Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 8

O Lord our Lord. — Jehovah our Lord. For the first time in the Book of Psalms the personal feeling is consciously lost sight of in a larger, a national, or possibly human feeling. The poet recognizes God’s relation to the whole of mankind as to the whole material creation. Thus the hymn appropriately lent itself to the use of the congregation in public worship, though it does not follow that this was the object of its composition.

Excellent. —The Septuagint and Vulgate, “wonderful.” Better, great or exalted.

Who have set ... —The translation of this clause is uncertain. It must be determined by the parallelism, and by the fact that the poet, in Psalms 8:4, merely expands the thought he had before expressed. There is plainly some error in the text since it is ungrammatical. The proposed emendations vary considerably. The ancient versions also disagree.

The Authorized Version may be retained, since it meets all the requirements of the context, and is etymologically correct; though, grammatically, Ewald’s correction, which also agrees with the Vulgate, is preferable, “You whose splendor is raised above the heavens.” The precise thought in the poet’s mind has also been the subject of contention.

Some take the clause to refer to the praises raised in Jehovah’s honor higher than the heavens, a thought parallel to the preceding clause; others, to the visible glory spread over the sky. Others see an antithesis. God’s glory is displayed on earth in His name, His real glory is above the heavens. Probably only a general sense of the majesty of Him that is higher than the highest (Ecclesiastes 5:8), and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain (1 Kings 8:27), occupied the poet’s mind.

Babes and sucklings. — Better, young children and sucklings. This is a regular phrase to describe children from one to three years old (1 Samuel 15:3; 1 Samuel 22:19). The yonek, or suckling, denotes an earlier stage of the nursing period (which, with Hebrew mothers, sometimes extended over three years (2 Maccabees 7:27), and according to Talmudic authority could not be less than two years) than the ôlel, which is applied to children able to play on the streets (Jeremiah 9:21; Lamentations 4:4). (See Dr. Ginsburg on Eastern Manners and Customs: Bible Educator, vol. 1, p. 29.)

Ordained strength... — At first glance, the Septuagint translation, as quoted in Matthew 21:16 (see Note, New Testament Commentary), “Thou hast perfected praise,” seems correct, from a comparison with Psalm 29:1, where strength translates the same Hebrew word and plainly means homage. This undoubtedly expresses part of the poet's thought: that in a child’s simple and innocent wonder lies the truest worship, and that God accomplishes the greatest things and reveals His glory by means of the weakest instruments—a thought seized upon by our Lord to condemn the lack of spirituality in the scribes and Pharisees.

But the context, speaking the language of war, seems to demand the primitive meaning: stronghold or defense.

The truth that the Bible proclaims about the innate divinity of man, his essential likeness to God, is the principal subject of the poet. In the princely heart of innocence of an unspoiled child, he sees its confirmation, just as Wordsworth saw.

“Trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home.”

Such a proof is strong even against the noisy clamor of apostate men, who rebel against the Divine government and lay the blame on God for their aberration from His order. “His merry babbling mouth provides a defense of the Creator against all the calumnies of the foe” (Ewald).

Others think rather of the faculty of speech, and its wonder and glory.

The avenger. — Properly, him who avenges himself.

When I consider. — Literally, see, scan.

Ordained. — Or, as in margin, founded — i.e., created, formed; but the English word aptly introduces the idea of order in the kosmos. Compare:—

“Know the cause why music was ordained?”

—Shakespeare.

In our humid climate, we can hardly imagine the brilliance of an Eastern night. “There,” writes one about a night in Palestine, “it seems so, bearing down upon our heads with power are the steadfast splendours of that midnight sky.”

But, on the other hand, the fuller revelations of astronomy do more than take the place of this splendour. These revelations fill us with amazement and admiration at the vast spaces the stars fill, and their mighty movements in their measured orbits.

Man ... son of man ... — The first, possibly, with a suggestion of frailty; the second, to his life derived from human ancestry. The answer to this question must always touch the two poles, of human frailty on the one hand, and the glory of human destiny on the other. “O the grandeur and the littleness, the excellence and the corruption, the majesty and the meanness, of man.” — Pascal.

The insignificance of man compared to the stars is a common theme of poetry; but how different is the feeling of the Hebrew from that of the modern poet, who regrets the culture by which he had been

“Brought to understand
A sad astrology, the boundless plan
That makes you tyrants in your iron skies,
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,
Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand
His nothingness into man.” — Tennyson: Maud.

And yet, again, how far removed from the other pole of modern feeling, which draws inanimate nature into close sympathy with human joy or sorrow, expressed in the following words: “When I have gazed into these stars, have they not looked down upon me as if with pity from their serene spaces, like eyes glistening with heavenly tears over the little lot of man?” — Carlyle.

The Hebrew poet dwells on neither of these aspects, but at once passes on to the essential greatness of man and his superiority in creation, by reason of his moral sense and his spiritual likeness to God. Another English poet sings to the stars:—

“’Tis to be forgiven
That, in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o’erleap their mortal state,
And claim a kinship with you.”

—BYRON: Childe Harold.

But the psalmist looks beyond the bright worlds to a higher kinship with God Himself.

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels.—Literally, you make him lack but a little from God: that is, you have made him little less than Divine. We should read, however, instead of “for you,” “ and you have made,” etc. The Authorized Version follows the Septuagint in a translation suggested doubtless by the desire to tone down an expression about the Deity that seemed too bold.

That version was adopted in his quotation by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 2:6–7). (See Note in New Testament Commentary.) Undoubtedly the word Elohim, being used to express a class of supernatural beings, includes angels as well as the Divine being (1 Samuel 28:13; Zechariah 12:8). But here there is nothing in the context to suggest limitation to one part of that class.

Crowned.—Or, compassed.