The same remarks which were made as to the date of the former psalm apply in this case. Two arguments have, however, been urged against the Maccabean date. The first is that drawn from the occurrence of vv. 6, 7, in Jer. x. 25. It is contended that Jeremiah is in the habit of borrowing from earlier writers, that the verse immediately preceding that in question is quoted from Psalm vi. 1, and that the connection of the passage in the psalm is closer than in the prophet, and, therefore, that the words are presumably _in situ_ here, as also that the verbal alterations are such as to suggest that the prophet rather than the psalmist is the adapter. But, on the other hand, Hupfeld maintains that the connection in Jeremiah is the closer. Not much weight can be attached to that point, for neither prophet nor poet can be tied down to cool concatenation of sentences. Delitzsch claims the verbal alterations as indubitable proofs of the priority of the prophet, and maintains that "the borrower betrays himself" by changing the prophet's words into less accurate and elegant ones, and by omissions which impair "the soaring fulness of Jeremiah's expressions." The critics who hold that the psalm refers to the Chaldean invasion, and that Jeremiah has borrowed from it, have to face a formidable difficulty. The psalm must have been written after the catastrophe: the prophecy preceded it. How then can the prophet be quoting the psalm? The question has not been satisfactorily answered, nor is it likely to be. A second argument against the Maccabean date is based upon the quotation of ver. 3 in 1 Macc. vii. 16, which it introduces by the usual formula of quotation from Scripture. It is urged that a composition so recent as the psalm would be, if of Maccabean date, would not be likely to be thus referred to. But this argument confuses the date of occurrence recorded in 1 Maccabees with the date of the record; and there is no improbability in the writer of the book quoting as Scripture a psalm which had sprung from the midst of the tragedy which he narrates. The strophical division is not perfectly clear, but it is probably best to recognise three strophes of four verses each, with an appended verse of conclusion. The first spreads before God His peoples miseries. The second and third are prayer for deliverance and confession of sin; but they differ, in that the former strophe dwells mainly upon the wished-for destruction of the enemy, and the latter upon the rescue of Israel, while a subordinate diversity is that ancestral sins are confessed in the one, and those of the present generation in the other. Ver. 13 stands out of the strophe scheme as a kind of epilogue.