Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 42:6

"O my God, my soul is cast down within me: Therefore do I remember thee from the land of the Jordan, And the Hermons, from the hill Mizar." — Psalms 42:6 (ASV)

Cast down. — The poet, though faith condemns his dejection, still feels it and cannot help expressing it. The heart will not be tranquil all at once; the utterance of its trouble, so natural, so pathetic, long after served, in the very words of the Septuagint, to express a deeper grief and mark a more tremendous crisis (John 12:27; Matthew 26:38).

Therefore will I. — Better, therefore do I remember you. (Compare to Jonah 2:7.)

From the land of Jordan — i.e., the uplands of the northeast, where the river rises. The poet has not yet passed quite into the land of exile, the country beyond Jordan, but already he is on its borders. As his sad eyes turn again and again towards the loved country he is leaving, its sacred summits begin to disappear, while ever nearer and higher rise the snow-clad peaks of Hermon.

Hermonites. — Rather, of the Hermons, i.e., either collectively for the whole range (as generally of mountains, the Balkans, etc.) or with reference to the appearance of the mountain as a ridge with a conspicuous peak at either end. (See Thomson, Land and Book, p. 177.) In reality, however, the group known especially as Hermon has three summits, situated, like the angles of a triangle, a quarter of a mile from each other, and of almost equal elevation. (See Smith’s Bible Dictionary, “Hermon.” Compare to Our Work in Palestine, p. 246.)

The hill Mizar. — Margin: the little hill. So too, the Septuagint and Vulgate have a monte modico (Compare to the play on the name Zoar in Genesis 19:20). Hence, some think the poet is contrasting Hermon with Zion. In such a case, however, the custom of Hebrew poetry was to exalt Zion and not depreciate the higher mountains. It is therefore very natural to suppose that some lower ridge or pass, over which the exile may be supposed wending his sad way, was actually called “the little” or “the less.”