Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 84

How amiable. —Better, How loved and how lovable. The Hebrew word combines both senses.

Tabernacles. —Better, perhaps, dwellings. (Compare to Psalms 43:3.) The plural is used poetically; therefore, we need not think of the various courts of the Temple.

Longs. — From a root meaning to grow pale, this expresses one effect of strong emotion—one grows pale with longing. Similarly, the Latin poets used pallidus to express the effects of passionate love, and generally of any strong emotion:

“Ambitione mala aut argenti pallet amore.”
Horace, Satires 2.3.78.

Or we may perhaps compare Shakespeare’s:

“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

For a similar fervid expression of desire for communion with God, compare Psalms 63:1.

Faints. — Or more properly, as the Septuagint has it, fails.

Courts. — This, too, like "tabernacles" mentioned above, seems to be used in a general, poetical way, so there is no need to think of the court of the priests as distinguished from that of the people.

The living God. — Compare Psalms 42:2, the only other place in the Psalms where God is so named.

Sparrow. —Heb., tsippôr, which is found upwards of forty times in the Old Testament, and is evidently used in a very general way to include a great number of small birds. "Our common house-sparrow is found on the coast in the towns, and inland its place is taken by a very closely-allied species, Passer cisalpina" (Tristram, Natural History of the Bible, p. 202).

Swallow. —Heb. derôr, which by its etymology implies a bird of rapid whirling flight. (See Proverbs 26:2, where this characteristic is especially noticed.) The ancient versions take the word as cognate with "turtle-dove." In an appendix to Delitzsch’s Commentary on the Psalms, Dr. J. G. Wetzstein identifies the tsippôr with the ôsfur of the Arabs, a generic name for small chirping birds, and derôr with dûri, which is specific to the sparrow.

Even your altars. —Better, at or near your altars, though even if taken as in the Authorized Version, the meaning is the same. There is no real occasion for the great difficulty that has been made about this verse.

It is absurd indeed to think of the birds actually nesting on the altars; but it is quite probable that they were found in and about the Temple, just as in Herodotus (i. 159) we read of Aristodicus making the circuit of the temple at Branchidae, and taking the nests of young sparrows and other birds. (Compare the story in Aelian of the man who was slain for harming a sparrow that had sheltered in the temple of Aesculapius.) Ewald gives many other references, and among them one to Burckhardt showing that birds nest in the Kaaba at Mecca.

The Hebrew poetic style is not favourable to simile, or the psalmist would have written (as a modern would), "As the birds delight to nest at your altars, so do I love to dwell in your house."

Blessed is the man. —Or collectively, men, as the suffix in their hearts shows.

Ways. —The word derives from a root meaning to cast up, and so refers to highways marked by the heaps of stone piled up at the side (Isaiah 57:14). In Jeremiah 18:15, mere footways or bypaths are contrasted with these. Consequently, the highway lends itself as a metaphor for the way of peace and righteousness (Proverbs 12:28), an interpretation adopted by the Chaldee and some modern expositors.

However, this moral intention is secondary to the actual desire to join the pilgrim band journeying towards Zion; the verse describes this in words that are echoed exactly in our own Chaucer:

“So pricketh hem Nature in her corages (in their hearts)
Than longen folk to go on pilgrimages.”

The well-known and deeply loved route to the sacred shrine is in their minds; their hearts are set upon it.

In these verses, as in the analogous picture (Isaiah 35:6–8), there is a blending of the real and the figurative; the actual journey towards Zion is represented as accompanied by ideal blessings of peace and refreshment. It is improbable that the poet would turn abruptly from the description of the swallows in the Temple to what looks like a description of a real journey, with a locality, or in any case a district, which was well known and introduced by its proper name, and yet intend only a figurative reference.

On the other hand, it is quite in the Hebrew manner to intermingle the ideal with the actual, and to present the spiritual side by side with the literal. Thus, we have here recorded the actual experience of a pilgrim’s route. But quite naturally and correctly has the world seen in it a description of the pilgrimage of life, and drawn from it many a sweet and consoling lesson.