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Title: The Life of David
       As Reflected in His Psalms

Author: Alexander Maclaren

Release Date: June 19, 2007 [EBook #21872]

Language: English

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{Transcriber's Note: Obvious typos, printing errors and mis-spellings
  have been corrected, but spellings have not been modernized. Footnotes
  follow immediately the paragraph in which they are noted. In Chapter
  XV, eighth paragraph, second last line, "His" changed to "his" in the
  sentence "Happy thoughts, not fears, hold his eyes waking" to agree
  with the author's obvious reference to David rather than to God.}


            =The Household Library of Exposition.=


                      THE LIFE OF DAVID
                 AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS.




                            THE
                        LIFE OF DAVID
                 AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS.


                            BY


                  ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D.


                      _NINTH EDITION._


                         =London:=
                   HODDER AND STOUGHTON
                   27, PATERNOSTER ROW


                          MCMIII


_Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London_




CONTENTS


                                                                   PAGE

    I. INTRODUCTION,                                                 1
   II. EARLY DAYS,                                                  14
   III. EARLY DAYS--_continued_,                                    31
    IV. THE EXILE,                                                  49
     V. THE EXILE--_continued_,                                     70
    VI. THE EXILE--_continued_,                                     86
   VII. THE EXILE--_continued_,                                    110
  VIII. THE EXILE--_continued_,                                    130
    IX. THE KING,                                                  144
     X. THE KING--_continued_,                                     157
    XI. THE KING--_continued_,                                     174
   XII. THE KING--_continued_,                                     185
  XIII. THE TEARS OF THE PENITENT,                                 205
   XIV. CHASTISEMENTS,                                             232
    XV. THE SONGS OF THE FUGITIVE,                                 245
        INDEX,                                                     262
        WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR,                                  263
        BIBLE CLASS EXPOSITIONS,                                   264
        THE HOUSEHOLD LIBRARY OF EXPOSITION,                       265




I.--INTRODUCTION.


Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the life of David is its
romantic variety of circumstances. What a many-coloured career that was
which began amidst the pastoral solitudes of Bethlehem, and ended in the
chamber where the dying ears heard the blare of the trumpets that
announced the accession of Bathsheba's son! He passes through the most
sharply contrasted conditions, and from each gathers some fresh fitness
for his great work of giving voice and form to all the phases of devout
feeling. The early shepherd life deeply influenced his character, and
has left its traces on many a line of his psalms.

  "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
   His daily teachers had been woods and rills;
   The silence that is in the starry sky,
   The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

And then, in strange contrast with the meditative quiet and lowly duties
of these first years, came the crowded vicissitudes of the tempestuous
course through which he reached his throne--court minstrel, companion
and friend of a king, idol of the people, champion of the armies of
God--and in his sudden elevation keeping the gracious sweetness of his
lowlier, and perhaps happier days. The scene changes with startling
suddenness to the desert. He is "hunted like a partridge upon the
mountains," a fugitive and half a freebooter, taking service at foreign
courts, and lurking on the frontiers with a band of outlaws recruited
from the "dangerous classes" of Israel. Like Dante and many more, he has
to learn the weariness of the exile's lot--how hard his fare, how
homeless his heart, how cold the courtesies of aliens, how unslumbering
the suspicions which watch the refugee who fights on the side of his
"natural enemies." One more swift transition and he is on the throne,
for long years victorious, prosperous, and beloved.

  "Nor did he change; but kept in lofty place
   The wisdom which adversity had bred,"

till suddenly he is plunged into the mire, and falsifies all his past,
and ruins for ever, by the sin of his mature age, his peace of heart
and the prosperity of his kingdom. Thenceforward trouble is never far
away; and his later years are shaded with the saddening consciousness of
his great fault, as well as by hatred and rebellion and murder in his
family, and discontent and alienation in his kingdom.

None of the great men of Scripture pass through a course of so many
changes; none of them touched human life at so many points; none of them
were so tempered and polished by swift alternation of heat and cold, by
such heavy blows and the friction of such rapid revolutions. Like his
great Son and Lord, though in a lower sense, he, too, must be "in all
points tempted like as we are," that his words may be fitted for the
solace and strength of the whole world. Poets "learn in suffering what
they teach in song." These quick transitions of fortune, and this wide
experience, are the many-coloured threads from which the rich web of his
psalms is woven.

And while the life is singularly varied, the character is also
singularly full and versatile. In this respect, too, he is most unlike
the other leading figures of Old Testament history. Contrast him, for
example, with the stern majesty of Moses, austere and simple as the
tables of stone; or with the unvarying tone in the gaunt strength of
Elijah. These and the other mighty men in Israel are like the ruder
instruments of music--the trumpet of Sinai, with its one prolonged note.
David is like his own harp of many chords, through which the breath of
God murmured, drawing forth wailing and rejoicing, the clear ring of
triumphant trust, the low plaint of penitence, the blended harmonies of
all devout emotions.

The man had his faults--grave enough. Let it be remembered that no one
has judged them more rigorously than himself. The critics who have
delighted to point at them have been anticipated by the penitent; and
their indictment has been little more than the quotation of his own
confession. His tremulously susceptible nature, especially assailable by
the delights of sense, led him astray. There are traces in his life of
occasional craft and untruthfulness which even the exigencies of exile
and war do not wholly palliate. Flashes of fierce vengeance at times
break from the clear sky of his generous nature. His strong affection
became, in at least one case, weak and foolish fondness for an unworthy
son.

But when all this is admitted, there remains a wonderfully rich, lovable
character. He is the very ideal of a minstrel hero, such as the legends
of the East especially love to paint. The shepherd's staff or sling, the
sword, the sceptre, and the lyre are equally familiar to his hands. That
union of the soldier and the poet gives the life a peculiar charm, and
is very strikingly brought out in that chapter of the book of Samuel (2
Sam. xxiii.) which begins, "These be the last words of David," and after
giving the swan-song of him whom it calls "the sweet psalmist of
Israel," passes immediately to the other side of the dual character,
with, "These be the names of the mighty men whom David had."

Thus, on the one side, we see the true poetic temperament, with all its
capacities for keenest delight and sharpest agony, with its tremulous
mobility, its openness to every impression, its gaze of child-like
wonder, and eager welcome to whatsoever things are lovely, its
simplicity and self-forgetfulness, its yearnings "after worlds half
realized," its hunger for love, its pity, and its tears. He was made to
be the inspired poet of the religious affections.

And, on the other side, we see the greatest qualities of a military
leader of the antique type, in which personal daring and a strong arm
count for more than strategic skill. He dashes at Goliath with an
enthusiasm of youthful courage and faith. While still in the earliest
bloom of his manhood, at the head of his wild band of outlaws, he shows
himself sagacious, full of resource, prudent in counsel, and swift as
lightning in act; frank and generous, bold and gentle, cheery in defeat,
calm in peril, patient in privations and ready to share them with his
men, modest and self-restrained in victory, chivalrous to his foes, ever
watchful, ever hopeful--a born leader and king of men.

The basis of all was a profound, joyous trust in his Shepherd God, an
ardour of personal love to Him, such as had never before been expressed,
if it had ever found place, in Israel. That trust "opened his mouth to
show forth" God's praise, and strengthened his "fingers to fight." He
has told us himself what was his habitual temper, and how it was
sustained: "I have set the Lord always before me. Because He is at my
right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my
glory rejoiceth." (Psa. xvi. 8, 9.)

Thus endowed, he moved among men with that irresistible fascination
which only the greatest exercise. From the day when he stole like a
sunbeam into the darkened chamber where Saul wrestled with the evil
spirit, he bows all hearts that come under his spell. The women of
Israel chant his name with song and timbrel, the daughter of Saul
confesses her love unasked, the noble soul of Jonathan cleaves to him,
the rude outlaws in his little army peril their lives to gratify his
longing for a draught from the well where he had watered his father's
flocks; the priests let him take the consecrated bread, and trust him
with Goliath's sword, from behind the altar; his lofty courtesy wins the
heart of Abigail; the very king of the Philistines tells him that he is
"good in his sight as an angel of God;" the unhappy Saul's last word to
him is a blessing; six hundred men of Gath forsake home and country to
follow his fortunes when he returns from exile; and even in the dark
close of his reign, though sin and self-indulgence, and neglect of his
kingly duties, had weakened his subjects' loyalty, his flight before
Absalom is brightened by instances of passionate devotion which no
common character could have evoked; and even then his people are ready
to die for him, and in their affectionate pride call him "the light of
Israel." It was a prophetic instinct which made Jesse call his youngest
boy by a name apparently before unused--David, "Beloved."

The Spirit of God, acting through these great natural gifts, and using
this diversified experience of life, originated in him a new form of
inspiration. The Law was the revelation of the mind, and, in some
measure, of the heart, of God to man. The Psalm is the echo of the law,
the return current set in motion by the outflow of the Divine will, the
response of the heart of man to the manifested God. There had, indeed,
been traces of hymns before David. There were the burst of triumph which
the daughters of Israel sang, with timbrel and dance, over Pharaoh and
his host; the prayer of Moses the man of God (Psa. xc.), so archaic in
its tone, bearing in every line the impress of the weary wilderness and
the law of death; the song of the dying lawgiver (Deut. xxxii.); the
passionate pćan of Deborah; and some few briefer fragments. But,
practically, the Psalm began with David; and though many hands struck
the harp after him, even down at least to the return from exile, he
remains emphatically "the sweet psalmist of Israel."

The psalms which are attributed to him have, on the whole, a marked
similarity of manner. Their characteristics have been well summed up as
"creative originality, predominantly elegiac tone, graceful form and
movement, antique but lucid style;"[A] to which may be added the
intensity of their devotion, the passion of Divine love that glows in
them all. They correspond, too, with the circumstances of his life as
given in the historical books. The early shepherd days, the manifold
sorrows, the hunted wanderings, the royal authority, the wars, the
triumphs, the sin, the remorse, which are woven together so strikingly
in the latter, all reappear in the psalms. The illusions, indeed, are
for the most part general rather than special, as is natural. His words
are thereby the better fitted for ready application to the trials of
other lives. But it has been perhaps too hastily assumed that the
allusions are so general as to make it impossible to connect them with
any precise events, or to make the psalms and the history mutually
illustrative. Much, no doubt, must be conjectured rather than affirmed,
and much must be left undetermined; but when all deductions on that
score have been made, it still appears possible to carry the process
sufficiently far to gain fresh insight into the force and definiteness
of many of David's words, and to use them with tolerable confidence as
throwing light upon the narrative of his career. The attempt is made in
some degree in this volume.

[A] Delitzsch, Kommentar, u. d. Psalter II. 376.

It will be necessary to prefix a few further remarks on the Davidic
psalms in general. Can we tell which are David's? The Psalter, as is
generally known, is divided into five books or parts, probably from some
idea that it corresponded with the Pentateuch. These five books are
marked by a doxology at the close of each, except the last. The first
portion consists of Psa. i.-xli.; the second of Psa. xlii.-lxxii; the
third of Psa. lxxiii.-lxxxix; the fourth of Psa. xc.-cvi.; and the fifth
of Psa. cvii.-cl. The psalms attributed to David are unequally
distributed through these five books. There are seventy-three in all,
and they run thus:--In the first book there are thirty-seven; so that
if we regard psalms i. and ii. as a kind of double introduction, a
frontispiece and vignette title-page to the whole collection, the first
book proper only two which are not regarded as David's. The second book
has a much smaller proportion, only eighteen out of thirty-one. The
third book has but one, the fourth two; while the fifth has fifteen,
eight of which (cxxxviii.-cxlv.) occur almost at the close. The
intention is obvious--to throw the Davidic psalms as much as possible
together in the first two books. And the inference is not unnatural that
these may have formed an earlier collection, to which were afterwards
added the remaining three, with a considerable body of alleged psalms of
David, which had subsequently come to light, placed side by side at the
end, so as to round off the whole.

Be that as it may, one thing is clear from the arrangement of the
Psalter, namely, that the superscriptions which give the authors' names
are at least as old as the collection itself; for they have guided the
order of the collection in the grouping not only of Davidic psalms, but
also of those attributed to the sons of Korah (xlii.-xlix.) and to Asaph
(lxxiii.-lxxxiii.)

The question of the reliableness of these superscriptions is hotly
debated. The balance of modern opinion is decidedly against their
genuineness. As in greater matters, so here "the higher criticism" comes
to the consideration of their claims with a prejudice against them, and
on very arbitrary grounds determines for itself, quite irrespective of
these ancient voices, the date and authorship of the psalms. The extreme
form of this tendency is to be found in the masterly work of Ewald, who
has devoted all his vast power of criticism (and eked it out with all
his equally great power of confident assertion) to the book, and has
come to the conclusion that we have but eleven of David's psalms,--which
is surely a result that may lead to questionings as to the method which
has attained it.

These editorial notes are proved to be of extreme antiquity by such
considerations as these: The Septuagint translators found them, and did
not understand them; the synagogue preserves no traditions to explain
them; the Book of Chronicles throws no light upon them; they are very
rare in the two last books of the Psalter (Delitzsch, ii. 393). In some
cases they are obviously erroneous, but in the greater number there is
nothing inconsistent with their correctness in the psalms to which they
are appended; while very frequently they throw a flood of light upon
these, and all but prove their trustworthiness by their appropriateness.
They are not authoritative, but they merit respectful consideration,
and, as Dr. Perowne puts it in his valuable work on the Psalms, stand on
a par with the subscriptions to the Epistles in the New Testament.
Regarding them thus, and yet examining the psalms to which they are
prefixed, there seem to be about forty-five which we may attribute with
some confidence to David, and with these we shall be concerned in this
book.




II.--EARLY DAYS


The life of David is naturally divided into epochs, of which we may
avail ourselves for the more ready arrangement of our material. These
are--his early years up to his escape from the court of Saul, his exile,
the prosperous beginning of his reign, his sin and penitence, his flight
before Absalom's rebellion, and the darkened end.

We have but faint incidental traces of his life up to his anointing by
Samuel, with which the narrative in the historical books opens. But
perhaps the fact that the story begins with that consecration to office,
is of more value than the missing biography of his childhood could have
been. It teaches us the point of view from which Scripture regards its
greatest names--as nothing, except in so far as they are God's
instruments. Hence its carelessness, notwithstanding that so much of it
is history, of all that merely illustrates the personal character of
its heroes. Hence, too, the clearness with which, notwithstanding that
indifference, the living men are set before us--the image cut with half
a dozen strokes of the chisel.

We do not know the age of David when Samuel appeared in the little
village with the horn of sacred oil in his hand. The only approximation
to it is furnished by the fact, that he was thirty at the beginning of
his reign. (2 Sam. v. 4.) If we take into account that his exile must
have lasted for a very considerable period (one portion of it, his
second flight to the Philistines, was sixteen months, 1 Sam. xxvii.
7),--that the previous residence at the court of Saul must have been
long enough to give time for his gradual rise to popularity, and
thereafter for the gradual development of the king's insane
hatred,--that further back still there was an indefinite period, between
the fight with Goliath, and the first visit as a minstrel-physician to
the palace, which was spent at Bethlehem, and that that visit itself
cannot have been very brief, since in its course he became very dear and
familiar to Saul,--it will not seem that all these events could be
crowded into less than some twelve or fifteen years, or that he could
have been more than a lad of some sixteen years of age when Samuel's
hand smoothed the sacred oil on his clustering curls.

How life had gone with him till then, we can easily gather from the
narrative of Scripture. His father's household seems to have been one in
which modest frugality ruled. There is no trace of Jesse having
servants; his youngest child does menial work; the present which he
sends to his king when David goes to court was simple, and such as a man
in humble life would give--an ass load of bread, one skin of wine, and
one kid--his flocks were small--"a few sheep." It would appear as if
prosperity had not smiled on the family since the days of Jesse's
grandfather, Boaz, that "mighty man of wealth." David's place in the
household does not seem to have been a happy one. His father scarcely
reckoned him amongst his sons, and answers Samuel's question, if the
seven burly husbandmen whom he has seen are all his children, with a
trace of contempt as he remembers that there is another, "and, behold,
he keepeth the sheep." Of his mother we hear but once, and that
incidentally, for a moment, long after. His brothers had no love for
him, and do not appear to have shared either his heart or his fortunes.
The boy evidently had the usual fate of souls like his, to grow up in
uncongenial circumstances, little understood and less sympathised with
by the common-place people round them, and thrown back therefore all the
more decisively upon themselves. The process sours and spoils some, but
it is the making of more--and where, as in this case, the nature is
thrown back upon God, and not on its own morbid operation, strength
comes from repression, and sweetness from endurance. He may have
received some instruction in one of Samuel's schools for the prophets,
but we are left in entire ignorance of what outward helps to unfold
itself were given to his budding life.

Whatever others he had, no doubt those which are emphasized in the Bible
story were the chief, namely, his occupation and the many gifts which it
brought to him. The limbs, "like hinds' feet," the sinewy arms which
"broke a bow of steel," the precision with which he used the sling, the
agility which "leaped over a rampart," the health that glowed in his
"ruddy" face, were the least of his obligations to the breezy uplands,
where he kept his father's sheep. His early life taught him courage,
when he "smote the lion" and laid hold by his ugly muzzle of the bear
that "rose against him," rearing itself upright for the fatal hug.
Solitude and familiarity with nature helped to nurture the poetical side
of his character, and to strengthen that meditative habit which blends
so strangely with his impetuous activity, and which for the most part
kept tumults and toils from invading his central soul. They threw him
back on God who peopled the solitude and spoke in all nature. Besides
this, he acquired in the sheepcote lessons which he practised on the
throne, that rule means service, and that the shepherd of men holds his
office in order that he may protect and guide. And in the lowly
associations of his humble home, he learned the life of the people,
their simple joys, their unconspicuous toils, their unnoticed sorrows--a
priceless piece of knowledge both for the poet and for the king.

A breach in all the tranquil habits of this modest life was made by
Samuel's astonishing errand. The story is told with wonderful
picturesqueness and dramatic force. The minute account of the successive
rejections of his brothers, Samuel's question and Jesse's answer, and
then the pause of idle waiting till the messenger goes and returns,
heighten the expectation with which we look for his appearance. And then
what a sweet young face is lovingly painted for us! "He was ruddy, and
withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to" (1 Sam. xvi.
12)--of fair complexion, with golden hair, which is rare among these
swarthy, black-locked easterns, with lovely eyes (for that is the
meaning of the words which the English Bible renders "of a beautiful
countenance"), large and liquid as become a poet. So he stood before the
old prophet, and with swelling heart and reverent awe received the holy
chrism. In silence, as it would seem, Samuel anointed him. Whether the
secret of his high destiny was imparted to him then, or left to be
disclosed in future years, is not told. But at all events, whether with
full understanding of what was before him or no, he must have been
conscious of a call that would carry him far away from the pastures and
olive yards of the little hamlet and of a new Spirit stirring in him
from that day forward.

This sudden change in all the outlook of his life must have given new
materials for thought when he went back to his humble task.
Responsibility, or the prospect of it, makes lads into men very quickly.
Graver meditations, humbler consciousness of weakness, a firmer trust in
God who had laid the burden upon him, would do in days the work of
years. And the necessity for bidding back the visions of the future in
order to do faithfully the obscure duties of the present, would add
self-control and patience, not usually the graces of youth. How swiftly
he matured is singularly shown in the next recorded incident--his
summons to the court of Saul, by the character of him drawn by the
courtier who recommends him to the king. He speaks of David in words
more suitable to a man of established renown than to a stripling. He is
minstrel and warrior, "cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man,"
and "skilled in speech (already eloquent), and fair in form, and the
Lord is with him." (1 Sam. xvi. 18.) So quickly had the new
circumstances and the energy of the Spirit of God, like tropical
sunshine, ripened his soul.

That first visit to the court was but an episode in his life, however
helpful to his growth it may have been. It would give him the knowledge
of new scenes, widen his experience, and prepare him for the future. But
it cannot have been of very long duration. Possibly his harp lost its
power over Saul's gloomy spirit, when he had become familiar with its
notes. For whatever reason, he returned to his father's house, and
gladly exchanged the favour at court, which might have seemed to a
merely ambitious man the first step towards fulfilling the prophecy of
Samuel's anointing, for the freedom of the pastoral solitudes about
Bethlehem. There he remained, living to outward seeming as in the quiet
days before these two great earthquakes in his life, but with deeper
thoughts and new power, with broader experience, and a wider horizon,
until the hour when he was finally wrenched from his seclusion, and
flung into the whirlpool of his public career.

There are none of David's psalms which can be with any certainty
referred to this first period of his life; but it has left deep traces
on many of them. The allusions to natural scenery and the frequent
references to varying aspects of the shepherd's life are specimens of
these. One characteristic of the poetic temperament is the faithful
remembrance and cherishing of early days. How fondly he recalled them is
shown in that most pathetic incident of his longing, as a weary exile,
for one draught of water from the well at Bethlehem--where in the dear
old times he had so often led his flocks.

But though we cannot say confidently that we have any psalms prior to
his first exile, there are several which, whatever their date may be,
are echoes of his thoughts in these first days. This is especially the
case in regard to the group which describe varying aspects of
nature--viz., Psalms xix., viii., xxix. They are unlike his later psalms
in the almost entire absence of personal references, or of any trace of
pressing cares, or of signs of a varied experience of human life. In
their self-forgetful contemplation of nature, in their silence about
sorrow, in their tranquil beauty, they resemble the youthful works of
many a poet whose later verse throbs with quivering consciousness of
life's agonies, or wrestles strongly with life's problems. They may not
unnaturally be regarded as the outpouring of a young heart at leisure
from itself, and from pain, far from men and very near God. The fresh
mountain air of Bethlehem blows through them, and the dew of life's
quiet morning is on them. The early experience supplied their materials,
whatever was the date of their composition; and in them we can see what
his inward life was in these budding years. The gaze of child-like
wonder and awe upon the blazing brightness of the noonday, and on the
mighty heaven with all its stars, the deep voice with which all creation
spoke of God, the great thoughts of the dignity of man (thoughts ever
welcome to lofty youthful souls), the gleaming of an inward light
brighter than all suns, the consciousness of mysteries of weakness which
may become miracles of sin in one's own heart, the assurance of close
relation to God as His anointed and His servant, the cry for help and
guidance--all this is what we should expect David to have thought and
felt as he wandered among the hills, alone with God; and this is what
these psalms give us.

Common to them all is the peculiar manner of looking upon nature, so
uniform in David's psalms, so unlike more modern descriptive poetry. He
can smite out a picture in a phrase, but he does not care to paint
landscapes. He feels the deep analogies between man and his
dwelling-place, but he does not care to lend to nature a shadowy life,
the reflection of our own. Creation is to him neither a subject for
poetical description, nor for scientific examination. It is nothing but
the garment of God, the apocalypse of the heavenly. And common to them
all is also the swift transition from the outward facts which reveal
God, to the spiritual world, where His presence is, if it were possible,
yet more needful, and His operations yet mightier. And common to them
all is a certain rush of full thought and joyous power, which is again a
characteristic of youthful work, and is unlike the elegiac tenderness
and pathos of David's later hymns.

The nineteenth Psalm paints for us the glory of the heavens by day, as
the eighth by night. The former gathers up the impressions of many a
fresh morning when the solitary shepherd-boy watched the sun rising over
the mountains of Moab, which close the eastern view from the hills above
Bethlehem. The sacred silence of dawn, the deeper hush of night, have
voice for his ear. "No speech! and no words! unheard is their voice."
But yet, "in all the earth goeth forth their line,[B] and in the end of
the habitable world their sayings." The heavens and the firmament, the
linked chorus of day and night, are heralds of God's glory, with silent
speech, heard in all lands, an unremitting voice. And as he looks, there
leaps into the eastern heavens, not with the long twilight of northern
lands, the sudden splendour, the sun radiant as a bridegroom from the
bridal chamber, like some athlete impatient for the course. How the joy
of morning and its new vigour throb in the words! And then he watches
the strong runner climbing the heavens till the fierce heat beats down
into the deep cleft of the Jordan, and all the treeless southern hills,
as they slope towards the desert, lie bare and blazing beneath the
beams.

[B] Their boundary, _i.e._, their territory, or the region through which
their witness extends. Others render "their chord," or sound (LXX.
Ewald, etc.)

The sudden transition from the revelation of God in nature to His voice
in the law, has seemed to many critics unaccountable, except on the
supposition that this psalm is made up of two fragments, put together by
a later compiler; and some of them have even gone so far as to maintain
that "the feeling which saw God revealed in the law did not arise till
the time of Josiah."[C] But such a hypothesis is not required to explain
either the sudden transition or the difference in style and rhythm
between the two parts of the psalm, which unquestionably exists. The
turn from the outer world to the better light of God's word, is most
natural; the abruptness of it is artistic and impressive; the difference
of style and measure gives emphasis to the contrast. There is also an
obvious connection between the two parts, inasmuch as the law is
described by epithets, which in part hint at its being a brighter sun,
enlightening the eyes.

[C] "Psalms chronologically arranged"--following Ewald.

The Word which declares the will of the Lord is better than the heavens
which tell His glory. The abundance of synonyms for that word show how
familiar to his thoughts it was. To him it is "the law," "the
testimonies" by which God witnesses of Himself and of man: "the
statutes," the fixed settled ordinances; that which teaches "the fear of
God," the "judgments" or utterances of His mind on human conduct. They
are "perfect, firm, right, clean, pure,"--like that spotless
sun--"eternal, true." "They quicken, make wise, enlighten," even as the
light of the lower world. His heart prizes them "more than gold," of
which in his simple life he knew so little; more than "the honey," which
he had often seen dropping from "the comb" in the pastures of the
wilderness.

And then the twofold contemplation rises into the loftier region of
prayer. He feels that there are dark depths in his soul, gloomier pits
than any into which the noontide sun shines. He speaks as one who is
conscious of dormant evils, which life has not yet evolved, and his
prayer is more directed towards the future than the past, and is thus
very unlike the tone of the later psalms, that wail out penitence and
plead for pardon. "Errors," or weaknesses,--"faults" unknown to
himself,--"high-handed sins,"[D]--such is the climax of the evils from
which he prays for deliverance. He knows himself "Thy servant" (2 Sam.
vii. 5, 8; Psa. lxxviii. 70)--an epithet which may refer to his
consecration to God's work by Samuel's anointing. He needs not only a
God who sets His glory in the heavens, nor even one whose will is made
known, but one who will touch his spirit,--not merely a Maker, but a
pardoning God; and his faith reaches its highest point as his song
closes with the sacred name of the covenant Jehovah, repeated for the
seventh time, and invoked in one final aspiration of a trustful heart,
as "my Rock, and my Redeemer."

[D] The form of the word would make "reckless men" a more natural
translation; but probably the context requires a third, more aggravated
sort of sin.

The eighth psalm is a companion picture, a night-piece, which, like the
former, speaks of many an hour of lonely brooding below the heavens,
whether its composition fall within this early period or no. The
prophetic and doctrinal value of the psalms is not our main subject in
the present volume, so that we have to touch but very lightly on this
grand hymn. What does it show us of the singer? We see him, like other
shepherds on the same hills, long after "keeping watch over his flocks
by night," and overwhelmed by all the magnificence of an eastern sky,
with its lambent lights. So bright, so changeless, so far,--how great
they are, how small the boy that gazes up so wistfully. Are they gods,
as all but his own nation believed? No,--"the work of Thy fingers,"
"which Thou hast ordained." The consciousness of God as their Maker
delivers from the temptation of confounding bigness with greatness, and
wakes into new energy that awful sense of personality which towers above
all the stars. He is a babe and suckling--is that a trace of the early
composition of the psalm?--still he knows that out of his lips, already
beginning to break into song, and out of the lips of his fellows, God
perfects praise. There speaks the sweet singer of Israel, prizing as the
greatest of God's gifts his growing faculty, and counting his God-given
words as nobler than the voice of "night unto night." God's fingers made
these, but God's own breath is in him. God ordained them, but God visits
him. The description of man's dignity and dominion indicates how
familiar David was with the story in Genesis. It may perhaps also,
besides all the large prophetic truths which it contains, have some
special reference to his own earlier experience. It is at least worth
noting that he speaks of the dignity of man as kingly, like that which
was dawning on himself, and that the picture has no shadows either of
sorrow or of sin,--a fact which may point to his younger days, when
lofty thoughts of the greatness of the soul are ever natural and when in
his case the afflictions and crimes that make their presence felt in
all his later works had not fallen upon him. Perhaps, too, it may not be
altogether fanciful to suppose that we may see the shepherd-boy
surrounded by his flocks, and the wild creatures that prowled about the
fold, and the birds asleep in their coverts beneath the moonlight, in
his enumeration of the subjects of his first and happiest kingdom, where
he ruled far away from men and sorrow, seeing God everywhere, and
learning to perfect praise from his youthful lips.




