Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 19:4

"Their line is gone out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun," — Psalms 19:4 (ASV)

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.