jehovah’s blessing comes out of Zion to His people. Here the people’s blessing in return goes from Zion and rises to Jehovah. They gathered there for worship, and dwelt with Him in His city and Temple. Swift interchange of the God-given blessing, which consists in mercies and gifts of gracious deliverance, and of the human blessing, which consists in thanksgiving and praise, fills the hours of those who dwell with Jehovah, as guests in His house, and walk the streets of the city which He guards and Himself inhabits. Psalms 136:1-26 THIS psalm is evidently intended for liturgic use. It contains reminiscences of many parts, of Scripture, and is especially based on the previous psalm, which it follows closely in Psalms 136:10-18, and quotes directly in Psalms 136:19-22. Delitzsch points out that if these quoted verses are omitted, the psalm falls into triplets. It would then also contain twenty-two verses, corresponding to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The general trend of thought is like that of Psa 135:1-21; but the addition in each verse of the refrain gives a noble swing and force to this exulting song. The first triplet is a general invocation to praise, coloured by the phraseology of Deuteronomy. Psalms 136:2 a and Psalms 136:3 a quote Deuteronomy 10:17. The second and third triplets (Psalms 136:4-9) celebrate Jehovah’s creative power. "Doeth great wonders" (Psalms 136:4) is from Psalms 72:18. The thought of the Divine Wisdom as the creative agent occurs in Psalms 104:24, and attains noble expression in Proverbs 3:1-35. In Psalms 136:6 the word rendered spread is from the same root as that rendered "firmament" in Genesis. The office of the heavenly bodies to rule day and night is taken from Genesis 1:1-31. But the psalm looks at the story of Creation from an original point of view, when it rolls out in chorus, after each stage of that work, that its motive lay in the eternal lovingkindness of Jehovah. Creation is an act of Divine love. That is the deepest truth concerning all things visible. They are the witnesses, as they are the result, of lovingkindness which endures forever. Psalms 136:10-22 pass from world wide manifestations of that creative lovingkindness to those specially affecting Israel. If Psalms 136:19-22 are left out of notice, there are three triplets in which the Exodus, desert life, and conquest of Caanan are the themes, -the first (Psalms 136:10-12) recounting the departure; the second (Psalms 136:13-15) the passage of the Red Sea; the third (Psalms 136:16-18) the guidance during the forty years and the victories over enemies. The whole is largely taken from the preceding psalm, and has also numerous allusions to other parts of Scripture. Psalms 136:12 a-is found in Deuteronomy 4:34, etc. The word for dividing the Red Sea is peculiar. It means to hew in pieces or in two, and is used for cutting in halves the child in Solomon’s judgment; (1 Kings 3:25) while the word "parts" is a noun from the same root, and is found in Genesis 15:17, to describe the two portions into which Abraham clave the carcasses. Thus, as with a sword, Jehovah hewed the sea in two, and His people passed between the parts, as between the halves of the covenant sacrifice. In Psalms 136:15 the word describing Pharaoh’s destruction is taken from Exodus 14:27, and vividly describes it as a "shaking out," as one would vermin or filth from a robe. In the last triplet (Psalms 136:23-25) the singer comes to the Israel of the present. It, too, had experienced Jehovah’s remembrance in its time of need, and felt the merciful grasp of His hand plucking it, with loving violence, from the claws of the lion. The word for "low estate" and that for "tore us from the grasp" are only found besides in late writings-the former in Ecclesiastes 10:6, and the latter in Lamentations 5:8. But the song will not close with reference only to Israel’s blessings. He gives bread to all flesh. "The lovingkindness which flashes forth even in destructive acts, and is manifested especially in bringing Israel back from exile, stretches as wide in its beneficence as it did in its first creative acts, and sustains all flesh which it has made. Therefore the final call to praise, which rounds off the psalm by echoing its beginning, does not name Him by the Name which implied Israel’s special relation, but by that by which other peoples could and did address Him, "the God of heaven," from whom all good comes down on all the earth. Psalms 137:1-9 THE captivity is past, as the tenses in Psalms 137:1-3 show, and as is manifest from the very fact that its miseries have become themes for a psalm. Grief must be somewhat removed before it can be sung. But the strains of triumph heard in other psalms are wanting in this, which breathes passionate love for Jerusalem, tinged with sadness still. The date of the psalm is apparently the early days of the Return, when true-hearted patriots still felt the smart of recent bondage and sadly gazed on the dear ruins of the city. The singer passes in brief compass from tender music breathing plaintive remembrance of the captives’ lot, to passionate devotion, and at last to an outburst of vehement imprecation, magnificent in its fiery rush, amply explicable by Israel’s wrongs and Babylon’s crimes, and yet to be frankly acknowledged as moving on a lower plane of sentiment than is permissible to those who have learned to repay scorn with gentleness, hate with love, and injuries with desires for the injurer’s highest good. The coals of fire which this psalmist scatters among Israel’s foes are not those which Christ’s servants are bidden to heap on their enemies’ heads. Nothing sweeter or sadder was ever written than that delicate, deeply felt picture of the exiles in the early verses of the psalm. We see them sitting, as too heavy-hearted for activity, and half noting, as adding to their grief, the unfamiliar landscape round them, with its innumerable canals, and the monotonous "willows" (rather, a species of poplar) stretching along their banks. How unlike this flat, tame fertility to the dear homeland, with its hills and glens and rushing streams! The psalmist was probably a Temple singer, but he did not find solace even in "the harp, his sole remaining joy." No doubt many of the exiles made themselves at home in captivity, but there were some more keenly sensitive or more devout, who found that it was better to remember Zion and weep than to enjoy Babylon. "Alas, alas! how much less it is to hold converse with others than to remember thee!" So they sat, like Michaelangelo’s brooding figure of Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel, silent, motionless, lost in bittersweet memories. But there was another reason than their own sadness for hanging their idle harps upon the willows. Their coarse oppressors bade them sing to make mirth. They wished entertainment from the odd sounds of foreign music, or they were petulantly angry that such dumb hang-dog people should keep sullen faces, like unilluminated windows, when their masters were pleased to be merry. So, like tipsy revellers, they called out "Sing!" The request drove the iron deeper into sad hearts, for it came from those who had made the misery. They had led away the captives, and now they bid them make sport. The word rendered plunderers is difficult. The translation adopted here is that of the LXX and others. It requires a slight alteration of reading, which is approved by Hupfeld (as an alternative), Perowne, Baethgen, Graetz, etc. Cheyne follows Halevy in preferring another conjectural alteration which gives "dancers" ("and of our dancers, festive glee"), but admits that the other view is "somewhat more natural." The roystering Babylonians did not care what kind of songs their slaves sang. Temple music would do as well as any other; but the devout psalmist and his fellows shrank from profaning the sacred songs that praised Jehovah by making them parts of a heathen banquet. Such sacrilege would have been like Belshazzar’s using the Temple vessels for his orgy. "Give not that which is holy to dogs." And the singers were not influenced by superstition, but by reverence, and by sadness, when they could not sing these songs in that strange land. No doubt it was a fact that the Temple music fell into desuetude during the Captivity. There are moods and there are scenes in which it is profanation to utter the deep music which may be sounding on perpetually in the heart. "Songs unheard" are sometimes not only "sweetest," but the truest worship. The psalmist’s remembrances of Babylon are suddenly broken off. His heart burns as he broods on that past, and then lifts his eyes to see how forlorn and forgotten-like Jerusalem stands, as if appealing to her sons for help. A rush of emotion sweeps over him, and he breaks into a passion of vowed loyalty to the mother city. He has Jerusalem written on his heart. It is noteworthy that her remembrance was the exiles’ crown of sorrow; it now becomes the apex of the singer’s joy. No private occasion for gladness so moves the depths of a soul, smitten with the noble and ennobling love of the city of God, as does its prosperity. Alas that the so called citizens of the true city of God should have so tepid interest in its welfare, and be so much more keenly touched by individual than by public prosperity or adversity! Alas that so often they should neither weep when they remember its bondage nor exult in its advancement! Psalms 137:5 b is emphatic by its incompleteness. "May my right hand forget!" What? Some word like "power," "cunning," or "movement" may be supplied. It would be as impossibly unnatural for the poet to forget Jerusalem as for his hand to forget to move or cease to be conscious of its connection with his body. Psalms 137:6 d reads literally "Above the head of my joy": an expression which may either mean the summit of my joy-i.e., my greatest joy; or the sum of my joy-i.e., my whole joy. In either case the well-being of Jerusalem is the psalmist’s climax of gladness; and so utterly does he lose himself in the community founded by God, that all his springs of felicity are in her. He had chosen the better part. Unselfish gladness is the only lasting bliss; and only they drink of an unfailing river of pleasures whose chiefest delight lies in beholding and sharing in the rebuilding of God’s city on earth. The lightning flashes of the last part of the psalm need little commenting. The desire for the destruction of Zion’s enemies, which they express, is not the highest mood of the loyal citizen of God’s city, and is to be fully recognised as not in accordance with Christian morality. But it has been most unfairly judged, as if it were nothing nobler than ferocious thirsting for vengeance. It is a great deal more. It is desire for retribution, heavy as the count of crimes which demands it is heavy. It is a solemn appeal to God to sweep away the enemies of Zion, who, in hating her, rebelled against Him. First, the psalmist turns to the treacherous kinsmen of Israel, the Edomites, who had, as Obadiah says, "rejoiced over the children of Judah in the days of their destruction," (Obadiah 1:12) and stimulated the work of rasing the city. Then the singer turns to Babylon, and salutes her as already laid waste; for he is a seer as well as a singer, and is so sure of the judgment to be accomplished that it is as good as done. The most repellent part of the imprecation, that which contemplates the dreadful destruction of tender infants, has its harshness somewhat softened by the fact that it is the echo of Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Babylon, (Isaiah 13:16-18), and still further by the consideration that the purpose of the apparently barbarous cruelty was to make an end of a "seed of evil-doers," whose continuance meant misery for wide lands. Undoubtedly, the words are stern, and the temper they embody is harsh discord, when compared with the Christian spirit. But they are not the utterances of mere ferocious revenge. Rather they proclaim God’s judgments, not with the impassiveness, indeed, which best befits the executors of such terrible sentences, but still less with the malignant gratification of sanguinary vengeance which has been often attributed to them. Perhaps, if some of their modern critics had been under the yoke from which this psalmist has been delivered, they would have understood a little better how a good man of that age could rejoice that Babylon was fallen and all its race extirpated. Perhaps, it would do modern tender heartedness no harm to have a little more iron infused into its gentleness, and to lay to heart that the King of Peace must first be King of Righteousness, and that Destruction of evil is the complement of Preservation of Good. Psalms 138:1-8 This is the first of a group of eight psalms attributed to David in the superscriptions. It precedes the closing hallelujah psalms, and thus stands where a "find" of Davidic psalms at a late date would naturally be put. In some cases, there is no improbability in the assigned authorship; and this psalm is certainly singularly unlike those which precede it, and has many affinities with the earlier psalms ascribed to David. In reading it, one feels the return to familiar thoughts and tones. The fragrance it exhales wakes memories of former songs. But the resemblance may be due to the imitative habit so marked in the last book of the Psalter. If it is a late psalm, the speaker is probably the personified Israel, and the deliverance which seems to the singer to have transcended all previous manifestations of the Divine name is the Restoration, which has inspired so many of the preceding psalms. The supporters of the Davidic authorship, on the other hand, point to the promise to David by Nathan of the perpetuity of the kinghood in his line, as the occasion of the psalmist’s triumph. The structure of the psalm is simple. It falls into three parts, of which the two former consist of three verses each, and the last of two. In the first, the singer vows praise and recounts God’s wondrous dealings with him (Psalms 138:1-3); in the second, he looks out over all the earth in the confidence that these blessings, when known, will bring the world to worship (Psalms 138:4-6); and in the third, he pleads for the completion to himself of mercies begun (Psalms 138:7-8). The first part is the outpouring of a thankful heart for recent great blessing, which has been the fulfilment of a Divine promise. So absorbed in his blessedness is the singer that he neither names Jehovah as the object of his thanks, nor specifies what has set his heart vibrating. The great Giver and the great gift are magnified by being unspoken. To whom but Jehovah could the current of the psalmist’s praise set? He feels that Jehovah’s mercy to him requires him to become the herald of His name; and therefore he vows, in lofty consciousness of his mission, that he will ring out God’s praises in presence of false gods, whose worshippers have no such experience to loose their tongues. Dead gods have dumb devotees; the servants of the living Jehovah receive His acts of power, that they may proclaim His name. The special occasion for this singer’s praise has been some act, in which Jehovah’s faithfulness was very conspicuously shown. "Thou hast magnified Thy promise above all Thy name." If the history of David underlies the psalm, it is most natural to interpret the "promise" as that of the establishment of the monarchy. But the fulfilment, not the giving, of a promise is its magnifying, and hence one would incline to take the reference to be to the great manifestation of God’s troth in restoring Israel to its land. In any case the expression is peculiar, and has induced many attempts at emendation. Baethgen would strike out "Thy name" as a dittograph from the previous clause, and thus gets the reading "done great things beyond Thy word"-i.e., transcended the promise in fulfilment-which yields a good sense. Others make a slight alteration in the word "Thy name," and read it "Thy heavens," supposing that the psalmist is making the usual comparison between the manifestation of Divine power in Nature and in Revelation, or in the specific promise in question. But the text as it stands, though peculiar, is intelligible, and yields a meaning very appropriate to the singer’s astonished thankfulness. A heart amazed by the greatness of recent blessings is ever apt to think that they, glittering in fresh beauty, are greater, as they are nearer