III.--EARLY DAYS--_CONTINUED_.


In addition to the psalms already considered, which are devoted to the
devout contemplation of nature, and stand in close connection with
David's early days, there still remains one universally admitted to be
his. The twenty-ninth psalm, like both the preceding, has to do with the
glory of God as revealed in the heavens, and with earth only as the
recipient of skyey influences; but while these breathed the profoundest
tranquillity, as they watched the silent splendour of the sun, and the
peace of moonlight shed upon a sleeping world, this is all tumult and
noise. It is a highly elaborate and vivid picture of a thunderstorm,
such as must often have broken over the shepherd-psalmist as he crouched
under some shelf of limestone, and gathered his trembling charge about
him. Its very structure reproduces in sound an echo of the rolling peals
reverberating among the hills.

There is first an invocation, in the highest strain of devout poetry,
calling upon the "sons of God," the angels who dwell above the lower
sky, and who see from above the slow gathering of the storm-clouds, to
ascribe to Jehovah the glory of His name--His character as set forth in
the tempest. They are to cast themselves before Him "in holy attire," as
priests of the heavenly sanctuary. Their silent and expectant worship is
like the brooding stillness before the storm. We feel the waiting hush
in heaven and earth.

Then the tempest breaks. It crashes and leaps through the short
sentences, each like the clap of the near thunder.

  _a._  The voice of Jehovah (is) on the waters.
        The God of glory thunders.
         _Jehovah (is) on many waters._
        The voice of Jehovah in strength!
        The voice of Jehovah in majesty!

  _b._  The voice of Jehovah rending the cedars!
         _And Jehovah rends the cedars of Lebanon_,
        And makes them leap like a calf;
        Lebanon and Sirion like a young buffalo
        The voice of Jehovah hewing flashes of fire!

  _c._  The voice of Jehovah shakes the desert,
         _Jehovah shakes the Kadesh desert_.

        The voice of Jehovah makes the hinds writhe
        And scathes the woods--and in His temple--
        --All in it (are) saying, "Glory."

Seven times the roar shakes the world. The voice of the seven thunders
is the voice of Jehovah. In the short clauses, with their uniform
structure, the pause between, and the recurrence of the same initial
words, we hear the successive peals, the silence that parts them, and
the monotony of their unvaried sound. Thrice we have the reverberation
rolling through the sky or among the hills, imitated by clauses which
repeat previous ones, as indicated by the italics, and one forked flame
blazes out in the brief, lightning-like sentence, "The voice of Jehovah
(is) hewing flashes of fire," which wonderfully gives the impression of
their streaming fiercely forth, as if cloven from some solid block of
fire, their swift course, and their instantaneous extinction.

The range and effects of the storm, too, are vividly painted. It is
first "on the waters," which may possibly mean the Mediterranean, but
more probably, "the waters that are above the firmament," and so depicts
the clouds as gathering high in air. Then it comes down with a crash on
the northern mountains, splintering the gnarled cedars, and making
Lebanon rock with all its woods--leaping across the deep valley of
Coelo-Syria, and smiting Hermon (for which Sirion is a Sidonian name),
the crest of the Anti Lebanon, till it reels. Onward it sweeps--or
rather, perhaps, it is all around the psalmist; and even while he hears
the voice rolling from the furthest north, the extreme south echoes the
roar. The awful voice shakes[E] the wilderness, as it booms across its
level surface. As far south as Kadesh (probably Petra) the tremor
spreads, and away in the forests of Edom the wild creatures in their
terror slip their calves, and the oaks are scathed and stripped of their
leafy honours. And all the while, like a mighty diapason sounding on
through the tumult, the voice of the sons of God in the heavenly temple
is heard proclaiming "Glory!"

[E] Delitzsch would render "whirls in circles"--a picturesque allusion
to the sand pillars which accompany storms in the desert.

The psalm closes with lofty words of confidence, built on the story of
the past, as well as on the contemplation of the present. "Jehovah sat
throned for (_i.e._, to send on earth) the flood" which once drowned
the world of old. "Jehovah will sit throned, a King for ever." That
ancient judgment spoke of His power over all the forces of nature, in
their most terrible form. So now and for ever, all are His servants, and
effect His purposes. Then, as the tempest rolls away, spent and
transient, the sunshine streams out anew from the softened blue over a
freshened world, and every raindrop on the leaves twinkles into diamond
light, and the end of the psalm is like the after brightness; and the
tranquil low voice of its last words is like the songs of the birds
again as the departing storm growls low and faint on the horizon. "The
Lord will bless His people with peace."

Thus, then, nature spoke to this young heart. The silence was vocal; the
darkness, bright; the tumult, order--and all was the revelation of a
present God. It is told of one of our great writers that, when a child,
he was found lying on a hill-side during a thunderstorm, and at each
flash clapping his hands and shouting, unconscious of danger, and
stirred to ecstasy. David, too, felt all the poetic elevation, and
natural awe, in the presence of the crashing storm; but he felt
something more. To him the thunder was not a power to tremble before,
not a mere subject for poetic contemplation. Still less was it
something, the like of which could be rubbed out of glass and silk, and
which he had done with when he knew its laws. No increase of knowledge
touching the laws of physical phenomena in the least affects the point
of view which these Nature-psalms take. David said, "God makes and moves
all things." We may be able to complete the sentence by a clause which
tells something of the methods of His operation. But that is only a
parenthesis after all, and the old truth remains widened, not overthrown
by it. The psalmist knew that all being and action had their origin in
God. He saw the last links of the chain, and knew that it was rivetted
to the throne of God, though the intermediate links were unseen; and
even the fact that there were any was not present to his mind. We know
something of these; but the first and the last of the series to him, are
the first and the last to us also. To us as to him, the silent splendour
of noonday speaks of God, and the nightly heavens pour the soft radiance
of His "excellent name over all the earth." The tempest is His voice,
and the wildest commotions in nature and among men break in obedient
waves around His pillared throne.

  "Well roars the storm to those who hear
   A deeper voice across the storm!"

There still remains one other psalm which may be used as illustrating
the early life of David. The Twenty-third psalm is coloured throughout
by the remembrances of his youthful occupation, even if its actual
composition is of a later date. Some critics, indeed, think that the
mention in the last verse of "the house of the Lord" compels the
supposition of an origin subsequent to the building of the Temple; but
the phrase in question need not have anything to do with tabernacle or
temple, and is most naturally accounted for by the preceding image of
God as the Host who feasts His servants at His table. There are no other
notes of time in the psalm, unless, with some commentators, we see an
allusion in that image of the furnished table to the seasonable
hospitality of the Gileadite chieftains during David's flight before
Absalom (2 Sam. xvii. 27-29)--a reference which appears prosaic and
flat. The absence of traces of distress and sorrow--so constantly
present in the later songs--may be urged with some force in favour of
the early date; and if we follow one of the most valuable commentators
(Hupfeld) in translating all the verbs as futures, and so make the whole
a hymn of hope, we seem almost obliged to suppose that we have here the
utterance of a youthful spirit, which ventured to look forward, because
it first looked upward. In any case, the psalm is a transcript of
thoughts that had been born and cherished in many a meditative hour
among the lonely hills of Bethlehem. It is the echo of the shepherd
life. We see in it the incessant care, the love to his helpless charge,
which was expressed in and deepened by all his toil for them. He had to
think for their simplicity, to fight for their defencelessness, to find
their pasture, to guard them while they lay amid the fresh grass;
sometimes to use his staff in order to force their heedlessness with
loving violence past tempting perils; sometimes to guide them through
gloomy gorges, where they huddled close at his heels; sometimes to smite
the lion and the bear that prowled about the fold--but all was for their
good and meant their comfort. And thus he has learned, in preparation
for his own kingdom, the inmost meaning of pre-eminence among men--and,
more precious lesson still, thus he has learned the very heart of God.
Long before, Jacob had spoken of Him as the "Shepherd of Israel;" but it
was reserved for David to bring that sweet and wonderful name into
closer relations with the single soul; and, with that peculiar
enthusiasm of personal reliance, and recognition of God's love to the
individual which stamps all his psalms, to say "The Lord is my
Shepherd." These dumb companions of his, in their docility to his
guidance, and absolute trust in his care, had taught him the secret of
peace in helplessness, of patience in ignorance. The green strips of
meadow-land where the clear waters brought life, the wearied flocks
sheltered from the mid-day heat, the quiet course of the little stream,
the refreshment of the sheep by rest and pasture, the smooth paths which
he tried to choose for them, the rocky defiles through which they had to
pass, the rod in his hand that guided, and chastised, and defended, and
was never lifted in anger,--all these, the familiar sights of his youth,
pass before us as we read; and to us too, in our widely different social
state, have become the undying emblems of the highest care and the
wisest love. The psalm witnesses how close to the youthful heart the
consciousness of God must have been, which could thus transform and
glorify the little things which were so familiar. We can feel, in a kind
of lazy play of sentiment, the fitness of the shepherd's life to suggest
thoughts of God--because it is not our life. But it needs both a
meditative habit and a devout heart to feel that the trivialities of our
own daily tasks speak to us of Him. The heavens touch the earth on the
horizon of our vision, but it always seems furthest to the sky from the
spot where we stand. To the psalmist, however,--as in higher ways to his
Son and Lord,--all things around him were full of God; and as the
majesties of nature, so the trivialities of man's works--shepherds and
fishermen--were solemn with deep meanings and shadows of the heavenly.
With such lofty thoughts he fed his youth.

The psalm, too, breathes the very spirit of sunny confidence and of
perfect rest in God. We have referred to the absence of traces of
sorrow, and to the predominant tone of hopefulness, as possibly
favouring the supposition of an early origin. But it matters little
whether they were young eyes which looked so courageously into the
unknown future, or whether we have here the more solemn and weighty
hopes of age, which can have few hopes at all, unless they be rooted in
God. The spirit expressed in the psalm is so thoroughly David's, that in
his younger days, before it was worn with responsibilities and sorrows,
it must have been especially strong. We may therefore fairly take the
tone of this song of the Shepherd God as expressing the characteristic
of his godliness in the happy early years. In his solitude he was glad.
One happy thought fills the spirit; one simple emotion thrills the
chords of his harp. No doubts, or griefs, or remorse throw their shadows
upon him. He is conscious of dependence, but he is above want and fear.
He does not ask, he has--he possesses God, and is at rest in Him. He is
satisfied with that fruition which blesseth all who hunger for God, and
is the highest form of communion with Him. As the present has no
longings, the future has no terrors. All the horizon is clear, all the
winds are still, the ocean at rest, "and birds of peace sit brooding on
the charmed wave." If there be foes, God holds them back. If there lie
far off among the hills any valley of darkness, its black portals cast
no gloom over him, and will not when he enters. God is his Shepherd,
and, by another image, God is his Host. The life which in one aspect, by
reason of its continual change, and occupation with outward things, may
be compared to the journeyings of a flock, is in another aspect, by
reason of its inward union with the stability of God, like sitting ever
at the table which His hand has spread as for a royal banquet, where the
oil of gladness glistens on every head, and the full cup of Divine
pleasure is in every hand. For all the outward and pilgrimage aspect,
the psalmist knows that only Goodness and Mercy--these two white-robed
messengers of God--will follow his steps, however long may be the term
of the days of his yet young life; for all the inward, he is sure that,
in calm, unbroken fellowship, he will dwell in the house of God, and
that when the twin angels who fed and guided him all his young life long
have finished their charge, and the days of his journeyings are ended,
there stretches beyond a still closer union with his heavenly Friend,
which will be perfected in His true house "for ever." We look in vain
for another example, even in David's psalms, of such perfect, restful
trust in God. These clear notes are perhaps the purest utterance ever
given of "the peace of God which passeth all understanding."

Such were the thoughts and hopes of the lad who kept his father's sheep
at Bethlehem. He lived a life of lofty thoughts and lowly duties. He
heard the voice of God amidst the silence of the hills, and the earliest
notes of his harp echoed the deep tones. He learned courage as well as
tenderness from his daily tasks, and patience from the contrast between
them and the high vocation which Samuel's mysterious anointing had
opened before him. If we remember how disturbing an influence the
consciousness of it might have wrought in a soul less filled with God,
we may perhaps accept as probably correct the superscription which
refers one sweet, simple psalm to him, and may venture to suppose that
it expresses the contentment, undazzled by visions of coming greatness,
that calmed his heart. "Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes
lofty; neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too
high for me. Surely I have smoothed and quieted my soul: like a weanling
on his mother's (breast), like a weanling is my soul within me." (Psa.
cxxxi.) So lying in God's arms, and content to be folded in His embrace,
without seeking anything beyond, he is tranquil in his lowly lot.

It does not fall within our province to follow the course of the
familiar narrative through the picturesque events that led him to fame
and position at court. The double character of minstrel and warrior, to
which we have already referred, is remarkably brought out in his double
introduction to Saul, once as soothing the king's gloomy spirit with the
harmonies of his shepherd's harp, once as bringing down the boasting
giant of Gath with his shepherd's sling. On the first occasion his
residence in the palace seems to have been ended by Saul's temporary
recovery. He returns to Bethlehem for an indefinite time, and then
leaves it and all its peaceful tasks for ever. The dramatic story of the
duel with Goliath needs no second telling. His arrival at the very
crisis of the war, the eager courage with which he leaves his baggage in
the hands of the guard and runs down the valley to the ranks of the
army, the busy hum of talk among the Israelites, the rankling jealousy
of his brother that curdles into bitter jeers, the modest courage with
which he offers himself as champion, the youthful enthusiasm of brave
trust in "the Lord, that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and
out of the paw of the bear;" the wonderfully vivid picture of the young
hero with his shepherd staff in one hand, his sling in the other, and
the rude wallet by his side, which had carried his simple meal, and now
held the smooth stone from the brook that ran between the armies in the
bottom of the little valley--the blustering braggadocio of the big
champion, the boy's devout confidence in "the name of the Lord of
hosts;" the swift brevity of the narrative of the actual fight, which in
its hurrying clauses seems to reproduce the light-footed eagerness of
the young champion, or the rapid whizz of the stone ere it crashed into
the thick forehead; the prostrate bulk of the dead giant prone upon the
earth, and the conqueror, slight and agile, hewing off the huge head
with Goliath's own useless sword;--all these incidents, so full of
character, so antique in manner, so weighty with lessons of the
impotence of strength that is merely material, and the power of a living
enthusiasm of faith in God, may, for our present purposes, be passed
with a mere glance. One observation may, however, be allowed. After the
victory, Saul is represented as not knowing who David was, and as
sending Abner to find out where he comes from. Abner, too, professes
entire ignorance; and when David appears before the king, "with the head
of the Philistine in his hand," he is asked, "Whose son art thou, young
man?" It has been thought that here we have an irreconcilable
contradiction with previous narratives, according to which there was
close intimacy between him and the king, who "loved him greatly," and
gave him an office of trust about his person. Suppositions of
"dislocation of the narrative," the careless adoption by the compiler of
two separate legends, and the like, have been freely indulged in. But it
may at least be suggested as a possible explanation of the seeming
discrepancy, that when Saul had passed out of his moody madness it is
not wonderful that he should have forgotten all which had occurred in
his paroxysm. It is surely a common enough psychological phenomenon that
a man restored to sanity has no remembrance of the events during his
mental aberration. And as for Abner's profession of ignorance, an
incipient jealousy of this stripling hero may naturally have made the
"captain of the host" willing to keep the king as ignorant as he could
concerning a probable formidable rival. There is no need to suppose he
was really ignorant, but only that it suited him to say that he was.

With this earliest deed of heroism the peaceful private days are closed,
and a new epoch of court favour and growing popularity begins. The
impression which the whole story leaves upon one is well summed up in a
psalm which the Septuagint adds to the Psalter. It is not found in the
Hebrew, and has no pretension to be David's work; but, as a _résumé_ of
the salient points of his early life, it may fitly end our
considerations of this first epoch.

"This is the autograph psalm of David, and beyond the number (_i.e._, of
the psalms in the Psalter), when he fought the single fight with
Goliath:--

"(1.) I was little among my brethren, and the youngest in the house of
my father: I kept the flock of my father. (2.) My hands made a pipe, my
fingers tuned a psaltery. (3.) And who shall tell it to my Lord? He is
the Lord, He shall hear me. (4.) He sent His angel (messenger), and
took me from the flocks of my father, and anointed me with the oil of
His anointing. (5.) But my brethren were fair and large, and in them the
Lord took not pleasure. (6.) I went out to meet the Philistine, and he
cursed me by his idols. (7.) But I, drawing his sword, beheaded him, and
took away reproach from the children of Israel."




IV.--THE EXILE.


David's first years at the court of Saul in Gibeah do not appear to have
produced any psalms which still survive.

  "The sweetest songs are those
   Which tell of saddest thought."

It was natural, then, that a period full of novelty and of prosperous
activity, very unlike the quiet days at Bethlehem, should rather
accumulate materials for future use than be fruitful in actual
production. The old life shut to behind him for ever, like some
enchanted door in a hill-side, and an unexplored land lay beckoning
before. The new was widening his experience, but it had to be mastered,
to be assimilated by meditation before it became vocal.

The bare facts of this section are familiar and soon told. There is
first a period in which he is trusted by Saul, who sets him in high
command, with the approbation not only of the people, but even of the
official classes. But a new dynasty resting on military pre-eminence
cannot afford to let a successful soldier stand on the steps of the
throne; and the shrill chant of the women out of all the cities of
Israel, which even in Saul's hearing answered the praises of his prowess
with a louder acclaim for David's victories, startled the king for the
first time with a revelation of the national feeling. His unslumbering
suspicion "eyed David from that day." Rage and terror threw him again
into the gripe of his evil spirit, and in his paroxysm he flings his
heavy spear, the symbol of his royalty, at the lithe harper, with fierce
vows of murder. The failure of his attempt to kill David seems to have
aggravated his dread of him as bearing a charm which won all hearts and
averted all dangers. A second stage is marked not only by Saul's growing
fear, but by David's new position. He is removed from court, and put in
a subordinate command, which only extends his popularity, and brings him
into more immediate contact with the mass of the people. "All Israel and
Judah loved David, because he went out and came in before them." Then
follows the offer of Saul's elder daughter in marriage, in the hope that
by playing upon his gratitude and his religious feeling, he might be
urged to some piece of rash bravery that would end him without scandal.
Some new caprice of Saul's, however, leads him to insult David by
breaking his pledge at the last moment, and giving the promised bride to
another. Jonathan's heart was not the only one in Saul's household that
yielded to his spell. The younger Michal had been cherishing his image
in secret, and now tells her love. Her father returns to his original
purpose, with the strange mixture of tenacity and capricious
changefulness that marks his character, and again attempts, by demanding
a grotesquely savage dowry, to secure David's destruction. But that
scheme, too, fails; and he becomes a member of the royal house.

This third stage is marked by Saul's deepening panic hatred, which has
now become a fixed idea. All his attempts have only strengthened David's
position, and he looks on his irresistible advance with a nameless awe.
He calls, with a madman's folly, on Jonathan and on all his servants to
kill him; and then, when his son appeals to him, his old better nature
comes over him, and with a great oath he vows that David shall not be
slain. For a short time David returns to Gibeah, and resumes his former
relations with Saul, but a new victory over the Philistines rouses the
slumbering jealousy. Again the "evil spirit" is upon him, and the great
javelin is flung with blind fury, and sticks quivering in the wall. It
is night, and David flies to his house. A stealthy band of assassins
from the palace surround the house with orders to prevent all egress,
and, by what may be either the strange whim of a madman, or the cynical
shamelessness of a tyrant, to slay him in the open daylight. Michal,
who, though in after time she showed a strain of her father's proud
godlessness, and an utter incapacity of understanding the noblest parts
of her husband's character, seems to have been a true wife in these
early days, discovers, perhaps with a woman's quick eye sharpened by
love, the crouching murderers, and with rapid promptitude urges
immediate flight. Her hands let him down from the window--the house
being probably on the wall. Her ready wit dresses up one of those
mysterious teraphim (which appear to have had some connection with
idolatry or magic, and which are strange pieces of furniture for
David's house), and lays it in the bed to deceive the messengers, and so
gain a little more time before pursuit began. "So David fled and
escaped, and came to Samuel to Ramah," and thus ended his life at court.

Glancing over this narrative, one or two points come prominently forth.
The worth of these events to David must have lain chiefly in the
abundant additions made to his experience of life, which ripened his
nature, and developed new powers. The meditative life of the sheepfold
is followed by the crowded court and camp. Strenuous work, familiarity
with men, constant vicissitude, take the place of placid thought, of
calm seclusion, of tranquil days that knew no changes but the
alternation of sun and stars, storm and brightness, green pastures and
dusty paths. He learned the real world, with its hate and effort, its
hollow fame and its whispering calumnies. Many illusions no doubt faded,
but the light that had shone in his solitude still burned before him for
his guide, and a deeper trust in his Shepherd God was rooted in his soul
by all the shocks of varying fortune. The passage from the visions of
youth and the solitary resolves of early and uninterrupted piety to the
naked realities of a wicked world, and the stern self-control of manly
godliness, is ever painful and perilous. Thank God! it may be made clear
gain, as it was by this young hero psalmist.

David's calm indifference to outward circumstances affecting himself, is
very strikingly expressed in his conduct. Partly from his poetic
temperament, partly from his sweet natural unselfishness, and chiefly
from his living trust in God, he accepts whatever happens with
equanimity, and makes no effort to alter it. He originates nothing.
Prosperity comes unsought, and dangers unfeared. He does not ask for
Jonathan's love, or the people's favour, or the women's songs, or Saul's
daughter. If Saul gives him command he takes it, and does his work. If
Saul flings his javelin at him, he simply springs aside and lets it
whizz past. If his high position is taken from him, he is quite content
with a lower. If a royal alliance is offered, he accepts it; if it is
withdrawn, he is not ruffled; if renewed, he is still willing. If a busy
web of intrigue is woven round him, he takes no notice. If
reconciliation is proposed, he cheerfully goes back to the palace. If
his life is threatened he goes home. He will not stir to escape but for
the urgency of his wife. So well had he already begun to learn the
worthlessness of life's trifles. So thoroughly does he practice his own
precept, "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers;" "rest in the Lord,
and wait patiently for Him." (Psa. xxxvii. 1, 7.)

This section gives also a remarkable impression of the irresistible
growth of his popularity and influence. The silent energy of the Divine
purpose presses his fortunes onward with a motion slow and inevitable as
that of a glacier. The steadfast flow circles unchecked round, or rises
victorious over all hindrances. Efforts to ruin, to degrade, to
kill--one and all fail. Terror and hate, suspicion and jealousy, only
bring him nearer the goal. A clause which comes in thrice in the course
of one chapter, expresses this fated advance. In the first stage of his
court life, we read, "David prospered" (1 Sam. xviii. 5, margin), and
again with increased emphasis it is told as the result of the efforts to
crush him, that, "He prospered in all his ways, and the Lord was with
him" (verse 14), and yet again, in spite of Saul's having "become his
enemy continually," he "prospered more than all the servants of Saul"
(verse 30). He moves onward as stars in their courses move, obeying the
equable impulse of the calm and conquering will of God.

The familiar Scripture antithesis, which naturally finds its clearest
utterance in the words of the last inspired writer--namely, the eternal
opposition of Light and Darkness, Love and Hate, Life and Death, is
brought into sharpest relief by the juxtaposition and contrast of David
and Saul. This is the key to the story. The two men are not more unlike
in person than in spirit. We think of the one with his ruddy beauty and
changeful eyes, and lithe slight form, and of the other gaunt and black,
his giant strength weakened, and his "goodly" face scarred with the
lightnings of his passions--and as they look so they are. The one full
of joyous energy, the other devoured by gloom; the one going in and out
among the people and winning universal love, the other sitting moody and
self-absorbed behind his palace walls; the one bringing sweet clear
tones of trustful praise from his harp, the other shaking his huge spear
in his madness; the one ready for action and prosperous in it all, the
other paralyzed, shrinking from all work, and leaving the conduct of
the war to the servant whom he feared; the one conscious of the Divine
presence making him strong and calm, the other writhing in the gripe of
his evil spirit, and either foaming in fury, or stiffened into torpor;
the one steadily growing in power and favour with God and man, the other
sinking in deeper mire, and wrapped about with thickening mists as he
moves to his doom. The tragic pathos of these two lives in their fateful
antagonism is the embodiment of that awful alternative of life and
death, blessing and cursing, which it was the very aim of Judaism to
stamp ineffaceably on the conscience.

David's flight begins a period to which a large number of his psalms are
referred. We may call them "The Songs of the Outlaw." The titles in the
psalter connect several with specific events during his persecution by
Saul, and besides these, there are others which have marked
characteristics in common, and may therefore be regarded as belonging to
the same time. The bulk of the former class are found in the second book
of the psalter (Ps. xlii.-lxxii.), which has been arranged with some
care. There are first eight Korahite psalms, and one of Asaph's; then a
group of fifteen Davidic (li.-lxv.), followed by two anonymous; then
three more of David's (lxviii.-lxx.), followed by one anonymous and the
well-known prayer "for Solomon." Now it is worth notice that the group
of fifteen psalms ascribed to David is as nearly as possible divided in
halves, eight having inscriptions which give a specific date of
composition, and seven having no such detail. There has also been some
attempt at arranging the psalms of these two classes alternately, but
that has not been accurately carried out. These facts show that the
titles are at all events as old as the compilation of the second book of
the psalter, and were regarded as accurate then. Several points about
the complete book of psalms as we have it, seem to indicate that these
two first books were an older nucleus, which was in existence long prior
to the present collection--and if so, the date of the titles must be
carried back a very long way indeed, and with a proportionate increase
of authority.

Of the eight psalms in the second book having titles with specific
dates, five (Ps. lii., liv., lvi., lvii., lix.) are assigned to the
period of the Sauline persecution, and, as it would appear, with
accuracy. There is a general similarity of tone in them all, as well as
considerable parallelisms of expression, favourite phrases and
metaphors, which are favourable to the hypothesis of a nearly
cotemporaneous date. They are all in what, to use a phrase from another
art, we may call David's earlier manner. For instance, in all the
psalmist is surrounded by enemies. They would "swallow him up" (lvi. 1,
2; lvii. 3). They "oppress" him (liv. 3; lvi. 1). One of their weapons
is calumny, which seems from the frequent references to have much moved
the psalmist. Their tongues are razors (lii. 2), or swords (lvii. 4;
lix. 7; lxiv. 3). They seem to him like crouching beasts ready to spring
upon harmless prey (lvi. 6; lvii. 6; lix. 3); they are "lions" (lvii.
4), dogs (lix. 6, 14). He is conscious of nothing which he has done to
provoke this storm of hatred (lix. 3; lxiv. 4.) The "strength" of God is
his hope (liv. 1; lix. 9, 17). He is sure that retribution will fall
upon the enemies (lii. 5; liv. 5; lvi. 7; lvii. 6; lix. 8-15; lxiv. 7,
8). He vows and knows that psalms of deliverance will yet succeed these
plaintive cries (lii. 9; liv. 7; lvi. 12; lvii. 7-11; lix. 16, 17).

We also find a considerable number of psalms in the first book of the
psalter which present the same features, and may therefore probably be
classed with these as belonging to the time of his exile. Such for
instance are the seventh and thirty-fourth, which have both inscriptions
referring them to this period, with others which we shall have to
consider presently. The imagery of the preceding group reappears in
them. His enemies are lions (vii. 2; xvii. 12; xxii. 13; xxxv. 17); dogs
(xxii. 16); bulls (xxii. 12). Pitfalls and snares are in his path (vii.
15; xxxi. 4; xxxv. 7). He passionately protests his innocence, and the
kindliness of his heart to his wanton foes (vii. 3-5; xvii. 3, 4); whom
he has helped and sorrowed over in their sickness (xxxv. 13, 14)--a
reference, perhaps, to his solacing Saul in his paroxysms with the music
of his harp. He dwells on retribution with vehemence (vii. 11-16; xi.
5-7; xxxi. 23; xxxv. 8), and on his own deliverance with confidence.

