There are many echoes of this period of Engedi in the Psalms. Perhaps
the most distinctly audible of these are to be found in the seventh
psalm, which is all but universally recognised as David's, even Ewald
concurring in the general consent. It is an irregular ode--for such is
the meaning of Shiggaion in the title, and by its broken rhythms and
abrupt transitions testifies to the emotion of its author. The occasion
of it is said to be "the words of Cush the Benjamite." As this is a
peculiar name for an Israelite, it has been supposed to be an
allegorical designation for some historical person, expressive of his
character. We might render it "the negro." The Jewish commentators have
taken it to refer to Saul himself, but the bitter tone of the psalm, so
unlike David's lingering forbearance to the man whom he never ceased to
love, is against that supposition. Shimei the Benjamite, whose foul
tongue cursed him in rabid rage, as he fled before Absalom, has also
been thought of, but the points of correspondence with the earlier date
are too numerous to make that reference tenable. It seems better to
suppose that Cush "the black" was one of Saul's tribe, who had been
conspicuous among the calumniators of whom we have seen David
complaining to the king. And if so, there is no period in the Sauline
persecution into which the psalm will fit so naturally as the present.
Its main thoughts are precisely those which he poured out so
passionately in his eager appeal when he and Saul stood face to face on
the solitary hill side. They are couched in the higher strain of poetry
indeed, but that is the only difference; whilst there are several verbal
coincidences, and at least one reference to the story, which seem to fix
the date with considerable certainty.
In it we see the psalmist's soul surging with the ground swell of strong
emotion, which breaks into successive waves of varied feeling--first
(vers. 1, 2) terror blended with trust, the enemy pictured, as so
frequently in these early psalms, as a lion who tears the flesh and
breaks the bones of his prey--and the refuge in God described by a
graphic word very frequent also in the cotemporaneous psalms (xi. 1;
lvii. 1, etc.). Then with a quick turn comes the passionate protestation
of his innocence, in hurried words, broken by feeling, and indignantly
turning away from the slanders which he will not speak of more
definitely than calling them "this."
(3) Jehovah, my God! if I have done this--
If there be iniquity in my hands--
(4) If I have rewarded evil to him that was at peace with me--
Yea, I delivered him that without cause is mine enemy--
(5) May the enemy pursue my soul and capture it,
And trample down to the earth my life,
And my glory in the dust may he lay!
How remarkably all this agrees with his words to Saul, "There is neither
evil nor transgression in my hand, ... yet thou huntest my soul to take
it" (1 Sam. xxiv. 11); and how forcible becomes the singular reiteration
in the narrative, of the phrase "my hand," which occurs six times in
four verses. The peculiarly abrupt introduction in ver. 4 of the clause,
"I delivered him that without cause is mine enemy," which completely
dislocates the grammatical structure, is best accounted for by
supposing that David's mind is still full of the temptation to stain
his hands with Saul's blood, and is vividly conscious of the effort
which he had had to make to overcome it. And the solemn invocation of
destruction which he dares to address to Jehovah his God includes the
familiar figure of himself as a fugitive before the hunters, which is
found in the words already quoted, and which here as there stands in
immediate connection with his assertion of clean hands.
Then follows, with another abrupt turn, a vehement cry to God to judge
his cause; his own individual case melts into the thought of a
world-wide judgment, which is painted with grand power with three or
four broad rapid strokes.
(6) Awake for me--Thou hast commanded judgment.
(7) Let the assembly of the nations stand round Thee,
And above it return Thou up on high.
(8) Jehovah will judge the nations.
Judge me, O Jehovah, according to my righteousness and mine
integrity in me!
Each smaller act of God's judgment is connected with the final
world-judgment, is a prophecy of it, is one in principle therewith; and
He, who at the last will be known as the universal Judge of all,
certainly cannot leave His servants' cause unredressed nor their cry
unheard till then. The psalmist is led by his own history to realize
more intensely that truth of a Divine manifestation for judicial
purposes to the whole world, and his prophetic lip paints its
solemnities as the surest pledge of his own deliverance. He sees the
gathered nations standing hushed before the Judge, and the Victor God at
the close of the solemn act ascending up on high where He was before,
above the heads of the mighty crowd (Psalm lxviii. 19). In the faith of
this vision, and because God will judge the nations, he invokes for
himself the anticipation of that final triumph of good over evil, and
asks to be dealt with according to his righteousness. Nothing but the
most hopeless determination to find difficulties could make a difficulty
of such words. David is not speaking of his whole character or life, but
of his conduct in one specific matter, namely, in his relation to Saul.