and newer, than the mercies which it has only heard of as of old. Today brings growing revelations of Jehovah to the waiting heart. The psalmist is singing, not dissertating. It is quite true that if his words are measured by the metaphysical theologian’s foot rule, they are inaccurate, for "the name of God cannot be surpassed by any single act of His, since every single act is but a manifestation of that name"; but thankfulness does not speak by rule, and the psalmist means to say that, so great has been the mercy given to him and so signal its confirmation of the Divine promise, that to him, at all events, that whole name blazes with new lustre, and breathes a deeper music. So should each man’s experience be the best teacher of what God is to all men. In Psalms 138:3 b the psalmist uses a remarkable expression, in saying that Jehovah had made him bold, or, as the word is literally, proud. The following words are a circumstantial or subsidiary clause, and indicate how the consciousness of inbreathed strength welling up in his soul gave him lofty confidence to confront foes. The second part (Psalms 138:4-6) resembles many earlier psalms in connecting the singer’s deliverance with a world wide manifestation of God’s name. Such a consciousness of a vocation to be the world’s evangelist is appropriate either to David or the collective Israel. Especially is it natural, and, as a fact, occurs in post-exilic psalms. Here "the words of Thy mouth" are equivalent to the promise already spoken of, the fulfilment of which has shown that Jehovah the High has regard to the lowly-i.e., to the psalmist; and "knows the lofty"-i.e., his oppressors-"afar off." He reads their characters thoroughly, without, as it were, needing to approach for minute study. The implication is that He will thwart their plans and judge the plotters. This great lesson of Jehovah’s providence, care for the lowly, faithfulness to His word, has exemplification in the psalmist’s history; and when it is known, the lofty ones of the earth shall learn the principles of Jehovah’s ways, and become lowly recipients of His favours and adoring singers of His great glory. The glowing vision is not yet fulfilled; but the singer was cherishing no illusions when he sang. It is true that the story of God’s great manifestation of Himself in Christ, in which He has magnified His Word above all His name, is one day to win the world. It is true that the revelation of a God who regards the lowly is the conquering Gospel which shall bow all hearts. In the third part (Psalms 138:7-8), the psalmist comes back to his own needs, and takes to his heart the calming assurance born of his experience, that he bears a charmed life. He but speaks the confidence which should strengthen every heart that rests on God. Such a one may be girdled about by troubles, but he will have an inner circle traced round him, within which no evil can venture. He may walk in the valley of the shadow of death unfearing, for God will hold his soul in life. Foes may pour out floods of enmity and wrath, but one strong hand will be stretched out against (or over) the wild deluge, and will draw the trustful soul out of its rush on to the safe shore. So was the psalmist assured; so may and should those be who have yet greater wonders for which to thank Jehovah. That last prayer of the psalm blends very beautifully confidence and petition. Its central clause is the basis of both the confidence in its first, and the petition in its last, clause. Because Jehovah’s lovingkindness endures forever, every man on whom His shaping Spirit has begun to work, or His grace in any form to bestow its gifts, may be sure that no exhaustion or change of these is possible. God is not as the foolish tower builder, who began and was not able to finish. He never stops till He has completed His work; and nothing short of the entire conformity of a soul to His likeness and the filling of it with Himself can be the termination of His loving purpose, or of His achieving grace. Therefore the psalmist "found it in his heart to pray" that God would not abandon the works of His own hands. The prayer appeals to His faithfulness and to His honour: It sets forth the obligations under which God comes by what He has done. It is a prayer which goes straight to His heart; and they who offer it receive the old answer, "I will not leave thee till I have done unto thee that which I have spoken to thee of." Psalms 139:1-24 THIS is the noblest utterance in the Psalter of pure contemplative theism, animated and not crushed by the thought of God’s omniscience and omnipresence. No less striking than the unequalled force and sublimity with which the psalm hymns the majestic attributes of an all-filling, all-knowing, all-creating God, is the firmness with which the singer’s personal relation to that God is grasped. Only in the last verses is there reference to other men. In the earlier parts of the psalm, there are but two beings in the universe-God and the psalmist. With impressive reiteration, God’s attributes are gazed on in their bearing on him. Not mere omniscience, but a knowledge which knows him altogether, not mere omnipresence, but a presence which he can nowhere escape, not mere creative power, but a power which shaped him, fill and thrill the psalmist’s soul. This is no cold theism, but vivid religion. Conscience and the consciousness of individual relation to God penetrate and vitalise the whole. Hence the sudden turn to prayer against evil men and for the singer’s direction in the right way, which closes the hymn, is natural, however abrupt. The course of thought is plain. There are four strophes of six verses each, -of which the first (Psalms 139:1-6) magnifies God’s omniscience; the second (Psalms 139:7-12), His omnipresence; the third (Psalms 139:13-18), His creative act, as the ground of the preceding attributes; and the fourth (Psalms 139:19-24) recoils from men who rebel against such a God, and joyfully submits to the searching of His omniscient eye, and the guidance of His ever-present hand. The psalmist is so thoroughly possessed by the thought of his personal relation to God that his meditation spontaneously takes the form of address to Him. That form adds much to the impressiveness, but is no rhetorical or poetic artifice. Rather, it is the shape in which such intense consciousness of God cannot but utter itself. How cold and abstract the awestruck sentences become, if we substitute "He" for "Thou," and "men" for "I" and "me"! The first overwhelming thought of God’s relation to the individual soul is that He completely knows the whole man. "Omniscience" is a pompous word, which leaves us unaffected by either awe or conscience. But the psalmist’s God was a God who came into close touch with him, and the psalmist’s religion translated the powerless generality of an attribute referring to the Divine relation to the universe into a continually exercised power having reference to himself. He utters his reverent consciousness of it in Psalms 139:1 in a single clause, and expands that verse in the succeeding ones. "Thou hast searched me" describes a process of minute investigation; "and known [me]," its result in complete knowledge. That knowledge is then followed out in various directions, and recognised as embracing the whole man in all his modes of action and repose, in all his inner and outward life. Psalms 139:2 and Psalms 139:3 are substantially parallel. "Down-sitting" and "uprising" correspond to "walking" and "lying down," and both antitheses express the contrast between action and rest. "My thought" in Psalms 139:2 corresponds to "my ways" in Psalms 139:3, -the former referring to the inner life of thought, purpose, and will; the latter to the outward activities which carry these into effect. Psalms 139:3 is a climax to Psalms 139:2, in so far as it ascribes a yet closer and more accurate knowledge to God. "Thou siftest" or winnowest gives a picturesque metaphor for careful and judicial scrutiny which discerns wheat from chaff. "Thou art familiar" implies intimate and habitual knowledge. But thought and action are not the whole man. The power of speech, which the Psalter always treats as solemn and a special object of Divine approval or condemnation, must also be taken into account. Psalms 139:4 brings it, too, under God’s cognisance. The meaning may either be that "There is no word on my tongue [which] Thou dost not know altogether"; or, "The word is not yet on my tongue, [but] lo! Thou knowest," etc. "Before it has shaped itself on the tongue, [much less been launched from it], thou knowest all its secret history" (Kay). The thought that God knows him through and through blends in the singer’s mind with the other, that God surrounds him on every side. Psalms 139:5 thus anticipates the thought of the next strophe, but presents it rather as the basis of God’s knowledge, and as limiting man’s freedom. But the psalmist does not feel that he is imprisoned, or that the hand laid on him is heavy. Rather, he rejoices in the defence of an encompassing God, who shuts off evil from him, as well as shuts him in from self-willed and self-determined action; and he is glad to be held by a hand so gentle as well as strong. Thou God seest me may either be a dread or a blessed thought. It may paralyse or stimulate. It should be the ally of conscience, and, while it stirs to all noble deeds, should also emancipate from all slavish fear. An exclamation of reverent wonder and confession of the limitation of human comprehension closes the strophe. Why should the thought that God is ever with the psalmist be put in the shape of vivid pictures of the impossibility of escape from Him? It is the sense of sin which leads men to hide from God, like Adam among the trees of the garden. The psalmist does not desire thus to flee, but he supposes the case, which would be only too common if men realised God’s knowledge of all their ways. He imagines himself reaching the extremities of the universe in vain flight, and stunned by finding God there. The utmost possible height is coupled with the utmost possible depth. Heaven and Sheol equally fail to give refuge from that moveless Face, which confronts the fugitive in both, and fills them as it fills all the intervening dim distances. The dawn flushes the east, and swiftly passes on roseate wings to the farthest bounds of the Mediterranean, which, to the psalmist, represented the extreme west, a land of mystery. In both places and in all the broad lands between, the fugitive would find himself in the grasp of the same hand (compare Psalms 139:5). Darkness is the friend of fugitives from men; but is transparent to God. In Psalms 139:11 the language is somewhat obscure. The word rendered above "cover" is doubtful, as the Hebrew text reads "bruise," which is quite unsuitable here. Probably there has been textual error, and the slight correction which yields the above sense is to be adopted, as by many moderns. The second clause of the verse carries on the supposition of the first, and is not to be regarded, as in the A.V., as stating the result of the supposition, or, in grammatical language, the apodosis. That begins with Psalms 139:12, and is marked there, as in Psalms 139:10, by "even." The third strophe (Psalms 139:13-18) grounds the psalmist’s relation to God on God’s creative act. The mysteries of conception and birth naturally struck the imagination of nonscientific man, and are to the psalmist the direct result of Divine power. He touches them with poetic delicacy and devout awe, casting a veil of metaphor over the mystery, and losing sight of human parents in the clear vision of the Divine Creator. There is room for his thought of the origin of the individual life, behind modern knowledge of embryology. In Psalms 139:13 the word rendered in the A.V. "possessed" is better understood in this context as meaning "formed," and that rendered there "covered" (as in Psalms 140:7) here means to plait or weave together, and picturesquely describes the interlacing bones and sinews, as in Job 10:11. But description passes into adoration in Psalms 139:14. Its language is somewhat obscure. The verb rendered "wondrously made" probably means here "selected" or "distinguished," and represents man as the chef d’oeuvre of the Divine Artificer. The psalmist cannot contemplate his own frame, God’s workmanship, without breaking into thanks, nor without being touched with awe. Every man carries in his own body reasons enough for reverent gratitude. The word for "bones" in Psalms 139:15 is a collective noun, and might be rendered "bony framework." The mysterious receptacle in which the unborn body takes shape and grows is delicately described as "secret" and likened to the hidden region of the underworld, where are the dead. The point of comparison is the mystery enwrapping both. The same comparison occurs in Job’s pathetic words, "Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither." It is doubtful whether the word rendered above "wrought like embroidery" refers to a pattern wrought by weaving or by needlework. In any case, it describes "the variegated colour of the individual members, especially of the viscera" (Delitzsch). The mysteries of antenatal being are still pursued in Psalms 139:16, which is extremely obscure. It is, however, plain that a sets forth the Divine knowledge of man in his first rudiments of corporeity. "My shapeless mass" is one word, meaning anything rolled up in a bundle or ball. But in b it is doubtful what is referred to in "they all." Strictly, the word should point back to something previously mentioned; and hence the A.V. and R.V. suppose that the "shapeless mass" is thought of as resolved into its component parts, and insert "my members"; but it is better to recognise a slight irregularity here, and to refer the word to the "days" immediately spoken of, which existed in the Divine foreknowledge long before they had real objective existence in the actual world. The last clause of the verse is capable of two different meanings, according as the Hebrew text or margin is followed. This is one of a number of cases in which there is a doubt whether we should read "not" or "to him" (or "it"). The Hebrew words having these meanings are each of two letters, the initial one being the same in both, and both words having the same sound. Confusion might easily therefore arise, and as a matter of fact there are numerous cases in which the text has the one and the margin the other of these two words. Here, if we adhere to the text, we read the negative, and then the force of the clause is to declare emphatically that the "days" were written in God’s book, and in a real sense "fashioned," when as yet they had not been recorded in earth’s calendars. If, on the other hand, the marginal reading is preferred, a striking meaning is obtained: "And for it [i.e., for the birth of the shapeless mass] there was one among them [predestined in God’s book]." In Psalms 139:17-18 the poet gathers together and crowns all his previous contemplations by the consideration that this God, knowing him altogether, ever near him, and Former of his being, has great "thoughts" or purposes affecting him individually. That assurance makes omniscience and omnipresence joys, and not terrors. The root meaning of the word rendered "precious" is weighty. The singer would weigh God’s thoughts towards him, and finds that they weigh down his scales. He would number them, and finds that they pass his enumeration. It is the same truth of the transcendent greatness and graciousness of God’s purposes as is conveyed in Isaiah’s "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My thoughts than your thoughts." "I awake, and am still with Thee,"-this is an artless expression of the psalmist’s blessedness in realising God’s continual nearness. He awakes from sleep, and is conscious of glad wonder to find that, like a tender mother by her slumbering child, God has been watching over him, and that all the blessed communion of past days abides as before. The fiery hatred of evil and evil men which burns in the last strophe offends many and startles more. But while the vehement prayer that "Thou wouldest slay the wicked" is not in a Christian tone, the recoil from those who could raise themselves against such a God is the necessary result of the psalmist’s delight in Him. Attraction and repulsion are equal and contrary. The measure of our cleaving to that which is good, and to Him who is good, settles the