These general characteristics accurately correspond with the
circumstances of David during the years of his wanderings. The scenery
and life of the desert colours the metaphors which describe his enemies
as wild beasts; himself as a poor hunted creature amongst pits and
snares; or as a timid bird flying to the safe crags, and God as his
Rock. Their strong assertions of innocence accord with the historical
indications of Saul's gratuitous hatred, and appear to distinguish the
psalms of this period from those of Absalom's revolt, in which the
remembrance of his great sin was too deep to permit of any such claims.
In like manner the prophecies of the enemies' destruction are too
triumphant to suit that later time of exile, when the father's heart
yearned with misplaced tenderness over his worthless son, and nearly
broke with unkingly sorrow for the rebel's death. Their confidence in
God, too, has in it a ring of joyousness in peril which corresponds with
the buoyant faith that went with him through all the desperate
adventures and hairbreadth escapes of the Sauline persecution. If then
we may, with some confidence, read these psalms in connection with that
period, what a noble portraiture of a brave, devout soul looks out upon
us from them. We see him in the first flush of his manhood--somewhere
about five-and-twenty years old--fronting perils of which he is fully
conscious, with calm strength and an enthusiasm of trust that lifts his
spirit above them all, into a region of fellowship with God which no
tumult can invade, and which no remembrance of black transgression
troubled and stained. His harp is his solace in his wanderings; and
while plaintive notes are flung from its strings, as is needful for the
deepest harmonies of praise here, every wailing tone melts into clear
ringing notes of glad affiance in the "God of his mercy."

Distinct references to the specific events of his wanderings are,
undoubtedly, rare in them, though even these are more obvious than has
been sometimes carelessly assumed. Their infrequency and comparative
vagueness has been alleged against the accuracy of the inscriptions
which allocate certain psalms to particular occasions. But in so far as
it is true that these allusions are rare and inexact, the fact is surely
rather in favour of than against the correctness of the titles. For if
these are not suggested by obvious references in the psalms to which
they are affixed, by what can they have been suggested but by a
tradition considerably older than the compilation of the psalter?
Besides, the analogy of all other poetry would lead us to expect
precisely what we find in these psalms--general and not detailed
allusions to the writer's circumstances. The poetic imagination does not
reproduce the bald prosaic facts which have set it in motion, but the
echo of them broken up and etherealised. It broods over them till life
stirs, and the winged creature bursts from them to sing and soar.

If we accept the title as accurate, the fifty-ninth psalm is the first
of these Songs of the Outlaw. It refers to the time "when Saul sent, and
they watched the house to kill him." Those critics who reject this date,
which they do on very weak grounds, lose themselves in a chaos of
assumptions as to the occasion of the psalm. The Chaldean invasion, the
assaults in the time of Nehemiah, and the era of the Maccabees, are
alleged with equal confidence and equal groundlessness. "We believe that
it is most advisable to adhere to the title, and most scientific to
ignore these hypotheses built on nothing." (Delitzsch.)

It is a devotional and poetic commentary on the story in Samuel. There
we get the bare facts of the assassins prowling by night round David's
house; of Michal's warning; of her ready-witted trick to gain time, and
of his hasty flight to Samuel at Ramah. In the narrative David is, as
usual at this period, passive and silent; but when we turn to the psalm,
we learn the tone of his mind as the peril bursts upon him, and all the
vulgar craft and fear fades from before his lofty enthusiasm of faith.

The psalm begins abruptly with a passionate cry for help, which is
repeated four times, thus bringing most vividly before us the extremity
of the danger and the persistency of the suppliant's trust. The peculiar
tenderness and closeness of his relation to his heavenly Friend, which
is so characteristic of David's psalms, and which they were almost the
first to express, breathes through the name by which he invokes help,
"my God." The enemies are painted in words which accurately correspond
with the history, and which by their variety reveal how formidable they
were to the psalmist. They "lie in wait (literally weave plots) for my
life." They are "workers of iniquity," "men of blood," insolent or
violent ("mighty" in English version). He asserts his innocence, as ever
in these Sauline psalms, and appeals to God in confirmation, "not for my
transgressions, nor for my sins, O Lord." He sees these eager tools of
royal malice hurrying to their congenial work: "they run and prepare
themselves." And then, rising high above all encompassing evils, he
grasps at the throne of God in a cry, which gains additional force when
we remember that the would-be murderers compassed his house in the
night. "Awake to meet me, and behold;" as if he had said, "In the
darkness do Thou see; at midnight sleep not Thou." The prayer is
continued in words which heap together with unwonted abundance the
Divine names, in each of which lie an appeal to God and a pillar of
faith. As Jehovah, the self-existent Fountain of timeless Being; as the
God of Hosts, the Commander of all the embattled powers of the universe,
whether they be spiritual or material; as the GOD of Israel, who calls
that people His, and has become theirs--he stirs up the strength of God
to "awake to visit all the heathen,"--a prayer which has been supposed
to compel the reference of the whole psalm to the assaults of Gentile
nations, but which may be taken as an anticipation on David's lips of
the truth that, "They are not all Israel which are of Israel." After a
terrible petition--"Be not merciful to any secret plotters of
evil"--there is a pause (Selah) to be filled, as it would appear, by
some chords on the harp, or the blare of the trumpets, thus giving time
to dwell on the previous petitions.

But still the thought of the foe haunts him, and he falls again to the
lower level of painting their assembling round his house, and their
whispers as they take their stand. It would appear that the watch had
been kept up for more than one night. How he flings his growing scorn of
them into the sarcastic words, "They return at evening; they growl like
a dog, and compass the city" (or "go their rounds in the city"). One
sees them stealing through the darkness, like the troops of vicious curs
that infest Eastern cities, and hears their smothered threatenings as
they crouch in the shadow of the unlighted streets. Then growing bolder,
as the night deepens and sleep falls on the silent houses: "Behold they
pour out with their mouth, swords (are) in their lips, for 'who hears'?"
In magnificent contrast with these skulking murderers fancying
themselves unseen and unheard, David's faith rends the heaven, and, with
a daring image which is copied in a much later psalm (ii. 4), shows God
gazing on them with Divine scorn which breaks in laughter and mockery. A
brief verse, which recurs at the end of the psalm, closes the first
portion of the psalm with a calm expression of untroubled trust, in
beautiful contrast with the peril and tumult of soul, out of which it
rises steadfast and ethereal, like a rainbow spanning a cataract. A
slight error appears to have crept into the Hebrew text, which can be
easily corrected from the parallel verse at the end, and then the quiet
confident words are--

  "My strength! upon Thee will I wait,
   For God is my fortress!"

The second portion is an intensification of the first; pouring out a
terrible prayer for exemplary retribution on his enemies; asking that no
speedy destruction may befall them, but that God would first of all
"make them reel" by the blow of His might; would then fling them
prostrate; would make their pride and fierce words a net to snare them;
and then, at last, would bring them to nothing in the hot flames of His
wrath--that the world may know that He is king. The picture of the
prowling dogs recurs with deepened scorn and firmer confidence that
they will hunt for their prey in vain.

  "And they return at evening; they growl like a dog,
   And compass the city.
   They--they prowl about for food
   If (or, since) they are not satisfied, they spend the night (in the
      search.)"

There is almost a smile on his face as he thinks of their hunting about
for him, like hungry hounds snuffing for their meal in the kennels, and
growling now in disappointment--while he is safe beyond their reach. And
the psalm ends with a glad burst of confidence, and a vow of praise very
characteristic on his lips--

  "But I--I will sing Thy power,
   And shout aloud, in the morning, Thy mercy,
   For Thou hast been a fortress for me.
   And a refuge in the day of my trouble.
   My strength! unto Thee will I harp,
   For God is my fortress--the God of my mercy."

Thrice he repeats the vow of praise. His harp was his companion in his
flight, and even in the midst of peril the poet's nature appears which
regards all life as materials for song, and the devout spirit appears
which regards all trial as occasions for praise. He has calmed his own
spirit, as he had done Saul's, by his song, and by prayer has swung
himself clear above fightings and fears. The refrain, which occurs twice
in the psalm, witnesses to the growth of his faith even while he sings.
At first he could only say in patient expectance, "My strength! I will
wait upon thee, for God is my fortress." But at the end his mood is
higher, his soul has caught fire as it revolves, and his last words are
a triumphant amplification of his earlier trust: "My strength! unto thee
will I sing with the harp--for God is my fortress--the God of my
mercy."




V.--THE EXILE--_CONTINUED_.


"So David fled, and escaped and came to Samuel to Ramah, and told him
all that Saul had done unto him. And he and Samuel went and dwelt in
Naioth" (1 Sam. xix. 18)--or, as the word probably means, in the
collection of students' dwellings, inhabited by the sons of the
prophets, where possibly there may have been some kind of right of
sanctuary. Driven thence by Saul's following him, and having had one
last sorrowful hour of Jonathan's companionship--the last but one on
earth--he fled to Nob, whither the ark had been carried after the
destruction of Shiloh. The story of his flight had not reached the
solitary little town among the hills, and he is received with the honour
due to the king's son-in-law. He pleads urgent secret business for Saul
as a reason for his appearance with a slender retinue, and unarmed; and
the priest, after some feeble scruples, supplies the handful of hungry
fugitives with the shewbread. But David's quick eye caught a swarthy
face peering at him from some enclosure of the simple forest sanctuary,
and as he recognised Doeg the Edomite, Saul's savage herdsman, a cold
foreboding of evil crept over his heart, and made him demand arms from
the peaceful priest. The lonely tabernacle was guarded by its own
sanctity, and no weapons were there, except one trophy which was of good
omen to David--Goliath's sword. He eagerly accepts the matchless weapon
which his hand had clutched on that day of danger and deliverance, and
thus armed, lest Doeg should try to bar his flight, he hurries from the
pursuit which he knew that the Edomite's malignant tongue would soon
bring after him. The tragical end of the unsuspecting priest's kindness
brings out the furious irrational suspicion and cruelty of Saul. He
rages at his servants as leagued with David in words which have a most
dreary sound of utter loneliness sighing through all their fierce folly:
"All of you have conspired against me; there is none of you that is
sorry for me" (1 Sam. xxii. 8.) Doeg is forward to curry favour by
telling his tale, and so tells it as to suppress the priest's ignorance
of David's flight, and to represent him as aiding and comforting the
rebel knowingly. Then fierce wrath flames out from the darkened spirit,
and the whole priestly population of Nob are summoned before him, loaded
with bitter reproaches, their professions of innocence disregarded, and
his guard ordered to murder them all then and there. The very soldiers
shrink from the sacrilege, but a willing tool is at hand. The wild blood
of Edom, fired by ancestral hatred, desires no better work, and Doeg
crowns his baseness by slaying--with the help of his herdsmen, no
doubt--"on that day fourscore and five persons that did wear an ephod,"
and utterly extirpating every living thing from the defenceless little
city.

One psalm, the fifty-second, is referred by its inscription to this
period, but the correspondence between the history and the tone of the
psalm is doubtful. It is a vehement rebuke and a prophecy of destruction
directed against an enemy, whose hostility was expressed in "devouring
words." The portrait does not apply very accurately to the Doeg of the
historical books, inasmuch as it describes the psalmist's enemy as "a
mighty man,"--or rather as "a hero," and as trusting "in the abundance
of his riches,"--and makes the point of the reproach against him that
he is a confirmed liar. But the dastardly deed of blood may be covertly
alluded to in the bitterly sarcastic "hero"--as if he had said, "O brave
warrior, who dost display thy prowess in murdering unarmed priests and
women?" And Doeg's story to Saul was a lie in so far as it gave the
impression of the priests' complicity with David, and thereby caused
their deaths on a false charge. The other features of the description
are not contrary to the narrative, and most of them are in obvious
harmony with it. The psalm, then, may be taken as showing how deeply
David's soul was stirred by the tragedy. He pours out broken words of
hot and righteous indignation:

  "Destructions doth thy tongue devise,
   Like a razor whetted--O thou worker of deceit."

       *       *       *       *       *

  "Thou lovest all words that devour:[F] O thou deceitful tongue!"

[F] Literally, "words of swallowing up."

He prophesies the destruction of the cruel liar, and the exultation of
the righteous when he falls, in words which do indeed belong to the old
covenant of retribution, and yet convey an eternal truth which modern
sentimentalism finds very shocking, but which is witnessed over and
over again in the relief that fills the heart of nations and of
individuals when evil men fade: "When the wicked perish, there is
shouting"--

  "Also God shall smite thee down for ever,
   Will draw thee out,[G] and carry thee away from the tent,
   And root thee out of the land of the living;
   And the righteous shall see and fear,
   And over him shall they laugh."

In confident security he opposes his own happy fellowship with God to
this dark tragedy of retribution:

  "But I--(I am) like a green olive tree in the house of God."

[G] The full force of the word is, "will pluck out as a glowing ember
from a hearth" (Delitzsch).

The enemy was to be "rooted out;" the psalmist is to flourish by
derivation of life and vigour from God. If Robinson's conjecture that
Nob was on the Mount of Olives were correct (which is very doubtful),
the allusion here would gain appropriateness. As the olives grew all
round the humble forest sanctuary, and were in some sort hallowed by the
shrine which they encompassed, so the soul grows and is safe in loving
fellowship with God. Be that as it may, the words express the outlaw's
serene confidence that he is safe beneath the sheltering mercy of God,
and re-echo the hopes of his earlier psalm, "I will dwell in the house
of the Lord for ever." The stormy indignation of the earlier verses
passes away into calm peace and patient waiting in praise and trust:

  "I will praise Thee for ever, for Thou hast done (it),
   And wait on Thy name in the presence of Thy beloved, for it is good."

Hunted from Nob, David with a small company struck across the country in
a southwesterly direction, keeping to the safety of the tangled
mountains, till, from the western side of the hills of Judah, he looked
down upon the broad green plain of Philistia. Behind him was a mad
tyrant, in front the uncircumcised enemies of his country and his God.
His condition was desperate, and he had recourse to desperate measures.
That nearest Philistine city, some ten miles off, on which he looked
down from his height, was Gath; the glen where he had killed its
champion was close beside him,--every foot of ground was familiar by
many a foray and many a fight. It was a dangerous resource to trust
himself in Gath, with Goliath's sword dangling in his belt. But he may
have hoped that he was not known by person, or may have thought that
Saul's famous commander would be a welcome guest, as a banished man, at
the Philistine court. So he made the plunge, and took refuge in
Goliath's city. Discovery soon came, and in the most ominous form. It
was an ugly sign that the servants of Achish should be quoting the words
of the chant of victory which extolled him as the slayer of their
countryman. Vengeance for his death was but too likely to come next. The
doubts of his identity seem to have lasted for some little time, and to
have been at first privately communicated to the king. They somehow
reached David, and awoke his watchful attention, as well as his fear.
The depth of his alarm and his ready resource are shown by his degrading
trick of assumed madness--certainly the least heroic action of his life.
What a picture of a furious madman is the description of his conduct
when Achish's servants came to arrest him. He "twisted himself about in
their hands" in the feigned contortions of possession; he drummed on the
leaves of the gate,[H] and "let his spittle run down into his beard."
(1 Sam. xxi. 13.) Israelitish quickness gets the better of Philistine
stupidity, as it had been used to do from Sampson's time onwards, and
the dull-witted king falls into the trap, and laughs away the suspicions
with a clumsy joke at his servants' expense about more madmen being the
last thing he was short of. A hasty flight from Philistine territory
ended this episode.

[H] The Septuagint appears to have followed a different reading here
from that of our present Hebrew text, and the change adds a very
picturesque clause to the description. A madman would be more likely to
hammer than to "scrabble" on the great double-leaved gate.

The fifty-sixth psalm, which is referred by its title to this period,
seems at first sight to be in strange contrast with the impressions
drawn from the narrative, but on a closer examination is found to
confirm the correctness of the reference by its contents. The terrified
fugitive, owing his safety to a trick, and slavering like an idiot in
the hands of his rude captors, had an inner life of trust strong enough
to hold his mortal terror in check, though not to annihilate it. The
psalm is far in advance of the conduct--is it so unusual a circumstance
as to occasion surprise, that lofty and sincere utterances of faith and
submission should co-exist with the opposite feelings? Instead of taking
the contrast between the words and the acts as a proof that this psalm
is wrongly ascribed to the period in question, let us rather be thankful
for another instance that imperfect faith may be genuine, and that if we
cannot rise to the height of unwavering fortitude, God accepts a
tremulous trust fighting against mortal terror, and grasping with a
feeble hand the word of God, and the memory of all his past
deliverances. It is precisely this conflict of faith and fear which the
psalm sets before us. It falls into three portions, the first and second
of which are closed by a kind of refrain (vers. 4, 10, 11)--a structure
which is characteristic of several of these Sauline persecution psalms
(_e.g._, lvii. 5, 11; lix. 9, 17). The first part of each of these two
portions is a vivid description of his danger, from which he rises to
the faith expressed in the closing words. The repetition of the same
thoughts in both is not to be regarded as a cold artifice of
composition, but as the true expression of the current of his thoughts.
He sees his enemies about him, ready to swallow him up--"there be many
fighting against me disdainfully"[I] (ver. 2). Whilst the terror creeps
round his heart ("he was sore afraid," 1 Sam. xxi. 12), he rouses
himself to trust, as he says, in words which express most emphatically
the co-existence of the two, and carry a precious lesson of the reality
of even an interrupted faith, streaked with many a black line of doubt
and dread.

[I] Literally, "loftily." Can there be any allusion to the giant stature
of Goliath's relations in Gath? We hear of four men "born to the giant
in Gath," who were killed in David's wars. (2 Sam. xxi. 22.)

  "(In) the day (that) I am afraid--I trust on Thee."

And then he breaks into the utterance of praise and confidence--to which
he has climbed by the ladder of prayer.

  "In God I praise His word,
   In God I trust, I do not fear:--
   What shall flesh do to me?"

How profoundly these words set forth the object of his trust, as being
not merely the promise of God--which in David's case may be the specific
promise conveyed by his designation to the throne--but the God who
promises, the inmost nature of that confidence as being a living union
with God, the power of it as grappling with his dread, and enabling him
now to say, "I do _not_ fear."

But again he falls from this height; another surge of fear breaks over
him, and almost washes him from his rock. His foes, with ceaseless
malice, arrest his words; they skulk in ambush, they dog his heels, they
long for his life. The crowded clauses portray the extremity of the
peril and the singer's agitation. His soul is still heaving with the
ground swell of the storm, though the blasts come more fitfully, and are
dying into calm. He is not so afraid but that he can turn to God; he
turns to Him because he is afraid, like the disciples in later days, who
had so much of terror that they must awake their Master, but so much of
trust that His awaking was enough. He pleads with God, as in former
psalms, against his enemies, in words which go far beyond the occasion,
and connect his own deliverance with the judgments of God over the whole
earth. He plaintively recalls his homelessness and his sorrows in words
which exhibit the characteristic blending of hope and pain, and which
are beautifully in accordance with the date assigned to the psalm. "My
wanderings dost Thou, even Thou, number." He is not alone in these
weary flights from Gibeah to Ramah, from Ramah to Nob, from Nob to Gath,
from Gath he knows not whither. One friend goes with him through them
all. And as the water-skin was a necessary part of a traveller's
equipment, the mention of his wanderings suggests the bold and tender
metaphor of the next clause, "Put my tears in Thy bottle,"--a prayer for
that very remembrance of his sorrows, in the existence of which he
immediately declares his confidence--"Are they not in Thy book?" The
true office of faithful communion with God is to ask for, and to
appropriate, the blessings which in the very act become ours. He knows
that his cry will scatter his foes, for God is for him. And thus once
again he has risen to the height of confidence where for a moment his
feet have been already planted, and again--but this time with even
fuller emphasis, expressed by an amplification which introduces for the
only time in the psalm the mighty covenant name--he breaks into his
triumphant strain--

  "In God I praise the Word;
   In JEHOVAH I praise the Word:
   In God I trust, I do not fear:--
   What shall man do to me?"

And from this mood of trustful expectation he does not again decline.
Prayer has brought its chiefest blessing--the peace that passeth
understanding. The foe is lost to sight, the fear conquered conclusively
by faith; the psalm which begins with a plaintive cry, ends in praise
for deliverance, as if it had been already achieved--

  "Thou hast delivered my life from death,
   (Hast Thou) not (delivered) my feet from falling,
   That I may walk before God in the light of the living?"

He already reckons himself safe; his question is not an expression of
doubt, but of assurance; and he sees the purpose of all God's dealings
with him to be that the activities of life may all be conducted in the
happy consciousness of _His_ eye who is at once Guardian and Judge of
His children. How far above his fears and lies has this hero and saint
risen by the power of supplication and the music of his psalm!

David naturally fled into Israelitish territory from Gath. The exact
locality of the cave Adullam, where we next find him, is doubtful; but
several strong reasons occur for rejecting the monkish tradition which
places it away to the east, in one of the wild wadies which run down
from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea. We should expect it to be much more
accessible by a hasty march from Gath. Obviously it would be convenient
for him to hang about the frontier of Philistia and Israel, that he
might quickly cross the line from one to the other, as dangers appeared.
Further, the city of Adullam is frequently mentioned, and always in
connections which fix its site as on the margin of the great plain of
Philistia, and not far from Gath. (2 Chron. xi. 7, etc.) There is no
reason to suppose that the cave of Adullam was in a totally different
district from the city. The hills of Dan and Judah, which break sharply
down into the plain within a few miles of Gath, are full of "extensive
excavations," and there, no doubt, we are to look for the rocky hold,
where he felt himself safer from pursuit, and whence he could look down
over the vast sweep of the rich Philistine country. Gath lay at his
feet, close by was the valley where he had killed Goliath, the scenes of
Samson's exploits were all about him. Thither fled to him his whole
family, from fear, no doubt, of Saul's revenge falling on them; and
there he gathers his band of four hundred desperate men, whom poverty
and misery, and probably the king's growing tyranny, drove to flight.
They were wild, rough soldiers, according to the picturesque
description, "whose faces were like the faces of lions, and were as
swift as the roes upon the mountains." They were not freebooters, but
seem to have acted as a kind of frontier-guard against southern Bedouins
and western Philistines for the sheep-farmers of the border whom Saul's
government was too weak to protect. In this desultory warfare, and in
eluding the pursuit of Saul, against whom it is to be observed David
never employed any weapon but flight, several years were passed. The
effect of such life on his spiritual nature was to deepen his
unconditional dependence on God; by the alternations of heat and cold,
fear and hope, danger and safety, to temper his soul and make it
flexible, tough and bright as steel. It evolved the qualities of a
leader of men; teaching him command and forbearance, promptitude and
patience, valour and gentleness. It won for him a name as the defender
of the nation, as Nabal's servant said of him and his men, "They were a
wall unto us, both by night and by day" (1 Sam. xxv. 16). And it
gathered round him a force of men devoted to him by the enthusiastic
attachment bred from long years of common dangers, and the hearty
friendships of many a march by day, and nightly encampment round the
glimmering watchfires, beneath the lucid stars.




VI.--THE EXILE--_CONTINUED_.


We have one psalm which the title connects with the beginning of David's
stay at Adullam,--the thirty-fourth. The supposition that it dates from
that period throws great force into many parts of it, and gives a unity
to what is else apparently fragmentary and disconnected. Unlike those
already considered, which were pure soliloquies, this is full of
exhortation and counsel, as would naturally be the case if it were
written when friends and followers began to gather to his standard. It
reads like a long sigh of relief at escape from a danger just past; its
burden is to tell of God's deliverance, and to urge to trust in Him. How
perfectly this tone corresponds to the circumstances immediately after
his escape from Gath to Adullam need not be more than pointed out. The
dangers which he had dreaded and the cry to God which he had sent forth
are still present to his mind, and echo through his song, like a
subtly-touched chord of sadness, which appears for a moment, and is
drowned in the waves of some triumphant music.

  "I sought the Lord, and He heard me,
   And from all my alarms He delivered me.

       *       *       *       *       *

  This afflicted (man) cried, and Jehovah heard,
  And from all his troubles He saved him."

And the "local colouring" of the psalm corresponds too with the
circumstances of Adullam. How appropriate, for instance, does the form
in which the Divine protection is proclaimed become, when we think of
the little band bivouacking among the cliffs, "The angel of the Lord
encampeth round about them that fear Him, and delivereth them." Like his
great ancestor, he is met in his desert flight by heavenly guards, "and
he calls the name of that place Mahanaim" (that is, "two camps"), as
discerning gathered round his own feeble company the ethereal weapons of
an encircling host of the warriors of God, through whose impenetrable
ranks his foes must pierce before they can reach him. From Samson's time
we read of lions in this district (Judges xiv. 8, 9), and we may
recognise another image as suggested by their growls heard among the
ravines, and their gaunt forms prowling near the cave. "The young lions
do lack and suffer hunger; but they that seek the Lord shall not want
any good" (ver. 10).

And then he passes to earnest instructions and exhortations, which
derive appositeness from regarding them as a proclamation to his men of
the principles on which his camp is to be governed. "Come, ye children,
hearken unto me." He regards himself as charged with guiding them to
godliness: "I will teach you the fear of the Lord." With some
remembrance, perhaps, of his deception at Gath, he warns them to "keep"
their "tongues from evil" and their "lips from speaking guile." They are
not to be in love with warfare, but, even with their swords in their
hands, are to "seek peace, and pursue it." On these exhortations follow
joyous assurances of God's watchful eye fixed upon the righteous, and
His ear open to their cry; of deliverance for his suppliants, whatsoever
hardship and trouble they may have to wade through; of a guardianship
which "keepeth all the bones" of the righteous, so that neither the
blows of the foe nor the perils of the crags should break them,--all
crowned with the contrast ever present to David's mind, and having a
personal reference to his enemies and to himself:

  "Evil shall slay the wicked,
   And the haters of the righteous shall suffer penalty.
   Jehovah redeems the life of His servants,
   And no penalty shall any suffer who trust in Him."

Such were the counsels and teachings of the young leader to his little
band,--noble "general orders" from a commander at the beginning of a
campaign!

We venture to refer the twenty-seventh psalm also to this period. It is
generally supposed, indeed, by those commentators who admit its Davidic
authorship, to belong to the time of Absalom's rebellion. The main
reason for throwing it so late is the reference in ver. 4 to dwelling in
the house of the Lord and inquiring in His temple.[J] This is supposed
to require a date subsequent to David's bringing up of the ark to
Jerusalem, and placing it in a temporary sanctuary. But whilst longing
for the sanctuary is no doubt characteristic of the psalms of the later
wanderings, it is by no means necessary to suppose that in the present
case that desire, which David represents as the longing of his life, was
a desire for mere bodily presence in a material temple. Indeed, the very
language seems to forbid such an interpretation. Surely the desire for
an abode in the house of the Lord--which was his one wish, which he
longed to have continuous throughout all the days of his life, which was
to surround him with a privacy of protection in trouble, and to be as
the munitions of rocks about him--was something else than a morbid
desire for an impossible seclusion in the tabernacle,--a desire fitter
for some sickly medićval monarch who buried his foolish head and faint
heart in a monastery than for God's Anointed. We have seen an earlier
germ of the same desire in the twenty-third psalm, the words of which
are referred to here; and the interpretation of the one is the
interpretation of the other. The psalmist breathes his longing for the
Divine fellowship, which shall be at once vision, and guidance, and
hidden life in distress, and stability, and victory, and shall break
into music of perpetual praise.

[J] "The fourth verse in its present form _must_ have been written after
the temple was built."--"The Psalms chronologically arranged," p.
68--following Ewald, in whose imperious criticism that same naked "must
have been," works wonders.

