1 In Jehovah have I taken refuge;
How say ye to my soul,
Flee to the mountain as a bird?
2 For lo, the wicked bend the bow,
They make ready their arrow upon the string,
To shoot in the dark at those who are upright of heart.
3 For the foundations are being destroyed;
The righteous--what hath he achieved?
4 Jehovah in His holy palace, Jehovah, whose throne is in heaven--
His eyes behold, His eyelids try, the children of men.
5 Jehovah trieth the righteous,
But the wicked and lover of violence His soul hateth.
6 May He rain upon the wicked snares;
Fire and brimstone and a burning wind be the portion of their cup!
7 For Jehovah is righteous: righteous deeds He loveth;
The upright shall behold His face.
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 iii.-vii., ix.-xiv., xvii. 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 (vv. 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 Psalm vii. 1 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 ver. 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 Psalm vii. 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 lxiv. 3, 4). The appeal to the instinct of self-preservation
is reinforced by the consideration (ver. 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
ver. 2, thus introducing a second co-ordinate reason for the counsel.
The translation of it as hypothetical or temporal (if or when) rather
weakens the urgency of ver. 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 (Psalm vii. 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 ver. 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 ver. 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 ver. 5 is the result of God's trial of
the two classes, is carried forward in vv. 6 and 7 to its twofold
issues. But the form of ver. 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 parts 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 ver. 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 ver. 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" (ver. 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 ver. 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."