measure of our abhorrence of that which is evil. The abrupt passing from petition in Psalms 139:19 a to command in b has been smoothed away by a slight alteration which reads, "And that men of blood would depart from me"; but the variation in tense is more forcible, and corresponds with the speaker’s strong emotion. He cannot bear companionship with rebels against God. His indignation has no taint of personal feeling, but is pure zeal for God’s honour. Psalms 139:20 presents difficulties. The word rendered in the A.V. and R.V. (text) "speak against Thee" is peculiarly spelt if this is its meaning, and its construction is anomalous. Probably, therefore, the rendering should be as above. That meaning does not require a change of consonants, but only of vowel points. The difficulty of the last clause lies mainly in the word translated in the A.V. adversaries; and in the R.V. "enemies." That meaning is questionable; and if the word is the nominative to the verb in the clause, the construction is awkward, since the preceding "who" would naturally extend its influence to this clause. Textual emendation has been resorted to: the simplest form of which is to read "against Thee" for "Thine adversaries," a change of one letter. Another form of emendation, which is adopted by Cheyne and Graetz, substitutes "Thy name," and reads the whole, "And pronounce Thy name for falsehoods." Delitzsch adheres to the reading "adversaries," and by a harsh ellipsis makes the whole to run, "Who pronounce [Thy name] deceitfully-Thine adversaries." The vindication of the psalmist’s indignation lies in Psalms 139:21-22. That soul must glow with fervent love to God which feels wrong done to His majesty with as keen a pain as if it were itself struck. What God says to those who love Him, they in their degree say to God: "He that toucheth Thee toucheth the apple of mine eye." True, hate is not the Christian requital of hate, whether that is directed against God or God’s servant. But recoil there must be, if there is any vigour of devotion; only, pity and love must mingle with it, and the evil of hatred be overcome by their good. Very beautifully does the lowly prayer for searching and guidance follow the psalmist’s burst of fire. It is easier to glow with indignation against evildoers than to keep oneself from doing evil. Many secret sins may hide under a cloak of zeal for the Lord. So the psalmist prays that God would search him, not because he fancies that there is no lurking sin to be burned by the light of God’s eye, like vermin that nestle and multiply under stones and shrivel when the sunbeams strike them, but because he dreads that there is, and would fain have it cast out. The psalm began with declaring that Jehovah had searched and known the singer, and it ends with asking for that searching knowledge. It makes much difference, not indeed in the reality or completeness of God’s knowledge of use but in the good we derive therefrom, whether we welcome and submit to it, or try to close our trembling hearts, that do not wish to be cleansed of their perilous stuff, from that loving and purging gaze. God will cleanse the evil which He sees, if we are willing that He should see it. Thoughts of the inner life and "ways" of the outer are equally to be submitted to Him. There are two "ways" in which men can walk. The one is a "way of grief or pain," because that is its terminus. All sin is a blunder. And the inclination to such ways is "in me," as every man who has dealt honestly with himself knows. The other is "a way everlasting," a way which leads to permanent good, which continues uninterrupted through the vicissitudes of life, and even (though that was not in the psalmist’s mind) through the darkness of death, and with ever closer approximation to its goal in God, through the cycles of eternity. And that way is not "in me," but I must he led into and in it by the God who knows me altogether and is ever with me, to keep my feet in the way of life, if I hold the guiding hand which He lays upon me. Psalms 140:1-13 IN tone and contents this psalm has many parallels in the earlier books, especially among the psalms ascribed to David. Its originality lies principally in its use of peculiar words, and in the extreme obscurity of a part of it. The familiar situation of a man ringed about by slanderous enemies, the familiar metaphors of snares and traps, the familiar venture of faith flinging itself into God’s arms for refuge, the familiar prayers for retribution, are all here. One cannot argue about impressions, but the present writer receives the impression strongly from the psalm that it is cast in the Davidic manner by a later singer, and is rather an echo than an original voice, while, no doubt, the feelings expressed, both of distress and of confidence, are none the less felt by the singer, though he falls back on familiar forms for their expression. The arrangement is in four strophes of approximately equal length, the first and third of which consist of three verses of two clauses each, while the fourth is abnormally elongated by having three clauses in Psalms 140:10, and the second (Psalms 140:4-5) has two verses of three clauses each. Selah again appears as dividing the strophes, but is omitted at the end of the fourth, to which a closing strophe of two verses is appended. The first two strophes (Psalms 140:1-3 and Psalms 140:4-5) cover the same ground. Both set forth the psalmist’s need, and plead for deliverance. The first verse of the second strophe (Psalms 140:4) is almost identical with Psalms 140:1. Both paint the psalmist’s enemies as evil and violent, plotting against him privily. The only difference in the two strophes is in the metaphors describing the foes and their devices, and in the prominence given in the first to their slanderous and sharp tongues. The forms of their malice are like those in earlier psalms. A characteristic of the Psalter is the prominence given to hostility which has but bitter speech for its weapon. (Psalms 10:7; Psalms 58:4) The slanderer’s tongue is sharp, like a serpent’s, with which the popular opinion supposed that the venom was injected. The particular kind of serpent meant in Psalms 140:3 a-is doubtful, as the word is only found here. The figures for hostility in the second strophe are the other equally familiar ones of setting snares and traps. The contrivers are here called "proud" since their hostility to God’s servant implies haughty antagonism to God. But they are not too proud to resort to tricks. Cunning and pride do not go well together, but they are united in these enemies, who spread a net "by the hand of the path." In the third strophe, Faith rouses itself to lay hold on God. The psalmist turns from contemplating what his foes are doing, to realise what Jehovah is to him, and is wont to do for him. Since He is the singer’s God and protects him in all conflict, he "finds it in his heart" to ask confidently that the plots of the foe may be wrecked. Consciousness of danger drove the poet in the former strophes to prayer; Jehovah’s character and loving relations to him draw him, in this one. "The day of battle" is literally "the day of armour"-when weapons clash and helmets are fitting wear. Then Jehovah will be as a headpiece to him, for He always gives the shape to His help which is required at the moment. The words in Psalms 140:8 for "desires" and "plan" are found here only. The text here is evidently in some disorder, and the word which is now awkwardly attached to the end of Psa 140:8 is by most commentators carried over to Psalms 140:9. The change of position clears away difficulties in both verses, but a considerable crop remains in this fourth strophe. The language becomes gnarled and obscure under the stress of the poet’s emotion, as he prays for the destruction of his persecutors. If the transference of the word from Psalms 140:8 to Psalms 140:9 is accepted, that verse describes in vivid fashion what in prose would have been cast into the form of, "When my encompassers lift up the head [i.e., in proud assault], then, " etc. The psalmist omits the particles which would give a hypothetical form, and prefers to set the two things side by side, and leave sympathetic readers to feel their connection. Psalms 140:10 is very obscure. According to the Hebrew text, the first clause would have to be rendered, "Let coals be thrown on them"; but such a rendering is "contrary to the usage of the language." The Hebrew margin, therefore, corrects into, "Let them [i.e., men indefinitely] cast down coals"; but this is harsh, and the office is strange as one attributed to men. The emendation which finds favour with most moderns substitutes for the inappropriate verb of the present text that which is used in precisely the same connection in Psalms 11:6, and gives the reading, "Let Him [i.e., Jehovah] rain coals on them." The following clause then swiftly adds another element of horror. Fire rains down from above; fire yawns below. They are beaten down by the burning storm, and they fall into a mass of flame. The noun in Psalms 140:10 c is found only here, and is by some rendered "pits," by others "floods," and by others is corrected into "nets." If "floods" is taken as the meaning, destruction by water is set by the side of that by fire, as if the antagonistic elements forgot their opposition and joined in strange amity to sweep the wicked from the earth. The terrible strophe ends with the assured declaration of the Divinely appointed transiency of the evil-doers, especially of the slanderers against whom the psalmist took refuge in Jehovah. They shall be soon cut off, and the hunters (Psalms 140:5) shall become the hunted. "Evil"-i.e., the punishment of their evil deeds-shall dog their heels, and with stroke after stroke chase them as dogs would follow vermin. In Psalms 140:13-13, the poet comes back to brighter thoughts, and his words become limpid again with his change of mood. He "knows," as the result of meditation and experience, that not only he, but all the afflicted and needy, who are righteous and upright, have God on their side. He will stand by their side in their hour of distress; He will admit them to dwell by His side, in deep, still communion, made more real and sweet by the harassments of earth, which drive them for shelter and peace to His breast. That confidence is a certitude for the psalmist. He announces it with an "I know," and seals it with a "surely." Such is the issue of trouble which was spread before Jehovah, and vented itself in prayer. Psalms 141:1-10 PART of this psalm is hopelessly obscure, and the connection is difficult throughout. It is a prayer of a harassed soul, tempted to slacken its hold on God, and therefore betaking itself to Him. Nothing more definite as to author or occasion can be said with certainty. The allusions in Psalms 141:6-7 are dark to us, and the psalm must, in many parts, remain an enigma. Probably Baethgen and Cheyne are wise in giving up the attempt to extract any intelligible meaning from Psalms 141:5 c and Psalms 141:6 as the words stand, and falling back on asterisks. Delitzsch regards the psalm as being composed as suitable to "a Davidic situation," either by David himself, or by some one who wished to give expression in strains like David’s to David’s probable mood. It would thus be a "Dramatic Idyll," referring, according to Delitzsch, to Absalom’s revolt. Psalms 141:2 is taken by him to allude to the king’s absence from the sanctuary, and the obscure Psalms 141:6, to the fate of the leaders of the revolt and the return of the mass of the people to loyal submission. But this is a very precarious reference. The psalm begins with the cry to God to hear, which so often forms the introduction to psalms of complaint and supplications for deliverance. But here a special colouring is given by the petition that the psalmist’s prayers may be equivalent to incense and sacrifice. It does not follow that he was shut out from outward participation in worship, but only that he had learned what that worship meant. "Appear" might be rendered established. The word means to be set firm, or, reflexively, to station oneself and hence is taken by some as equivalent to "appear" or "come" before Thee; while others give prominence rather to the notion of stability in the word, and take it to mean continue-i.e., be accepted. There may be a reference to the morning sacrifice in the "incense," so that both morning and evening ritual would be included; but it is more natural to think of the evening incense, accompanying the evening "meal offering," and to suppose that the psalm is an evening prayer. The penetrating insight into the realities of spiritual worship which the singer has gained is more important to note than such questions about the scope of his figures. The prayer in Psalms 141:3-4 is for deliverance not from dangers, but from temptation to sin in word or deed. The psalmist is not suffering from the hostility of the workers of iniquity, but dreads becoming infected with their sin. This phase of trial was not David’s in Absalom’s revolt, and the prominence given to it here makes Delitzsch’s view of the psalm very doubtful. An earlier psalmist had vowed to "put a muzzle on his mouth," but a man’s own guard over his words will fail, unless God keeps the keeper, and, as it were, sets a sentry to watch the lips. The prayer for strength to resist temptation to wrong acts, which follows that against wrong speech, is curiously loaded with synonymous terms. The psalmist asks that his heart, which is but too apt to feel the risings of inclination to fall in with the manners around him, may be stiffened into wholesome loathing of every evil-"To practise practices in wickedness with men [perhaps, great men] who work iniquity." The clause rather drags, and the proposed insertion of "Let me not sit" before "with men that work iniquity" lightens the weight, and supplies a good parallel with "Let me not eat of their dainties." It is, however, purely conjectural, and the existing reading is intelligible, though heavy. The psalmist wishes to keep clear of association with the corrupt society around him, and desires to be preserved from temptations to fall in with its luxurious sensuality, lest thereby he should slide into imitation of its sins. He chose plain living, because he longed for high thinking, and noble doing, and grave, reverend speech. All this points to a period when the world fought against goodness by proffering vulgar delights, rather than by persecution. Martyrs have little need to pray that they may not be tempted by persecutors’ feasts. This man "scorned delights" and chose to dwell with good men. The connection of Psa 141:5 with the preceding seems to be that in it the psalmist professes his preference for the companionship of the righteous, even if they reprove him. It is better, in his judgment, to have the wholesome correction of the righteous than to feast with the wicked. But while this is the bearing of the first part of the verse, the last clause is obscure, almost to unintelligibility, and even the earlier ones are doubtful. If the Hebrew accents are adhered to, the rendering above must be adopted. The division of clauses and rendering adopted by Hupfeld and many others, and in the A.V. and R.V., gives vividness, but requires "it shall be" to be twice supplied. The whole sentence seems to run more smoothly, if the above translation is accepted. "Oil for the head" is that with which the head is anointed as for a feast and there is probably a tacit suggestion of a better festival, spread in the austere abodes of the righteous poor, than on the tables loaded with the dainties of the wicked rich. But what is the meaning and bearing of the last clause of Psa 141:5? No wholly satisfactory answer has been given. It is needless here to travel through the various more or less violent and unsuccessful attempts to unravel the obscurities of this clause and of the next verse. One sympathises with Hupfeld’s confession that it is an unwelcome (sauer) task to him to quote the whirl of varying conjectures. The rendering adopted above, as, on the whole, the least unlikely, is substantially Delitzsch’s. It means that the psalmist "will oppose no weapon but prayer to his enemies’ wickedness, and is therefore in the spiritual mood susceptible to well-meaning reproof." The logic of the clause is not very clear, even with this explanation. The psalmist’s continuance in prayer against the wicked is not very obviously