If, then, we are not obliged by the words in question to adopt the
later date, there is much in the psalm which strikingly corresponds with
the earlier, and throws beautiful illustration on the psalmist's mood at
this period. One such allusion we venture to suppose in the words (ver.
2),

  "When the wicked came against me to devour my flesh,
   My enemies and my foes,--they stumbled and fell;"

which have been usually taken as a mere general expression, without any
allusion to a specific event. But there was one incident in David's life
which had been forced upon his remembrance by his recent peril at
Gath--his duel with Goliath, which exactly meets the very peculiar
language here. The psalm employs the same word as the narrative, which
tells how the Philistine "arose, and came, and drew near to David." The
braggart boast, "I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air and the
beasts of the fields," is echoed in the singular phrase of the psalm;
and the emphatic, rapid picture, "they stumbled and fell," is at once a
reminiscence of the hour when the stone crashed through the thick
forehead, "and he fell upon his face to the earth;" and also a reference
to an earlier triumph in Israel's history, celebrated with fierce
exultation in the wild chant whom rolls the words like a sweet morsel
under the tongue, as it tells of Sisera--

  "Between her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay;
   Between her feet he bowed, he fell;
   Where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

Another autobiographical reference in the psalm has been disputed on
insufficient grounds:

  "For my father and my mother forsake me,
   And Jehovah takes me up." (Ver. 10.)

It is, at all events, a remarkable coincidence that the only mention of
his parents after the earliest chapters of his life falls in precisely
with this period of the history, and is such as might have suggested
these words. We read (1 Sam. xxii. 3, 4) that he once ventured all the
way from Adullam to Moab to beg an asylum from Saul's indiscriminate
fury for his father and mother, who were no doubt too old to share his
perils, as the rest of his family did. Having prepared a kindly welcome
for them, perhaps on the strength of the blood of Ruth the Moabitess in
Jesse's veins, he returned to Bethlehem, brought the old couple away,
and guarded them safely to their refuge. It is surely most natural to
suppose that the psalm is the lyrical echo of that event, and most
pathetic to conceive of the psalmist as thinking of the happy home at
Bethlehem now deserted, his brothers lurking with him among the rocks,
and his parents exiles in heathen lands. Tears fill his eyes, but he
lifts them to a Father that is never parted from him, and feels that he
is no more orphaned nor homeless.

The psalm is remarkable for the abrupt transition of feeling which
cleaves it into two parts; one (vers. 1-6) full of jubilant hope and
enthusiastic faith, the other (vers. 7-14) a lowly cry for help. There
is no need to suppose, with some critics, that we have here two
independent hymns bound together in error. He must have little knowledge
of the fluctuations of the devout life who is surprised to find so swift
a passage from confidence to conscious weakness. Whilst the usual order
in the psalms, as the usual order in good men's experience, is that
prayer for deliverance precedes praise and triumph, true communion with
God is bound to no mechanical order, and may begin with gazing on God,
and realizing the mysteries of beauty in His secret place, ere it drops
to earth. The lark sings as it descends from the "privacy of glorious
light" to its nest in the stony furrows as sweetly, though more
plaintively, than whilst it circles upwards to the sky. It is perhaps a
nobler effect of faith to begin with God and hymn the victory as if
already won, than to begin with trouble and to call for deliverance. But
with whichever we commence, the prayer of earth must include both; and
so long as we are weak, and God our strength, its elements must be
"supplication and thanksgiving." The prayer of our psalm bends round
again to its beginning, and after the plaintive cry for help breaks once
more into confidence (vers. 13, 14). The psalmist shudders as he thinks
what ruin would have befallen him if he had not trusted in God, and
leaves the unfinished sentence,--as a man looking down into some fearful
gulf starts back and covers his eyes, before he has well seen the bottom
of the abyss.

  "If I had not believed to see the goodness of the Lord
     in the land of the living!"

Then rejoicing to remember how even by his feeble trust he has been
saved, he stirs up himself to a firmer faith, in words which are
themselves an exercise of faith, as well as an incitement to it:

  "Wait on Jehovah!
   Courage! and let thy heart be strong!
   Yea! wait on Jehovah!"

Here is the true highest type of a troubled soul's fellowship with God,
when the black fear and consciousness of weakness is inclosed in a
golden ring of happy trust. Let the name of our God be first upon our
lips, and the call to our wayward hearts to wait on Him be last, and
then we may between think of our loneliness, and feebleness, and foes,
and fears, without losing our hold of our Father's hand.

David in his rocky eyrie was joyful, because he began with God. It was a
man in real peril who said, "The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom
shall I fear?" It was at a critical pause in his fortunes, when he knew
not yet whether Saul's malice was implacable, that he said, "Though war
should rise against me, in this will I be confident." It was in
thankfulness for the safe hiding-place among the dark caverns of the
hills that he celebrated the dwelling of the soul in God with words
coloured by his circumstances, "In the secret of His tabernacle shall
He hide me; He shall set me up upon a rock." It was with Philistia at
his feet before and Saul's kingdom in arms behind that his triumphant
confidence was sure that "Now shall mine head be lifted up above mine
enemies round about me." It was in weakness, not expelled even by such
joyous faith, that he plaintively besought God's mercy, and laid before
His mercy-seat as the mightiest plea His own inviting words, "Seek ye My
face," and His servant's humble response, "Thy face, Lord, will I seek."
Together, these made it impossible that that Face, the beams of which
are light and salvation, should be averted. God's past comes to his lips
as a plea for a present consistent with it and with His own mighty name.
"Thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my
salvation." His loneliness, his ignorance of his road, and the enemies
who watch him, and, like a later Saul, "breathe out cruelty" (see Acts
ix. 1), become to him in his believing petitions, not grounds of fear,
but arguments with God; and having thus mastered all that was
distressful in his lot, by making it all the basis of his cry for help,
he rises again to hope, and stirs up himself to lay hold on God, to be
strong and bold, because his expectation is from Him. A noble picture of
a steadfast soul; steadfast not because of absence of fears and reasons
for fear, but because of presence of God and faith in Him.

Having abandoned Adullam, by the advice of the prophet Gad, who from
this time appears to have been a companion till the end of his reign (2
Sam. xxiv. 11), and who subsequently became his biographer (1 Chron.
xxix. 29), he took refuge, as outlaws have ever been wont to do, in the
woods. In his forest retreat, somewhere among the now treeless hills of
Judah, he heard of a plundering raid made by the Philistines on one of
the unhappy border towns. The marauders had broken in upon the mirth of
the threshing-floors with the shout of battle, and swept away the year's
harvest. The banished man resolved to strike a blow at the ancestral
foes. Perhaps one reason may have been the wish to show that, outlaw as
he was, he, and not the morbid laggard at Gibeah, who was only stirred
to action by mad jealousy, was the sword of Israel. The little band
bursts from the hills on the spoil-encumbered Philistines, recaptures
the cattle which like moss troopers they were driving homewards from
the ruined farmsteads, and routs them with great slaughter. But the
cowardly townspeople of Keilah had less gratitude than fear; and the
king's banished son-in-law was too dangerous a guest, even though he was
of their own tribe, and had delivered them from the enemy. Saul, who had
not stirred from his moody seclusion to beat back invasion, summoned a
hasty muster, in the hope of catching David in the little city, like a
fox in his earth: and the cowardly citizens meditated saving their homes
by surrendering their champion. David and his six hundred saved
themselves by a rapid flight, and, as it would appear, by breaking up
into detachments. "They went whithersoever they could go" (1 Sam. xxiii.
13); whilst David, with some handful, made his way to the inhospitable
wilderness which stretches from the hills of Judah to the shores of the
Dead Sea, and skulked there in "lurking places" among the crags and
tangled underwood. With fierce perseverance "Saul sought him every day,
but God delivered him not into his hand." One breath of love, fragrant
and strength-giving, was wafted to his fainting heart, when Jonathan
found his way where Saul could not come, and the two friends met once
more. In the woodland solitudes they plighted their faith again, and the
beautiful unselfishness of Jonathan is wonderfully set forth in his
words, "Thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee;"
while an awful glimpse is given into that mystery of a godless will
consciously resisting the inevitable, when there is added, "and that
also Saul, my father, knoweth." In such resistance the king's son has no
part, for it is pointedly noticed that he returned to his house.
Treachery, and that from the men of his own tribe, again dogs David's
steps. The people of Ziph, a small place on the edge of the southern
desert, betray his haunt to Saul. The king receives the intelligence
with a burst of thanks, in which furious jealousy and perverted
religion, and a sense of utter loneliness and misery, and a strange
self-pity, are mingled most pathetically and terribly: "Blessed be ye of
the Lord, for ye have compassion on me!" He sends them away to mark down
his prey; and when they have tracked him to his lair, he follows with
his force and posts them round the hill where David and his handful
lurk. The little band try to escape, but they are surrounded and
apparently lost. At the very moment when the trap is just going to
close, a sudden messenger, "fiery red with haste," rushes into Saul's
army with news of a formidable invasion: "Haste thee and come; for the
Philistines have spread themselves upon the land!" So the eager hand,
ready to smite and crush, is plucked back; and the hour of deepest
distress is the hour of deliverance.

At some period in this lowest ebb of David's fortunes, we have one short
psalm, very simple and sad (liv.) It bears the title, "When the Ziphims
came and said to Saul, Doth not David hide himself with us?" and may
probably be referred to the former of the two betrayals by the men of
Ziph. The very extremity of peril has made the psalmist still and quiet.
The sore need has shortened his prayer. He is too sure that God hears to
use many words; for it is distrust, not faith, which makes us besiege
His throne with much speaking. He is confident as ever; but one feels
that there is a certain self-restraint and air of depression over the
brief petitions, which indicate the depth of his distress and the
uneasiness of protracted anxiety. Two notes only sound from his harp:
one a plaintive cry for help; the other, thanksgiving for deliverance as
already achieved. The two are bound together by the recurrence in each
of "the name" of GOD, which is at once the source of his salvation and
the theme of his praise. We have only to read the lowly petitions to
feel that they speak of a spirit somewhat weighed down by danger, and
relaxed from the loftier mood of triumphant trust.

  (1) O God, by Thy name save me,
      And in Thy strength do judgment for me

  (2) O God, hear my prayer,
      Give ear to the words of my mouth.

  (3) For strangers are risen against me,
      And tyrants seek my life.
      They set not God before them.

The enemies are called "strangers;" but, as we have seen in the first of
these songs of the exile, it is not necessary, therefore, to suppose
that they were not Israelites. The Ziphites were men of Judah like
himself; and there is bitter emphasis as well as a gleam of insight into
the spiritual character of the true Israel in calling them foreigners.
The other name, oppressors, or violent men, or, as we have rendered it,
tyrants, corresponds too accurately with the character of Saul in his
later years, to leave much doubt that it is pointed at him. If so, the
softening of the harsh description by the use of the plural is in
beautiful accordance with the forgiving leniency which runs through all
David's conduct to him. Hard words about Saul himself do not occur in
the psalms. His counsellors, his spies, the liars who calumniated David
to him, and for their own ends played upon his suspicious nature,--the
tools who took care that the cruel designs suggested by themselves
should be carried out, kindle David's wrath, but it scarcely ever lights
on the unhappy monarch whom he loved with all-enduring charity while he
lived, and mourned with magnificent eulogy when he died. The allusion is
made all the more probable, because of the verbal correspondence with
the narrative which records that "Saul was come out to seek his life" (1
Sam. xxiii. 15.)

A chord or two from the harp permits the mind to dwell on the thought of
the foes, and prepares for the second part of this psalm. In it
thanksgiving and confidence flow from the petitions of the former
portion. But the praise is not so jubilant, nor the trust so
victorious, as we have seen them. "The peace of God" has come in answer
to prayer, but it is somewhat subdued:

  "Behold, God is my helper;
   The Lord is the supporter of my life."

The foes sought his life, but, as the historical book gives the
antithesis, "Saul sought him every day, but God delivered him not into
his hand." The rendering of the English version, "The Lord is with them
that uphold my soul," is literally accurate, but does not convey the
meaning of the Hebrew idiom. God is not regarded as one among many
helpers, but as alone the supporter or upholder of his life. Believing
that, the psalmist, of course, believes as a consequence that his
enemies will be smitten with evil for their evil. The prophetic lip of
faith calls things that are not as though they were. In the midst of his
dangers he looks forward to songs of deliverance and glad sacrifices of
praise; and the psalm closes with words that approach the more fervid
utterances we have already heard, as if his song had raised his own
spirit above its fears:

  (6) With willinghood will I sacrifice unto Thee.
      I will praise Thy name for it is good.


  (7) For from all distress it has delivered me.
      And on my enemies will mine eye see (my desire)

The name--the revealed character of God--was the storehouse of all the
saving energies to which he appealed in verse 1. It is the theme of his
praise when the deliverance shall have come. It is almost regarded here
as equivalent to the Divine personality--it is good, _it_ has delivered
him. Thus, we may say that this brief psalm gives us as the single
thought of a devout soul in trouble, the name of the Lord, and teaches
by its simple pathos how the contemplation of God as He has made Himself
known, should underlie every cry for help and crown every thanksgiving;
whilst it may assure us that whosoever seeks for the salvation of that
mighty name may, even in the midst of trouble, rejoice as in an
accomplished deliverance. And all such thoughts should be held with a
faith at least as firm as the ancient psalmist's, by us to whom the
"name" of the Lord is "declared" by Him who is the full revelation of
God, and the storehouse of all blessings and help to his "brethren."
(Heb. ii. 12.)

A little plain of some mile or so in breadth slopes gently down towards
the Dead Sea about the centre of its western shore. It is girdled round
by savage cliffs, which, on the northern side, jut out in a bold
headland to the water's edge. At either extremity is a stream flowing
down a deep glen choked with luxurious vegetation; great fig-trees,
canes, and maiden-hair ferns covering the rocks. High up on the hills
forming its western boundary a fountain sparkles into light, and falls
to the flat below in long slender threads. Some grey weathered stones
mark the site of a city that was old when Abraham wandered in the land.
Traces of the palm forests which, as its name indicates, were cleared
for its site (Hazezon Tamar, The palm-tree clearing) have been found,
encrusted with limestone, in the warm, damp gullies, and ruined terraces
for vineyards can be traced on the bare hill-sides. But the fertility of
David's time is gone, and the precious streams nourish only a jungle
haunted by leopard and ibex. This is the fountain and plain of Engedi
(the fount of the wild goat), a spot which wants but industry and care
to make it a little paradise. Here David fled from the neighbouring
wilderness, attracted no doubt by the safety of the deep gorges and
rugged hills, as well as by the abundance of water in the fountain and
the streams. The picturesque and touching episode of his meeting with
Saul has made the place for ever memorable. There are many excavations
in the rocks about the fountain, which may have been the cave--black as
night to one looking inward with eyes fresh from the blinding glare of
sunlight upon limestone, but holding a glimmering twilight to one
looking outwards with eyes accustomed to the gloom--in the innermost
recesses of which David lay hid while Saul tarried in its mouth. The
narrative gives a graphic picture of the hurried colloquy among the
little band, when summary revenge was thus unexpectedly put within their
grasp. The fierce retainers whispered their suggestion that it would be
"tempting providence" to let such an opportunity escape; but the nobler
nature of David knows no personal animosity, and in these earliest days
is flecked by no cruelty nor lust of blood. He cannot, however, resist
the temptation of showing his power and almost parading his forbearance
by stealing through the darkness and cutting away the end of Saul's long
robe. It was little compared with what he could as easily have
done--smite him to the heart as he crouched there defenceless. But it
was a coarse practical jest, conveying a rude insult, and the quickly
returning nobleness of his nature made him ashamed of it, as soon as he
had clambered back with his trophy. He felt that the sanctity of Saul's
office as the anointed of the Lord should have saved him from the gibe.
The king goes his way all unawares, and, as it would seem, had not
regained his men, when David, leaving his band (very much out of temper
no doubt at his foolish nicety), yields to a gush of ancient friendship
and calls loudly after him, risking discovery and capture in his
generous emotion. The pathetic conversation which ensued is eminently
characteristic of both men, so tragically connected and born to work woe
to one another. David's remonstrance (1 Sam. xxiv. 9-15) is full of
nobleness, of wounded affection surviving still, of conscious rectitude,
of solemn devout appeal to the judgment of God. He has no words of
reproach for Saul, no weak upbraidings, no sullen anger, no repaying
hate with hate. He almost pleads with the unhappy king, and yet there is
nothing undignified or feeble in his tone. The whole is full of
correspondences, often of verbal identity, with the psalms which we
assign to this period. The calumnies which he so often complains of in
these are the subject of his first words to Saul, whom he regards as
having had his heart poisoned by lies: "Wherefore hearest thou men's
words, saying, Behold! David seeketh thy hurt." He asserts absolute
innocence of anything that warranted the king's hostility, just as he
does so decisively in the psalms. "There is neither evil nor
transgression in my hand, and I have not sinned against thee." As in
them he so often compares himself to some wild creature pursued like the
goats in the cliffs of Engedi, so he tells Saul, "Thou huntest my life
to take it." And his appeal from earth's slanders, and misconceptions,
and cruelties, to the perfect tribunal of God, is couched in language,
every clause of which may be found in his psalms. "The Lord, therefore,
be judge, and judge between me and thee, and see, and plead my cause,
and deliver me out of thy hand."

The unhappy Saul again breaks into a passion of tears. With that sudden
flashing out into vehement emotion so characteristic of him, and so
significant of his enfeebled self-control, he recognises David's
generous forbearance and its contrast to his own conduct. For a moment,
at all events, he sees, as by a lightning flash, the mad hopelessness of
the black road he is treading in resisting the decree that has made his
rival king--and he binds him by an oath to spare his house when he sits
on the throne. The picture moves awful thoughts and gentle pity for the
poor scathed soul writhing in its hopelessness and dwelling in a great
solitude of fear, but out of which stray gleams of ancient nobleness
still break;--and so the doomed man goes back to his gloomy seclusion at
Gibeah, and David to the free life of the mountains and the wilderness.




VII.--THE EXILE--_CONTINUED_.


There are many echoes of this period of Engedi in the Psalms. Perhaps
the most distinctly audible of these are to be found in the seventh
psalm, which is all but universally recognised as David's, even Ewald
concurring in the general consent. It is an irregular ode--for such is
the meaning of Shiggaion in the title, and by its broken rhythms and
abrupt transitions testifies to the emotion of its author. The occasion
of it is said to be "the words of Cush the Benjamite." As this is a
peculiar name for an Israelite, it has been supposed to be an
allegorical designation for some historical person, expressive of his
character. We might render it "the negro." The Jewish commentators have
taken it to refer to Saul himself, but the bitter tone of the psalm, so
unlike David's lingering forbearance to the man whom he never ceased to
love, is against that supposition. Shimei the Benjamite, whose foul
tongue cursed him in rabid rage, as he fled before Absalom, has also
been thought of, but the points of correspondence with the earlier date
are too numerous to make that reference tenable. It seems better to
suppose that Cush "the black" was one of Saul's tribe, who had been
conspicuous among the calumniators of whom we have seen David
complaining to the king. And if so, there is no period in the Sauline
persecution into which the psalm will fit so naturally as the present.
Its main thoughts are precisely those which he poured out so
passionately in his eager appeal when he and Saul stood face to face on
the solitary hill side. They are couched in the higher strain of poetry
indeed, but that is the only difference; whilst there are several verbal
coincidences, and at least one reference to the story, which seem to fix
the date with considerable certainty.

In it we see the psalmist's soul surging with the ground swell of strong
emotion, which breaks into successive waves of varied feeling--first
(vers. 1, 2) terror blended with trust, the enemy pictured, as so
frequently in these early psalms, as a lion who tears the flesh and
breaks the bones of his prey--and the refuge in God described by a
graphic word very frequent also in the cotemporaneous psalms (xi. 1;
lvii. 1, etc.). Then with a quick turn comes the passionate protestation
of his innocence, in hurried words, broken by feeling, and indignantly
turning away from the slanders which he will not speak of more
definitely than calling them "this."

  (3) Jehovah, my God! if I have done this--
      If there be iniquity in my hands--

  (4) If I have rewarded evil to him that was at peace with me--
      Yea, I delivered him that without cause is mine enemy--

  (5) May the enemy pursue my soul and capture it,
      And trample down to the earth my life,
      And my glory in the dust may he lay!

How remarkably all this agrees with his words to Saul, "There is neither
evil nor transgression in my hand, ... yet thou huntest my soul to take
it" (1 Sam. xxiv. 11); and how forcible becomes the singular reiteration
in the narrative, of the phrase "my hand," which occurs six times in
four verses. The peculiarly abrupt introduction in ver. 4 of the clause,
"I delivered him that without cause is mine enemy," which completely
dislocates the grammatical structure, is best accounted for by
supposing that David's mind is still full of the temptation to stain
his hands with Saul's blood, and is vividly conscious of the effort
which he had had to make to overcome it. And the solemn invocation of
destruction which he dares to address to Jehovah his God includes the
familiar figure of himself as a fugitive before the hunters, which is
found in the words already quoted, and which here as there stands in
immediate connection with his assertion of clean hands.

Then follows, with another abrupt turn, a vehement cry to God to judge
his cause; his own individual case melts into the thought of a
world-wide judgment, which is painted with grand power with three or
four broad rapid strokes.

  (6) Awake for me--Thou hast commanded judgment.

  (7) Let the assembly of the nations stand round Thee,
      And above it return Thou up on high.

  (8) Jehovah will judge the nations.
      Judge me, O Jehovah, according to my righteousness and mine
       integrity in me!

Each smaller act of God's judgment is connected with the final
world-judgment, is a prophecy of it, is one in principle therewith; and
He, who at the last will be known as the universal Judge of all,
certainly cannot leave His servants' cause unredressed nor their cry
unheard till then. The psalmist is led by his own history to realize
more intensely that truth of a Divine manifestation for judicial
purposes to the whole world, and his prophetic lip paints its
solemnities as the surest pledge of his own deliverance. He sees the
gathered nations standing hushed before the Judge, and the Victor God at
the close of the solemn act ascending up on high where He was before,
above the heads of the mighty crowd (Psalm lxviii. 19). In the faith of
this vision, and because God will judge the nations, he invokes for
himself the anticipation of that final triumph of good over evil, and
asks to be dealt with according to his righteousness. Nothing but the
most hopeless determination to find difficulties could make a difficulty
of such words. David is not speaking of his whole character or life, but
of his conduct in one specific matter, namely, in his relation to Saul.
The righteous integrity which he calls God to vindicate is not general
sinlessness nor inward conformity with the law of God, but his
blamelessness in all his conduct to his gratuitous foe. His prayer that
God would judge him is distinctly equivalent to his often repeated cry
for deliverance, which should, as by a Divine arbitration, decide the
debate between Saul and him. The whole passage in the psalm, with all
its lyrical abruptness and lofty imagery, is the expression of the very
same thought which we find so prominent in his words to Saul, already
quoted, concerning God's judging between them and delivering David out
of Saul's hand. The parallel is instructive, not only as the prose
rendering of the poetry in the psalm, explaining it beyond the
possibility of misunderstanding, but also as strongly confirmatory of
the date which we have assigned to the latter. It is so improbable as to
be almost inconceivable that the abrupt disconnected themes of the psalm
should echo so precisely the _whole_ of the arguments used in the
remonstrance of the historical books, and should besides present verbal
resemblances and historical allusions to these, unless it be of the same
period, and therefore an inlet into the mind of the fugitive as he
lurked among the rugged cliffs by "the fountain of the wild goat."

In that aspect the remainder of the psalm is very striking and
significant. We have two main thoughts in it--that of God as punishing
evil in this life, and that of the self-destruction inherent in all sin;
and these are expressed with such extraordinary energy as to attest at
once the profound emotion of the psalmist, and his familiarity with such
ideas during his days of persecution. It is noticeable, too, that the
language is carefully divested of all personal reference; he has risen
to the contemplation of a great law of the Divine government, and at
that elevation the enemies whose calumnies and cruelties had driven him
to God fade into insignificance.

With what magnificent boldness he paints God the Judge arraying Himself
in His armour of destruction!

  (11) God is a righteous Judge,
       And a God (who is) angry every day.

  (12) If he (_i.e._, the evil-doer) turn not, He whets His sword,
       His bow He has bent, and made it ready.

  (13) And for him He has prepared weapons of death,
       His arrows He has made blazing darts.

Surely there is nothing grander in any poetry than this tremendous
image, smitten out with so few strokes of the chisel, and as true as it
is grand. The representation applies to the facts of life, of which as
directed by a present Providence, and not of any future retribution,
David is here thinking. Among these facts is chastisement falling upon
obstinate antagonism to God. Modern ways of thinking shrink from such
representations; but the whole history of the world teems with
confirmation of their truth--only what David calls the flaming arrows of
God, men call "the natural consequences of evil." The later revelation
of God in Christ brings into greater prominence the disciplinary
character of all punishment here, but bates no jot of the intensity with
which the earlier revelation grasped the truth of God as a righteous
Judge in eternal opposition to, and aversion from, evil.

With that solemn picture flaming before his inward eye, the
prophet-psalmist turns to gaze on the evil-doer who has to bear the
brunt of these weapons of light. Summoning us to look with him by a
"Behold!" he tells his fate in an image of frequent occurrence in the
psalms of this period, and very natural in the lips of a man wandering
in the desert among wild creatures, and stumbling sometimes into the
traps dug for them: "He has dug a hole and hollowed it out, and he falls
into the pitfall he is making." The crumbling soil in which he digs
makes his footing on the edge more precarious with every spadeful that
he throws out, and at last, while he is hard at work, in he tumbles. It
is the conviction spoken in the proverbs of all nations, expressed here
by David in a figure drawn from life--the conviction that all sin digs
its own grave and is self-destructive. The psalm does not proclaim the
yet deeper truth that this automatic action, by which sin sets in motion
its own punishment, has a disciplinary purpose, so that the arrows of
God wound for healing, and His armour is really girded on for, even
while it seems to be against, the sufferer. But it would not be
difficult to show that that truth underlies the whole Old Testament
doctrine of retribution, and is obvious in many of David's psalms. In
the present one the deliverance of the hunted prey is contemplated as
the end of the baffled trapper's fall into his own snare, and beyond
that the psalmist's thoughts do not travel. His own safety, the
certainty that his appeal to God's judgment will not be in vain, fill
his mind; and without following the fate of his enemy further, he closes
this song of tumultuous and varied emotion with calm confidence and a
vow of thanksgiving for a deliverance which is already as good as
accomplished:

  (17) I will give thanks to Jehovah according to His righteousness,
       And I will sing the name of Jehovah, Most High.

We have still another psalm (lvii.) which is perhaps best referred to
this period. According to the title, it belongs to the time when David
"fled from Saul in the cave." This may, of course, apply to either
Adullam or Engedi, and there is nothing decisive to be alleged for
either; yet one or two resemblances to psalm vii. incline the balance to
the latter period.

These resemblances are the designation of his enemies as lions (vii. 2;
lvii. 4); the image of their falling into their own trap (vii. 15; lvii.
6); the use of the phrase "my honour" or "glory" for "my soul" (vii. 5;
lvii. 8--the same word in the original); the name of God as "Most High"
(vii. 17; lvii. 2), an expression which only occurs twice besides in the
Davidic psalms (ix. 2; xxi. 7); the parallelism in sense between the
petition which forms the centre and the close of the one, "Be Thou
exalted, O God, above the heavens" (lvii. 5, 11), and that which is the
most emphatic desire of the other, "Arise, O Lord, awake, ... lift up
Thyself for me" (vii. 6). Another correspondence, not preserved in our
English version, is the employment in both of a rare poetical word,
which originally means "to complete," and so comes naturally to have the
secondary significations of "to perfect" and "to put an end to." The
word in question only occurs five times in the Old Testament, and always
in psalms. Four of these are in hymns ascribed to David, of which two
are (lvii. 2), "The God that _performeth_ all things for me," and (vii.
9), "Let the wickedness of the wicked _come to an end_." The use of the
same peculiar word in two such dissimilar connections seems to show that
it was, as we say, "running in his head" at the time, and is, perhaps, a
stronger presumption of the cotemporaneousness of both psalms than its
employment in both with the same application would have been.