The righteous integrity which he calls God to vindicate is not general
sinlessness nor inward conformity with the law of God, but his
blamelessness in all his conduct to his gratuitous foe. His prayer that
God would judge him is distinctly equivalent to his often repeated cry
for deliverance, which should, as by a Divine arbitration, decide the
debate between Saul and him. The whole passage in the psalm, with all
its lyrical abruptness and lofty imagery, is the expression of the very
same thought which we find so prominent in his words to Saul, already
quoted, concerning God's judging between them and delivering David out
of Saul's hand. The parallel is instructive, not only as the prose
rendering of the poetry in the psalm, explaining it beyond the
possibility of misunderstanding, but also as strongly confirmatory of
the date which we have assigned to the latter. It is so improbable as to
be almost inconceivable that the abrupt disconnected themes of the psalm
should echo so precisely the _whole_ of the arguments used in the
remonstrance of the historical books, and should besides present verbal
resemblances and historical allusions to these, unless it be of the same
period, and therefore an inlet into the mind of the fugitive as he
lurked among the rugged cliffs by "the fountain of the wild goat."
In that aspect the remainder of the psalm is very striking and
significant. We have two main thoughts in it--that of God as punishing
evil in this life, and that of the self-destruction inherent in all sin;
and these are expressed with such extraordinary energy as to attest at
once the profound emotion of the psalmist, and his familiarity with such
ideas during his days of persecution. It is noticeable, too, that the
language is carefully divested of all personal reference; he has risen
to the contemplation of a great law of the Divine government, and at
that elevation the enemies whose calumnies and cruelties had driven him
to God fade into insignificance.
With what magnificent boldness he paints God the Judge arraying Himself
in His armour of destruction!
(11) God is a righteous Judge,
And a God (who is) angry every day.
(12) If he (_i.e._, the evil-doer) turn not, He whets His sword,
His bow He has bent, and made it ready.
(13) And for him He has prepared weapons of death,
His arrows He has made blazing darts.
Surely there is nothing grander in any poetry than this tremendous
image, smitten out with so few strokes of the chisel, and as true as it
is grand. The representation applies to the facts of life, of which as
directed by a present Providence, and not of any future retribution,
David is here thinking. Among these facts is chastisement falling upon
obstinate antagonism to God. Modern ways of thinking shrink from such
representations; but the whole history of the world teems with
confirmation of their truth--only what David calls the flaming arrows of
God, men call "the natural consequences of evil." The later revelation
of God in Christ brings into greater prominence the disciplinary
character of all punishment here, but bates no jot of the intensity with
which the earlier revelation grasped the truth of God as a righteous
Judge in eternal opposition to, and aversion from, evil.
With that solemn picture flaming before his inward eye, the
prophet-psalmist turns to gaze on the evil-doer who has to bear the
brunt of these weapons of light. Summoning us to look with him by a
"Behold!" he tells his fate in an image of frequent occurrence in the
psalms of this period, and very natural in the lips of a man wandering
in the desert among wild creatures, and stumbling sometimes into the
traps dug for them: "He has dug a hole and hollowed it out, and he falls
into the pitfall he is making." The crumbling soil in which he digs
makes his footing on the edge more precarious with every spadeful that
he throws out, and at last, while he is hard at work, in he tumbles. It
is the conviction spoken in the proverbs of all nations, expressed here
by David in a figure drawn from life--the conviction that all sin digs
its own grave and is self-destructive. The psalm does not proclaim the
yet deeper truth that this automatic action, by which sin sets in motion
its own punishment, has a disciplinary purpose, so that the arrows of
God wound for healing, and His armour is really girded on for, even
while it seems to be against, the sufferer. But it would not be
difficult to show that that truth underlies the whole Old Testament
doctrine of retribution, and is obvious in many of David's psalms. In
the present one the deliverance of the hunted prey is contemplated as
the end of the baffled trapper's fall into his own snare, and beyond
that the psalmist's thoughts do not travel. His own safety, the
certainty that his appeal to God's judgment will not be in vain, fill
his mind; and without following the fate of his enemy further, he closes
this song of tumultuous and varied emotion with calm confidence and a
vow of thanksgiving for a deliverance which is already as good as
accomplished:
(17) I will give thanks to Jehovah according to His righteousness,
And I will sing the name of Jehovah, Most High.
We have still another psalm (lvii.) which is perhaps best referred to
this period. According to the title, it belongs to the time when David
"fled from Saul in the cave." This may, of course, apply to either
Adullam or Engedi, and there is nothing decisive to be alleged for
either; yet one or two resemblances to psalm vii. incline the balance to
the latter period.
These resemblances are the designation of his enemies as lions (vii. 2;
lvii. 4); the image of their falling into their own trap (vii. 15; lvii.