a reason for his accepting kindly rebuke. But no better explanation is proposed. The darkness thickens in Psalms 141:6. The words indeed are all easily translatable; but what the whole sentence means, or what an allusion to the destruction of some unnamed people’s rulers has to do here, or who they are who hear the psalmist’s words, are questions as yet unanswered. To cast men down "by the sides [lit., hands] of a rock" is apparently an expression for the cruel punishment mentioned as actually inflicted on ten thousand of the "children of Seir". (2 Chronicles 25:12) Those who, with Delitzsch, take the revolt under Absalom to be the occasion of the psalm, find in the casting down of these judges an imaginative description of the destruction of the leaders of the revolt, who are supposed to be hurled down the rocks by the people whom they had misled while the latter, having again come to their right mind, attend to David’s word and find it pleasant and beneficent. But this explanation requires much supplementing of the language, and does not touch the difficulty of bringing the verse into connection with the preceding. Nor is the connection with what follows more clear. A various reading substitutes "Their" for "Our" in Psalms 141:7, and so makes the whole verse a description of the bones of the ill-fated "judges" lying in a litter at the base of the precipice. But apparently the reading is merely an attempt to explain the difficulty. Clearly enough the verse gives an extraordinarily energetic and graphic picture of a widespread slaughter. But who are the slain, and what event or events in the history of Israel are here imaginatively reproduced, is quite unknown. All that is certain is the tremendous force of the representation, the Aeschylean ruggedness of the metaphor, and the desperate condition to which it witnesses. The point of the figure lies in the resemblance of the bones strewn at the mouth of Sheol to broken clods turned up by a plough. Sheol seems here to waver between the meanings of the unseen world of souls and the grave. The unburied bones of slaughtered saints "lie scattered," as unregarded as the lumps of soil behind the ploughman. In Psalms 141:8-10 the familiar psalm tone recurs, and the language clears itself. The stream has been foaming among rocks in a gorge, but it has emerged into sunlight, and flows smoothly. Only the "For" at the beginning of Psa 141:8 is difficult, if taken to refer to the immediately preceding verses. Rather, it overleaps the obscure middle part of the psalm, and links on to the petitions of Psa 141:1-4. Patient, trustful expectance is the psalmist’s temper, which gazes not interrogatively, but with longing which is sure of satisfaction, towards God, from amidst the temptations or sorrows of earth. The reason for that fixed, look of faith lies in the Divine names, so rich in promise, which are here blended in an unusual combination. The devout heart pleads its own act of faith in conjunction with God’s names, and is sure that, since He is Jehovah, Lord, it cannot be vain to hide oneself in Him. Therefore, the singer prays for preservation from destruction. "Pour not out my soul" recalls Isaiah 53:12, where the same vivid metaphor is used. The prayer of the earlier verses was for protection from temptation; here, circumstances have darkened, and the psalmist’s life is in danger. Possibly the "snares" and "gins" of Psalms 141:9 mean both temptations and perils. The final petition in Psalms 141:10 is like many in earlier psalms. It was a fundamental article of faith for all the psalmists that a great Lex Talionis was at work, by which every sin was avenged in kind; and if one looks deeper than the outside of life, the faith is eternally warranted. For nothing is more certain than that, whomsoever else a man may harm by his sin, he harms himself most. Nets woven and spread for others may or may not ensnare them, but their meshes cling inextricably round the feet of their author, and their tightening folds will wrap him helpless, like a fly in a spider’s web. The last clause presents some difficulties. The word rendered above "at the same time" is literally "together," but seems to be used here, Psalms 4:8 (at once), with the meaning of simultaneously. The two things are cotemporaneous-the enemies’ ensnaring and the psalmist’s escape. The clause is abnormal in its order of words. It stands thus: "At the same time I, while [until] I pass by." Probably the irregularity arose from a desire to put the emphatic word "at the same time" in the prominent place. It is doubtful whether we should translate "while" or "until." Authorities are divided, and either meaning is allowable. But though the rendering until gives picturesqueness to the representation of the snared foe restrained and powerless, until his hoped for prey walks calmly, through the toils, the same idea is conveyed by while, and that rendering avoids the implication that the snaring lasted only as long as the time taken for the psalmist’s escape. What is uppermost in the psalmist’s mind is, in any case, not the destruction of his enemies, but their being made powerless to prevent his "passing by" their snares uncaptured. Psalms 142:1-7 THE superscription not only calls this a psalm of David’s, but specifies the circumstances of its composition. It breathes the same spirit of mingled fear and faith which characterises many earlier psalms, but one fails to catch the unmistakable note of freshness, and there are numerous echoes of preceding singers. This psalmist has as deep sorrows as his predecessors, and as firm a grasp of Jehovah, his helper. His song runs naturally in well-worn channels, and is none the less genuine and acceptable to God because it does. Trouble and lack of human sympathy or help have done their best work on him, since they have driven him to God’s breast. He has cried in vain to man; and now he has gathered himself up in a firm resolve to cast himself upon God. Men may take offence that they are only appealed to as a last resort, but God does not. The psalmist is too much in earnest to be content with unspoken prayers. His voice must help his thoughts. Wonderful is the power of articulate utterance in defining, and often in diminishing, sorrows. Put into words, many a burden shrinks. Speaking his grief, many a man is calmed and braced to endure. The complaint poured out before God ceases to flood the spirit; the straits told to Him begin to grip less tightly. Psalms 142:1 resembles Psalms 77:1, and Psalms 142:3 has the same vivid expression for a spirit swathed in melancholy as Psalms 77:3. Hupfeld would transfer Psalms 142:3 a to Psalms 142:2, as being superfluous in Psalms 142:3, and, in connection with the preceding, stating the situation or disposition from which the psalmist’s prayer flows. If so taken, the copula (And) introducing b will be equivalent to "But," and contrasts the omniscience of God with the psalmist’s faintheartedness. If the usual division of verses is retained, the same contrast is presented still more forcibly, and the copula may be rendered "Then." The outpouring of complaint is not meant to tell Jehovah what He does not know. It is for the complainer’s relief, not for God’s information. However a soul is wrapped, in gloom, the thought that God knows the road which is so dark brings a little creeping beam into the blackness. In the strength of that conviction the psalmist beseeches Jehovah to behold what He does behold. That is the paradox of faithful prayer, which asks for what it knows that it possesses, and dared not ask for unless it knew. The form of the word rendered above "Look" is irregular, a "hybrid" (Delitzsch); but when standing beside the following "see," it is best taken as an imperative of petition to Jehovah. The old versions render both wards as first person singular, in which they are followed by Baethgen, Graetz, and Cheyne. It is perhaps more natural that the psalmist should represent himself as looking round in vain for help, than that he should ask God to look; and, as Baethgen remarks, the copula before "There is none" in Psalms 142:4 b favours this reading, as it is superfluous with an imperative. In either case the drift of Psa 142:4 is to set forth the suppliant’s forlorn condition. The "right hand" is the place for a champion or helper, but this lonely sufferer’s is unguarded, and there is none who knows him, in the sense of recognising him as one to be helped. (Rth 2:10; Rth 2:19) Thus abandoned, friendless, and solitary, confronted by foes, he looks about for some place to hide in; but that too has failed him. (Job 11:20; Jeremiah 25:35; Amos 2:14) There is no man interested enough in him to make inquiry after his life. Whether he is alive or dead matters not a straw to any. Thus utterly naked of help, allies, and earthly hiding place, what can a man do but fling himself into the arms of God? This one does so. as the rest of the psalm tells. He had looked all round the horizon in vain for a safe cranny to creep into and escape. He was out in the open, without a bush or rock to hide behind, on all the dreary level. So he looks up, and suddenly there rises by his side an inexpugnable fortress, as if a mountain sprang at once from the flat earth. "I have said, Thou art my refuge!" Whoso says thus has a shelter, some one to care for him, and the gloom begins to thin off from his soul. The psalmist is not only safe in consequence of his prayer, but rich; for the soul which, by strong resolve, even in the midst of straits, claims God as its portion will at once realise its portion in God. The prayer for complete deliverance in Psalms 142:6-7 passes into calmness, even while it continues fully conscious of peril and of the power of the pursuers. Such is the reward of invoking Jehovah’s help. Agitation is soothed, and, even before any outward effect has been manifest, the peace of God begins to shed itself over heart and mind. The suppliant still spreads his needs before God, is still conscious of much weakness, of strong persecutors, and feels that he is, as it were, in prison (an evident metaphor, though Graetz, with singular prosaicness, will have it to be literal); but he has hold of God now, and so is sure of deliverance, and already begins to shape his lips for songs of praise, and to anticipate the triumph which his experience will afford to those who are righteous, and so are his fellows. He was not, then, so utterly solitary as he had wailed that he was. There were some who would joy in his joy, even if they could not help his misery. But the soul that has to wade through deep waters has always to do it alone; for no human sympathy reaches to full knowledge of, or share in, even the best loved one’s grief. We have companions in joy; sorrow we have to face by ourselves. Unless we have Jesus with us in the darkness, we have no one. The word rendered above "shall glory" is taken in different meanings. According to some, it is to be rendered here "surround"-i.e., with congratulations; others would take the meaning to be "shall crown themselves"-i.e., " triumph on my account" (Delitzsch, etc.). Graetz suggests a plausible emendation, which Cheyne adopts, reading "glory in," the resulting meaning being the same as that of Delitzsch. The notion of participation in the psalmist’s triumph is evidently intended to be conveyed; and any of these renderings preserves that. Possibly surround is most in accordance with the usage of the word. Thus the psalmist’s plaints end, as plaints which are prayers ever do, in triumph anticipated by faith, and one day to be realised in experience. Psalms 143:1-12 THIS psalm’s depth of sadness and contrition, blended with yearning trust, recalls the earlier psalms attributed to David. Probably this general resemblance in inwardness and mood is all that is meant by the superscription in calling it "a psalm of David." Its copious use of quotations and allusions indicate a late date. But there is no warrant for taking the speaker to be the personified Israel. It is clearly divided into two equal halves, as indicated by the Selah, which is not found in Books 4 and 5, except here, and in Psalms 140:1-13. The former half (Psalms 143:1-6) is complaint; the latter (Psalms 143:7-12), petition. Each part may again be regarded as falling into two equal portions, so that the complaint branches out into a plaintive description of the psalmist’s peril (Psalms 143:1-3), and a melancholy disclosure of his feelings (Psalms 143:4-6); while the prayer is similarly parted into cries for deliverance (Psalms 143:7-9), and for inward enlightenment and help (Psalms 143:10-12). But we are not reading a logical treatise, but listening to the cry of a tried spirit, and so need not wonder if the discernible sequence of thought is here and there broken. The psalmist knows that his affliction is deserved. His enemy could not have hunted and crushed him (Psalms 143:3) unless God had been thereby punishing him. His peril has forced home the penitent conviction of his sin, and therefore he must first have matters set right between him and God by Divine forgiveness. His cry for help is not based upon any claims of his own, nor even on his extremity of need, but solely on God’s character, and especially on the twin attributes of Faithfulness and Righteousness. By the latter is not meant the retributive righteousness which gives according to desert, but that by which He maintains the order of salvation established by His holy love. The prayer anticipates St. John’s declaration that God is "faithful and just to forgive us our sins." That answer in righteousness is as eagerly desired as God’s dealing on the footing of retributive justice is shrunk from. "Enter not into judgment with Thy servant" is not a prayer referring to a future appearance before the Judge of all, but the judgment deprecated is plainly the enmity of men, which, as the next verse complains, is crushing the psalmist’s life out of him. His cry is for deliverance from it, but he feels that a more precious gift must precede outward deliverance and God’s forgiveness must first be sealed on his soul. The conviction that, when the light of God’s face is turned on the purest life, it reveals dark stains which retributive justice cannot but condemn, is not. in the psalmist’s mouth, a palliation of his guilt. Rather, it drives him to take his place among the multitude of offenders, and from that lowly position to cry for pardon to the very Judge whose judgment he cannot meet. The blessedness of contrite trust is that it nestles the closer to God, the more it feels its unworthiness. The child hides its face on the mother’s bosom when it has done wrong. God is our refuge from God. A little beam of light steals into the penitent’s darkness, while he calls himself God’s servant, and ventures to plead that relation, though he has done what was unworthy of it, as a reason for pardon. The significant "For" beginning Psalms 143:3 shows that the enemy’s acts were, to the contrite psalmist, those of God’s stern justice. Psalms 143:3 a, b, are moulded on Psalms 7:5, and c is verbally identical with Lamentations 3:6. "The dead of long ago" is by some rendered dead forever; but the translation adopted above adds force to the psalmist’s sad description of himself, by likening him to those forgotten ones away back in the mists of bygone ages. In Psalms 143:4-6 the record of the emotions caused by his peril follows. They begin with the natural gloom. As in Psalms 142:3 (with which this has many points of resemblance, possibly indicating identity of author), he describes his "spirit" as swathed in dark robes of melancholy. His heart, too, the centre of personality, was stunned or benumbed, so that it almost ceased to beat. What should a "servant" of Jehovah’s, brought to such a pass, do? If he is truly God’s, he will do precisely what this man did. He will compel his thoughts to take another direction, and call Memory in to fight Despair and feed Hope. His own past and God’s past are arguments enough to cheer the most gloom-wrapped sufferer. "A sorrow’s crown of sorrow" may be "remembering happier things," but the remembrance will be better used to discrown a sorrow which threatens to lord it over a life. Psalms 77:5-6; Psalms 77:11-12, has shaped the expressions here. Both the contrast of present misery with past mercy, and the assurances of present help given by that past mercy, move the psalmist to appeal to God, stretching out his hands in entreaty. Psalms 63:1 echoes