Characteristic of these early psalms is the occurrence of a refrain
(compare lvi. and lix.) which in the present instance closes both of
the portions of which the hymn consists. The former of these (1-5)
breathes prayerful trust, from which it passes to describe the
encompassing dangers; the second reverses this order, and beginning with
the dangers and distress, rises to ringing gladness and triumph, as
though the victory were already won. The psalmist's confident cleaving
of soul to God is expressed (ver. 1) by an image that may be connected
with his circumstances at Engedi: "In Thee has my soul taken refuge."
The English version is correct as regards the sense, though it
obliterates the beautiful metaphor by its rendering "trusteth." The
literal meaning of the verb is "to flee to a refuge," and its employment
here may be due to the poetical play of the imagination, which likens
his secure retreat among the everlasting hills to the safe hiding-place
which his spirit found in God his habitation. A similar analogy appears
in the earliest use of the expression, which may have been floating in
the psalmist's memory, and which occurs in the ancient song of Moses
(Deut. xxxii.). The scenery of the forty years' wanderings remarkably
colours that ode, and explains the frequent recurrence in it of the name
of God as "the Rock." We have false gods, too, spoken of in it, as,
"Their rock in whom they took refuge," where the metaphor appears in its
completeness (ver. 37). Our psalm goes on with words which contain a
further allusion to another part of the same venerable hymn, "And in the
shadow of Thy wings will I take refuge," which remind us of the grand
image in it of God's care over Israel, as of the eagle bearing her
eaglets on her mighty pinions (ver. 11), and point onwards to the still
more wonderful saying in which all that was terrible and stern in the
older figure is softened into tenderness, and instead of the fierce
affection of the mother eagle, the hen gathering her chickens under her
wings becomes the type of the brooding love and more than maternal
solicitude of God in Christ. Nor can we forget that the only other
instance of the figure before David's psalms is in the exquisite idyl
which tells of the sweet heroism of David's ancestress, Ruth, on whose
gentle and homeless head was pronounced the benediction, "A full reward
be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come
to trust" (Ruth ii. 12). We may perhaps also see in this clause an
extension of the simile which unquestionably lies in the verb, and may
think of the strong "sides of the cave," arching above the fugitive like
a gigantic pair of wings beneath which he nestles warm and dry, while
the short-lived storm roars among the rocks--a type of that broad pinion
which is his true defence till threatening evils be overpast. In the
past he has sheltered his soul in God, but no past act of faith can
avail for present distresses. It must be perpetually renewed. The past
deliverances should make the present confidence more easy; and the true
use of all earlier exercises of trust is to prepare for the resolve that
we will still rely on the help we have so often proved. "I have trusted
in Thee" should ever be followed by "And in the shadow of Thy wings will
I trust."

The psalmist goes on to fulfil his resolve. He takes refuge by prayer in
God, whose absolute elevation above all creatures and circumstances is
the ground of his hope, whose faithful might will accomplish its design,
and complete His servant's lot. "I will call to God Most High; to God
who perfects (His purpose) for me." And then assured hope gleams upon
his soul, and though the storm-clouds hang low and black as ever, they
are touched with light. "He will send from heaven and save me." But even
while this happy certainty dawns upon him, the contending fears, which
ever lurk hard by faith, reassert their power, and burst in, breaking
the flow of the sentence, which by its harsh construction indicates the
sudden irruption of disturbing thoughts. "He that would swallow me up
reproaches (me)." With this two-worded cry of pain--prolonged by the
very unusual occurrence, in the middle of a verse, of the "Selah," which
is probably a musical direction for the accompaniment--a billow of
terror breaks over his soul; but its force is soon spent, and the hope,
above which for a moment it had rolled, rises from the broken spray like
some pillared light round which the surges dash in vain. "God shall send
forth His mercy and His truth"--those two white-robed messengers who
draw nigh to all who call on Him. Then follows in broken words, the true
rendering of which is matter of considerable doubt, a renewed picture of
his danger:

  (4) (With) my soul--among lions will I lie down.
      Devourers are the sons of men;
      Their teeth a spear and arrows,
      And their tongue a sharp sword

The psalmist seems to have broken off the construction, and instead of
finishing the sentence as he began it, to have substituted the first
person for the third, which ought to have followed "my soul." This
fragmentary construction expresses agitation of spirit. It may be a
question whether the "lions" in the first clause are to be regarded as a
description of his enemies, who are next spoken of without metaphor as
sons of men who devour (or who "breathe out fire"), and whose words are
cutting and wounding as spear and sword. The analogy of the other psalms
of this period favours such an understanding of the words. But, on the
other hand, the reference preferred by Delitzsch and others gives great
beauty. According to that interpretation, the fugitive among the savage
cliffs prepares himself for his nightly slumbers in calm confidence, and
lays himself down there in the cave, while the wild beasts, whose haunt
it may have been, prowl without, feeling himself safer among them than
among the more ferocious "sons of men," whose hatred has a sharper tooth
than even theirs. And then this portion of the psalm closes with the
refrain, "Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let Thy glory be
above all the earth." A prayer that God would show forth His power, and
exalt His name by delivering His servant. What lofty conviction that his
cause was God's cause, that the Divine honour was concerned in his
safety, that he was a chosen instrument to make known God's praise over
all the world!--and what self-forgetfulness in that, even whilst he
prays for his own deliverance, he thinks of it rather as the magnifying
of God, than as it affects himself personally!

The second part continues the closing strain of the former, and
describes the plots of his foes in the familiar metaphor of the pit,
into which they fall themselves. The contemplation of this divine
Nemesis on evil-doers leads up to the grand burst of thanksgiving with
which the psalm closes--

  (7) Fixed is my heart, O God! fixed my heart!
      I will sing and strike the harp.[K]

  (8) Awake, my glory! awake psaltery and harp![L]
      I will awake the dawn.

[K] Properly, "sing with a musical accompaniment."

[L] Two kinds of stringed instrument, the difference between which is
very obscure.

If the former part may be regarded as the evening song of confidence,
this is the morning hymn of thankfulness. He lay down in peace among
lions; he awakes to praise. He calls upon his soul to shake off slumber;
he invokes the chords of his harp to arouse from its chamber the
sleeping dawn. Like a mightier than himself, he will rise a great while
before day, and the clear notes of the rude lyre, his companion in all
his wanderings, will summon the morning to add its silent speech to His
praise. But a still loftier thought inspires him. This hunted solitary
not only knows that his deliverance is certain, but he has already the
consciousness of a world-wide vocation, and anticipates that the story
of his sorrow and his trust, with the music of his psalms, belong to the
world, and will flow over the barriers of his own generation and of his
own land into the whole earth--

   (9) I will praise Thee among the peoples, O Lord,
       I will strike the harp to Thee among the nations.

  (10) For great unto the heavens is Thy mercy,
       And to the clouds Thy truth.

These two mighty messengers of God, whose coming he was sure of (ver.
3), will show themselves in his deliverance, boundless and filling all
the creation. They shall be the theme of his world-wide praise. And
then with the repetition of the refrain the psalm comes round again to
supplication, and dies into silent waiting before God till He shall be
pleased to answer. Thus triumphant were the hopes of the lonely fugitive
skulking in the wilderness; such bright visions peopled the waste
places, and made the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose.

The cxlii. is also, according to the title, one of the cave-psalms. But
considerable doubt attaches to the whole group of so-called Davidic
compositions in the last book of the psalter (p. 138-144), from their
place, and from the fact that there are just seven of them, as well as
in some cases from their style and character. They are more probably
later hymns in David's manner. The one in question corresponds in tone
with the psalms which we have been considering. It breathes the same
profound consciousness of desolation and loneliness: "My spirit is
darkened within me;" "Refuge fails me, no man cares for my soul." It
glows with the same ardour of personal trust in and love to God which
spring from his very loneliness and helplessness: "I cry unto Thee, O
Jehovah! I say Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the
living." It triumphs with the same confidence, and with the same
conviction that his deliverance concerns all the righteous: "They shall
_crown themselves in me_, for Thou hast dealt bountifully with me;" for
such would appear to be the true meaning of the word rendered in our
version "compass me about;" the idea being that the mercy of God to the
psalmist would become a source of festal gladness to all His servants,
who would bind the story of God's bounty to him upon their brows like a
coronal for a banquet.




VIII.--THE EXILE--_CONTINUED_.


As our purpose in this volume is not a complete biography, it will not
be necessary to dwell on the subsequent portions of the exile, inasmuch
as there is little reference to these in the psalms. We must pass over
even that exquisite episode of Abigail, whose graceful presence and
"most subtle flow of silver-paced counsel" soothed David's ruffled
spirit, and led him captive at once as in a silken leash. The glimpse of
old-world ways in the story, the rough mirth of the shearers, the hint
of the kind of black mail by which David's little force was provided,
the snarling humour and garrulous crustiness of Nabal, David's fierce
blaze of hot wrath, the tribute of the shepherds to the kindliness and
honour of the outlaws, the rustic procession, with the gracious lady
last of all, the stately courtesy of the meeting, her calm wise
words--not flattery, yet full of predictions of prosperity most pleasant
to hear from such lips; not rebuke, yet setting in the strongest light
how unworthy of God's anointed personal vengeance was; not servile, but
yet recognising in delicate touches his absolute power over her; not
abject, and yet full of supplication,--the quick response of David's
frank nature and susceptible heart, which sweeps away all his wrath; the
budding germ of love, which makes him break into benedictions on her and
her wisdom, and thankfulness that he had been kept back from "hurting
_thee_," and the dramatic close in their happy union,--all make up one
of the most charming of the many wonderful idyls of Scripture, all
fragrant with the breath of love, and fresh with undying youth. The
story lives--alas! how much longer do words endure than the poor earthly
affections which they record!

After a second betrayal by the men of Ziph, and a second meeting with
Saul--their last--in which the doomed man parts from him with blessing
and predictions of victory on his unwilling lips, David seems to have
been driven to desperation by his endless skulking in dens and caves,
and to have seen no hope of continuing much longer to maintain himself
on the frontier and to elude Saul's vigilance. Possibly others than
Nabal grudged to pay him for the volunteer police which he kept up on
behalf of the pastoral districts exposed to the wild desert tribes. At
all events he once more made a plunge into Philistine territory, and
offers himself and his men to the service of the King of Gath. On the
offer being accepted, the little town of Ziklag was allotted to them,
and became their home for a year and four months.

To this period of comparative security one psalm has been supposed to
belong--the xxxi., which, in tone and in certain expressions,
corresponds very well with the circumstances. There are many
similarities in it with the others of the same period which we have
already considered--such, for instance, as the figure of God his rock
(ver. 3), the net which his enemies have laid for him (ver. 4), the
allusions to their calumnies and slanders (vers. 13, 18), his safe
concealment in God (ver. 20: compare xxvii. 5; lvii. 1; xvii. 8, etc.),
and the close verbal resemblance of ver. 24 with the closing words of
psalm xxvii. The reference, however, which has been taken as pointing to
David's position in Ziklag is that contained in the somewhat remarkable
words (ver. 21): "Blessed be the Lord, for He hath showed me His
marvellous loving-kindness in a strong city." Of course, the expression
may be purely a graphic figure for the walls and defences of the Divine
protection, as, indeed, it is usually understood to be. But the general
idea of the encompassing shelter of God has just been set forth in the
magnificent imagery of the previous verse as the tabernacle, the secret
of His presence in which He hides and guards His servants. And the
further language of the phrase in question, introduced as it is by a
rapturous burst of blessing and praise, seems so emphatic and peculiar
as to make not unnatural the supposition of a historical basis in some
event which had recently happened to the psalmist.

No period of the life will so well correspond to such a requirement as
the sixteen months of his stay in Ziklag, during which he was completely
free from fear of Saul, and stood high in favour with the King of Gath,
in whose territory he had found a refuge. We may well believe that to
the hunted exile, so long accustomed to a life of constant alarms and
hurried flight, the quiet of a settled home was very sweet, and that
behind the rude fortifications of the little town in the southern
wilderness there seemed security, which made a wonderful contrast to
their defenceless lairs and lurking-places among the rocks. Their eyes
would lose their watchful restlessness, and it would be possible to lay
aside their weapons, to gather their households about them, and, though
they were in a foreign land, still to feel something of the bliss of
peaceful habitudes and tranquil use and wont healing their broken lives.
No wonder, then, that such thankful praise should break from the
leader's lips! No wonder that he should regard this abode in a fortified
city as the result of a miracle of Divine mercy! He describes the
tremulous despondency which had preceded this marvel of loving-kindness
in language which at once recalls the wave of hopelessness which swept
across his soul after his final interview with Saul, and which led to
his flight into Philistine territory, "And David said in his heart, I
shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul" (1 Sam. xxvii. 1). How
completely this corresponds with the psalm, allowance being made for the
difference between poetry and prose, when he describes the thoughts
which had shaded his soul just before the happy peace of the strong
city--"I said in my haste,[M] I am cut off from before Thine eyes;
nevertheless Thou heardest the voice of my supplication" (ver. 22). And
rising, as was ever his manner, from his own individual experience to
the great truths concerning God's care of His children, the discovery of
which was to him even more precious than his personal safety, he breaks
forth in jubilant invocation, which, as always, is full of his
consciousness that his life and his story belong to the whole household
of God--

  (23) O love Jehovah, all ye beloved of Him!
       The faithful doth Jehovah preserve,
       And plentifully repayeth the proud-doer.

  (24) Courage! and let your heart be strong,
       All ye that wait for Jehovah!

[M] Confusion (Perowne), distrust (Delitzsch), anguish (Ewald),
trepidation (Calvin). The word literally means to sway backwards and
forwards, and hence to be agitated by any emotion, principally by fear;
and then, perhaps, to flee in terror.

The glow of personal attachment to Jehovah which kindles in the trustful
words is eminently characteristic. It anticipates the final teaching of
the New Testament in bringing all the relations between God and the
devout soul down to the one bond of love. "We love Him because He first
loved us," says John. And David has the same discernment that the basis
of all must be the outgoing of love from the heart of God, and that the
only response which that seeking love requires is the awaking of the
echo of its own Divine voice in our hearts. Love begets love; love seeks
love; love rests in love. Our faith _corresponds_ to His faithfulness,
our obedience to His command, our reverence to His majesty; but our love
_resembles_ His, from which it draws its life. So the one exhortation is
"love the Lord," and the ground of it lies in that name--"His
beloved"--those to whom He shows His loving-kindness (ver. 21).

The closing words remind us of the last verse of psalm xxvii. They are
distinctly quoted from it, with the variation that there the heartening
to courage was addressed to his own soul, and here to "all who wait on
the Lord." The resemblance confirms the reference of both psalms to the
same epoch, while the difference suits the change in his circumstances
from a period of comparative danger, such as his stay at Adullam, to one
of greater security, like his residence in Ziklag. The same persons who
were called to love the Lord because they were participant of His
loving-kindness, are now called to courage and manly firmness of soul
because their hope is fixed on Jehovah. The progress of thought is
significant and obvious. Love to God, resting on consciousness of His
love to us, is the true armour. "There is no fear in love." The heart
filled with it is strong to resist the pressure of outward disasters,
while the empty heart is crushed like a deserted hulk by the grinding
collision of the icebergs that drift rudderless on the wild wintry sea
of life. Love, too, is the condition of hope. The patience and
expectation of the latter must come from the present fruition of the
sweetness of the former. Of these fair sisters, Love is the elder as the
greater; it is she who bears in her hands the rich metal from which Hope
forges her anchor, and the strong cords that hold it; her experience
supplies all the colours with which her sister paints the dim distance;
and she it is who makes the other bold to be sure of the future, and
clear-sighted to see the things that are not as though they were. To
love the Lord is the path, and the only path, to hoping in the Lord. So
had the psalmist found it for himself. In his changeful, perilous years
of exile he had learned that the brightness with which hope glowed on
his lonely path depended not on the accident of greater or less external
security, but on the energy of the clear flame of love in his heart. Not
in vain had his trials been to him, which cast that rich treasure to his
feet from their stormy waves. Not in vain will ours be to us, if we
learn the lesson which he here would divide with all those "that wait on
the Lord."

Our limits prevent the further examination of the remaining psalms of
this period. It is the less necessary, inasmuch as those which have been
already considered fairly represent the whole. The xi., xiii., xvii.,
xxii., xxv., and lxiv. may, with varying probability, be considered as
belonging to the Sauline persecution. To this list some critics would
add the xl. and lxix., but on very uncertain grounds. But if we exclude
them, the others have a strong family likeness, not only with each
other, but with those which have been presented to the reader. The
imagery of the wilderness, which has become so familiar to us,
continually reappears; the prowling wild beasts, the nets and snares,
the hunted psalmist like a timid bird among the hills; the protestation
of innocence, the passionate invocation of retribution on the wicked,
the confidence that their own devices will come down on their heads, the
intense yearning of soul after God--are all repeated in these psalms.
Single metaphors and peculiar phrases which we have already met with
recur--as, for instance, "the shadow of Thy wings" (xvii. 8, lvii. 1),
and the singular phrase rendered in our version, "show Thy marvellous
loving-kindness" (xvii. 7, xxxi. 21), which is found only here. In one
of these psalms (xxxv. 13) there seems to be a reference to his earliest
days at the court, and to the depth of loving sympathy with Saul's
darkened spirit, which he learned to cherish, as he stood before him to
soothe him with the ordered harmonies of harp and voice. The words are
so definite that they appear to refer to some historic occasion:

  And as for me--in their sickness my clothing was sackcloth,
  With fasting I humbled my soul,
  And my prayer into my own bosom returned.

So truly did he feel for him who is now his foe. The outward marks of
mourning became the natural expression of his feelings. Such is plainly
the meaning of the two former clauses, as well as of the following
verse. As the whole is a description of the outward signs of grief, it
seems better to understand the last of these three clauses as a picture
of the bent head sunk on the bosom even while he prayed,[N] than to
break the connection by referring it either to the requital of hate for
his sympathy,[O] or to the purity of his prayer, which was such that he
could desire nothing more for himself.[P] He goes on with the
enumeration of the signs of sorrow: "As if (he had been) a friend, a
brother to me, I went,"--walking slowly, like a man absorbed in sorrow:
"as one who laments a mother, in mourning garments I bowed
down,"--walking with a weary, heavy stoop, like one crushed by a
mother's death, with the garb of woe. Thus faithfully had he loved, and
truly wept for the noble ruined soul which, blinded by passion and
poisoned by lies, had turned to be his enemy. And that same love clung
by him to the last, as it ever does with great and good men, who learn
of God to suffer long and be kind, to bear all things, and hope all
things.

[N] So Ewald and Delitzsch.

[O] Hupfeld.

[P] Perowne.

Of these psalms the xxii. is remarkable. In it David's personal
experience seems to afford only the starting-point for a purely
Messianic prophecy, which embraces many particulars that far transcend
anything recorded of his sorrows. The impossibility of finding
occurrences in his life corresponding to such traits as tortured limbs
and burning thirst, pierced hands and parted garments, has driven some
critics to the hypothesis that we have here a psalm of the exile
describing either actual sufferings inflicted on some unknown confessor
in Babylon, or in figurative language the calamities of Israel there.
But the Davidic origin is confirmed by many obvious points of
resemblance with the psalms which are indisputably his, and especially
with those of the Sauline period, while the difficulty of finding
historical facts answering to the emphatic language is evaded, not met,
by either assuming that such facts existed in some life which has left
no trace, or by forcing a metaphorical sense on words which sound
wonderfully like the sad language of a real sufferer. Of course, if we
believe that prediction is an absurdity, any difficulty will be lighter
than the acknowledgment that we have prediction here. But, unless we
have a foregone conclusion of that sort to blind us, we shall see in
this psalm a clear example of the prophecy of a suffering Messiah. In
most of the other psalms where David speaks of his sorrows we have only
a typical foreshadowing of Christ. But in this, and in such others as
lxix. and cix. (if these are David's), we have type changing into
prophecy, and the person of the psalmist fading away before the image
which, by occasion of his own griefs, rose vast, and solemn, and distant
before his prophet gaze,--the image of One who should be perfectly all
which he was in partial measure, the anointed of God, the utterer of His
name to His brethren, the King of Israel,--and whose path to His
dominion should be thickly strewn with solitary sorrow, and reproach,
and agony, to whose far more exceeding weight of woe all his affliction
was light as a feather, and transitory as a moment. And when the
psalmist had learned that lesson, besides all the others of trust and
patience which his wanderings taught him, his schooling was nearly over,
he was almost ready for a new discipline; and the slowly-evolving
revelation of God's purposes, which by his sorrows had unfolded more
distinctly than before "the sufferings of the Messiah," was ripening for
the unveiling, in his Kinghood, of "the glory that should follow."




IX.--THE KING.


We have now to turn and see the sudden change of fortune which lifted
the exile to a throne. The heavy cloud which had brooded so long over
the doomed king broke in lightning crash on the disastrous field of
Gilboa. Where is there a sadder and more solemn story of the fate of a
soul which makes shipwreck "of faith and of a good conscience," than
that awful page which tells how, godless, wretched, mad with despair and
measureless pride, he flung himself on his bloody sword, and died a
suicide's death, with sons and armour-bearer and all his men, a ghastly
court of corpses, laid round him? He had once been brave, modest, and
kind, full of noble purposes and generous affections--and he ended so.
Into what doleful regions of hate and darkness may self-will drag a
soul, when once the reins fall loose from a slackened hand! And what a
pathetic beam of struggling light gleams through heavy clouds, in the
grateful exploit of the men of Jabesh, who remembered how he had once
saved them, while yet he could care and dare for his kingdom, and
perilled their lives to bear the poor headless corpse to its rude
resting-place!

The news is received by the fugitive at Ziklag in striking and
characteristic fashion. He first flames out in fierce wrath upon the
lying Amalekite, who had hurried with the tidings and sought favour by
falsely representing that he had killed the king on the field. A short
shrift and a bloody end were his. And then the wrath melts into
mourning. Forgetting the mad hatred and wild struggles of that poor
soul, and his own wrongs, remembering only the friendship and nobleness
of his earlier days, he casts over the mangled corpses of Saul and
Jonathan the mantle of his sweet elegy, and bathes them with the healing
waters of his unstinted praise and undying love. Not till these two
offices of justice and affection had been performed, does he remember
himself and the change in his own position which had been effected. He
had never thought of Saul as standing between him and the kingdom; the
first feeling on his death was not, as it would have been with a less
devout and less generous heart, a flush of gladness at the thought of
the empty throne, but a sharp pang of pain from the sense of an empty
heart. And even when he begins to look forward to his own new course,
there is that same remarkable passiveness which we have observed
already. His first step is to "inquire of the Lord, saying, Shall I go
up to any of the cities of Judah?" (2 Sam. ii. 1). He will do nothing in
this crisis of his fortunes, when all which had been so long a hope
seemed to be rapidly becoming a fact, until his Shepherd shall lead him.
Rapid and impetuous as he was by nature, schooled to swift decisions,
followed by still swifter action, knowing that a blow struck at once,
while all was chaos and despair at home, might set him on the throne, he
holds nature and policy and the impatience of his people in check to
hear what God will say. So fully did he fulfil the vow of his early
psalm, "My strength! upon thee will I wait" (lix. 9).

We can fancy the glad march to the ancient Hebron, where the great
fathers of the nation lay in their rock-hewn tombs. Even before the
death of Saul, David's strength had been rapidly increasing, by a
constant stream of fugitives from the confusion and misery into which
the kingdom had fallen. Even Benjamin, Saul's own tribe, sent him some
of its famous archers--a sinister omen of the king's waning fortunes;
the hardy half-independent men of Manasseh and Gad, from the pastoral
uplands on the east of Jordan, "whose faces," according to the vivid
description of the chronicler (1 Chron. xii. 8), "were like the faces of
lions, and were as swift as roes upon the mountains," sought his
standard; and from his own kinsmen of Judah recruits "day by day came to
David to help him, until it was a great host like the host of God." With
such forces, it would have been child's play to have subdued any
scattered troops of the former dynasty which might still have been in a
condition to keep the field. But he made no attempt of the sort; and
even when he came to Hebron he took no measures to advance any claims to
the crown. The language of the history seems rather to imply a
disbanding of his army, or at least their settling down to domestic life
in the villages round Hebron, without a thought of winning the kingdom
by arms. And his elevation to the partial monarchy which he at first
possessed was the spontaneous act of "the men of Judah," who come to him
and anoint him king over Judah.

The limits of his territory are substantially those of the kingdom over
which his descendants ruled after Jeroboam's revolt, thus indicating the
existence of a natural "line of cleavage" between north and south. The
geographical position of Benjamin finally attached it to the latter
monarchy; but for the present, the wish to retain the supremacy which it
had had while the king was one of the tribe, made it the nucleus of a
feeble and lingering opposition to David, headed by Saul's cousin Abner,
and rallying round his incompetent son Ishbosheth.[Q] The chronology of
this period is obscure. David reigned in Hebron seven years and a half,
and as Ishbosheth's phantom sovereignty only occupied two of these
years, and those evidently the last, it would appear almost as if the
Philistines had held the country, with the exception of Judah, in such
force that no rival cared to claim the dangerous dignity, and that five
years passed before the invaders were so far cleared out as to leave
leisure for civil war.

[Q] The Canaanitish worship of Baal seems to have lingered in Saul's
family. One of his grand-uncles was named Baal (1 Chron. ix. 36); his
son was really called Eshbaal (Fire of Baal), which was contemptuously
converted into Ishbosheth (Man of Shame). So also Mephibosheth was
properly Meribbaal (Fighter for Baal).

The summary narrative of these seven years presents the still youthful
king in a very lovable light. The same temper which had marked his first
acts after Saul's death is strikingly brought out (2 Sam. ii.-iv.) He
seems to have left the conduct of the war altogether to Joab, as if he
shrank from striking a single blow for his own advancement. When he does
interfere, it is on the side of peace, to curb and chastise ferocious
vengeance and dastardly assassination. The incidents recorded all go to
make up a picture of rare generosity, of patient waiting for God to
fulfil His purposes, of longing that the miserable strife between the
tribes of God's inheritance should end. He sends grateful messages to
Jabesh-Gilead; he will not begin the conflict with the insurgents. The
only actual fight recorded is provoked by Abner, and managed with
unwonted mildness by Joab. The list of his children born in Hebron is
inserted in the very heart of the story of the insurrection, a token of
the quiet domestic life of peaceful joys and cares which he lived while
the storm was raging without. Eagerly, and without suspicion, he
welcomes Abner's advances towards reconciliation. He falls for a moment
to the level of his times, and yields to a strong temptation, in making
the restoration of his long-lost wife Michal the condition of further
negotiations--a demand which was strictly just, no doubt, but for which
little more can be said. The generosity of his nature and the ideal
purity of his love, which that incident shadows, shine out again in his
indignation at Joab's murder of Abner, though he was too meek to avenge
it. There is no more beautiful picture in his life than that of his
following the bier where lay the bloody corpse of the man who had been
his enemy ever since he had known him, and sealing the reconciliation
which Death ever makes in noble souls, by the pathetic dirge he chanted
over Abner's grave. We have a glimpse of his people's unbounded
confidence in him, given incidentally when we are told that his sorrow
pleased them, "as whatsoever the king did pleased all the people." We
have a glimpse of the feebleness of his new monarchy as against the
fierce soldier who had done so much to make it, in his acknowledgment
that he was yet weak, being but recently anointed king, and that these
vehement sons of Zeruiah were too strong for him; and we have a
remarkable trace of connection with the psalms, in the closing words
with which he invokes on Joab the vengeance which he as yet felt himself
unable to execute: "The Lord shall reward the doer of evil according to
his wickedness."

The only other incident recorded of his reign in Hebron is his execution
of summary justice upon the murderers of the poor puppet-king
Ishbosheth, upon whose death, following so closely that of Abner, the
whole resistance to David's power collapses. There had never been any
real popular opposition. His enemies are emphatically named as "the
house of Saul," and we find Abner himself admitting that "the elders of
Israel" wanted David as king (2 Sam. iii. 17), so that when he was gone,
it is two Benjamites who give the _coup-de-grâce_ to Ishbosheth, and end
the whole shadowy rival power. Immediately the rulers of all the tribes
come up to Hebron, with the tender of the crown. They offer it on the
triple grounds of kinship, of his military service even in Saul's reign,
and of the Divine promise of the throne. A solemn pact was made, and
David was anointed in Hebron, a king by Divine right, but also a
constitutional monarch chosen by popular election, and limited in his
powers.

