1 Hear this, all ye peoples;
Give ear, all ye inhabitants of the world:
2 Both low-born and high-born,
Rich and poor together.
3 My mouth shall speak wisdom;
And the meditation of my heart shall utter understanding
4 I will bend my ear to a parable:
I will open my riddle on the harp.
5 Why should I fear in the days of evil,
When the malice of my pursuers surrounds me,
6 [Even of] those who rely on their riches,
And boast of their wealth?
7 No man can at all redeem a brother;
He cannot give to God a ransom for him
8 (Yea, too costly is the redemption price of their soul,
And he must leave it alone for ever):
9 That he may continue living on for ever,
And may not see the pit.
10 Nay, he must see that the wise die
The fool and the brutish perish alike,
And leave to others their riches.
11 Their inward thought [is that] their houses [shall last] for ever,
Their dwellings to generation after generation;
They call their lands by their own names.
12 But man [being] in honour abides not:
He becomes like the beasts [that] are brought to silence.
13 This is the lot of them to whom presumptuous confidence belongs:
And after them men approve their sayings. Selah.
14 Like sheep they are folded in Sheol;
Death shepherds them:
And the upright shall rule over them in the morning;
And their form shall be wasted away by Sheol,
So that it is without a dwelling.
15 Surely God shall redeem my soul from the power of Sheol:
For He shall take me. Selah.
16 Fear not thou when a man becomes rich,
When the glory of his house increases:
17 For when he dies he will not take away any [of it];
His glory shall not go down after him.
18 Though in his lifetime he bless his soul
(And [men] praise thee when thou doest well for thyself)
19 He shall go to the generation of his fathers;
For evermore they see not light.
20 Man [who is] in honour, and has not understanding,
Becomes like the beasts that are brought to silence.
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 Psalm lxxiii., 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 Psalm
lxxiii. as "more skilful," and therefore presumably later than
Psalm xlix., 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 (vv. 1-4), the
psalm is divided into two parts, each closed with a refrain. The
former of these (vv. 5-12) contrasts the arrogant security of the
prosperous godless with the end that awaits them; while the second
(vv. 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 Psalm lxxiii.,
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 Psalm lxxviii. 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 (lxxiii.) the singer
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 ver. 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. Ver. 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 xvii. 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 ver. 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 ver. 15 (the direct antithesis of this verse), and is
characteristic of the parallel Psalm lxxiii. 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 ver. 15 points back to this verse,
and declares that God can do what man cannot. Ver. 8 must be taken as
a parenthesis, and the construction carried on from ver. 7 to ver.
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 for ever.
The "see" in ver. 10 is taken by many to have the same object as
the "see" in ver. 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 ver. 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 for ever. Like the godless man in Psalm
x., 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 ver. 11 _a_ is that
"their grave (or, the graves) are their houses for ever," there is no
parallelism between ver. 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 ver. 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 ver. 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 ver. 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 ver. 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 vv. 6-11 is
foolish, but that the end foretold in ver. 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 ver. 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 ver. 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 for ever" (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. Ver. 15 is plainly
antithetical, not only to ver. 14, but to ver. 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 Psalm lxiii. 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 Psalm
lxxiii. 24, "Thou shalt take me," and in both passages the psalmist is
obviously quoting from the narrative of Enoch's translation. "God took
him" (Gen. v. 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 xvi. and xvii.,
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. Ver. 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 ver. 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!"