in Psalms 143:6 b, the pathos and beauty of which need no elucidation. The very cracks in parched ground are like mouths opened for the delaying rains; so the singer’s soul was gaping wide in trouble for God’s coming, which would refresh and fertilise. Blessed is that weariness which is directed to Him; it ever brings the showers of grace for which it longs. The construction of Psa 143:6 b is doubtful, and the supplement "thirsteth" (A.V. and R.V.) is possibly better than the "is" given above. The second half of the psalm is purely petition. Psalms 143:7-9 ask especially for outward deliverance. They abound with reminiscences of earlier psalms. "Make haste, answer me" recalls Psalms 69:17; "my spirit faints" is like Psalms 84:2; "Hide not Thy face from me" is a standing petition, as in Psalms 27:9; Psalms 102:2, etc., "Lest I become like those who descend into the pit" is exactly reproduced from Psalms 28:1. The prayer for the manifestation of God’s lovingkindness in the morning is paralleled in Psalms 90:14, and that for illumination as to the way to walk in is like Exodus 33:13 Psalms 25:4. The plea "To Thee do I lift my soul" is found in Psalms 25:1; Psalms 86:4. The plea appended to the petition in Psalms 143:9 b is difficult. Literally, the words run, "To Thee have I covered [myself]," which can best be explained as a pregnant construction, equivalent to "I have fled to Thee and hid myself in Thee." Much divergence exists in the renderings of the clause. But a slight emendation, adopted by Hupfeld and Cheyne from an ancient Jewish commentator, reads the familiar expression, "I have fled for refuge." Baethgen prefers to read "have waited," which also requires but a trivial alteration; while Graetz reaches substantially the same result by another way, and would render "I have hope." A glance at these three verses of petition as a whole brings out the sequence of the prayers and of their pleas. The deepest longing of the devout soul is for the shining of God’s face, the consciousness of His loving regard, and that not only because it scatters fears and foes, but because it is good to bathe in that sunshine. The next longing is for the dawning of a glad morning, which will bring to a waiting heart sweet whispers of God’s lovingkindness, as shown by outward deliverances. The night of fear has been dark and tearful, but joy comes with the morning. The next need is for guidance in the way in which a man should go, which here must be taken in the lower sense of practical direction, rather than in any higher meaning. That higher meaning follows in Psalms 143:10-12; but in Psalms 143:8 the suppliant asks to be shown the path by which he can secure deliverance from his foes. That deliverance is the last of his petitions. His pleas are beautiful as examples of the logic of supplication. He begins with his great need. His spirit faints, and he is on the edge of the black pit into which so much brightness and strength have gone down. The margin is slippery and crumbling; his feet are feeble. One Helper alone can hold him up. But his own exceeding need is not all that he pleads. He urges his trust, his fixing of his desires, hopes, and whole self, by a dead lift of faith, on God. That is a reason for Divine help. Anything is possible rather than that such hope should be disappointed. It cannot be that any man, who has fled for sanctuary to the asylum of God’s heart, should be dragged thence and slain before the God whose altar he has vainly clasped. The last part (Psalms 143:10-12) puts foremost the prayer for conformity of will with God’s and, though it closes with recurring prayer for outward deliverance, yet breathes desires for more inward blessings. As in the preceding verses, there are, in these closing ones, many echoes of other psalms. The sequence of petitions and pleas is instructive. To do, not merely to know, God’s will is the condition of all blessedness, and will be the deepest desire of every man who is truly God’s servant. But that obedience of heart and hand must be taught by God, and He regards our taking Him for our God as establishing a claim on Him to give all illumination of heart and all bending of will and all skill of hand which are necessary to make us doers of His will. His teaching is no mere outward communication of knowledge, but an in-breathing of power to discern, and of disposition and ability to perform, what is His will. Psalms 143:10 b is best taken as a continuous sentence, embodying a prayer for guidance. The plea on which it rests remains the same, though the statement of it as a separate clause is not adopted in our translation. For the fact that God’s spirit is "good"-i.e., beneficently self-communicative-heartens us to ask, and binds Him to give, all such direction as is needed. This is not a mere repetition of the prayer in Psalms 143:8, but transcends it. "A level land" (or, according to a possible suggested emendation, path) is one in which the psalmist can freely walk, unhindered in doing God’s will. His next petition goes deepest of the three, inasmuch as it asks for that new Divine life to be imparted, without which no teaching to do God’s will can be assimilated, and no circumstances, however favourable, will conduce to doing it. He may not have known all the depth which his prayer sounded; but no man who has real desires to conform heart and life to the supreme will of God but must have felt his need of a purer life to be poured into his spirit. As this prayer is deep, so its plea is high. "For Thy name’s sake" nothing can be pleaded of such force as that. God supremely desires the glory of His name; and, for the sake of men whose blessedness depends on their knowing and loving it, will do nothing that can dim its lustre. His name is the record of His past acts, the disclosure of that in Him which is knowable. That name contains the principles of all His future acts. He will be what He has been. He will magnify His name and the humblest, most tormented soul that can say, "Thou art my God," may be sure that Divinely given life will throb in it, and that even its lowliness may contribute to the honour of the name. The hunted psalmist cannot but come back, in the close of his psalm, to his actual circumstances, for earthly needs do clog the soul’s wings. He unites righteousness and lovingkindness as cooperating powers, as in Psalms 143:1 he had united faithfulness and righteousness. And as in the first verses he had blended pleas drawn from God’s character with those drawn from his relation to God, so he ends his petitions with pleading that he is God’s servant, and, as such, a fit object of God’s protection. Psalms 144:1-15 THE force of compilation could no further go than in this psalm, which is, in the first eleven verses (Psalms 144:1-11)simply a rechauffe of known psalms, and in Psalms 144:12-15 is most probably an extract from an unknown one of later date. The junctions are not effected with much skill, and the last is tacked on very awkwardly (Psalms 144:12). It is completely unlike the former part, inasmuch as there the speaker is a warlike king praying for victory, while in the latter the nation sings of the tranquil blessings of peaceful expansion. The language of the later portion is full of late forms and obscurities. But the compiler’s course of thought is traceable. He begins by praising Jehovah, who has taught him warlike skill; then adoringly thinks of his own weakness, made strong by God’s condescending regard; next prays for complete victory, and vows fresh praises for new mercies; and closes with a picture of the prosperity which follows conquest, and is secured to Israel because Jehovah is its God. Psalms 144:1-2 are echoes of Psa 18:2; Psalms 18:34; Psalms 18:46, with slight variations. The remarkable epithet "My lovingkindness" offends some critics, who emend so as to read "My stronghold"; but it has a parallel in Jonah 2:9, and is forcible as an emotional abbreviation of the fuller "God of my lovingkindness". (Psalms 59:10) The original passage reads "people," which is the only appropriate word in this connection, and should probably be read in Psalms 144:2 c. Psalms 8:1-9 supplies the original of Psa 144:3-4, with a reminiscence of Psa 39:5, and of Psa 102:11, from which comes the pathetic image of the fleeting shadow. The link between this and the former extract seems to be the recognition of God’s condescension in strengthening so weak and transient a creature for conflict and conquest. The following prayer for further Divine help in further struggles is largely borrowed from the magnificent picture of a theophany in Psalms 18:9; Psalms 18:14-16. The energetic "Lighten lightning" is peculiar to this psalm, as is the use of the word for "Pluck out." The description of the enemies as "sons of the alien" is like Psalms 18:44-45. As in many other psalms, the treachery of the foe is signalised. They break their oaths. The right hand which they had lifted in swearing is a lying hand. The vow of new praise recalls Psalms 33:2-3; Psalms 96:1; Psalms 98:1. Psalms 144:10 is a reproduction of Psa 18:50. The mention of David’s deliverance from the "evil sword" has apparently been the reason for the LXX referring the psalm to the victory over Goliath an impossible view. The new song is not here sung; but the psalm drops from the level of praise to renew the petition for deliverance, in the manner of a refrain caught up in Psalms 144:11 from Psalms 144:7. This might make a well-rounded close, and may have originally been the end of the psalm. The appended fragment (Psalms 144:12-15) is attached to the preceding in a most embarrassing fashion. The first word of Psa 144:12 is the sign of the relative. The LXX accordingly translates "Whose sons are," etc., and understands the whole as a description of the prosperity of the enemies, which view necessarily involves the alteration of "our" into "their" in the following clauses. Others supply an antecedent to the relative by inserting save us or the like expression at the beginning of the verse. Others, again-e.g., Ewald, followed by Perowne-connect the relative with Psalms 144:15: "We whose sons are," etc "Happy is the people," etc. Delitzsch takes the relative to signify here "because," and compares Judges 9:17; Jeremiah 16:13. The prosperity subsequently described would then be alleged as the occasion of the enemies’ envy. Others would slightly emend the text so as to read, "I pronounce happy," or "Happy are we." The latter, which makes all smooth, and corresponds with Psalms 144:15, is Graetz’s proposal. The rendering of the A.V. "that" or "in order that," has much in its favour. The word which is the sign of the relative is a component of the full expression usually so rendered, and stands alone as equivalent to it in Deuteronomy 4:40, Genesis 11:7. It is true, as Delitzsch objects to this rendering that the following verbs are usually finite, while here they are participles; but that is not a fatal objection. The whole that follows would then be dependent on the petition of Psa 144:11, and would describe the purpose of the desired deliverance. "This is, in fact, the poet’s meaning. He prays for deliverance from enemies, in order that the happy condition pictured in Psalms 144:12 sqq. may come to pass" (Baethgen). On the whole, that rendering presents least difficulty, but in any case the seam is clumsy. The substance of the description includes three things-a vigorous, growing population, agricultural prosperity, and freedom from invasion. The language is obscure, especially in Psalms 144:14, but the general drift is plain. The characteristic Jewish blessing of numerous offspring is first touched on in two figures, of which the former is forcible and obvious, and the latter obscure. The comparison of the virgin daughters of Israel to "corners" is best understood by taking the word to mean "corner pillars," not necessarily caryatides, as is usually supposed-an architectural decoration unknown in the East. The points of comparison would then be slender uprightness and firm grace. Delitzsch prefers to take the word as meaning cornices, such as, to the present day, are found in the angles of Eastern rooms, and are elaborately carved in mazy patterns and brightly coloured. He would also render "variegated" instead of "carved." But such a comparison puts too much stress on gay dresses, and too little on qualities corresponding to those of the "well-grown" youths in the former clause. The description of a flourishing rural community is full of difficult words. "Granaries" is found only here, and "kind" is a late word. "Fields" is the same word as is usually rendered "streets"; it literally means "places outside," and here obviously must refer to the open pastures without the city, in contrast to the "open spaces" within it, mentioned in the next verse. In that verse almost every word is doubtful. That rendered "kine" is masculine in form, but is generally taken as being applicable to both sexes, and here used for the milky mothers of the herd. The word translated above "heavy with young" means laden, and if the accompanying noun is masculine, must mean laden with the harvest sheaves; but the parallel of the increasing flocks suggests the other rendering. The remainder of Psa 144:14 would in form make a complete verse, and it is possible that something has fallen out between the first clause and the two latter. These paint tranquil city life when enemies are far away. "No breach"-i.e., in the defences by which besiegers could enter; "No going forth"-i.e., sally of the besieged, as seems most probable, though going forth as captured or surrendering has been suggested; "No cry"-i.e., of assailants who have forced an entrance, and of defenders who make their last stand in the open places of the city. The last verse sums up all the preceding picture of growth, prosperity, and tranquillity, and traces it to the guardian care and blessing of Jehovah. The psalmist may seem to have been setting too much store by outward prosperity. His last word not only points to the one Source of it, but sets high above the material consequences of God’s favour, joyous as these are, that favour itself, as the climax of human blessedness. Psalms 145:1-21 This is an acrostic psalm. Like several others of that kind, it is slightly irregular, one letter (Nun) being omitted. The omission is supplied in the LXX by an obviously spurious verse inserted in the right place between Psalms 145:13 and Psalms 145:14. Though the psalm has no strophical divisions, it has distinct sequence of thought, and celebrates the glories of Jehovah’s character and deeds from a fourfold point of view. It sings of His greatness (Psalms 145:1-6), goodness (Psalms 145:7-10), His kingdom (Psalms 145:11-13), and the universality of His beneficence (Psalms 145:14-21). It is largely coloured by other psalms, and is unmistakably of late origin. The first group of verses has two salient characteristics-the accumulation of epithets expressive of the more majestic aspects of Jehovah’s self-revelation, and the remarkable alternation of the psalmist’s solo of song and the mighty chorus which takes up the theme and sends a shout of praise echoing down the generations. The psalmist begins with his own tribute of praise, which he vows shall be perpetual. Psalms 145:1 recalls Psalms 30:1; Psalms 34:1. We "exalt" God, when we recognise that He is King, and worthily adore Him as such. A heart suffused with joy in the thought of God would fain have no other occupation than the loved one of ringing out His name. The singer sets "forever and aye" at the end of both Psalms 145:1 and Psalms 145:2, and while it is possible to give the expression a worthy meaning as simply equivalent to continually, it is more in harmony with the exalted strain of the psalm and the emphatic position of the words to hear in them an expression of the assurance which such delight in God and in the contemplation of Him naturally brings with it, that over communion so deep and blessed, Death has no power. "Every day will I bless Thee"-that is the happy vow of the devout heart. "And I will praise Thy name forever and ever"-that is the triumphant confidence that springs from the vow. The experiences of fellowship with God are prophets of their own immortality. Psalms 145:3 a-is from Psalms 48:1, and b is tinged by Isaiah 40:1-31, but substitutes "greatness," the keynote of the first part of this psalm for "understanding." That note having been thus struck, is taken up in