The first result of his new strength is the capture of the old
hill-fortress of the Jebusites, the city of Melchizedek, which had
frowned down upon Israel unsubdued till now, and whose inhabitants
trusted so absolutely in its natural strength that their answer to the
demand for surrender was the jeer, "Thou wilt not come hither, but the
blind and lame will drive thee away." This time David does not leave the
war to others. For the first time for seven years we read, "_The king_
and his men went to Jerusalem." Established there as his capital, he
reigns for some ten years with unbroken prosperity over a loyal and
loving people, with this for the summary of the whole period, "David
went on and grew great, and the Lord God of Hosts was with him" (2 Sam.
v. 10). These years are marked by three principal events--the bringing
up of the ark to the city of David, the promise by Nathan of the
perpetual dominion of his house, and the unbroken flow of victories over
the surrounding nations. These are the salient points of the narrative
in the Book of Samuel (2 Sam. v.-viii.), and are all abundantly
illustrated by the psalms. We shall have next then to consider "The
Songs of the King."

How did the fugitive bear his sudden change of fortune? What were his
thoughts when at last the dignity which he had ever expected and never
sought was his? The answer is ready to our hand in that grand psalm (Ps.
xviii.) which he "spake in the day that the Lord delivered him from all
his enemies, and from the hand of Saul." The language of this
superscription seems to connect the psalm with the period of internal
and external repose which preceded and prompted David's "purpose to
build an house for the Lord" (2 Sam. vii.) The same thankfulness which
glows so brightly in the psalm stimulated that desire, and the emphatic
reference to the mercy promised by God to "his seed for evermore," which
closes the hymn, points perhaps to the definite promise of the
perpetuity of the kingdom to his descendants, which was God's answer to
the same desire. But whether the psalm belongs to the years of the
partial sovereignty at Hebron, or to those of the complete dominion at
Jerusalem, it cannot be later than the second of these two dates; and
whatever may have been the time of its composition, the feelings which
it expresses are those of the first freshness of thankful praise when he
was firmly settled in the kingdom. Some critics would throw it onwards
to the very close of his life. But this has little in its favour beyond
the fact that the author of the Book of Samuel has placed his version of
the psalm among the records of David's last days. There is, however,
nothing to show that that position is due to chronological
considerations. The victories over heathen nations which are supposed to
be referred to in the psalm, and are relied on by the advocates of later
date, really point to the earlier, which was the time of his most
brilliant conquests. And the marked assertions of his own purity, as
well as the triumphant tone of the whole, neither of which
characteristics corresponds to the sad and shaded years after his great
fall, point in the same direction. On the whole, then, we may fairly
take this psalm as belonging to the bright beginning of the monarchy,
and as showing us how well the king remembered the vows which the exile
had mingled with his tears.

It is one long outpouring of rapturous thankfulness and triumphant
adoration, which streams from a full heart in buoyant waves of song.
Nowhere else, even in the psalms--and if not there, certainly nowhere
else--is there such a continuous tide of unmingled praise, such
magnificence of imagery, such passion of love to the delivering God,
such joyous energy of conquering trust. It throbs throughout with the
life blood of devotion. The strong flame, white with its very ardour,
quivers with its own intensity as it steadily rises heavenward. All the
terrors, and pains, and dangers of the weary years--the black fuel for
the ruddy glow--melt into warmth too great for smoke, too equable to
blaze. The plaintive notes that had so often wailed from his harp, sad
as if the night wind had been wandering among its chords, have all led
up to this rushing burst of full-toned gladness. The very blessedness of
heaven is anticipated, when sorrows gone by are understood and seen in
their connection with the joy to which they have led, and are felt to
be the theme for deepest thankfulness. Thank God that, for the
consolation of the whole world, we have this hymn of praise from the
same lips which said, "My life is spent with grief, and my years with
sighing." "We have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very
pitiful and of tender mercy." The tremulous minors of trustful sorrow
shall swell into rapturous praise; and he who, compassed with foes,
cries upon God, will, here or yonder, sing this song "unto the Lord, in
the day that the Lord delivers him from the hand of all his enemies."




X.--THE KING--_CONTINUED_.


In our last chapter we have seen that the key-note of "The Songs of the
King" may be said to be struck in Psalm xviii. Its complete analysis
would carry us far beyond our limits. We can but glance at some of the
more prominent points of the psalm.

The first clause strikes the key-note. "I love Thee, O Jehovah, my
strength." That personal attachment to God, which is so characteristic
of David's religion, can no longer be pent up in silence, but gushes
forth like some imprisoned stream, broad and full even from its
well-head. The common word for "love" is too weak for him, and he bends
to his use another, never elsewhere employed to express man's emotions
towards God, the intensity of which is but feebly expressed by some such
periphrasis as, "From my heart do I love Thee." The same exalted feeling
is wonderfully set forth by the loving accumulation of Divine names
which follow, as if he would heap together in one great pile all the
rich experiences of that God, unnamed after all names, which he had
garnered up in his distresses and deliverances. They tell so much as the
poor vehicle of words can tell, what his Shepherd in the heavens had
been to him. They are the treasures which he has brought back from his
exile; and they most pathetically point to the songs of that time. He
had called on God by these names when it was hard to believe in their
reality, and now he repeats them all in his glad hour of fruition, for
token that they who in their extremity trust in the name of the Lord
will one day have the truth of faith transformed into truth of
experience. "Jehovah, my rock and my fortress," reminds us of his cry in
Ziklag, "Thou art my rock and my fortress" (xxxi. 3), and of the "hold"
(the same word) of Adullam in which he had lain secure. "My deliverer"
echoes many a sigh in the past, now changed into music of praise. "My
rock" (a different word from that in a preceding clause), "in whom I
take refuge," recalls the prayer, "Be Thou my rock of strength" (xxxi.
2), and his former effort of confidence, when, in the midst of
calamities, he said, "My soul takes refuge in Thee" (lvii. 1.) "My
shield" carries us back to the ancient promise, fresh after so many
centuries, and fulfilled anew in every age, "Fear not, Abram, I am thy
shield," and to his own trustful words at a time when trust was
difficult, "My shield is upon God" (vii. 10). "My high tower," the last
of this glowing series, links on to the hope breathed in the first song
of his exile, "God is my defence" (the same expression); "Thou hast been
my defence in the day of trouble" (lix. 9, 16). And then he sums up his
whole past in one general sentence, which tells his habitual resource in
his troubles, and the blessed help which he has ever found, "I call on
Jehovah, who is worthy to be praised;[R] and from my enemies am I saved"
(verse 3).

[R] The old English word "the worshipful" comes near the form and
meaning of the phrase.

No comment can heighten, and no translation can adequately represent,
while none can altogether destroy the unapproachable magnificence of the
description which follows, of the majestic coming forth of God in answer
to his cry. It stands at the very highest point, even when compared with
the other sublime passages of a like kind in Scripture. How
pathetically he paints his sore need in metaphors which again bring to
mind the songs of the outlaw:--

  The snares of death compassed me,
  And floods of destruction made me afraid;
  The snares of Sheol surrounded me,
  The toils of death surprised me.

As he so often likened himself to some wild creature in the nets, so
here Death, the hunter, has cast his fatal cords about him, and they are
ready suddenly to close on the unsuspecting prey. Or, varying the image,
he is sinking in black waters, which are designated by a difficult
phrase (literally, "streams of Belial," or worthlessness), which is most
probably rendered as above (so Ewald, Hupfeld). In this dire extremity
one thing alone is left him. He is snared, but he has his voice free to
cry with, and a God to cry to. He is all but sinking, but he can still
shriek (so one of the words might be rendered) "like some strong swimmer
in his agony." And it is enough. That one loud call for help rises, like
some slender pillar of incense-smoke, straight into the palace temple of
God--and, as he says, with a meaning which our version obscures, "My cry
before Him came into His ears." The prayer that springs from a living
consciousness of being in God's presence, even when nearest to
perishing, is the prayer that He hears. The cry is a poor, thin,
solitary voice, unheard on earth, though shrill enough to rise to
heaven; the answer shakes creation. One man in his extremity can put in
motion all the magnificence of God. Overwhelming is the contrast between
the cause and the effect. And marvellous as the greatness, so also is
the swiftness of the answer. A moment suffices--and then! Even whilst he
cries, the rocking earth and the quivering foundations of the hills are
conscious that the Lord comes from afar for his help. The majestic
self-revelation of God as the deliverer has for its occasion the
psalmist's cry of distress, and for its issue, "He drew me out of many
waters." All the splendour flames out because a poor man prays, and all
the upheaval of earth and the artillery of heaven has simply this for
its end, that a poor man may be delivered. The paradox of prayer never
found a more bold expression than in this triumphant utterance, of the
insignificant occasion for, and the equally insignificant result sought
by, the exercise of the energy of Omnipotence.

The Divine deliverance is set forth under the familiar image of the
coming of God in a tempest. Before it bursts, and simultaneous with the
prayer, the "earth rocks and quivers," the sunless "pillars of the hills
reel and rock to and fro," as if conscious of the gathering wrath which
begins to flame far off in the highest heavens. There has been no
forth-putting yet of the Divine power. It is but accumulating its fiery
energy, and already the solid framework of the world trembles,
anticipating the coming crash. The firmest things shake, the loftiest
bow before His wrath. "There went up smoke out of his nostrils, and fire
out of his mouth devoured; coals were kindled by it." This kindling
anger, expressed by these tremendous metaphors, is conceived of as the
preparation in "His temple" for the earthly manifestation of delivering
vengeance. It is like some distant thunder-cloud which grows on the
horizon into ominous blackness, and seems to be filling its
ashen-coloured depths with store of lightnings. Then the piled-up terror
begins to move, and, drawing nearer, pours out an avalanche of gloom
seamed with fire. First the storm-cloud descends, hanging lower and
lower in the sky. And whose foot is that which is planted upon its heavy
mass, thick and frowning enough to be the veil of God?

  "He bowed the heavens, and came down,
   And blackness of cloud was under His feet."

Then the sudden rush of wind which heralds the lightning breaks the
awful silence:--

  And He rode upon a cherub, and did fly,
  Yea, He swept along upon the wings of the wind.

The cherubs bear, as in a chariot, the throned God, and the swift
pinions of the storm bear the cherubs. But He that sits upon the throne,
above material forces and the highest creatures, is unseen. The
psalmist's imagination stops at its base, nor dares to gaze into that
light above; and the silence is more impressive than all words. Instead
of pagan attempts at a likeness of God, we have next painted, with equal
descriptive accuracy, poetic force, and theological truth, the pitchy
blackness which hides Him. In the gloom of its depths He makes His
"secret place" His "tent." It is "darkness of waters," that is, darkness
from which streams out the thunder-rain; it is "thick clouds of the
skies;" or perhaps the expression should be rendered, "heavy masses of
clouds." Then comes the crash of the tempest. The brightness that lies
closer around Him, and lives in the heart of the blackness, flames
forth, parting the thick clouds--and through the awful rent hail and
coals of fire are flung down on the trembling earth. The grand
description may be rendered in two ways: either that adopted in our
version, "At the brightness that was before Him His thick clouds
passed--hailstones and coals of fire;" or, "Through His thick clouds
there passed hailstones and coals of fire." The former of these is the
more dramatic; the broken construction expresses more vividly the fierce
suddenness of the lightning blaze and of the down-rush of the hail, and
is confirmed by the repetition of the same words in the same
construction in the next verse. That verse describes another burst of
the tempest--the deep roll of the thunder along the skies is the voice
of Jehovah, and again the lightning tears through the clouds, and the
hail streams down. With what profound truth all this destructive power
is represented as coming from the brightness of God--that "glory" which
in its own nature is light, but in its contact with finite and sinful
creatures must needs become darkness, rent asunder by lightning! What
lessons as to the root and the essential nature of all punitive acts of
God cluster round such words! and how calm and blessed the faith which
can pierce even the thickest mass "that veileth Love!"--to see the light
at the centre, even though the circumference be brooding thunder-clouds
torn by sudden fires. Then comes the purpose of all this apocalypse of
Divine magnificence. The fiery arrows scatter the psalmist's enemies.
The waters in which he had well nigh drowned are dried up before the hot
breath of His anger. "That dread voice" speaks "which shrinks their
streams." And amid the blaze of tempest, the rocking earth, and the
failing floods, His arm is thrust forth from above, and draws His
servant from many waters. As one in later times, "he was afraid, and
beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me; and immediately He
stretched forth His hand and caught him."

A calmer tone follows, as the psalmist recounts without metaphor his
deliverance, and reiterates the same assertion of his innocence which
we have already found so frequently in the previous psalms (vers.
17-24). Rising from his personal experience to the broad and lofty
thoughts of God which that experience had taught him, as it does all who
prize life chiefly as a means of knowing Him, he proclaims the solemn
truth, that in the exercise of a righteous retribution, and by the very
necessity of our moral nature, God appears to man what man is to God:
loving to the loving, upright to the upright, pure to the pure, and
froward to the froward. Our thoughts of God are shaped by our moral
character; the capacity of perceiving depends on sympathy. "Unless the
eye were light, how could it see the sun?" The self-revelation of God in
His providence, of which only the psalm speaks, is modified according to
our moral character, being full of love to those who love, being harsh
and antagonistic to those who set themselves in opposition to it. There
is a higher law of grace, whereby the sinfulness of man but draws forth
the tenderness of a father's pardoning pity; and the brightest
revelation of His love is made to froward prodigals. But that is not in
the psalmist's view here, nor does it interfere with the law of
retribution in its own sphere.

The purely personal tone is again resumed, and continued unbroken to the
close. In the former portion David was passive, except for the voice of
prayer, and God's arm alone was his deliverance. In the latter half he
is active, the conquering king, whose arm is strengthened for victory by
God. This difference may possibly suggest the reference of the former
half to the Sauline persecution, when, as we have seen, the exile ever
shrunk from avenging himself; and of the latter to the early years of
his monarchy, which, as we shall see, were characterized by much
successful military activity; and if so, the date of the psalm would
most naturally be taken to be the close of his victorious campaigns,
when "the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies round about" (2
Sam. vii. 1). Be that as it may, the latter portion of the psalm shows
us the soldier king tracing all his past victories to God alone, and
building upon them the confidence of a world-wide dominion. The point at
which memory passes into hope is difficult to determine, and great
variety of opinion prevails on the matter among commentators. It is
perhaps best to follow many of the older versions, and the valuable
exposition of Hupfeld, in regarding the whole section from ver. 37 of
our translation as the expression of the trust which past experience had
wrought. We shall then have two periods in the second half of the
psalm--the past victories won by God's help (vers. 31-36), the coming
triumphs of which these are the pledge (vers. 37-end).

In the former there shine out not only David's habitual consciousness of
dependence on and aid from God, but also a very striking picture of his
physical qualifications for a military leader. He is girded with bodily
strength, swift and sure of foot like a deer, able to scale the crags
where his foes fortified themselves like the wild antelopes he had so
often seen bounding among the dizzy ledges of the cliffs in the
wilderness; his hands are trained for war, and his sinewy arms can bend
the great bow of brass. But these capacities are gifts, and not they,
but their Giver, have made him victorious. Looking back upon all his
past, this is its summing up:--

  "Thou hast also given me the shield of Thy salvation,
   And Thy right hand hath holden me up,
   And Thy lowliness hath made me great."

God's strength, God's buckler, God's supporting hand, God's
condescension, by which He bows down to look upon and help the feeble,
with the humble showing Himself humble--these have been his weapons, and
from these has come his victory.

And because of these, he looks forward to a future like the past, but
more glorious still, thereby teaching us how the unchanging faithfulness
of our God should encourage us to take all the blessings which we have
received as but the earnest of what is yet to come. He sees himself
pursuing his enemies, and smiting them to the ground. The fierce light
of battle blazes through the rapid sentences which paint the panic
flight, and the swift pursuit, the vain shrieks to man and God for
succour, and the utter annihilation of the foe:--

  (42) "And I will pound them like dust before the wind,
        Like street-filth will I empty them out."

Then he gives utterance to the consciousness that his kingdom is
destined to extend far beyond the limits of Israel, in words which, like
so many of the prophecies, may be translated in the present tense, but
are obviously future in signification--the prophet placing himself in
imagination in the midst of the time of which he speaks:--

  (43) "Thou deliverest me from the strivings of the people (_i.e._,
          Israel),
        Thou makest me head of the heathen;
        People whom I knew not serve me.

  (44)  At the hearing of the ear they obey me.
        The sons of the stranger feign obedience to me.

  (45)  The sons of the stranger fade away,
        They come trembling from their hiding-places."

The rebellion which weakened his early reign is subdued, and beyond the
bounds of his own people his dominion spreads. Strange tribes submit to
the very sound of his name, and crouch before him in extorted and
pretended submission. The words are literally "lie unto me," descriptive
of the profuse professions of loyalty characteristic of conquered
orientals. Their power withers before him like a gathered flower before
a hot wind, and the fugitives creep trembling out of their holes where
they have hid themselves.

Again he recurs to the one thought which flows like a river of light
through all the psalm--that all his help is in God. The names which he
lovingly heaped together at the beginning are in part echoed in the
close. "The Lord liveth, and blessed is my rock, and the God of my
salvation is exalted." His deliverances have taught him to know a living
God, swift to hear, active to help, in whom he lives, who has magnified
His own name in that He has saved His servant. And as that blessed
conviction is the sum of all his experience, so one glad vow expresses
all his resolves, and thrills with the expectation which he had
cherished even in his lonely exile, that the music of his psalm would
one day echo through all the world. With lofty consciousness of his new
dignity, and with lowly sense that it is God's gift, he emphatically
names himself _His_ king, _His_ anointed, taking, as it were, his crown
from his brows and laying it on the altar. With prophetic eye he looks
onward, and sees the throne to which he had been led by a series of
miracles enduring for ever, and the mercy of God sustaining the dominion
of his house through all generations:--

  (49) "Therefore will I give thanks to Thee among the nations, O
         Jehovah,
        And to Thy name will I strike the harp:

  (50)  Who maketh great the deliverances of His king
        And executeth mercy for His anointed,
        For David and his seed for evermore."

And what were his purposes for the future? Here is his answer, in a
psalm which has been with considerable appropriateness regarded as a
kind of manifesto of the principles which he intended should
characterize his reign (Psa. ci.): "I will walk within my house with a
perfect heart. I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes." For
himself, he begins his reign with noble self-restraint, not meaning to
make it a region of indulgence, but feeling that there is a law above
his will, of which he is only the servant, and knowing that if his
people and his public life are to be what they should be, his own
personal and domestic life must be pure. As for his court and his
ministers, he will make a clean sweep of the vermin who swarm and sting
and buzz about a throne. The froward, the wicked, privy slanderers,
proud hearts, crafty plotters, liars, and evil-doers he will not
suffer--but "mine eyes shall be upon the faithful in the land; he that
walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me." He is fired with ambition,
such as has brightened the beginning of many a reign which has darkened
to cruelty and crime, to make his kingdom some faint image of God's, and
to bring the actual Israel into conformity with its ancient Magna
Charta, "Ye shall be to me a holy nation." And so, not knowing perhaps
how hard a task he planned, and little dreaming of his own sore fall, he
grasps the sword, resolved to use it for the terror of evil-doers, and
vows, "I will early destroy all the wicked in the land, that I may cut
off all wicked doers from the city of the Lord." Such was his
"proclamation against vice and immorality" on his accession to his
throne.




XI.--THE KING--_CONTINUED_.


The years thus well begun are, in the historical books, characterized
mainly by three events, namely, the bringing up of the ark to the newly
won city of David, Nathan's prophecy of the perpetual dominion of his
house, and his victories over the surrounding nations. These three
hinges of the narrative are all abundantly illustrated in the psalms.

As to the first, we have relics of the joyful ceremonial connected with
it in two psalms, the fifteenth and twenty-fourth, which are singularly
alike not only in substance but in manner, both being thrown into a
highly dramatic form by question and answer. This peculiarity, as we
shall see, is one of the links of connection which unite them with the
history as given in the Book of Samuel (2 Sam. vi.). From that record we
learn that David's first thought after he was firmly seated as king over
all Israel, was the enthronement in his recently-captured city of the
long-forgotten ark. That venerable symbol of the presence of the true
King had passed through many vicissitudes since the days when it had
been carried round the walls of Jericho. Superstitiously borne into
battle, as if it were a mere magic palladium, by men whose hearts were
not right with God, the presence which they had invoked became their
ruin, and Israel was shattered, and "the ark of God taken," on the fatal
field of Aphek. It had been carried in triumph through Philistine
cities, and sent back in dismay. It had been welcomed with gladness by
the villagers of Bethshemesh, who lifted their eyes from their harvest
work, and saw it borne up the glen from the Philistine plain. Their rude
curiosity was signally punished, "and the men of Bethshemesh said, Who
is able to stand before this holy Lord God, and to whom shall He go up
from us?" It had been removed to the forest seclusion of Kirjath-jearim
(the city of the woods), and there bestowed in the house of Abinadab
"upon the hill," where it lay neglected and forgotten for about seventy
years. During Saul's reign they "inquired not at it," and, indeed, the
whole worship of Jehovah seems to have been decaying. David set himself
to reorganize the public service of God, arranged a staff of priests and
Levites, with disciplined choir and orchestra (1 Chron. xv.), and then
proceeded with representatives of the whole nation to bring up the ark
from its woodland hiding-place. But again death turned gladness into
dread, and Uzzah's fate silenced the joyous songs, "and David was afraid
of the Lord that day, and said, How shall the ark of God come unto me?"
The dangerous honour fell on the house of Obed-edom; and only after the
blessing which followed its three months' stay there, did he venture to
carry out his purpose. The story of the actual removal of the ark to the
city of David with glad ceremonial need not be repeated here; nor the
mocking gibes of Michal who had once loved him so fondly. Probably she
bitterly resented her violent separation from the household joys that
had grown up about her in her second home; probably the woman who had
had teraphim among her furniture cared nothing for the ark of God;
probably, as she grew older, her character had hardened in its lines,
and become like her father's in its measureless pride, and in its
half-dread, half-hatred of David--and all these motives together pour
their venom into her sarcasm. Taunts provoke taunts; the husband feels
that the wife is in heart a partisan of the fallen house of her father,
and a despiser of the Lord and of His worship; her words hiss with
scorn, his flame with anger and rebuke--and so these two that had been
so tender in the old days part for ever. The one doubtful act that
stained his accession was quickly avenged. Better for both that she had
never been rent from that feeble, loving husband that followed her
weeping, and was driven back by a single word, flung at him by Abner as
if he had been a dog at their heels! (2 Sam. iii. 16).

The gladness and triumph, the awe, and the memories of victory which
clustered round the dread symbol of the presence of the Lord of Hosts,
are wonderfully expressed in the choral twenty-fourth psalm. It is
divided into two portions, which Ewald regards as being originally two
independent compositions. They are, however, obviously connected both in
form and substance. In each we have question and answer, as in psalm
xv., which belongs to the same period. The first half replies to the
question, "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand
in His holy place?"--an echo of the terror-struck exclamation of the
people of Bethshemesh, already quoted. The answer is a description of
the _men who dwell with God_. The second half deals with the correlative
inquiry, "Who is the King of Glory?" and describes the _God who comes to
dwell with men_. It corresponds in substance, though not in form, with
David's thought when Uzzah died, in so far as it regards God as drawing
near to the worshippers, rather than the worshippers drawing near to
Him. Both portions are united by a real internal connection, in that
they set forth the mutual approach of God and man which leads to
communion, and thus constitute the two halves of an inseparable whole.

Most expositors recognise a choral structure in the psalm, as in several
others of this date, as would be natural at the time of the
reorganization of the public musical service. Probably we may gain the
key to its form by supposing it to be a processional hymn, of which the
first half was to be sung during the ascent to the city of David, and
the second while standing before the gates. We have then to fancy the
long line of worshippers climbing the rocky steep hill-side to the
ancient fortress so recently won, the Levites bearing the ark, and the
glad multitude streaming along behind them.

First there swells forth from all the singers the triumphant
proclamation of God's universal sovereignty, "The earth is the Lord's
and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein. For He
hath founded it upon the seas and established it upon the floods." It is
very noteworthy that such a thought should precede the declaration of
His special dwelling in Zion. It guards that belief from the abuses to
which it was of course liable--the superstitions, the narrowness, the
contempt of all the rest of the world as God-deserted, which are its
perversion in sensuous natures. If Israel came to fancy that God
belonged to them, and that there was only one sacred place in all the
world, it was not for want of clear utterances to the contrary, which
became more emphatic with each fresh step in the development of the
specializing system under which they lived. The very ground of their
peculiar relation to God had been declared, in the hour of constituting
it to be--"all the earth is Mine" (Exod. xix. 5). So now, when the
symbol of His presence is to have a local habitation in the centre of
the national life, the psalmist lays for the foundation of his song the
great truth, that the Divine presence is concentrated in Israel, but not
confined there, and concentrated in order that it may be diffused. The
glory that lights the bare top of Zion lies on all the hills; and He who
dwells between the cherubim dwells in all the world, which His continual
presence fills with its fulness, and upholds above the floods.

Then, as they climb, a single voice perhaps chants the solemn question,
"Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in the place
of His holiness?"

And the full-toned answer portrays the men who shall dwell with God, in
words which begin indeed with stringent demands for absolute purity, but
wonderfully change in tone as they advance, into gracious assurances,
and the clearest vision that the moral nature which fits for God's
presence is God's gift. "The clean-handed, and pure-hearted, who has not
lifted up his soul to vanity, nor sworn deceitfully;" there is the
eternal law which nothing can ever alter, that to abide with God a man
must be like God--the law of the new covenant as of the old, "Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." But this requirement,
impossible of fulfilment, is not all. If it were, the climbing
procession might stop. But up and up they rise, and once again the song
bursts forth in deeper and more hopeful words, "He shall _receive_ the
blessing from Jehovah, and righteousness from the God of his salvation."
Then that righteousness, which he who honestly attempts to comply with
such requirements will soon find that he does not possess, is to be
received from above, not elaborated from within; is a gift from God, not
a product of man's toils. God will make us pure, that we may dwell with
Him. Nor is this all. The condition of receiving such a gift has been
already partially set forth in the preceding clause, which seems to
require righteousness to be possessed as the preliminary to receiving
it. The paradox which thus results is inseparable from the stage of
religious knowledge attained under the Mosaic Law. But the last words of
the answer go far beyond it, and proclaim the special truth of the
gospel, that the righteousness which fits for dwelling with God is given
on the simple condition of _seeking_ Him. To this designation of the
true worshippers is appended somewhat abruptly the one word "Jacob,"
which need neither be rendered as in the English version as an
invocation, nor as in the margin, with an unnecessary and improbable
supplement, "O God of Jacob;" but is best regarded as in apposition with
the other descriptive clauses, and declaring, as we have found David
doing already in previous psalms, that the characters portrayed in them,
and these only, constituted the true Israel.

  This is the generation of them that seek Him,
  That seek Thy face--(this is) Jacob.

And so the first question is answered, "Who are the men who dwell with
God?"--The pure, who receive righteousness, who seek Him, the true
Israel.

And now the procession has reached the front of the ancient city on the
hill, and stands before the very walls and weather-beaten gates which
Melchizedek may have passed through, and which had been barred against
Israel till David's might had burst them. National triumph and glad
worship are wonderfully blended in the summons which rings from the lips
of the Levites without: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates! and be ye lift
up, ye doors (that have been from) of old!" as if even their towering
portals were too low, "and the King of glory shall come in." What force
in that name here, in this early song of the King! How clearly he
recognises his own derived power, and the real Monarch of whom he is but
the shadowy representative! The newly-conquered city is summoned to
admit its true conqueror and sovereign, whose throne is the ark, which
was emphatically named "the glory,"[S] and in whose train the earthly
king follows as a subject and a worshipper. Then, with wonderful
dramatic force, a single voice from within the barred gates asks, like
some suspicious warder, "Who then is the King of glory?" With what a
shout of proud confidence and triumphant memories of a hundred fields
comes, ready and full, the crash of many voices in the answer, "Jehovah
strong and mighty, Jehovah mighty in battle!" How vividly the reluctance
of an antagonistic world to yield to Israel and Israel's King, is
represented in the repetition of the question in a form slightly more
expressive of ignorance and doubt, in answer to the reiterated summons,
"Who is He, then, the King of glory?" With what deepened intensity of
triumph there peals, hoarse and deep, the choral shout, "The Lord of
Hosts, He is the King of glory." That name which sets Him forth as
Sovereign of the personal and impersonal forces of the universe--angels,
and stars, and terrene creatures, all gathered in ordered ranks,
embattled for His service--was a comparatively new name in Israel,[T]
and brought with it thoughts of irresistible might in earth and heaven.
It crashes like a catapult against the ancient gates; and at that
proclamation of the omnipotent name of the God who dwells with men, they
grate back on their brazen hinges, and the ark of the Lord enters into
its rest.

