Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 19

The heavens declare. —Better, the heavens are telling. The poet is even now gazing at the sky, not philosophizing on a familiar natural phenomenon, nor is he merely enjoying beauty. Not only is his aesthetic faculty satisfied, but his spirit, his religious nature is moved. He has an immediate apprehension, an intuition of God. He is looking on the freshness of the morning, and all he sees is telling of God, bringing God before him. This constitutes the essence of the greater part of Hebrew poetry.

This is the inspiration of the bard of Israel—a religious inspiration. The lower, the aesthetic perception of beauty, is ready at every moment to pass into the higher, the religious emotion. All truly great poetry partakes of this elevation—Hebrew poetry in its highest degree. Some lines from Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni” not only supply a modern example, but explain the moral, or rather spiritual process, involved—

“O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Did’st vanish from my thought; entranced in prayer,
I worshipped the Invisible alone.”

(See an article on “God in Nature and in History,” in The Expositor for March, 1881.)

Utters. —Literally, pours out, or makes well up, like a fountain, undoubtedly in reference to the light streaming forth.

Shows. —Literally, breathes out; perhaps with reference to the cool evening breeze, so welcome in the East. (See Song of Solomon 2:17, Note.) Notice that it is not here the heavens that are telling the tale of God’s glory to man, or “to the listening earth,” as in Addison’s well-known hymn, but day tells its successor day, and night whispers to night, so handing on, as if from parent to son, the great news.

There is no speech. —The literal rendering is Not speech, not words, their voice is not heard.

In explaining this:

1. One interpretation, from the English version (Bible and Prayer Book) and (if intelligible at all) the Septuagint and Vulgate, proposes: “There is no speech nor language without their (the heavens’) speech being heard (i.e., understood).” But this gives an inadmissible sense to davar, which does not mean language, but a spoken word. Besides, it was not a likely thought for the psalmist that the divine tradition of the heavens, while it travels over the whole earth, would be everywhere intelligible.

2. A second interpretation suggests: “It is not speech, it is not words whose voice is inaudible,” meaning, unintelligible; but, on the contrary, it is a manifestation to all the world. However, the parallelism of the text argues against this.

3. A third view, and the one preferred here, notes that the line “their voice is not heard” is merely the rhythmic echo of “there is no speech nor word.” Therefore, this approach keeps close to the literal rendering: There is no speech, there are no (uttered) words, their voice is inaudible; understanding the poet to say that the manifestation of the Creator’s glory—which he has just imagined the heavens proclaiming, and of which each succeeding day passes on the story—is not made in audible words. The communication of the sky is eloquent, but mute; its voice is for the heart and emotion, not the ear.

So Addison—

“What though in solemn silence all
Move round this dark terrestrial ball,
What though no real voice or sound
Amidst their radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice
And utter forth a glorious voice,
For ever singing as they shine
The hand that made us is Divine.”

Their line. —Hebrew, kav, a cord, used of a plummet line (Zechariah 1:16); a measuring cord (Jeremiah 31:39, where the same verb, gone forth, also appears). In Isaiah 28:10, the word is used ethically for a definition or law. But neither of these seems very appropriate here. The verse lacks sound or voice, and words of this intention actually appear in the Septuagint, Vulgate, Symmachus, Jerome, and the Syriac.

The use which Saint Paul makes of these words (Romans 10:18) is as natural as striking. The march of truth has always been compared to the spread of light. But the allegorical interpretation based on the quotation, making the heavens a figure of the Church and the sun of the Gospel, loses the force and beauty of the Apostle’s application.

In them has ... —This clause is not only rightly joined to Psalm 19:4, but concludes a stanza: the relative in the next verse of the Authorized Version mars the true construction.

A tabernacle. —The tent-chamber into which the sun retired after his day’s journey, and from which he started in the morning, Aurora, or dawn (according to Greek mythology) drawing back the curtains for his departure, was naturally a conception common to all nations. That the phenomena of sunset should engage the poet’s attention before those of sunrise was inevitable in a race who reckoned the evening and the morning were the first day. The Septuagint and Vulgate completely spoil the picture by rendering he has pitched his tent in the sun.

Which is. Better: and he is. The suddenness of the Eastern sunrise is finely caught in the image of the uplifted tent-curtain and the appearance of the radiant hero (“strong man; ” Hebrew, gibbor. Compare to Judges 5:31).

This lack of twilight, this absence of silent preparation for the supreme moment, distinguishes Eastern songs of sunrise from the poetry of the West. In these Eastern songs, there are no musterings of “mute companies of changeful clouds,” no “forerunners of the light,” no “grey lines fretting the clouds as messengers of day.”

Unheralded, unannounced, the sun leaps forth in all his splendor—a young bridegroom with the joy of the wedding day still on his countenance, a hero leaping forth on his path of conquest and glory.

How different the suggested feeling of this is from the wistful tenderness of Milton’s dawn coming forth “with pilgrim steps in amice grey;” or Shakespeare’s “morn in russet clad,” that “walks over the dew” of the high eastern hill.

Chamber. Hebrew: chuphah, a marriage chamber or bed (Joel 2:16). In later Hebrew, it refers to the canopy carried over the wedded pair, or even the marriage itself.

Rejoiceth. Literally: leaps for joy.

A race. Better: his race, that is, his daily course or journey.