Psalms 145:4-6, which set forth various aspects of that greatness, as manifested in works which are successively described as "mighty"-i.e., instinct with conquering power such as a valiant hero wields; as, taken together, constituting the "splendour of the glory of Thy majesty," the flashing brightness with which, when gathered, as it were, in a radiant mass, they shine out, like a great globe of fire; as "wonders," not merely in the narrower sense of miracles, but as being productive of lowly astonishment in the thoughtful spectator; and as being "dread acts"-i.e., such as fill the beholder with holy awe. In Psalms 145:5 b the phrase rendered above "records of His wonders" is literally "words of His wonders," which some regard as being like the similar phrase in Psalms 65:3 (words or matters of iniquities), a pleonasm, and others would take as they do the like expression in Psalms 105:27, as equivalent to "deeds of the Divine wonders" (Delitzsch). But "words" may very well here retain its ordinary sense, and the poet represents himself as meditating on the records of God’s acts in the past as well as gazing on those spread before his eyes in the present. His passing and repassing from his own praise in Psalms 145:1-2, to that of successive generations in Psalms 145:4 others in Psalms 145:6, is remarkable. Does he conceive of himself as the chorus leader, teaching the ages his song? Or does he simply rejoice in the less lofty consciousness that his voice is not solitary? It is difficult to say, but this is clear, that the Messianic hope of the world’s being one day filled with the praises which were occasioned by God’s manifestation in Israel burned in this singer’s heart. He could not bear to sing alone, and this hymn would lack its highest note, if he did not believe that the world was to catch up the song. But greatness, majesty, splendour, are not the Divinest parts of the Divine nature, as this singer had learned. These are but the fringes of the central glory. Therefore the song rises from greatness to celebrate better things, the moral attributes of Jehovah (Psalms 145:7-10). The psalmist has no more to say of himself, till the end of his psalm. He gladly listens rather to the chorus of many voices which proclaims Jehovah’s widespread goodness. In Psalms 145:7 the two attributes which the whole Old Testament regards as inseparable are the themes of the praise of men. Goodness and righteousness are not antithetic, but complementary, as green and red rays blend in white light. The exuberance of praise evoked by these attributes is strikingly represented by the two strong words describing it: of which the former, "well forth," compares its gush to the clear waters of a spring bursting up into sunlight, dancing and flashing, musical and living, and the other describes it as like the shrill cries of joy raised by a crowd on some festival, or such as the women trilled out when a bride was brought home. Psalms 145:8 rests upon Exodus 34:6. (compare Psalms 103:8) It is difficult to desynonymise "gracious" and "full of compassion." Possibly the former is the wider, and expresses love in exercise towards the lowly in its most general aspect, while the latter specialises graciousness as it reveals itself to those afflicted with any evil. As "slow to anger," Jehovah keeps back the wrath which is part of His perfection, and only gives it free course after long waiting and wooing. The contrast in Psalms 145:8 b is not so much between anger and lovingkindness, which to the psalmist are not opposed, as between the slowness with which the one is launched against a few offenders and the plenitude of the other. That thought of abundant lovingkindness is still further widened, in Psalms 145:9, to universality. God’s goodness embraces all, and His compassions hover over all His works, as the broad wing and warm breast of the mother eagle protect her brood. Therefore the psalmist hears a yet more multitudinous voice of praise from all creatures; since their very existence, and still more their various blessednesses, give witness to the all-gladdening Mercy which encompasses them. But Creation’s anthem is a song without words, and needs to be made articulate by the conscious thanksgivings of those who, being blessed by possession of Jehovah’s lovingkindness, render blessing to Him with heart and lip. The Kingship of God was lightly touched in Psalms 145:1. It now becomes the psalmist’s theme in Psalms 145:11-13. It is for God’s favoured ones to speak, while Creation can but be. It is for men who can recognise God’s sovereign will as their law, and know Him as ruler, not only by power, but by goodness, to proclaim that kingdom which psalmists knew to be "righteousness, peace, and joy." The purpose for which God has lavished His favour on Israel is that they might be the heralds of His royalty to "the sons of men." The recipients of His grace should be the messengers of His grace. The aspects of that kingdom which fill the psalmist’s thoughts in this part of his hymn, correspond with that side of the Divine nature celebrated in Psalms 145:1-6 - namely, the more majestic-while the graciousness magnified in Psalms 145:7-10 is again the theme in the last portion (Psalms 145:14-20). An intentional parallelism between the first and third parts is suggested by the recurrence in Psalms 145:12 of part of the same heaped together phrase which occurs in Psalms 145:5. There we read of "the splendour of the glory of Thy majesty"; here of "the glory of the splendour of Thy kingdom,"-expressions substantially identical in meaning. The very glory of the kingdom of Jehovah is a pledge that it is eternal. What corruption or decay could touch so radiant and mighty a throne? Israel’s monarchy was a thing of the past; but as, "in the year that King Uzziah died," Isaiah saw the true King of Israel throned in the Temple, so the vanishing of the earthly head of the theocracy seems to have revealed with new clearness to devout men in Israel the perpetuity of the reign of Jehovah. Hence the psalms of the King are mostly post-exilic. It is blessed when the shattering of earthly goods or the withdrawal of human helpers and lovers makes more plain the Unchanging Friend and His abiding power to succour and suffice. The last portion of the psalm is marked by a frequent repetition of "all," which occurs eleven times in these verses. The singer seems to delight in the very sound of the word, which suggests to him boundless visions of the wide sweep of God’s universal mercy, and of the numberless crowd of dependents who wait on and are satisfied by Him. He passes far beyond national bounds. Psalms 145:14 begins the grand catalogue of universal blessings by an aspect of God’s goodness which, at first sight, seems restricted, but is only too wide, since there is no man who is not often ready to fall and needing a strong hand to uphold him. The universality of man’s weakness is pathetically testified by this verse. Those who are in the act of falling are upheld by Him; those who have fallen are helped to regain their footing. Universal sustaining and restoring grace are His. The psalmist says nothing of the conditions on which that grace in its highest forms is exercised; but these are inherent in the nature of the case, for, if the falling man will not lay hold of the outstretched hand, down he must go. There would be no place for restoring help if sustaining aid worked as universally as it is proffered. The word for "raises" in Psalms 145:14 b occurs only here and in Psalms 146:8. Probably the author of both psalms is one. In Psalms 145:15-16, the universality of Providence is set forth in language partly taken from Psalms 104:27-28. The petitioners are all creatures. They mutely appeal to God, with expectant eyes fixed on Him, like a dog looking for a crust from its master. He has but to "open His hand" and they are satisfied. The process is represented as easy and effortless. Psalms 145:16 b has received different explanations. The word rendered "desire" is often used for "favour"-i.e., God’s-and is by some taken in that meaning here. So Cheyne translates "fillest everything that lives with goodwill." But seeing that the same word recurs in Psalms 145:19, in an obvious parallel with this verse, and has there necessarily the meaning of desire, it is more natural to give it the same signification here. The clause then means that the opening of God’s hand satisfies every creature, by giving it that which it desires in full enjoyment. These common blessings of Providence avail to interpret deeper mysteries. Since the world is full of happy creatures nourished by Him, it is a reasonable faith that His work is all of a piece, and that in all His dealings the twin attributes of righteousness and lovingkindness rule. There are enough plain tokens of God’s character in plain things to make us sure that mysterious and apparently anomalous things have the same character regulating them. In Psalms 145:17 b the word rendered loving is that usually employed of the objects of lovingkindness, God’s "favoured ones." It is used of God only here and in Jeremiah 3:12, and must be taken in an active sense, as One who exercises lovingkindness. The underlying principle of all His acts is Love, says the psalmist, and there is no antagonism between that deepest motive and Righteousness. The singer has indeed climbed to a sun-lit height, from which he sees far and can look down into the deep of the Divine judgments and discern that they are a clear-obscure. He does not restrict this universal beneficence when he goes on to lay down conditions on which the reception of its highest forms depend. These conditions are not arbitrary; and within their limits, the same universality is displayed. The lower creation makes its mute appeal to God, but men have the prerogative and obligation of calling upon Him with real desire and trust. Such suppliants will universally be blessed with a nearness of God to them, better than His proximity through power, knowledge, or the lower manifestations of His lovingkindness, to inferior creatures. Just as the fact of life brought with it certain wants, which God is bound to supply, since He gives it, so the fear and love of Him bring deeper needs, which He is still more (if that were possible) under pledge to satisfy. The creatures have their desires met. Those who fear Him will certainly have theirs; and that, not only in so far as they share physical life with worm and bee, whom their heavenly Father feeds, but in so far as their devotion sets in motion a new series of aspirations, longings, and needs, which will certainly not be left unfulfilled. "Food" is all the boon that the creatures crave, and they get it by an easy process. But man, especially man who fears and loves God, has deeper needs, sadder in one aspect, since they come from perils and ills from which he has to be saved, but more blessed in another, since every need is a door by which God can enter a soul. These sacreder necessities and more wistful longings are not to be satisfied by simply opening God’s hand. More has to be done than that. For they can only be satisfied by the gift of Himself, and men need much disciplining before they will to receive Him into their hearts. They who love and fear Him will desire Him chiefly, and that desire can never be balked. There is a region, and only one, in which it is safe to set our hearts on unattained good. They who long for God will always have as much of God as they long for and are capable of receiving. But notwithstanding the universality of the Divine lovingkindness, mankind still parts into two sections, one capable of receiving the highest gifts, one incapable, because not desiring them. And therefore the One Light, in its universal shining, works two effects, being lustre and life to such as welcome it, but darkness and death to those who turn from it. It is man’s awful prerogative that he can distil poison out of the water of life, and can make it impossible for himself to receive from tender, universal Goodness anything but destruction. The singer doses his song with the reiterated vow that his songs shall never dose, and, as in the earlier part of the psalm, rejoices in the confidence that his single voice shall, like that of the herald angel at Bethlehem, be merged in the notes of "a multitude praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest." Psalms 146:1-10 THE long-drawn music of the Psalter closes with five Hallelujah psalms, in which, with constantly swelling diapason, all themes of praise are pealed forth, until the melodious thunder of the final psalm, which calls on everything that has breath to praise Jehovah. Possibly the number of these psalms may have reference to the five books into which the Psalter is divided. This is the first of the five. It is largely coloured by earlier songs, but still throbs with fresh emotion. Its theme is the blessedness of trust in Jehovah, as shown by His character and works. It deals less with Israel’s special prerogatives than its companions do, while yet it claims the universally beneficent Ruler as Israel’s God. The singer’s full heart of thanksgiving must first pour itself out in vows of perpetual praise, before he begins to woo others to the trust which blesses him. Exhortations are impotent unless enforced by example. Psalms 146:2 is borrowed with slight variation from Psalms 104:33. The negative side of the psalmist’s exhortation follows in Psalms 146:3-4 which warn against wasting trust on powerless men. The same antithesis between men and God as objects of confidence occurs in many places of Scripture, and here is probably borrowed from Psalms 118:8. The reason assigned for the dehortation is mainly man’s mortality. However high his state, he is but a "son of Adam" (the earth born), and inherits the feebleness and fleetingness which deprive him of ability to help. "He has no salvation" is the literal rendering of the last words of Psa 146:3 b. Psalms 60:11 gives the same thought, and almost in the same words. Psalms 146:4 sets forth more fully man’s mortality, as demonstrating the folly of trusting in him. His breath or spirit escapes; he goes back to "his earth," from which he was created; and what becomes of all his busy schemes? They "perish" as he does. The psalmist has a profound sense of the phantasmal character of the solid-seeming realities of human glory and power. But it wakes no bitterness in him, nor does it breathe any sadness into his song. It only teaches him to cling the more closely to the permanent and the real. His negative teaching, if it stood alone, would be a gospel of despair, the reduction of life to a torturing cheat; but taken as the prelude to the revelation of One whom it is safe to trust, there is nothing sad in it. So the psalm springs up at once from these thoughts of the helplessness of mortal man, to hymn the blessedness of trust set upon the undying God, like a song bird from its lair in a graveyard, which pours its glad notes above the grassy mounds, as it rises in spirals towards the blue, and at each gives forth a more exultant burst of music. The exclamation in Psalms 146:5 is the last of the twenty-five "Blesseds" in the Psalter. Taken together, as any concordance will show, beginning with Psalms 1:1-6, they present a beautiful and comprehensive ideal of the devout life. The felicity of such a life is here gathered up into two comprehensive considerations, which supplement each other. It is blessed to have the God of Jacob on our side; but it is not enough for the heart to know that He bore a relation to another in the far-off past or to a community in the present. There must be an individualising bond between the soul and God, whereby the "God of Jacob" becomes the God who belongs to the single devout man, and all the facts of whose protection in the past are renewed in the prosaic present. It is blessed to have Jehovah for one’s "help," but that is only secured when, by the effort of one’s own will, He is clasped as one’s "hope." Such hope is blessed, for it will never be put to shame, nor need to shift its anchorage. It brings into any life the all-sufficient help which is the ultimate source of all felicity, and makes the hope that grasps it blessed, as the hand that holds some fragrant gum is perfumed by the touch. But the psalmist passes swiftly from celebrating trust to magnify its object, and sets forth in an impressive series the manifold perfections and acts which witness that