[S] "And she named the child I-chabod (Where is the glory?) saying, The
glory is departed from Israel: because the ark of God was taken."--1
_Sam._ iv. 21.

[T] It has been asserted that this is the first introduction of the
name. ("Psalms Chronologically Arranged by Four Friends," p. 14). But it
occurs in Hannah's vow (1 Sam. i. 11); in Samuel's words to Saul (xv.
2); in David's reply to Goliath (xvii. 45). We have it also in Psalm
lix. 5, which we regard as his earliest during his exile. Do the authors
referred to consider these speeches in 1 Sam. as not authentic?




XII.--THE KING--_CONTINUED_.


The second event recorded as important in the bright early years is the
great promise of the perpetuity of the kingdom in David's house. As soon
as the king was firmly established and free from war, he remembered the
ancient word which said, "When He giveth you rest from all your enemies
round about, so that ye dwell in safety, then there shall be a place
which the Lord your God shall choose to cause His name to dwell there"
(Deut. xii. 10, 11). His own ease rebukes him; he regards his
tranquillity not as a season for selfish indolence, but as a call to new
forms of service. He might well have found in the many troubles and
vicissitudes of his past life an excuse for luxurious repose now. But
devout souls will consecrate their leisure as their toil to God, and
will serve Him with thankful offerings in peace whom they invoked with
earnest cries in battle. Prosperity is harmless only when it is
accepted as an opportunity for fresh forms of devotion, not as an
occasion for idle self-indulgence. So we read, with distinct verbal
reference to the words already quoted, that "when the Lord had given him
rest round about from all his enemies, the king said unto Nathan the
prophet, See now, I dwell in an house of cedar, but the ark of God
dwelleth in curtains." The impulse of generous devotion, which cannot
bear to lavish more upon self than it gives to God, at first commended
itself to the prophet; but in the solitude of his nightly thoughts the
higher wisdom speaks in his spirit, and the word of God gives him a
message for the king. The narrative in 2 Sam. makes no mention of
David's warlike life as unfitting him for the task, which we find from 2
Chron. was one reason why his purpose was set aside, but brings into
prominence the thought that David's generous impulse was outrunning
God's commandment, and that his ardour to serve was in some danger of
forgetting his entire dependence on God, and of fancying that God would
be the better for him. So the prophetic message reminds him that the
Lord had never, through all the centuries, asked for a house of cedar,
and recalls the past life of David as having been wholly shaped and
blessed by Him, while it pointedly inverts the king's proposal in its
own grand promise, "The Lord telleth thee that He will make thee an
house." Then follows the prediction of a son of David who should build
the house, whose kingdom should be perpetual, whose transgressions
should be corrected indeed, but never punished as those of the unhappy
Saul; and then, in emphatic and unmistakable words, the perpetuity of
David's house, his kingdom, and his throne, is reiterated as the close
of the whole.

The wonderful burst of praise which sprang from David's heart in answer
cannot be dealt with here; but clearly from that time onwards a new
element had been added to his hopes, and a new object presented to his
faith. The prophecy of the Messiah enters upon a new stage, bearing a
relation, as its successive stages, always unmistakably did, to the
history which supplies a framework for it. Now for the first time can he
be set forth as the king of Israel; now the width of the promise which
at first had embraced the seed of the woman, and then had been narrowed
to the seed of Abraham, and thereafter probably to the tribe of Judah,
is still further defined as to be fulfilled in the line of the house of
David; now the personal Messiah Himself begins to be discerned through
the words which are to have a preparatory fulfilment, in itself
prophetic, in the collective Davidic monarchs whose very office is
itself also a prophecy.

Many echoes of this new message ring through the later psalms of the
king. His own dominion, his conquests, and his office, gradually became
to himself a solemn prophecy of a mysterious descendant who should be
really and fully all that he was in shadow and in part. As the
experience of the exile, so that of the victorious monarch supplied the
colours with which the spirit of prophecy in him painted "beforehand the
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow." In both classes
of psalms we have two forms of the Messianic reference, the typical and
the purely prophetic. In the former the events of David's own biography
and the feelings of his own soul are so portrayed and expressed as to
suggest his greater Son. In the latter, the personality of the psalmist
retreats into the background, and is at most only the starting-point for
wails of sorrow or gleams of glory which far transcend anything in the
life of the singer. There are portions, for instance, of the xxii. and
lxix. psalms which no torturing can force into correspondence with any
of David's trials; and in like manner there are pćans of victory and
predictions of dominion which demand a grander interpretation than his
own royalty or his hopes for his house can yield. Of course, if prophecy
is impossible, there is no more to be said, but that in that case a
considerable part of the Old Testament, including many of David's
psalms, is unintelligible.

Perhaps the clearest instance of distinct prophecy of the victorious
dominion of the personal Messiah is the 110th psalm. In it we do see, no
doubt, the influence of the psalmist's own history, shaping the image
which rises before his soul. But the attributes of that king whom he
beholds are not his attributes, nor those of any son of his who wore the
crown in Israel. And whilst his own history gives the form, it is "the
Spirit of Christ that was in" him which gives the substance, and
transfigures the earthly monarchy into a heavenly dominion. We do not
enter upon the question of the Davidic authorship of this psalm. Here we
have not to depend upon Jewish superscriptions, but on the words of Him
whose bare assertion should be "an end of all strife." Christ says that
David wrote it. Some of us are far enough behind the age to believe that
what He said He meant, and that what He meant is truth.

This psalm, then, being David's, can hardly be earlier than the time of
Nathan's prophecy. There are traces in it of the influence of the
history of the psalmist, giving, as we have said, form to the
predictions. Perhaps we may see these in Zion being named as the seat of
Messiah's sovereignty and in the reference to Melchizedek, both of which
points assume new force if we suppose that the ancient city over which
that half-forgotten name once ruled had recently become his own.
Possibly, too, his joy in exchanging his armour and kingly robe for the
priest's ephod, when he brought up the ark to its rest, and his
consciousness that in himself the regal and the sacerdotal offices did
not blend, may have led him to meditations on the meaning of both, on
the miseries that seemed to flow equally from their separation and from
their union, which were the precursors of his hearing the Divine oath
that, in the far-off future, they would be fused together in that mighty
figure who was to repeat in higher fashion the union of functions which
invested that dim King of Righteousness and Priest of God in the far-off
past. He discerns that _his_ support from the right hand of God, _his_
sceptre which he swayed in Zion, _his_ loyal people fused together into
a unity at last, _his_ triumphant warfare on the nations around, are all
but faint shadows of One who is to come. That solemn form on the horizon
of hope is his Lord, the true King whose viceroy he was, the "bright
consummate flower" for the sake of which the root has its being. And, as
he sees the majestic lineaments shimmering through the facts of his own
history, like some hidden fire toiling in a narrow space ere it leaps
into ruddy spires that burst their bonds and flame heaven high, he is
borne onwards by the prophetic impulse, and the Spirit of God speaks
through his tongue words which have no meaning unless their theme be a
Divine ruler and priest for all the world.

He begins with the solemn words with which a prophetic message is wont
to be announced, thus at the outset stamping on the psalm its true
character. The "oracle" or "word of Jehovah unto my Lord," which he
heard, is a new revelation made to him from the heavens. He is taken up
and listens to the Divine voice calling to His right hand, to the most
intimate communion with Himself, and to wielding the energies of
omnipotence--Him whom David knew to be his lord. And when that Divine
voice ceases, its mandate having been fulfilled, the prophetic spirit in
the seer hymns the coronation anthem of the monarch enthroned by the
side of the majesty in the heavens. "The sceptre of Thy strength will
Jehovah send out of Zion. Rule Thou in the midst of Thine enemies." In
singular juxtaposition are the throne at God's right hand and the
sceptre--the emblem of sovereignty--issuing from Zion, a dominion
realised on earth by a monarch in the heavens, a dominion the centre of
which is Zion, and the undefined extent universal. It is a monarchy,
too, established in the midst of enemies, sustained in spite of
antagonism not only by the power of Jehovah, but by the activity of the
sovereign's own "rule." It is a dominion for the maintenance of which
devout souls will burst into prayer, and the most powerful can bring
but their aspirations. But the vision includes more than the warrior
king and his foes. Imbedded, as it were, in the very heart of the
description of the former comes the portraiture of his subjects, for a
witness how close is the union between Him and them, and how inseparable
from His glories are those who serve Him. They are characterised in a
threefold manner. "Thy people (shall be) willing in the day of Thine
array." The army is being mustered.[U] They are not mercenaries, nor
pressed men. They flock gladly to the standard, like the warriors
celebrated of old in Deborah's chant of victory, who "willingly offered
themselves." The word of our psalm might be translated "freewill
offerings," and the whole clause carries us into the very heart of that
great truth, that glad consecration and grateful self-surrender is the
one bond which knits us to the Captain of our salvation who gave
Himself for us, to the meek Monarch whose crown is of thorns and His
sceptre a reed, for tokens that His dominion rests on suffering and is
wielded in gentleness. The next words should be punctuated as a separate
clause, co-ordinate with the former, and adding another feature to the
description of the army. "In the beauties of holiness" is a common name
for the dress of the priests: the idea conveyed is that the army is an
army of priests, as the king himself is a priest. They are clothed, not
in mail and warlike attire, but in "fine linen clean and white," like
the armies which a later prophet saw following the Lord of lords. Their
warfare is not to be by force and cruelty, nor their conquests bloody;
but while soldiers they are to be priests, their weapons purity and
devotion, their merciful struggle to bring men to God, and to mirror God
to men. Round the one image gather all ideas of discipline, courage,
consecration to a cause, loyalty to a leader; round the other, all
thoughts of gentleness, of an atmosphere of devotion calm and still as
the holy place, of stainless character. Christ's servants must be both
soldiers and priests, like some of those knightly orders who bore the
cross on helmet and shield, and shaped the very hilts of their swords
into its likeness. And these soldier-priests are described by yet
another image, "From the womb of the morning thou hast the dew of thy
youth," where we are to regard the last word as used in a collective
sense, and equivalent to "Thy young warriors." They are like the dew
sparkling in infinite globelets on every blade of grass, hanging gems on
every bit of dead wood, formed in secret silence, reflecting the
sunlight, and, though the single drops be small and feeble, yet together
freshening the thirsty world. So, formed by an unseen and mysterious
power, one by one insignificant, but in the whole mighty, mirroring God
and quickening and beautifying the worn world, the servants of the
priest-king are to be "in the midst of many people like the dew from the
Lord."

[U] The word translated "power" in our version, has the same double
meaning as that has in old English, or as "force" has now, sometimes
signifying "strength" and sometimes an "army." The latter is the more
appropriate here. "The day of Thine army" will then be equivalent to the
day of mustering the troops.

Another solemn word from the lips of God begins the second half of the
psalm. "Jehovah swears," gives the sanction and guarantee of His own
nature, puts in pledge His own being for the fulfilment of the promise.
And that which He swears is a new thing in the earth. The blending of
the royal and priestly offices in the Messiah, and the eternal duration
in Him of both, is a distinct advancement in the development of
Messianic prophecy. The historical occasion for it may indeed be
connected with David's kingship and conquest of Melchizedek's city; but
the real source of it is a direct predictive inspiration. We have here
not merely the devout psalmist meditating on the truths revealed before
his day, but the prophet receiving a new word from God unheard by mortal
ears, and far transcending even the promises made to him by Nathan.
There is but one person to whom it can apply, who sits as a priest upon
his throne, who builds the temple of the Lord (Zech. vi. 12, 13).

As the former Divine word, so this is followed by the prophet's
rapturous answer, which carries on the portraiture of the priest-king.
There is some doubt as to the person addressed in these later verses.
"The Lord at thy right hand crushes kings in the day of His wrath."
Whose right hand? The answer generally given is, "The Messiah's." Who is
the Lord that smites the petty kinglets of earth? The answer generally
given is, "God." But it is far more dramatic, avoids an awkward
abruptness in the change of persons in the last verse, and brings out a
striking contrast with the previous half, if we take the opposite view,
and suppose Jehovah addressed and the Messiah spoken of throughout. Then
the first Divine word is followed by the prophetic invocation of the
exalted Messiah throned at the right hand and expecting till His enemies
be made His footstool. The second is followed by the prophetic
invocation of Jehovah, and describes the Lord Messiah at God's right
hand as before, but instead of longer waiting He now flames forth in all
the resistless energy of a conqueror. The day of His array is succeeded
by the day of His wrath. He crushes earth's monarchies. The psalmist's
eye sees the whole earth one great battle-field. "(It is) full of
corpses. He wounds the head over wide lands," where there may possibly
be a reference to the first vague dawning of a hope which God's mercy
had let lighten on man's horizon--"He shall bruise thy head," or the
word may be used as a collective expression for rulers, as the
parallelism with the previous verse requires. Thus striding on to
victory across the prostrate foe, and pursuing the flying relics of
their power, "He drinks of the brook in the way, therefore shall He lift
up the head," words which are somewhat difficult, however interpreted.
If, with the majority of modern commentators, we take them as a
picturesque embodiment of eager haste in the pursuit, the conqueror
"faint, yet pursuing," and stooping for a moment to drink, then hurrying
on with renewed strength after the fugitives, one can scarcely help
feeling that such a close to such a psalm is trivial and liker the
artificial play of fancy than the work of the prophetic spirit, to say
nothing of the fact that there is nothing about pursuit in the psalm. If
we fall back on the older interpretation, which sees in the words a
prophecy of the sufferings of the Messiah who tastes death and drinks of
the cup of sorrows, and therefore is highly exalted, we get a meaning
which worthily crowns the psalm, but seems to break somewhat abruptly
the sequence of thought, and to force the metaphor of drinking of the
brook into somewhat strained parallelism with the very different New
Testament images just named. But the doubt we must leave over these
final words does not diminish the preciousness of this psalm as a clear,
articulate prophecy from David's lips of David's Son, whom he had
learned to know through the experiences and facts of his own life. He
had climbed through sufferings to his throne. God had exalted him and
given him victory, and surrounded him with a loyal people. But he was
only a shadow; limitations and imperfections surrounded his office and
weakened himself; half of the Divine counsel of peace could not be
mirrored in his functions at all, and death lay ahead of him. So his
glory and his feebleness alike taught him that "one mightier than" he
must be coming behind him, "the latchet of whose shoes he was not worthy
to unloose"--the true King of Israel, to bear witness to whom was his
highest honour.

The third characteristic of the first seventeen years of David's reign
is his successful wars with surrounding nations. The gloomy days of
defeat and subjugation which had darkened the closing years of Saul are
over now, and blow after blow falls with stunning rapidity on the amazed
enemies. The narrative almost pants for breath as it tells with hurry
and pride how, south, and east, and north, the "lion of the tribe of
Judah" sprang from his fastness, and smote Philistia, Edom, Moab, Ammon,
Amalek, Damascus, and the Syrians beyond, even to the Euphrates; and
the bounding courage of king and people, and the unity of heart and hand
with which they stood shoulder to shoulder in many a bloody field, ring
through the psalms of this period. Whatever higher meaning may be
attached to them, their roots are firm in the soil of actual history,
and they are first of all the war-songs of a nation. That being so, that
they should also be inspired hymns for the church in all ages will
present no difficulty nor afford any consecration to modern warfare, if
the progressive character of revelation be duly kept in mind. There is a
whole series of such psalms, such as xx., xxi., lx., and probably
lxviii. We cannot venture in our limited space on any analysis of the
last of these. It is a splendid burst of national triumph and devout
praise, full of martial ardour, throbbing with lofty consciousness of
God's dwelling in Israel, abounding with allusions to the ancient
victories of the people, and world-wide in its anticipations of future
triumph. How strange the history of its opening words has been! Through
the battle smoke of how many a field they have rung! On the plains of
the Palatinate, from the lips of Cromwell's Ironsides, and from the poor
peasants that went to death on many a bleak moor for Christ's crown and
covenant, to the Doric music of their rude chant--

  "Let God arise, and scattered
    Let all His enemies be;
  And let all those that do Him hate,
    Before His presence flee."

The sixtieth psalm is assigned to David after Joab's signal victory over
the Edomites (2 Sam. viii.). It agrees very well with that date, though
the earlier verses have a wailing tone so deep over recent disasters, so
great that one is almost inclined to suppose that they come from a later
hand than his. But after the first verses all is warlike energy and
triumph. How the glad thought of ruling over a united people dances in
the swift words, "I will rejoice, I will divide Shechem, and mete out
the valley of Succoth;" he has, as it were, repeated Joshua's conquest
and division of the land, and the ancient historical sites that fill a
conspicuous place in the history of his great ancestor are in his power.
"Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine, Ephraim also is the defence of my
head, Judah my staff of command." He looks eastward to the woods and
pastoral uplands across the Jordan, whose inhabitants had been but
loosely attached to the western portion of the nation, and triumphs in
knowing that Gilead and Manasseh own his sway. The foremost tribes on
this side the river are to him like the armour and equipments of a
conqueror; he wears the might of Ephraim, the natural head of the
northern region, as his helmet, and he grasps the power of Judah as his
baton of command or sceptre of kingly rule (Gen. xlix. 10).

Thus, strong in the possession of a united kingdom, his flashing eye
turns to his enemies, and a stern joy, mingled with contempt, blazes up
as he sees them reduced to menial offices and trembling before him.
"Moab (is) my washing-basin; to Edom will I fling my shoe; because of
me, Philistia, cry out" (in fear). The three ancestral foes that hung on
Israel's southern border from east to west are subdued. He will make of
one "a vessel of dishonour" to wash his feet, soiled with battle; he
will throw his shoes to another the while, as one would to a slave to
take care of; and the third, expecting a like fate, shrieks out in fear
of the impending vengeance. He pants for new victories, "Who will bring
me into (the) strong city?" probably the yet unsubdued Petra, hidden
away in its tortuous ravine, with but one perilous path through the
gorge. And at last all the triumph of victory rises to a higher region
of thought in the closing words, which lay bare the secret of his
strength, and breathe the true spirit of the soldier of Jehovah. "In God
we shall do valiantly; and He, even He, shall tread down our enemies."

The twentieth psalm, another of these stirring war-songs, is in that
choral manner which we have already seen in psalm xxiv., and the
adoption of which was probably connected with David's careful
organization of "the service of song." It is all ablaze with the light
of battle and the glow of loyal love.

The army, ready drawn up for action, as we may fancy, prays for the
king, who, according to custom, brings sacrifices and offerings before
the fight. "Jehovah hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God
of Jacob defend thee, send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen
thee out of Zion, remember all thine offerings, and accept thy burnt
sacrifice." Then, as they wave their standards in the sunshine, or plant
before the ranks of each tribe its cognizance, to be defended to the
death, the hoarse shout rises from the files, "In the name of our God we
will set up (or wave) our banners." Then the single voice of the king
speaks, rejoicing in his soldiers' devotion, which he accepts as an omen
that his sacrifice has not been in vain: "Now know I that Jehovah saveth
His anointed. He will hear him from the heaven of His holiness with the
strength of the salvation of His right hand;" not merely from a God
dwelling in Zion, according to language of the previous prayer, but from
the Lord in the heavens, will the strength come. Then again the chorus
of the host exclaims, as they look across the field to the chariots and
cavalry of the foe--forces which Israel seldom used--"These (boast[V])
of chariots, and those of horses, and we, of the name of Jehovah, our
God, do we boast." Ere a sword has been drawn, they see the enemy
scattered. "They are brought down and fallen; and we, we are risen and
stand upright." Then one earnest cry to God, one more thought of the
true monarch of Israel, whom David would teach them to feel he only
shadowed; and with the prayer, "Jehovah! save! Let the King hear us in
the day when we cry," ringing like the long trumpet blast that sounds
for the charge, they dash forth to victory!

[V] Lit. "make mention of" or "commemorate."




XIII.--THE TEARS OF THE PENITENT.


Adversity had taught David self-restraint, had braced his soul, had
driven him to grasp firmly the hand of God. And prosperity had seemed
for nearly twenty years but to perfect the lessons. Gratitude had
followed deliverance, and the sunshine after the rain had brought out
the fragrance of devotion and the blossoms of glad songs. A good man,
and still more a man of David's age at the date of his great crime,
seldom falls so low, unless there has been previous, perhaps
unconscious, relaxation of the girded loins, and negligence of the
untrimmed lamp. The sensitive nature of the psalmist was indeed not
unlikely to yield to the sudden force of such a temptation as conquered
him, but we can scarcely conceive of its having done so without a
previous decay of his religious life, hidden most likely from himself.
And the source of that decay may probably be found in self-indulgence,
fostered by ease, and by long years of command. The actual fall into
sin seems to have been begun by slothful abdication of his functions as
captain of Israel. It is perhaps not without bitter emphasis that the
narrative introduces it by telling us that, "at the time when kings go
forth to battle," David contented himself with sending his troops
against Ammon, and "tarried still at Jerusalem." At all events, the
story brings into sharp contrast the levy _en masse_, encamped round
Rabbath, and their natural head, who had once been so ready to take his
share of blows and privations, loitering behind, taking his quiet siesta
in the hot hours after noon, as if there had been no soldiers of his
sweltering in their armour, and rising from his bed to stroll on his
palace roof, and peer into the household privacies below, as if his
heart had no interest in the grim tussle going on behind the hills that
he could almost see from his height, as they grew purple in the evening
twilight. He has fallen to the level of an Eastern despot, and has lost
his sense of the responsibilities of his office. Such loosening of the
tension of his moral nature as is indicated in his absence from the
field, during what was evidently a very severe as well as a long
struggle, prepared the way for the dismal headlong plunge into sin.

The story is told in all its hideousness, without palliation or reserve,
without comment or heightening, in that stern judicial fashion so
characteristic of the Bible records of its greatest characters. Every
step is narrated without a trace of softening, and without a word of
emotion. Not a single ugly detail is spared. The portraiture is as vivid
as ever. Bathsheba's willing complicity, her punctilious observance of
ceremonial propriety while she is trampling under foot her holiest
obligations; the fatal necessity which drags sin after sin, and summons
up murder to hide, if it be possible, the foul form of adultery; the
stinging rebuke in the conduct of Uriah, who, Hittite as he was, has a
more chivalrous, not to say devout, shrinking from personal ease while
his comrades and the ark are in the field, than the king has; the mean
treason, the degradation implied in getting into Joab's power; the
cynical plainness of the murderous letter, in which a hardened
conscience names his purposed evil by its true name; the contemptuous
measure of his master which Joab takes in his message, the king's
indifference to the loss of his men so long as Uriah is out of the way;
the solemn platitudes with which he pretends to console his tool for the
check of his troops; and the hideous haste with which, after her
scrupulous "mourning" for one week, Bathsheba threw herself again into
David's arms;--all these particulars, and every particular an
aggravation, stand out for ever, as men's most hidden evil will one day
do, in the clear, unpitying, unmistakable light of the Divine record.
What a story it is!

This saint of nearly fifty years of age, bound to God by ties which he
rapturously felt and acknowledged, whose words have been the very breath
of devotion for every devout heart, forgets his longings after
righteousness, flings away the joys of Divine communion, darkens his
soul, ends his prosperity, brings down upon his head for all his
remaining years a cataract of calamities, and makes his name and his
religion a target for the barbed sarcasms of each succeeding generation
of scoffers. "All the fences and their whole array," which God's mercies
and his own past had reared, "one cunning sin sweeps quite away." Every
obligation of his office, as every grace of his character, is trodden
under foot by the wild beast roused in his breast. As man, as king, as
soldier, he is found wanting. Lust and treason, and craft and murder,
are goodly companions for him who had said, "I will walk within my house
with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes." Why
should we dwell on the wretched story? Because it teaches us, as no
other page in the history of God's church does, how the alchemy of
Divine love can extract sweet perfumes of penitence and praise out of
the filth of sin; and therefore, though we turn with loathing from
David's sin, we have to bless God for the record of it, and for the
lessons of hope that come from David's pardon.

To many a sin-tortured soul since then, the two psalms (li., xxxii.),
all blotted with tears, in which he has sobbed out his penitence, have
been as footsteps in a great and terrible wilderness. They are too
familiar to need, and too sacred to bear, many words here, but we may
briefly note some points connected with them--especially those which
assist us in forming some image of the psalmist's state of mind after
his transgression. It may be observed that of these two psalms, the
fifty-first is evidently earlier than the thirty-second. In the former
we see the fallen man struggling up out of the "horrible pit and miry
clay;" in the latter he stands upon the rock, with a new song in his
mouth, even the blessedness of him "whose sin is covered." It appears
also that both must be dated after the sharp thrust of God's lancet
which Nathan drove into his conscience, and the healing balsam of God's
assurance of forgiveness which Nathan laid upon his heart. The
passionate cries of the psalm are the echo of the Divine promise--the
effort of his faith to grasp and keep the merciful gift of pardon. The
consciousness of forgiveness is the basis of the prayer for forgiveness.

Somewhere about a year passed between the crime and the message of
Nathan. And what sort of a year it was the psalms tell us. The coarse
satisfactions of his sin could not long content him, as they might have
done a lower type of man. Nobody buys a little passing pleasure in evil
at so dear a rate, or keeps it for so short a time as a good man. He
cannot make himself as others. "That which cometh into your mind shall
not be at all, in that ye say, We will be as the families of the
nations, which serve wood and stone." Old habits quickly reassert their
force, conscience soon lifts again its solemn voice; and while worse men
are enjoying the strong-flavoured meats on sin's table, the servant of
God, who has been seduced to prefer them for a moment to the "light
bread" from heaven, tastes them already bitter in his mouth. He may be
far from true repentance, but he will very soon know remorse. Months may
pass before he can feel again the calm joys of God, but disgust with
himself and with his sin will quickly fill his soul. No more vivid
picture of such a state has ever been drawn, than is found in the psalms
of this period. They tell of sullen "silence;" dust had settled on the
strings of his harp, as on helmet and sword. He will not speak to God of
his sin, and there is nothing else that he can speak of. They tell of
his "roaring all the day long"--the groan of anguish forced from his yet
unsoftened spirit. Day and night God's heavy hand weighed him down; the
consciousness of that power, whose gentleness had once holden him up,
crushed, but did not melt him. Like some heated iron, its heaviness
scorched as well as bruised, and his moisture--all the dew and
freshness of his life--was dried up at its touch and turned into dusty,
cracking drought, that chaps the hard earth, and shrinks the streamlets,
and burns to brown powder the tender herbage (Ps. xxxii.). Body and mind
seem both to be included in this wonderful description, in which
obstinate dumbness, constant torture, dread of God, and not one
softening drop of penitence fill the dry and dusty heart, while "bones
waxing old," or, as the word might be rendered, "rotting," sleepless
nights, and perhaps the burning heat of disease, are hinted at as the
accompaniments of the soul-agony. It is possible that similar allusions
to actual bodily illness are to be found in another psalm, probably
referring to the same period, and presenting striking parallelisms of
expression (Ps. vi.), "Have mercy upon me, Jehovah, for I languish (fade
away); heal me, for my bones are affrighted. My soul is also sore vexed.
I am weary with my groaning; every night make I my bed to swim. I water
my couch with my tears." The similar phrase, too, in psalm fifty-one,
"The bones which Thou hast broken," may have a similar application.
Thus, sick in body and soul, he dragged through a weary year--ashamed
of his guilty dalliance, wretched in his self-accusations, afraid of
God, and skulking in the recesses of his palace from the sight of his
people. A goodly price he had sold integrity for. The bread had been
sweet for a moment, but how quickly his "mouth is filled with gravel"
(Proverbs xx. 17). David learned, what we all learn (and the holier a
man is, the more speedily and sharply does the lesson follow on the
heels of his sin), that every transgression is a blunder, that we never
get the satisfaction which we expect from any sin, or if we do, we get
something with it which spoils it all. A nauseous drug is added to the
exciting, intoxicating drink which temptation offers, and though its
flavour is at first disguised by the pleasanter taste of the sin, its
bitterness is persistent though slow, and clings to the palate long
after that has faded utterly.