6); the use of the phrase "my honour" or "glory" for "my soul" (vii. 5;
lvii. 8--the same word in the original); the name of God as "Most High"
(vii. 17; lvii. 2), an expression which only occurs twice besides in the
Davidic psalms (ix. 2; xxi. 7); the parallelism in sense between the
petition which forms the centre and the close of the one, "Be Thou
exalted, O God, above the heavens" (lvii. 5, 11), and that which is the
most emphatic desire of the other, "Arise, O Lord, awake, ... lift up
Thyself for me" (vii. 6). Another correspondence, not preserved in our
English version, is the employment in both of a rare poetical word,
which originally means "to complete," and so comes naturally to have the
secondary significations of "to perfect" and "to put an end to." The
word in question only occurs five times in the Old Testament, and always
in psalms. Four of these are in hymns ascribed to David, of which two
are (lvii. 2), "The God that _performeth_ all things for me," and (vii.
9), "Let the wickedness of the wicked _come to an end_." The use of the
same peculiar word in two such dissimilar connections seems to show that
it was, as we say, "running in his head" at the time, and is, perhaps, a
stronger presumption of the cotemporaneousness of both psalms than its
employment in both with the same application would have been.
Characteristic of these early psalms is the occurrence of a refrain
(compare lvi. and lix.) which in the present instance closes both of
the portions of which the hymn consists. The former of these (1-5)
breathes prayerful trust, from which it passes to describe the
encompassing dangers; the second reverses this order, and beginning with
the dangers and distress, rises to ringing gladness and triumph, as
though the victory were already won. The psalmist's confident cleaving
of soul to God is expressed (ver. 1) by an image that may be connected
with his circumstances at Engedi: "In Thee has my soul taken refuge."
The English version is correct as regards the sense, though it
obliterates the beautiful metaphor by its rendering "trusteth." The
literal meaning of the verb is "to flee to a refuge," and its employment
here may be due to the poetical play of the imagination, which likens
his secure retreat among the everlasting hills to the safe hiding-place
which his spirit found in God his habitation. A similar analogy appears
in the earliest use of the expression, which may have been floating in
the psalmist's memory, and which occurs in the ancient song of Moses
(Deut. xxxii.). The scenery of the forty years' wanderings remarkably
colours that ode, and explains the frequent recurrence in it of the name
of God as "the Rock." We have false gods, too, spoken of in it, as,
"Their rock in whom they took refuge," where the metaphor appears in its
completeness (ver. 37). Our psalm goes on with words which contain a
further allusion to another part of the same venerable hymn, "And in the
shadow of Thy wings will I take refuge," which remind us of the grand
image in it of God's care over Israel, as of the eagle bearing her
eaglets on her mighty pinions (ver. 11), and point onwards to the still
more wonderful saying in which all that was terrible and stern in the
older figure is softened into tenderness, and instead of the fierce
affection of the mother eagle, the hen gathering her chickens under her
wings becomes the type of the brooding love and more than maternal
solicitude of God in Christ. Nor can we forget that the only other
instance of the figure before David's psalms is in the exquisite idyl
which tells of the sweet heroism of David's ancestress, Ruth, on whose
gentle and homeless head was pronounced the benediction, "A full reward
be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come
to trust" (Ruth ii. 12). We may perhaps also see in this clause an
extension of the simile which unquestionably lies in the verb, and may
think of the strong "sides of the cave," arching above the fugitive like
a gigantic pair of wings beneath which he nestles warm and dry, while
the short-lived storm roars among the rocks--a type of that broad pinion
which is his true defence till threatening evils be overpast. In the
past he has sheltered his soul in God, but no past act of faith can
avail for present distresses. It must be perpetually renewed. The past
deliverances should make the present confidence more easy; and the true
use of all earlier exercises of trust is to prepare for the resolve that
we will still rely on the help we have so often proved. "I have trusted
in Thee" should ever be followed by "And in the shadow of Thy wings will
I trust."
The psalmist goes on to fulfil his resolve. He takes refuge by prayer in
God, whose absolute elevation above all creatures and circumstances is
the ground of his hope, whose faithful might will accomplish its design,
and complete His servant's lot. "I will call to God Most High; to God
who perfects (His purpose) for me." And then assured hope gleams upon
his soul, and though the storm-clouds hang low and black as ever, they
are touched with light. "He will send from heaven and save me." But even
while this happy certainty dawns upon him, the contending fears, which
ever lurk hard by faith, reassert their power, and burst in, breaking
the flow of the sentence, which by its harsh construction indicates the
sudden irruption of disturbing thoughts. "He that would swallow me up
reproaches (me)." With this two-worded cry of pain--prolonged by the
very unusual occurrence, in the middle of a verse, of the "Selah," which
is probably a musical direction for the accompaniment--a billow of
terror breaks over his soul; but its force is soon spent, and the hope,
above which for a moment it had rolled, rises from the broken spray like
some pillared light round which the surges dash in vain. "God shall send
forth His mercy and His truth"--those two white-robed messengers who
draw nigh to all who call on Him. Then follows in broken words, the true
rendering of which is matter of considerable doubt, a renewed picture of
his danger:
(4) (With) my soul--among lions will I lie down.