Jehovah is worthy to be the sole Confidence of men. The nine Divine acts, which invite to trust in Him, are divided into two parts, by a change in construction. There is, first, a series of participles (Psalms 146:6-7 b), and then a string of brief sentences enumerating Divine deeds (Psalms 146:7-9). No very clear difference in thought can be established as corresponding to this difference in form. The psalmist begins with God’s omnipotence as manifested in creation. The first requisite for trust is assurance of power in the person trusted. The psalmist calls heaven and earth and sea, with all their inhabitants as witnesses that Jehovah is not like the son of man, in whom there is no power to help. But power may be whimsical, changeable, or may shroud its designs in mystery; therefore, if it is to be trusted, its purposes and methods must be so far known that a man may be able to reckon on it. Therefore the psalm adds unchangeable faithfulness to His power. But Power, however faithful, is not yet worthy of trust, unless it works according to righteousness, and has an arm that wars against wrong; therefore to creative might and plighted troth the psalmist adds the exercise of judgment. Nor are these enough, for the conception which they embody may be that of a somewhat stern and repellent Being, who may be reverenced, but not approached with the warm heart of trust; therefore the psalmist adds beneficence, which ministers their appropriate food to all desires, not only of the flesh, but of the spirit. The hungry hearts of men, who are all full of needs and longing, may turn to this mighty, faithful, righteous Jehovah, and be sure that He never sends mouths but He sends meat to fill them. All our various kinds of hunger are doors for God to come into our spirits. The second series of sentences deals mainly with the Divine beneficence in regard to man’s miseries. The psalmist does not feel that the existence of these sad varieties of sorrow clouds his assurance in God’s goodness. To him they are occasions for the most heart-touching display of God’s pitying, healing hand. If there is any difference between the two sets of clauses descriptive of God’s acts, the latter bring into clearer light His personal agency in each case of suffering. This mighty, faithful, righteous, beneficent Jehovah, in all the majesty which that name suggests, comes down to the multitude of burdened ones and graciously deals with each, having in His heart the knowledge of, and in His hand the remedy for, all their ills. The greatness of His nature expressed by His name is vividly contrasted with the tenderness and lowliness of His working. Captives, blind persons, and those bowed down by sorrows or otherwise appeal to Him by their helplessness, and His strong hand breaks the fetters, and His gentle touch opens without pain the closed eyes and quickens the paralysed nerve to respond to the light, and His firm, loving hold lifts to their feet and establishes the prostrate. All these classes of afflicted persons are meant to be regarded literally, but all may have a wider meaning and be intended to hint at spiritual bondage, blindness, and abjectness. The next clause (Psalms 146:8 c) seems to interrupt the representation of forms of affliction, but it comes in with great significance in the centre of that sad catalogue: for its presence here teaches that not merely affliction, whether physical or other, secures Jehovah’s gracious help, but that there must be the yielding of heart to Him, and the effort at conformity of life with His precepts and pattern, if His aid is to be reckoned on in men’s sorrows. The prisoners will still languish in chains, the blind will grope in darkness, the bowed down will lie prone in the dust, unless they are righteous. The series of afflictions which God alleviates is resumed in Psalms 146:9 with a pathetic triad-strangers. widows, and fatherless. These are forlorn indeed, and the depth of their desolation is the measure of the Divine compassion. The enumeration of Jehovah’s acts, which make trust in God blessed in itself, and the sure way of securing help which is not vain, needs but one more touch for completion, and that is added in the solemn thought that He, by His providences and in the long run, turns aside (i.e. from its aim) the way of the wicked. That aspect of God’s government is lightly handled in one clause, as befits the purpose of the psalm. But it could not be left out. A true likeness must have shadows. God were not a God for men to rely on, unless the trend of His reign was to crush evil and thwart the designs of sinners. The blessedness of trust in Jehovah is gathered up into one great thought in the last verse of the psalm. The sovereignty of God to all generation., suggests the swift disappearance of earthly princes, referred to in Psalms 146:4. To trust in fleeting power is madness; to trust in the Eternal King is wisdom and blessedness, and in some sense makes him who trusts a sharer in the eternity of the God in whom is his hope, and from whom is his help. Psalms 147:1-20 THE threefold calls to praise Jehovah (Psalms 147:1, Psalms 147:7, Psalms 147:12) divide this psalm into three parts, the two former of which are closely connected, inasmuch as the first part is mainly occupied with celebrating God’s mercy to the restored Israel, and the second takes a wider outlook, embracing His beneficence to all living things. Both these points of view are repeated in the same order in the third part (Psalms 147:12-20), which the LXX makes a separate psalm. The allusions to Jerusalem as rebuilt, to the gathering of the scattered Israelites, and to the fortifications of the city naturally point to the epoch of the Restoration, whether or not, with Delitzsch and others, we suppose that the psalm was sung at the feast of the dedication of the new walls. In any case, it is a hymn of the restored people, which starts from the special mercy shown to them, and rejoices in the thought that "Our God" fills the earth with good and reigns to bless, in the realm of Nature as in that of special Revelation. The emphasis placed on God’s working in nature, in this and others of these closing psalms, is probably in part a polemic against the idolatry which Israel had learned to abhor, by being brought face to face with it in Babylon, and in part a result of the widening of conceptions as to His relation to the world outside Israel which the Exile had also effected. The two truths of His special relation to His people and of His universal lovingkindness have often been divorced, both by His people and by their enemies. This psalm teaches a more excellent way. The main theme of Psa 147:1-6 is God’s manifestation of transcendent power and incalculable wisdom, as well as infinite kindness, in building up the ruined Jerusalem and collecting into a happy band of citizens the lonely wanderers of Israel. For such blessings praise is due, and the psalm summons all who share them to swell the song. Psalms 147:1 is somewhat differently construed by some, as Hupfeld, who would change one letter in the word rendered above "to harp," and, making it an imperative, would refer "good" and "pleasant" to God, thus making the whole to read, "Praise Jehovah, for He is good; harp to our God, for He is pleasant: praise is comely." This change simplifies some points of construction, but labors under the objection that it is contrary to usage to apply the adjective "pleasant" to God; and the usual rendering is quite intelligible and appropriate. The reason for the fittingness and delightsomeness of praise is the great mercy shown to Israel in the Restoration, which mercy is in the psalmist’s thoughts throughout this part. He has the same fondness for using participles as the author of the previous psalm, and begins Psalms 147:2, Psalms 147:3, Psalms 147:4, and Psalms 147:6 with them. Possibly their use is intended to imply that the acts described by them are regarded as continuous, not merely done once for all. Jehovah is ever building up Jerusalem, and, in like manner, uninterruptedly energising in providence and nature. The collocation of Divine acts in Psalms 147:2 bears upon the great theme that fills the singer’s heart and lips. It is the outcasts of Israel of whom he thinks, while he sings of binding up the brokenhearted. It is they who are the "afflicted," helped up by that strong, gentle clasp; while their oppressors are the wicked, flung prone by the very wind of God’s hand. The beautiful and profound juxtaposition of gentle healing and omnipotence in Psalms 147:3-4, is meant to signalise the work of restoring Israel as no less wondrous than that of marshalling the stars, and to hearten faith by pledging that incalculable Power to perfect its restoring work. He who stands beside the sick bed of the brokenhearted, like a gentle physician, with balm and bandage, and lays a tender hand on their wounds, is He who sets the stars in their places and tells them as a shepherd his flock or a commander his army. The psalmist borrows from Isaiah 40:26-29, where several of his expressions occur. "Counting a number for the stars" is scarcely equivalent to numbering them as they shine. It rather means determining how many of them there shall be. Calling them all by names (lit., He calls names to them all) is not giving them designations, but summoning them as a captain reading the muster roll of his band. It may also imply full knowledge of each individual in their countless hosts. Psalms 147:5 is taken from the passage in Isaiah already referred to, with the change of "no number" for "no searching," a change which is suggested by the preceding reference to the number of the stars. These have a number, though it surpasses human arithmetic; but His wisdom is measureless. And all this magnificence of power, this minute particularising knowledge, this abyss of wisdom, are guarantees for the healing of the broken hearted. The thought goes further than Israel’s deliverance from bondage. It has a strong voice of cheer for all sad hearts, who will let Him probe their wounds that He may bind them up. The mighty God of Creation is the tender God of Providence and of Redemption. Therefore "praise is comely," and fear and faltering are unbefitting. The second part of the psalm (Psalms 147:7-11) passes out from the special field of mercy to Israel, and comes down from the glories of the heavens, to magnify God’s universal goodness manifested in physical changes, by which lowly creatures are provided for. The point of time selected is that of the November rains. The verbs in Psalms 147:8, Psalms 147:9, Psalms 147:11, are again participles, expressive of continuous action. The yearly miracle which brings from some invisible storehouse the clouds to fill the sky and drop down fatness, the answer of the brown earth which mysteriously shoots forth the tender green spikelets away up on the mountain flanks, where no man has sown and no man will reap, the loving care which thereby provides food for the wild creatures, owned by no one, and answers the hoarse croak of the callow fledglings in the ravens’ nests-these are manifestations of God’s power and revelations of His character worthy to be woven into a hymn which celebrates His restoring grace, and to be set beside the apocalypse of His greatness in the mighty heavens. But what has Psalms 147:10 to do here? The connection of it is difficult to trace. Apparently, the psalmist would draw from the previous verses, which exhibit God’s universal goodness and the creatures’ dependence on Him, the lesson that reliance on one’s own resources or might is sure to be smitten with confusion, while humble trust in God, which man alone of earth’s creatures can exercise, is for him the condition of his receiving needed gifts. The beast gets its food, and it is enough that the young ravens should croak, but man has to "fear Him" and to wait on His "lovingkindness." Psalms 147:10 is a reminiscence of Psa 33:16-17, and Psalms 147:11 of the next verse of the same psalm. The third part (Psalms 147:12-20) travels over substantially the same ground as the two former, beginning with the mercy shown to the restored Israel, and passing on to the wider manifestations of God’s goodness. But there is a difference in this repeated setting forth of both these themes. The fortifications of Jerusalem are now complete, and their strength gives security to the people gathered into the city. Over all the land once devastated by war peace broods, and the fields that lay desolate now have yielded harvest. The ancient promise (Psalms 81:16) has been fulfilled, its condition having been complied with, and Israel having hearkened to Jehovah. Protection, blessing, tranquillity, abundance, are the results of obedience, God’s gifts to them that fear Him. So it was in the psalmist’s experience; so, in higher form, it is still. These Divine acts are continuous, and as long as there are men who trust, there will be a God who builds defences around them and satisfies them with good. Again the psalmist turns to the realm of nature; but it is nature at a different season which now yields witness to God’s universal power and care. The phenomena of a sharp winter were more striking to the psalmist than to us. But his poet’s eye and his devout heart recognise even in the cold, before which his Eastern constitution cowered shivering, the working of God’s Will. His "commandment" or Word is personified, and compared to a swift-footed messenger. As ever, power over material things is attributed to the Divine word, and as ever, in the Biblical view of nature, all intermediate links are neglected, and the Almighty cause at one end of the chain and the physical effect at the other are brought together. There is between these two clauses room enough for all that meteorology has to say. The winter piece in Psalms 147:16-17 dashes off the dreary scene with a few bold strokes. The air is full of flakes like floating wool, or the white mantle covers the ground like a cloth; rime lies everywhere, as if ashes were powdered over trees and stones. Hailstones fall, as if He flung them down from above. They are like "morsels" of bread, a comparison which strikes us as violent, but which may possibly describe the more severe storms, in which flat pieces of ice fall. As by magic, all is changed when He again sends forth His word. It but needs that He should let a warm wind steal gently across the desolation, and every sealed and silent brook begins to tinkle along its course. And will not He who thus changes the face of the earth in like manner breathe upon frost-bound lives and hearts, "And every winter merge in spring"? But the psalm cannot end with contemplation of God’s universal beneficence, however gracious that is. There is a higher mode of activity for His word than that exercised on material things. God sends His commandment forth and earth unconsciously obeys, and all creatures, men included, are fed and blessed. But the noblest utterance of His word is in the shape of statutes and judgments, and these are Israel’s prerogative. The psalmist is not rejoicing that other nations have not received these, but that Israel has. Its privilege is its responsibility. It has received them that it may obey them, and then that it may make them known. If the God who scatters lower blessings broadcast, not forgetting beasts and ravens, has restricted His highest gift to His people, the restriction is a clear call to them to spread the knowledge of the treasure entrusted to them. To glory in privilege is sin; to learn that it means responsibility is wisdom. The lesson is needed by those who today have been served as heirs to Israel’s prerogative, forfeited by it because it clutched it for itself, and forgot its obligation to carry it as widely as God had diffused His lower gifts. Psalms 148:1-14 THE mercy granted to Israel (Psalms 148:14) is, in the psalmist’s estimation, worthy to call forth strains of praise from all creatures. It is the same conception as is found in several of the psalms of the King (Psalms 93:1-5; Psalms 94:1-23; Psalms 95:1-11; Psalms 96:1-13; Psalms 97:1-12; Psalms 98:1-9; Psalms 99:1-9; Psalms 100:1-5), but is here expressed with unparalleled magnificence and fervour. The same idea attains the climax of its representation in the mighty anthem from "every creature which is in heaven and on the earth, and under the earth and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them," whom John heard saying, "Blessing and honour