Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 120

Deliver ... —This is the cry for help that was just mentioned. This idea is one we have encountered frequently. Of all the elements of bitterness that made up Israel's lot under foreign rule, taunts and slanders seem to have inflicted the deepest wound and left the most lasting scar. This was “the torture prolonged from age to age,” under which we hear one psalmist after another raising his cry for deliverance.

What shall ... ?—Literally, What will he give to you, and what will he add to you, deceitful tongue? where it is better, as in the Authorized Version, to take the subject as indefinite and so render it in the passive voice. Thus, we essentially get the following question: “What more can be added to you (i.e., in the way of epithet), besides lying and false, you deceitful tongue?”

The answer is given by suggesting the usual metaphors for malicious speech: “the warrior’s sharpened arrows” (Jeremiah 9:8; Psalms 57:4); “fire” (James 3:6). Only here, both images are elaborated.

For the Hebrew word give with the sense of comparison, see 1 Samuel 1:16: Count (Hebrew, give) not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial. Gesenius compares the use of the Greek τιθένμι, instead of νομίζειν. So, too, the word “add” has a similar sense (1 Kings 10:7; see margin).

Sharp. More accurately, sharpened, whetted, as if for a purpose.

Juniper. Properly, broom. It is the Hebrew rothem, a plant identical with the Arabian retem and Algerian retama (see 1 Kings 19:4–5).

Dr. Tristram mentions the employment of this bush for fuel: “It is ruthlessly uprooted by the Arabs, wherever it is tolerably abundant, for the manufacture of charcoal, which is considered of the finest quality, and fetches a higher price at Cairo than any other kind. Several travelers have mentioned their meeting with Bedouins employed in conveying retem charcoal to the Egyptian markets” (Natural History of the Bible, p. 360; see also Bible Educator, IV, p. 194).

Burckhardt and Robinson also both noticed this trade.

Wonderful stories are told by both Jerome and the rabbis about how travelers, having cooked their food with fires made from the juniper wood, which they suppose to be the wood meant here, and returning a year later to the same spot, still found the embers alive.

Mesech. —This name is generally identified with Moschi, mentioned by Herodotus (iii. 94), a tribe on the borders of Colchis and Armenia. It appears again in the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 27:13; Ezekiel 38:3; Ezekiel 39:1). The only reason for suspecting the accuracy of this identification is its remoteness from Kedar, who were a nomad tribe of Arabia (Song of Solomon 1:5). But in the absence of any other indication of the motive for mentioning these tribes here, this very remoteness affords a sufficiently plausible one; or they may be types of savage life, selected the one from the north, and the other from the south, as poetry dictated.

It is quite possible that the circumstances in which the poet wrote made it necessary for him to veil his allusion in this way to powerful tribes, from whose violence the nation was suffering. In any case, the two concluding verses leave no doubt that some troubled state of affairs is presented here, in which choosing a course of action was not easy, and which affected the whole nation, not an individual.

I am for peace. —For the concise and significant phrase, “I peace,” see Note, Psalms 109:3. Both pronouns, I and they, are emphatic. No doubt these verses are intended to indicate the nature of the malicious speeches mentioned in Psalm 120:2-3.

We imagine Israel in particularly difficult political relations under the Persians, possibly very soon after the Return. They were trying to keep in favour and peace with the ruling powers but were continually drawn into trouble by the jealousy and bitterness of other subject tribes. (See Introduction.)