Devourers are the sons of men;
Their teeth a spear and arrows,
And their tongue a sharp sword
The psalmist seems to have broken off the construction, and instead of
finishing the sentence as he began it, to have substituted the first
person for the third, which ought to have followed "my soul." This
fragmentary construction expresses agitation of spirit. It may be a
question whether the "lions" in the first clause are to be regarded as a
description of his enemies, who are next spoken of without metaphor as
sons of men who devour (or who "breathe out fire"), and whose words are
cutting and wounding as spear and sword. The analogy of the other psalms
of this period favours such an understanding of the words. But, on the
other hand, the reference preferred by Delitzsch and others gives great
beauty. According to that interpretation, the fugitive among the savage
cliffs prepares himself for his nightly slumbers in calm confidence, and
lays himself down there in the cave, while the wild beasts, whose haunt
it may have been, prowl without, feeling himself safer among them than
among the more ferocious "sons of men," whose hatred has a sharper tooth
than even theirs. And then this portion of the psalm closes with the
refrain, "Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let Thy glory be
above all the earth." A prayer that God would show forth His power, and
exalt His name by delivering His servant. What lofty conviction that his
cause was God's cause, that the Divine honour was concerned in his
safety, that he was a chosen instrument to make known God's praise over
all the world!--and what self-forgetfulness in that, even whilst he
prays for his own deliverance, he thinks of it rather as the magnifying
of God, than as it affects himself personally!
The second part continues the closing strain of the former, and
describes the plots of his foes in the familiar metaphor of the pit,
into which they fall themselves. The contemplation of this divine
Nemesis on evil-doers leads up to the grand burst of thanksgiving with
which the psalm closes--
(7) Fixed is my heart, O God! fixed my heart!
I will sing and strike the harp.[K]
(8) Awake, my glory! awake psaltery and harp![L]
I will awake the dawn.
[K] Properly, "sing with a musical accompaniment."
[L] Two kinds of stringed instrument, the difference between which is
very obscure.
If the former part may be regarded as the evening song of confidence,
this is the morning hymn of thankfulness. He lay down in peace among
lions; he awakes to praise. He calls upon his soul to shake off slumber;
he invokes the chords of his harp to arouse from its chamber the
sleeping dawn. Like a mightier than himself, he will rise a great while
before day, and the clear notes of the rude lyre, his companion in all
his wanderings, will summon the morning to add its silent speech to His
praise. But a still loftier thought inspires him. This hunted solitary
not only knows that his deliverance is certain, but he has already the
consciousness of a world-wide vocation, and anticipates that the story
of his sorrow and his trust, with the music of his psalms, belong to the
world, and will flow over the barriers of his own generation and of his
own land into the whole earth--
(9) I will praise Thee among the peoples, O Lord,
I will strike the harp to Thee among the nations.
(10) For great unto the heavens is Thy mercy,
And to the clouds Thy truth.
These two mighty messengers of God, whose coming he was sure of (ver.
3), will show themselves in his deliverance, boundless and filling all
the creation. They shall be the theme of his world-wide praise. And
then with the repetition of the refrain the psalm comes round again to
supplication, and dies into silent waiting before God till He shall be
pleased to answer. Thus triumphant were the hopes of the lonely fugitive
skulking in the wilderness; such bright visions peopled the waste
places, and made the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose.
The cxlii. is also, according to the title, one of the cave-psalms. But
considerable doubt attaches to the whole group of so-called Davidic
compositions in the last book of the psalter (p. 138-144), from their
place, and from the fact that there are just seven of them, as well as
in some cases from their style and character. They are more probably
later hymns in David's manner. The one in question corresponds in tone
with the psalms which we have been considering. It breathes the same
profound consciousness of desolation and loneliness: "My spirit is
darkened within me;" "Refuge fails me, no man cares for my soul." It
glows with the same ardour of personal trust in and love to God which
spring from his very loneliness and helplessness: "I cry unto Thee, O
Jehovah! I say Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the
living." It triumphs with the same confidence, and with the same
conviction that his deliverance concerns all the righteous: "They shall
_crown themselves in me_, for Thou hast dealt bountifully with me;" for
such would appear to be the true meaning of the word rendered in our
version "compass me about;" the idea being that the mercy of God to the
psalmist would become a source of festal gladness to all His servants,
who would bind the story of God's bounty to him upon their brows like a
coronal for a banquet.