Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 9
Charles Ellicott Commentary
Psalms 9
Charles Ellicott Commentary
Psalms 9
"I will give thanks unto Jehovah with my whole heart; I will show forth all thy marvellous works." — Psalms 9:1 (ASV)
The alphabetic arrangement is begun in its most complete form. Every clause of the first stanza begins with Aleph.
"When mine enemies turn back, They stumble and perish at thy presence." — Psalms 9:3 (ASV)
When. —Literally, in the turning of my enemies back, which may be either when they turned, or because they turned, or possibly with both ideas combined. The older versions have when.Psalms 9:2–3 form one sentence: I will be glad and rejoice in thee ... when mine enemies are turned back, (when) they fall and perish at thy presence.
Fall. —Better, stumble through weakness. So the Septuagint, are weak.
"For thou hast maintained my right and my cause; Thou sittest in the throne judging righteously." — Psalms 9:4 (ASV)
Thou hast maintained my right. —Literally, thou hast made my judgment, as the Septuagint and Vulgate. For this confidence in the supreme arbiter of events, compare Shakespeare:
“Is this your Christian counsel? Out upon you!
Heaven is above all yet. There sits a Judge
That no king can corrupt.”—Henry VIII.
"Thou hast rebuked the nations, thou hast destroyed the wicked; Thou hast blotted out their name for ever and ever." — Psalms 9:5 (ASV)
Put out. —Better, blotted out. The family is extinct and its name erased from the civil register. (Psalms 109:13.) The Daleth stanza is missing.
"The enemy are come to an end, they are desolate for ever; And the cities which thou hast overthrown, The very remembrance of them is perished." — Psalms 9:6 (ASV)
O thou enemy ... —This vocative gives no intelligible meaning. Translate, As for the enemy, they are made an utter wreck and perpetual ruin.
Destructions. —Properly, desolations, ruins, from a word meaning “to be dried up.”
Come to a perpetual end. —Properly, are completed for ever.
Thou hast destroyed. —Some understand the relative: “the cities which you have destroyed.”
Their memorial. —Better, their very memory is perished; literally, their memory, theirs. (Compare “He cannot flatter, he”—Shakespeare, King Lear).
The Septuagint and Vulgate read, “with a sound,” referring to the crash of falling cities.
Some would substitute enemies for cities, but they lose the emphasis of the passage, which points to the utter evanishment from history of great cities as a consequence and sign of Divine judgment.
Probably the poet thinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose overthrow left such a significant mark on the thought of Israel. We think of the mounds of earth which alone represent Nineveh and Babylon.
“’Mid far sands,
The palm-tree cinctured city stands,
Bright white beneath, as heaven, bright blue,
Leans over it, while the years pursue
Their course, unable to abate
Its paradisal laugh at fate.
One morn the Arab staggers blind
O’er a new tract of earth calcined
To ashes, silence, nothingness,
And strives, with dizzy wits, to guess
From where fell the blow.”—R. BROWNING: Easter Day.
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