and glory and power unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever." It may be maintained that this psalm is only a highly emotional and imaginative rendering of the truth that all God’s works praise Him, whether consciously or not. but its correspondence with a line of thought which runs through Scripture from its first page to its last-namely, that, as man’s sin subjected the creatures to "vanity," so his redemption shall be their glorifying-leads us to see prophetic anticipation, and not mere poetic rapture, in this summons pealed out to heights and depths, and all that lies between, to rejoice in what Jehovah has done for Israel. The psalm falls into two broad divisions in the former of which heaven, and in the latter earth, are invoked to praise Jehovah. Psalms 148:1 addresses generally the subsequently particularised heavenly beings. "From the heavens" and "in the heights" praise is to sound: the former phrase marks the place of origin, and may imply the floating down to a listening earth of that ethereal music; the latter thinks of all the dim distances as filled with it. The angels, as conscious beings, are the chorus leaders, and even to "principalities and powers in heavenly places" Israel’s restoration reveals new phases of the "manifold wisdom of God." The "host" (or hosts, according to the amended reading of the Hebrew margin) are here obviously angels, as required by the parallelism with a. The sun, moon, and stars, of which the psalmist knows nothing but that they burn with light and roll in silence through the dark expanse, are bid to break the solemn stillness that fills the daily and nightly sky. Finally, the singer passes in thought through the lower heavens, and would fain send his voice whither his eye cannot pierce, up into that mysterious watery abyss, which, according to ancient cosmography, had the. firmament for its floor. It is absurd to look for astronomical accuracy in such poetry as this; but a singer who knew no more about sun, moon. and stars, and depths of space, than that they were all God’s creatures and in their silence praised Him, knew and felt more of their true nature and charm than does he who knows everything about them except these facts. Psalms 148:5-6 assign the reason for the praise of the heavens-Jehovah’s creative act, His sustaining power and His "law," the utterance of His will to which they conform. Psalms 148:6 a emphatically asserts, by expressing the "He," which is in Hebrew usually included in the verb, that it is Jehovah and none other who "preserves the stars from wrong." "Preservation is continuous creation." The meaning of the close of Psa 148:6 b is doubtful, if the existing text is adhered to. It reads literally "and [it?] shall not pass." The unexpressed nominative is by some taken to be the before mentioned "law," and "pass" to mean cease to be in force or be transgressed. Others take the singular verb as being used distributively, and so render "None of them transgresses." But a very slight alteration gives the plural verb, which makes all plain. In these starry depths obedience reigns; it is only on earth that a being lives who can and will break the merciful barriers of Jehovah’s law. Therefore, from that untroubled region of perfect service comes a purer song of praise, though it can never have the pathetic harmonies of that which issues from rebels brought back to allegiance. The summons to the earth begins with the lowest places, as that to the heavens did with the highest. The psalmist knows little of the uncouth forms that may wallow in ocean depths, but he is sure that they too, in their sunless abodes, can praise Jehovah. From the ocean the psalm rises to the air, before it, as it were, settles down on earth. Psalms 148:8 may refer to contemporaneous phenomena, and, if so, describes a wild storm hurtling through the lower atmosphere. The verbal arrangement in Psalms 148:8 a is that of inverted parallelism, in which "fire" corresponds to "smoke" and "hail" to "snow." Lightning and hail, which often occur together, are similarly connected in Psalms 18:12. But it is difficult to explain "snow and smoke," if regarded as accompaniments of the former pair fire and hail. Rather they seem to describe another set of meteorological phenomena, a winter storm, in which the air is thick with flakes as if charged with smoke, while the preceding words refer to a summer’s thunderstorm. The resemblance to the two pictures in the preceding psalm, one of the time of the latter rains and one of bitter winter weather, is noticeable. The storm wind, which drives all these formidable agents through the air, in its utmost fury is a servant. As in Psalms 107:25, it obeys God’s command. The solid earth itself, as represented by its loftiest summits which pierce the air; vegetable life, as represented by the two classes of fruit-bearing and forest trees; animals in their orders, wild and domestic; the lowest worm that crawls and the light-winged bird that soars, -these all have voices to praise God. The song has been steadily rising in the scale of being from inanimate to animated creatures, and last it summons man, in whom creation’s praise becomes vocal and conscious. All men, without distinction of rank, age. or sex, have the same obligation and privilege of praise. Kings are most kingly when they cast their crowns before Him. Judges are wise when they sit as His vicegerents. The buoyant vigour of youth is purest when used with remembrance of the Creator; the maiden’s voice is never so sweet as in hymns to Jehovah. The memories and feebleness of age are hallowed and strengthened by recognition of the God who can renew failing energy and soothe sad remembrances; and the child’s opening powers are preserved from stain and distortion, by drawing near to Him in whose praise the extremes of life find common ground. The young man’s strong bass, the maiden’s clear alto, the old man’s quavering notes, the child’s fresh treble, should blend in the song. Psalms 148:13 gives the reason for the praise of earth, but especially of man, with very significant difference from that assigned in Psalms 148:5-6. "His name is exalted." He has manifested Himself to eves that can see, and has shown forth His transcendent majesty. Man’s praise is to be based not only on the Revelation of God in Nature, but on that higher one in His dealings with men, and especially with Israel. This thief reason for praise is assigned in Psalms 148:14 and indeed underlies the whole psalm. "He has lifted up a horn for His people," delivering them from their humiliation and captivity, and setting them again in their land. Thereby He has provided all His favoured ones with occasion for praise. The condensed language of Psa 148:14 b is susceptible of different constructions and meanings. Some would understand the verb from a as repeated before "praise," and take the meaning to be "He exalts the praise [i.e., the glory] of His beloved," but it is improbable that praise here should mean anything but that rendered to God. The simplest explanation of the words is that they are in apposition to the preceding clause, and declare that Jehovah, by "exalting a horn to His people," has given them especially occasion to praise Him. Israel is further designated as "a people near to Him." It is a nation of priests, having the privilege of access to His presence; and, in the consciousness of this dignity, "comes forward in this psalm as the leader of all the creatures in their praise of God, and strikes up a hallelujah that is to be joined in by heaven and earth" (Delitzsch). Psalms 149:1-9 IN the preceding psalm Israel’s restoration was connected with the recognition by all creatures and especially by the kings of the earth and their people, of Jehovah’s glory. This psalm presents the converse thought, that the restored Israel becomes the executor of judgments on those who will not join in the praise which rings from Israel that it may be caught up by all. The two psalms are thus closely connected. The circumstances of the Restoration accord with the tone of both, as of the other members of this closing group. The happy recipients of new mercy are, as in Psalms 96:1-13; Psalms 98:1-9, summoned to break into new songs. Winter silences the birds; but spring, the new "life reorient out of dust," is welcomed with music from every budding tree. Chiefly should God’s praise sound out from "the congregation of His favoured ones," the long-scattered captives who owe it to His favour that they are a congregation once more. The jubilant psalmist delights in that name for Israel, and uses it thrice in his song. He loves to set forth the various names, which each suggest some sweet strong thought of what God is to the nation and the nation to God-His favoured ones, Israel, the children of Zion, His people, the afflicted. He heaps together synonyms expressive of rapturous joy-rejoice, be glad, exult. He calls for expressions of triumphant mirth in which limbs, instruments, and voices unite. He would have the exuberant gladness well over into the hours of repose and the night be made musical with ringing shouts of joy. "Praise is better than sleep," and the beds which had often been privy to silent tears may well be witnesses of exultation that cannot be dumb. The psalmist touches very lightly on the reason for this outburst of praise, because he takes it for granted that so great and recent mercy needed little mention. One verse (Psalms 149:4) suffices to recall it. The very absorption of the heart in its bliss may make it silent about the bliss. The bride needs not to tell what makes her glad. Restored Israel requires little reminder of its occasion for joy. But the brief mention of it is very beautiful. It makes prominent, not so much the outward fact, as the Divine pleasure in His people, of which the fact was effect and indication. Their affliction had been the token that God’s complacency did not rest on them; their deliverance is the proof that the sunlight of His face shines on them once more. His chastisements rightly borne are ever precursors of deliverance, which adorns the meek afflicted, giving "beauty for ashes." The qualification for receiving Jehovah’s help is meekness, and the effect of that help on the lowly soul is to deck it with strange loveliness. Therefore God’s favoured ones may well exult in glory-i.e., on account of the glory with which they are invested by His salvation. The stern close of the psalm strikes a note which many ears feel to be discordant, and which must be freely acknowledged to stand on the same lower level as the imprecatory psalms, while, even more distinctly than these, it is entirely free from any sentiment of personal vengeance. The picture of God’s people going forth to battle, chanting His praises and swinging two-edged swords, shocks Christian sentiment. It is not to be explained away as meaning the spiritual conquest of the world with spiritual weapons. The psalmist meant actual warfare and real iron fetters. But, while the form of his anticipations belongs to the past and is entirely set aside by the better light of Christianity, their substance is true forever. Those who have been adorned with Jehovah’s salvation have the subjugation of the world to God’s rule committed to them. "The weapons of our warfare are not carnal." There are stronger fetters than those of iron, even "the cords of love" and "the bands of a man." "The judgment written," which is to be executed by the militant Israel on the nations does not seem to have reference either to the commandment to exterminate the Canaanites or to the punishments threatened in many places of Scripture. It is better to take it as denoting a judgment "fixed, settled written thus by God Himself" (Perowne). Psalms 149:9 b may be rendered (as Hupfeld does) "Honour [or, majesty] is He to all His favoured ones," in the sense that God manifests His majesty to them, or that He is the object of their honouring; but the usual rendering is more in accordance with the context and its high-strung martial ardour. "This"-namely, the whole of the crusade just described-is laid upon all Jehovah’s favoured ones, by the fact of their participation in His salvation. They are redeemed from bondage that they may be God’s warriors. The honour and obligation are universal. Psalms 150:1-6 THIS noble close of the Psalter rings out one clear note of praise, as the end of all the many moods and experiences recorded in its wonderful sighs and songs. Tears, groans, wailings for sin, meditations on the dark depths of Providence, fainting faith and foiled aspirations, all lead up to this. The psalm is more than an artistic close of the Psalter: it is a prophecy of the last result of the devout life, and, in its unclouded sunniness, as well as in its universality, it proclaims the certain end of the weary years for the individual and for the world. "Everything that hath breath" shall yet praise Jehovah. The psalm is evidently meant for liturgic use, and one may imagine that each instrument began to take part in the concert as it was named, till at last all blended in a mighty torrent of praiseful sound, to which the whirling dancers kept time. A strange contrast to modern notions of sobriety in worship! The tenfold "Praise Him" has been often noticed as symbolic of completeness, but has probably no special significance. In Psalms 150:1 the psalmist calls on earth and heaven to praise. The "sanctuary" may, indeed, be either the Temple or the heavenly palace of Jehovah, but it is more probable that the invocation, like so many others of a similar kind, is addressed to men and angels, than that the latter only are meant. They who stand in the earthly courts and they who circle the throne that is reared above the visible firmament are parts of a great whole, an antiphonal chorus. It becomes them to praise, for they each dwell in God’s sanctuary. The theme of praise is next touched in Psalms 150:2. "His mighty deeds" might be rendered "His heroic [or, valiant] acts." The reference is to His deliverance of His people as a signal manifestation of prowess or conquering might. The tenderness which moved the power is not here in question, but the power cannot be worthily praised or understood, unless that Divine pity and graciousness of which it is the instrument are apprehended. Mighty acts, unsoftened by loving impulse and gracious purpose, would evoke awe, but not thanks. No praise is adequate to the abundance of His greatness, but yet He accepts such adoration as men can render. The instruments named in Psalms 150:3-5 were not all used, so far as we know, in the Temple service. There is possibly an intention to go beyond those recognised as sacred, in order to emphasise the universality of praise. The horn was the curved "Shophar," blown by the priests; "harp and psaltery were played by the Levites, timbrels were struck by women; and dancing, playing on stringed instruments and pipes and cymbals, were not reserved for the Levites. Consequently the summons to praise God is addressed to priests, Levites, and people" (Baethgen). In Psalms 150:4 b "strings" means stringed instruments, and "pipe" is probably that used by shepherds, neither of which kinds of instrument elsewhere appears as employed in worship. Too little is known of Jewish music to enable us to determine whether the epithets applied to cymbals refer to two different kinds. Probably they do; the first being small and high pitched, the second larger, like the similar instrument used in military music, and of a deep tone. But the singer would fain hear a volume of sound which should drown all that sweet tumult which he has evoked; and therefore he calls on "everything that has breath" to use it in sending forth a thunder chorus of praise to Jehovah. The invocation bears the prophecy of its own fulfilment. These last strains of the long series of psalmists are as if that band of singers of Israel turned to the listening world, and gave into its keeping the harps which, under their own hands, had yielded such immortal music. Few voices have obeyed the summons, and the vision of a world melodious with the praise of Jehovah and of Him alone appears to us, in our despondent moments, almost as far off as it was when the last psalmist ceased to sing. But his call is our confidence; and we know that the end of history shall be that to Him whose work is mightier than all the other mighty acts of Jehovah, "Every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."