1 (ל) Why, Jehovah, dost Thou stand far off?
Why veilest [Thine eyes] in times of extremity?
2 Through the pride of the wicked the afflicted is burned away;
They are taken in the plots which these have devised.
3 For the wicked boasts of his soul's desire,
And the rapacious man renounces, contemns, Jehovah.
4 The wicked, by (lit., according to) the uplifting of his nostrils,
[says,] He will not inquire;
There is no God, is all his thought.
5 His ways are stable at all times;
High above [him] are Thy judgments, remote from before him;
His adversaries--he snorts at them.
6 He says in his heart, I shall not be moved;
To generation after generation, [I am he] who never falls into
adversity.
7 Of cursing his mouth is full, and deceits, and oppression;
Under his tongue are mischief and iniquity.
8 He couches in the hiding-places of the villages;
In secret he slays the innocent;
His eyes watch the helpless.
9 He lies in wait in secret, like a lion in his lair;
He lies in wait to seize the afflicted;
He seizes the afflicted, dragging him in his net.
10 He crouches, he bows down,
And there falls into his strong [claws] the helpless.
11 He says in his heart, God forgets;
He hides His face, He will not ever see it.
12 (ק) Rise! Jehovah, God! lift up Thy hand!
Forget not the afflicted.
13 Wherefore does the wicked blaspheme God,
[And] say in his heart, Thou wilt not inquire?
14 (ר) Thou hast seen, for Thou, Thou dost behold mischief and
trouble, to take it into Thy hand;
To Thee the helpless leaves himself;
The orphan, Thou, Thou hast been his Helper.
15 (ש) Break the arm of the wicked;
As for the evil man, inquire for his wickedness [till] Thou find
none.
16 Jehovah is King for ever and aye;
The nations are perished out of the land.
17 (ת) The desire of the meek Thou hast heard, Jehovah;
Thou wilt prepare their heart, wilt make Thine ear attentive
18 To do judgment for the orphan and downtrodden;
Terrible no more shall the man of the earth be.
Psalms ix. and x. are alike in their imperfectly acrostic structure,
the occurrence of certain phrases--_e.g._, the very uncommon
expression for "times of trouble" (ix. 9; x. 1), "Arise, O Lord" (ix.
19; x. 12)--and the references to the nations' 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 effected; 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 Psalm x., as if the last
stanza of ix. had begun with the regular Kaph instead of the cognate
Qoph; but it then disappears till ver. 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 verse 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 (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) psalm ix. is
wholly addressed to God, and that the parts of x. which are addressed
to Him are likewise acrostic, the section vv. 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: vv. 3-11, the grim picture of the enemy of
the "poor"; and vv. 12-18, the cry for deliverance and judgment.
The first stanza (vv. 1, 2) gives in its passionate cry a general
picture of the situation, which is entirely different from that of
Psalm ix. 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 (vv. 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.
Ver. 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 Psalm ix. 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 (vv. 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? Ver. 7
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, Grätz _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 for ever" (Psalm xlix.). "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 vv. 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
ver. 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 (ver. 9 _c_) into that of a hunter with
his net, and then is resumed and completed in ver. 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 (ver. 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 (vv. 8, 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 vv. 10, 12, and 17.
The second part of the psalm (ver. 12 to end) 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 ix. 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 (ver. 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 (ver. 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 (ver. 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 ver. 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 ver. 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 (vv.
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 ver. 15, in which he prays that God would "seek
out"--_i.e._, require and requite, so as to abolish and make utterly
non-existent--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 Psalm ix., 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.