The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 1: Psalms I.-XXXVIII.Maclaren, Alexander
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 1: Psalms I.-XXXVIII.
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Psalms -- Commentaries
The third turn of feeling is in vv. 6 and 7. The sense of his own
pains which, in the two previous parts of the psalm, had been
contending with the thought of God, masters the psalmist in these
dreary verses, in which the absence of the name of God is noteworthy
as expressive of his absorption in brooding over his misery. The
vehemence of the manifestations of sorrow and the frankness of the
record of these manifestations in the song are characteristic of the
emotional, demonstrative Eastern temperament, and strike our more
reticent dispositions as excessive. But however expressed in
unfamiliar terms, the emotion which wails in these sad verses is only
too familiar to men of all temperaments. All sad hearts are tempted to
shut out God and to look only at their griefs. There is a strange
pleasure in turning round the knife in the wound and recounting the
tokens of misery. This man feels some ease in telling how he had
exhausted his strength with groaning and worn away the sleepless
night with weeping. Night is ever the nurse of heavy thought, and
stings burn again then. The hyperbolical expressions that he had set
his bed afloat with his tears and "melted" it (as the word means) are
matched by the other hyperboles which follow, describing the effect of
this unmeasured weeping on his eyes. He had wept them away, and they
were bleared and dim like those of an old man. The cause of this
passion of weeping is next expressed, in plain words, which connect
this turn of the thought with the next verses, and seem to explain the
previously mentioned physical pains as either metaphorical or
consequent on the hostility of "mine adversaries."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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