1 The fool says in his heart, There is no God.
They corrupt _and_ make abominable their _iniquity_;
There is no one doing good.
2 _God_ looketh down from heaven upon the sons of men,
To see if there is any having discernment seeking after God.
3 _Each of them_ is _turned aside_; together they are become putrid;
There is no one doing good;
There is not even one.
4 Do the workers of iniquity not know
Who devour my people [as] they devour bread?
On _God_ they do not call.
5 There they feared a [great] fear, _where no fear was_:
For God _has scattered the bones of him that encamps against thee_;
_Thou hast_ put _them_ to shame; for God _has rejected them_.
6 Oh that the salvations of Israel were come out of Zion!
When _God_ brings back the captivity of His people,
May Jacob exult, may Israel be glad!
In this psalm we have an Elohistic recast of Psalm xiv., differing from
its original in substituting Elohim for Jehovah (four times) and in the
language of ver. 5. There are also other slight deviations not affecting
the sense. For the exposition the reader is referred to that of Psalm
xiv. It is only necessary here to take note of the divergences.
The first of these occurs in ver. 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 ver. 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 emend. In ver. 4 "all," which in Psalm xiv. precedes
"workers of iniquity," is omitted, probably as unnecessary.
The most important changes are in ver. 5, which stands for vv. 5 and
6 of Psalm xiv. 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 Psalm xiv. 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 Psalm xiv., to express the completeness and
manifoldness of the deliverance thus yearned for of old, and not yet
come in its perfection.