Ver. 8. "_Judah, thou, thy brethren shall praise thee; thy hand shall be on the neck of thine enemies; before thee shall bow down the sons of thy father._ Ver. 9. _A lion's whelp is Judah; from the prey, my son, thou goest up; he stoopeth down, he coucheth as a lion, and as a full-grown lion, who shall rouse him up?_ Ver. 10. _The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and unto Him the people shall adhere._" Thus does dying Jacob, in announcing "what shall befall his sons in the end of the days" (ver. 1), speak to Judah, after having dismissed those of his sons to whom, in the name of the Lord, he must tell hard things--things which did not, however, exclude them from the salvation common to all of them (ver. 28), although their shadow made the light of Judah shine so much the more brightly.[1] In ver. 8 everything depends upon a right determination of the meaning of the name Judah. Being formed from the Future in Hophal, it signifies: "He (viz., God) shall be praised." This explanation rests upon Gen. xxix. 35, where Leah, after the birth of Judah, says, "Now will I praise the Lord;" and then follow the words: "therefore she called his name Judah." It rests likewise on the common use of the verb ידה, the Hiphil of which is, according to _Maurer_, almost constantly used of "praising God," and is, as it were, set apart and sanctified for that purpose. After having enumerated a multitude of passages, _Gesenius_ says, in his _Thesaurus_: "In all these passages it refers [Pg 58] to the praise of God, and it is only rarely (Gen. xlix. 8 compared with Job xl. 14) that it refers to the praise of men." Even these few exceptions are such only in appearance. In Job xl. 14, he whom God will praise is not an ordinary man, but a _god-man_. By the subsequent words in Gen. xlix. 8, "Before thee shall bow down," something divine is ascribed to Judah; we need not therefore be astonished that, by the word יודוך, he is raised above the merely human standing. They only who do not know the Lion of the tribe of Judah, have any reason to explain away, by a forced exposition, the slight allusion to a superhuman dignity of the tribe of Judah. The greater number of expositors, referring to the subsequent words, "thy brethren shall praise thee," explain the name by the expression, "blessed one." But, even though we should retain the sure explanation which has been given above, the idea now mentioned falls very naturally in with it. He who, in the fullest sense, is a "God's-praise" (_Gottlob_), whose very existence becomes the cause of exclaiming, δόξα τῷ Θεῷ, praise be to God, will assuredly receive praise from the brethren.--"Judah thou" stands (according to Gen. xxvii. 36; Matt. xvi. 18) either for, "Thou art Judah," _i.e._, thou art rightly called so, or, according to Gen. xxiv. 60, for, "Thou Judah," _i.e._, I have something particular to tell thee (compare the emphatic "I" in Gen. xxiv. 27).--On the