Into this dreary life Nathan's message comes with merciful rebuke. The
prompt severity of David's judgment against the selfish sinner of the
inimitable apologue may be a subtle indication of his troubled
conscience, which fancies some atonement for his own sin in stern
repression of that of others; for consciousness of evil may sometimes
sting into harshness as well as soften to lenity, and sinful man is a
sterner judge than the righteous God. The answer of Nathan is a perfect
example of the Divine way of convincing of sin. There is first the plain
charge pressed home on the individual conscience, "Thou art the man."
Then follows, not reproach nor further deepening of the blackness of the
deed, but a tender enumeration of God's great benefits, whereon is built
the solemn question, "Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of
the Lord, to do evil in His sight?" The contemplation of God's faithful
love, and of the all-sufficient gifts which it bestows, makes every
transgression irrational as well as ungrateful, and turns remorse, which
consumes like the hot wind of the wilderness, into tearful repentance
which refreshes the soul. When God has been seen loving and bestowing
ere He commands and requires, it is profitable to hold the image of the
man's evil in all its ugliness close up to his eyes; and so the bald
facts are repeated next in the fewest, strongest words. Nor can the
message close until a rigid law of retribution has been proclaimed, the
slow operation of which will filter bitterness and shame through all
his life. "And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord."
Two words (in the Hebrew) make the transition from sullen misery to real
though shaded peace. No lengthened outpouring, no accumulation of
self-reproach; he is too deeply moved for many words, which he knows God
does not need. More would have been less. All is contained in that one
sob, in which the whole frostwork of these weary months breaks up and
rolls away, swept before the strong flood. And as brief and simple as
the confession, is the response, "And Nathan said unto David, The Lord
also hath put away thy sin." How full and unconditional the blessing
bestowed in these few words; how swift and sufficient the answer! So the
long estrangement is ended. Thus simple and Divine is the manner of
pardon. In such short compass may the turning point of a life lie! But
while confession and forgiveness heal the breach between God and David,
pardon is not impunity, and the same sentence which bestows the
remission of sin announces the exaction of a penalty. The judgments
threatened a moment before--a moment so far removed now to David's
consciousness that it would look as if an age had passed--are not
withdrawn, and another is added, the death of Bathsheba's infant. God
loves His servants too well to "suffer sin upon them," and the freest
forgiveness and the happiest consciousness of it may consist with the
loving infliction and the submissive bearing of pains, which are no
longer the strokes of an avenging judge, but the chastisements of a
gracious father.

The fifty-first psalm must, we think, be conceived of as following soon
after Nathan's mission. There may be echoes of the prophet's stern
question, "Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to
do evil in His sight?" and of the confession, "I have sinned against the
Lord," in the words, "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned, and done
evil in Thy sight" (ver. 4), though perhaps the expressions are not so
peculiar as to make the allusion certain. But, at all events, the
penitence and prayers of the psalm can scarcely be supposed to have
preceded the date of the historical narrative, which clearly implies
that the rebuke of the seer was the first thing that broke up the dumb
misery of unrepented sin.

Although the psalm is one long cry for pardon and restoration, one can
discern an order and progress in its petitions--the order, not of an
artificial reproduction of a past mood of mind, but the instinctive
order in which the emotion of contrite desire will ever pour itself
forth. In the psalm all begins, as all begins in fact, with the
grounding of the cry for favour on "Thy loving-kindness," "the multitude
of Thy tender mercies;" the one plea that avails with God, whose love is
its own motive and its own measure, whose past acts are the standard for
all His future, whose compassions, in their innumerable numbers, are
more than the sum of our transgressions, though these be "more than the
hairs of our head." Beginning with God's mercy, the penitent soul can
learn to look next upon its own sin in all its aspects of evil. The
depth and intensity of the psalmist's loathing of self is wonderfully
expressed in his words for his crime. He speaks of his "transgressions"
and of his "sin." Looked at in one way, he sees the separate acts of
which he had been guilty--lust, fraud, treachery, murder: looked at in
another, he sees them all knotted together, in one inextricable tangle
of forked, hissing tongues, like the serpent locks that coil and twist
round a Gorgon head. No sin dwells alone; the separate acts have a
common root, and the whole is matted together like the green growth on a
stagnant pond, so that, by whatever filament it is grasped, the whole
mass is drawn towards you. And a profound insight into the essence and
character of sin lies in the accumulated synonyms. It is
"transgression," or, as the word might be rendered, "rebellion"--not the
mere breach of an impersonal law, not merely an infraction of "the
constitution of our nature"--but the rising of a subject will against
its true king, disobedience to a person as well as contravention of a
standard. It is "iniquity"--perversion or distortion--a word which
expresses the same metaphor as is found in many languages, namely,
crookedness as descriptive of deeds which depart from the perfect line
of right. It is "sin," _i.e._, "missing one's aim;" in which profound
word is contained the truth that all sin is a blunder, shooting wide of
the true goal, if regard be had to the end of our being, and not less
wide if regard be had to our happiness. It ever misses the mark; and the
epitaph might be written over every sinner who seeks pleasure at the
price of righteousness, "Thou fool."

Nor less pregnant with meaning is the psalmist's emphatic
acknowledgment, "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned." He is not
content with looking upon his evil in itself, or in relation only to the
people who had suffered by it; he thinks of it in relation to God. He
had been guilty of crimes against Bathsheba and Uriah, and even the
rough soldier whom he made his tool, as well as against his whole
subjects; but, dark as these were, they assumed their true character
only when they were discerned as done against God. "Sin," in its full
sense, implies "God" as its correlative. We transgress against each
other, but we sin against Him.

Nor does the psalmist stop here. He has acknowledged the tangled
multiplicity and dreadful unity of his evil, he has seen its inmost
character, he has learned to bring his deed into connection with God;
what remains still to be confessed? He laments, and that not as
extenuation (though it be explanation), but as aggravation, the sinful
nature in which he had been born. The deeds had come from a source--a
bitter fountain had welled out this blackness. He himself is evil,
therefore he has done evil. The sin is his; he will not contest his full
responsibility; and its foul characteristics declare the inward foulness
from which it has flowed--and that foulness is himself. Does he
therefore think that he is less to blame? By no means. His
acknowledgment of an evil nature is the very deepest of his confessions,
and leads not to a palliation of his guilt, but to a cry to Him who
alone can heal the inward wound; and as He can purge away the
transgressions, can likewise stanch their source, and give him to feel
within "that he is healed from that plague."

The same intensity of feeling expressed by the use of so many words for
sin is revealed also in the reiterated synonyms for pardon. The prayer
comes from his lips over and over again, not because he thinks that he
shall be heard for his much speaking, but because of the earnestness of
his longing. Such repetitions are signs of the persistence of faith,
while others, though they last like the prayers of Baal's priests, "from
morning till the time of the evening sacrifice," indicate only the
suppliant's doubt. David prays that his sins may be "blotted out," in
which petition they are conceived as recorded against him in the
archives of the heavens; that he may be "washed" from them, in which
they are conceived as foul stains upon himself, needing for their
removal hard rubbing and beating (for such is, according to some
commentators, the force of the word); that he may be "cleansed"--the
technical word for the priestly cleansing of the leper, and declaring
him clear of the taint. He also, with similar recurrence to the Mosaic
symbols, prays that he may be "purged with hyssop." There is a pathetic
appropriateness in the petition, for not only lepers, but those who had
become defiled by contact with a dead body, were thus purified; and on
whom did the taint of corruption cleave as on the murderer of Uriah? The
prayer, too, is even more remarkable in the original, which employs a
verb formed from the word for "sin;" "and if in our language that were a
word in use, it might be translated, 'Thou shalt un-sin me.'"[W]

[W] Donne's Sermons, quoted in Perowne, _in. loc._

In the midst of these abased confessions and cries for pardon there
comes with wonderful force and beauty the bold prayer for restoration
to "joy and gladness"--an indication surely of more than ordinary
confidence in the full mercy of God, which would efface all the
consequences of his sin.

And following upon them are petitions for sanctifying, reiterated and
many-sided, like those that have preceded. Three pairs of clauses
contain these, in each of which the second member of the clause asks for
the infusion into his spirit of some grace from God--that he may possess
a "steadfast spirit," "Thy Holy Spirit," "a willing spirit." It is
perhaps not an accident that the central petition of the three is the
one which most clearly expresses the thought which all imply--that the
human spirit can only be renewed and hallowed by the entrance into it of
the Divine. We are not to commit the theological anachronism which has
been applied with such evil effect to the whole Old Testament, and
suppose that David meant by that central clause in his prayer for
renewal all that we mean by it; but he meant, at least, that his
spiritual nature could be made to love righteousness and hate iniquity
by none other power than God's breathing on it. If we may venture to
regard this as the heart of the series, the other two on either side of
it may be conceived as its consequences. It will then be "a right
spirit," or, as the word means, a steadfast spirit, strong to resist,
not swept away by surges of passion, nor shaken by terrors of remorse,
but calm, tenacious, and resolved, pressing on in the path of holiness,
and immovable with the immobility of those who are rooted in God and
goodness. It will be a free, or "a willing spirit," ready for all joyful
service of thankfulness, and so penetrated with the love of his God that
he will delight to do His will, and carry the law charactered in the
spontaneous impulses of his renewed nature. Not without profound meaning
does the psalmist seem to recur in his hour of penitence to the tragic
fate of his predecessor in the monarchy, to whom, as to himself, had
been given by the same anointing, the same gift of "the Spirit of God."
Remembering how the holy chrism had faded from the raven locks of Saul
long before his bloody head had been sent round Philistine cities to
glut their revenge, and knowing that if God were "strict to mark
iniquity," the gift which had been withdrawn from Saul would not be
continued to himself, he prays, not as anointed monarch only, but as
sinful man, "Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me." As before he had
ventured to ask for the joy of forgiveness, so now he pleads once more
for "the joy of Thy salvation," which comes from cleansing, from
conscious fellowship--which he had so long and deeply felt, which for so
many months had been hid from him by the mists of his own sin. The
psalmist's natural buoyancy, the gladness which was an inseparable part
of his religion, and had rung from his harp in many an hour of peril,
the bold width of his desires, grounded on the clear breadth of his
faith in God's perfect forgiveness, are all expressed in such a prayer
from such lips at such a time, and may well be pondered and imitated by
us.

The lowly prayer which we have been tracing rises ere its close to a vow
of renewed praise. It is very beautiful to note how the poet nature, as
well as the consciousness of a Divine function, unite in the resolve
that crowns the psalm. To David no tribute that he could bring to God
seemed so little unworthy--none to himself so joyous--as the music of
his harp, and the melody of his songs; nor was any part of his kingly
office so lofty in his estimation as his calling to proclaim in glowing
words the name of the Lord, that men might learn to love. His earliest
song in exile had closed with a like vow. It had been well fulfilled for
many a year; but these last doleful months had silenced all his praise.
Now, as hope begins to shine upon him once more, the frost which had
stilled the stream of his devotion is melting, and as he remembers his
glad songs of old, and this miserable dumbness, his final prayer is, "O
Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise."

The same consciousness of sin, which we have found in a previous verse
discerning the true significance of ceremonial purification, leads also
to the recognition of the insufficiency of outward sacrifices--a thought
which is not, as some modern critics would fain make it, the product of
the latest age of Judaism, but appears occasionally through the whole of
the history, and indicates not the date, but the spiritual elevation of
its utterer. David sets it on the very summit of his psalm, to sparkle
there like some stone of price. The rich jewel which he has brought up
from the abyss of degradation is that truth which has shone out from its
setting here over three millenniums: "The sacrifices of God are a
broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not
despise."

The words which follow, containing a prayer for the building up of Zion,
and a prediction of the continuous offering of sacrifice, present some
difficulty. They do not necessarily presuppose that Jerusalem is in
ruins; for "build Thou the walls" would be no less appropriate a
petition if the fortifications were unfinished (as we know they were in
David's time) than if they had been broken down. Nor do the words
contradict the view of sacrifice just given, for the use of the symbol
and the conviction of its insufficiency co-existed, in fact, in every
devout life, and may well be expressed side by side. But the transition
from so intensely personal emotions to intercession for Zion seems
almost too sudden even for a nature as wide and warm as David's. If the
closing verses are his, we may, indeed, see in them the king re-awaking
to a sense of his responsibilities, which he had so long neglected,
first, in the selfishness of his heart, and then in the morbid
self-absorption of his remorse; and the lesson may be a precious one
that the first thought of a pardoned man should be for others. But
there is much to be said, on the other hand, in favour of the conjecture
that these verses are a later addition, probably after the return from
captivity, when the walls of Zion were in ruins, and the altar of the
temple had been long cold. If so, then our psalm, as it came from
David's full heart, would be all of a piece--one great gush of penitence
and faith, beginning with, "Have mercy upon me, O God," ending with the
assurance of acceptance, and so remaining for all ages the chart of the
thorny and yet blessed path that leads "from death unto life." In that
aspect, what it does not contain is as noteworthy as what it does. Not
one word asks for exemption from such penalties of his great fall as can
be inflicted by a loving Father on a soul that lives in His love. He
cries for pardon, but he gives his back to the smiters whom God may
please to send.

The other psalm of the penitent (xxxii.) has been already referred to in
connection with the autobiographical materials which it contains. It is
evidently of a later period than the fifty-first. There is no struggle
in it; the prayer has been heard, and this is the beginning of the
fulfilment of the vow to show forth God's praise. In the earlier he had
said, "Then will I teach transgressors the way;" here he says, "I will
instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go." There he
began with the plaintive cry for mercy; here with a burst of praise
celebrating the happiness of the pardoned penitent. There we heard the
sobs of a man in the very agony of abasement; here we have the story of
their blessed issue. There we had multiplied synonyms for sin, and for
the forgiveness which was desired; here it is the many-sided
preciousness of forgiveness possessed which runs over in various yet
equivalent phrases. There the highest point to which he could climb was
the assurance that a bruised heart was accepted, and the bones broken
might still rejoice. Here the very first word is of blessedness, and the
close summons the righteous to exuberant joy. The one is a psalm of
wailing; the other, to use its own words, a "song of deliverance."

What glad consciousness that he himself is the happy man whom he
describes rings in the melodious variations of the one thought of
forgiveness in the opening words! How gratefully he draws on the
treasures of that recent experience, while he sets it forth as being
the "taking away" of sin, as if it were the removal of a solid
something, or the lifting of a burden off his back; and as the
"covering" of sin, as if it were the wrapping of its ugliness in thick
folds that hide it for ever even from the all-seeing Eye; and as the
"non-reckoning" of sin, as if it were the discharge of a debt! What
vivid memory of past misery in the awful portrait of his impenitent
self, already referred to--on which the mind dwells in silence, while
the musical accompaniment (as directed by the "selah") touches some
plaintive minor or grating discord! How noble and eloquent the brief
words (echo of the historical narrative) that tell the full and swift
forgiveness that followed simple confession--and how effectively the
music again comes in, prolonging the thought and rejoicing in the
pardon! How sure he is that his experience is of priceless value to the
world for all time, when he sees in his absolution a motive that will
draw all the godly nearer to their Helper in heaven! How full his heart
is of praise, that he cannot but go back again to his own story, and
rejoice in God his hiding-place--whose past wondrous love assures him
that in the future songs of deliverance will ring him round, and all his
path be encompassed with music of praise.

So ends the more personal part of the psalm. A more didactic portion
follows, the generalization of that. Possibly the voice which now speaks
is a higher than David's. "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the
way which thou shalt go. I will guide thee with mine eye," scarcely
sounds like words meant to be understood as spoken by him. They are the
promise from heaven of a gentle teaching to the pardoned man, which will
instruct by no severity, but by patient schooling; which will direct by
no harsh authority, but by that loving glance that is enough for those
who love, and is all too subtle and delicate to be perceived by any
other. Such gracious direction is not for the psalmist alone, but it
needs a spirit in harmony with God to understand it. For others there
can be nothing higher than mere force, the discipline of sorrow, the
bridle in the hard mouth, the whip for the stiff back. The choice for
all men is through penitence and forgiveness to rise to the true
position of men, capable of receiving and obeying a spiritual guidance,
which appeals to the heart, and gently subdues the will, or by stubborn
impenitence to fall to the level of brutes, that can only be held in by
a halter and driven by a lash. And because this is the alternative,
therefore "Many sorrows shall be to the wicked; but he that trusteth in
the Lord, mercy shall compass him about."

And then the psalm ends with a great cry of gladness, three times
reiterated, like the voice of a herald on some festal day of a nation:
"Rejoice in Jehovah! and leap for joy, O righteous! and gladly shout,
all ye upright in heart!"

Such is the end of the sobs of the penitent.




XIV.--CHASTISEMENTS.


The chastisements, which were the natural fruits of David's sin, soon
began to show themselves, though apparently ten years at least passed
before Absalom's revolt, at which time he was probably a man of sixty.
But these ten years were very weary and sad. There is no more joyous
activity, no more conquering energy, no more consciousness of his
people's love. Disasters thicken round him, and may all be traced to his
great sin. His children learned the lesson it had taught them, and lust
and fratricide desolated his family. A parent can have no sharper pang
than the sight of his own sins reappearing in his child. David saw the
ghastly reflection of his unbridled passion in his eldest son's foul
crime (and even a gleam of it in his unhappy daughter), and of his
murderous craft in his second son's bloody revenge. Whilst all this hell
of crime is boiling round him, a strange passiveness seems to have
crept over the king, and to have continued till his flight before
Absalom. The narrative is singularly silent about him. He seems
paralysed by the consciousness of his past sin; he originates nothing.
He dares not punish Ammon; he can only weep when he hears of Absalom's
crime. He weakly longs for the return of the latter from his exile, but
cannot nerve himself to send for him till Joab urges it. A flash of his
old kingliness blazes out for a moment in his refusal to see his son;
but even that slight satisfaction to justice vanishes as soon as Joab
chooses to insist that Absalom shall return to court. He seems to have
no will of his own. He has become a mere tool in the hands of his fierce
general--and Joab's hold upon him was his complicity in Uriah's murder.
Thus at every step he was dogged by the consequences of his crime, even
though it was pardoned sin. And if, as is probable, Ahithophel was
Bathsheba's grandfather, the most formidable person in Absalom's
conspiracy, whose defection wounded him so deeply, was no doubt driven
to the usurper's side out of revenge for the insult to his house in her
person. Thus "of our pleasant vices doth heaven make whips to scourge
us." "Be not deceived; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap."

It is not probable that many psalms were made in those dreary days. But
the forty-first and fifty-fifth are, with reasonable probability,
referred to this period by many commentators. They give a very touching
picture of the old king during the four years in which Absalom's
conspiracy was being hatched. It seems, from the forty-first, that the
pain and sorrow of his heart had brought on some serious illness, which
his enemies had used for their own purposes, and embittered by
hypocritical condolences and ill-concealed glee. The sensitive
nature of the psalmist winces under their heartless desertion of him,
and pours out its plaint in this pathetic lament. He begins with a
blessing on those who "consider the afflicted"--having reference,
perhaps, to the few who were faithful to him in his languishing
sickness. He passes thence to his own case, and, after humble confession
of his sin,--almost in the words of the fifty-first psalm,--he tells how
his sickbed had been surrounded by very different visitors. His disease
drew no pity, but only fierce impatience that he lingered in life so
long. "Mine enemies speak evil of me--when will he die, and his name
have perished?" One of them, in especial, who must have been a man in
high position to gain access to the sick chamber, has been conspicuous
by his lying words of condolence: "If he come to see me he speaketh
vanity." The sight of the sick king touched no chord of affection, but
only increased the traitor's animosity--"his heart gathereth evil to
itself"--and then, having watched his pale face for wished-for
unfavourable symptoms, the false friend hurries from the bedside to talk
of his hopeless illness--"he goeth abroad, he telleth it." The tidings
spread, and are stealthily passed from one conspirator to another. "All
that hate me whisper together against me." They exaggerate the gravity
of his condition, and are glad because, making the wish the father to
the thought, they believe him dying. "A thing of Belial" (_i.e._, a
destructive disease), "say they, is poured out upon him, and now that he
lieth, he shall rise up no more." And, sharpest pang of all, that among
these traitors, and probably the same person as he whose heartless
presence in the sick chamber was so hard to bear, should be Ahithophel,
whose counsel had been like an oracle from God. Even he, "the man of my
friendship, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread"--he, like an
ignoble, vicious mule--"has lifted high his heel" against the sick lion.

We should be disposed to refer the thirty-ninth psalm also to this
period. It, too, is the meditation of one in sickness, which he knows to
be a Divine judgment for his sin. There is little trace of enemies in
it; but his attitude is that of silent submission, while wicked men are
disquieted around him--which is precisely the characteristic peculiarity
of his conduct at this period. It consists of two parts (vers. 1-6 and
7-13), in both of which the subjects of his meditations are the same,
but the tone of them different. His own sickness and mortality, and
man's fleeting, shadowy life, are his themes. The former has led him to
think of the latter. The first effect of his sorrow was to close his
lips in a silence that was not altogether submission. "I held my peace,
even from good, and my sorrow was stirred." As in his sin, when he kept
silence, his "bones waxed old," so now in his sorrow and sickness the
pain that could not find expression raged the more violently. The
tearless eyes were hot and aching; but he conquered the dumb spirit, and
could carry his heavy thoughts to God. They are very heavy at first. He
only desires that the sad truth may be driven deeper into his soul. With
the engrossment so characteristic of melancholy, he asks, what might
have been thought the thing he needed least, "Make me to know mine end;"
and then he dilates on the gloomy reflections which he had been
cherishing in silence. Not only he himself, with his handbreadth of
days, that shrink into absolute nothingness when brought into contrast
with the life of God, but "every man," even when apparently "standing"
most "firm, is only a breath." As a shadow every man moves spectral
among shadows. The tumult that fills their lives is madness; "only for a
breath are they disquieted." So bitterly, with an anticipation of the
sad, clear-eyed pity and scorn of "The Preacher," does the sick and
wearied king speak, in tones very unlike the joyous music of his earlier
utterances.

But, true and wholesome as such thoughts are, they are not all the
truth. So the prayer changes in tone, even while its substance is the
same. He rises from the shows of earth to his true home, driven thither
by their hollowness. "My hope is in Thee." The conviction of earth's
vanity is all different when it has "tossed him to Thy breast." The
pardoned sinner, who never thereafter forgot his grievous fall, asks for
deliverance "from all his transgressions." The sullen silence has
changed into full acquiescence: "I opened not my mouth, because Thou
didst it,"--a silence differing from the other as the calm after the
storm, when all the winds sleep and the sun shines out on a freshened
world, differs from the boding stillness while the slow thunder-clouds
grow lurid on the horizon. He cries for healing, for he knows his
sickness to be the buffet and assault of God's hand; and its bitterness
is assuaged, even while its force continues, by the conviction that it
is God's fatherly chastisement for sin which gnaws away his manly vigour
as the moth frets his kingly robe. The very thought which had been so
bitter--that every man is vanity--reappears in a new connection as the
basis of the prayer that God would hear, and is modified so as to become
infinitely blessed and hopeful. "I am a stranger with Thee, and a
sojourner, as all my fathers were." A wanderer indeed, and a transient
guest on earth; but what of that, if he be God's guest? All that is
sorrowful is drawn off from the thought when we realise our connection
with God. We are in God's house; the host, not the guest, is responsible
for the housekeeping. We need not feel life lonely if He be with us, nor
its shortness sad. It is not a shadow, a dream, a breath, if it be
rooted in Him. And thus the sick man has conquered his gloomy thoughts,
even though he sees little before him but the end; and he is not cast
down even though his desires are all summed up in one for a little
respite and healing, ere the brief trouble of earth be done with: "O
spare me, that I may recover strength before I go hence, and be no
more."

It may be observed that this supposition of a protracted illness, which
is based upon these psalms, throws light upon the singular passiveness
of David during the maturing of Absalom's conspiracy, and may naturally
be supposed to have favoured his schemes, an essential part of which was
to ingratiate himself with suitors who came to the king for judgment by
affecting great regret that no man was deputed of the king to hear them.
The accumulation of untried causes, and the apparent disorganization of
the judicial machinery, are well accounted for by David's sickness.

The fifty-fifth psalm gives some very pathetic additional particulars.
It is in three parts--a plaintive prayer and portraiture of the
psalmist's mental distress (vers. 1-8); a vehement supplication against
his foes, and indignant recounting of their treachery (vers. 9-16); and,
finally, a prophecy of the retribution that is to fall upon them (vers.
17-23). In the first and second portions we have some points which help
to complete our picture of the man. For instance, his heart "writhes"
within him, the "terrors of death" are on him, "fear and trembling" are
come on him, and "horror" has covered him. All this points, like
subsequent verses, to his knowledge of the conspiracy before it came to
a head. The state of the city, which is practically in the hands of
Absalom and his tools, is described with bold imagery. Violence and
Strife in possession of it, spies prowling about the walls day and
night, Evil and Trouble in its midst, and Destruction, Oppression, and
Deceit--a goodly company--flaunting in its open spaces. And the spirit,
the brain of the whole, is the trusted friend whom he had made his own
equal, who had shared his secretest thoughts in private, who had walked
next him in solemn processions to the temple. Seeing all this, what does
the king do, who was once so fertile in resource, so decisive in
counsel, so prompt in action? Nothing. His only weapon is prayer. "As
for me, I will call upon God; and the Lord will save me. Evening, and
morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: and He shall hear my
voice." He lets it all grow as it list, and only longs to be out of all
the weary coil of troubles. "Oh that I had wings like a dove, then would
I fly away and be at rest. Lo, I would flee far off, I would lodge in
the wilderness. I would swiftly fly to my refuge from the raging wind,
from the tempest." The langour of his disease, love for his worthless
son, consciousness of sin, and submission to the chastisement through
"one of his own house," which Nathan had foretold, kept him quiet,
though he saw the plot winding its meshes round him. And in this
submission patient confidence is not wanting, though subdued and
saddened, which finds expression in the last words of this psalm of the
heavy laden, "Cast thy burden upon Jehovah. He, He will sustain
thee.... I will trust in Thee."

When the blow at last fell, the same passive acquiescence in what he
felt to be God's chastisement is very noticeable. Absalom escapes to
Hebron, and sets up the standard of revolt. When the news comes to
Jerusalem the king's only thought is immediate flight. He is almost
cowardly in his eagerness to escape, and is prepared to give up
everything without a blow. It seems as if only a touch was needed to
overthrow his throne. He hurries on the preparations for flight with
nervous haste. He forms no plans beyond those of his earlier wish to fly
away and be at rest. He tries to denude himself of followers. When the
six hundred men of Gath--who had been with him ever since his early days
in Philistia, and had grown grey in his service--make themselves the van
of his little army, he urges the heroic Ittai, their leader, to leave
him a fugitive, and to worship the rising sun, "Return to thy place, and
abide with _the king_"--so thoroughly does he regard the crown as passed
already from his brows. The priests with the ark are sent back; he is
not worthy to have the symbol of the Divine presence identified with
his doubtful cause, and is prepared to submit without a murmur if God
"thus say, I have no delight in thee." With covered head and naked feet
he goes up the slope of Olivet, and turning perhaps at that same bend in
the rocky mountain path where the true King, coming to the city, wept as
he saw its shining walls and soaring pinnacles across the narrow valley,
the discrowned king and all his followers broke into passionate weeping
as they gazed their last on the lost capital, and then with choking sobs
rounded the shoulder of the hill and set their faces to their forlorn
flight. Passing through the territory of Saul's tribe--dangerous ground
for him to tread--the rank hatred of Shimei's heart blossoms into
speech. With Eastern vehemence, he curses and flings stones and dust in
the transports of his fury, stumbling along among the rocks high up on
the side of the glen, as he keeps abreast of the little band below. Did
David remember how the husband from whom he had torn Michal had followed
her to this very place, and there had turned back weeping to his lonely
home? The remembrance, at any rate, of later and more evil deeds
prompted his meek answer, "Let him curse, for the Lord hath bidden
him."

The first force of the disaster spent itself, and by the time he was
safe across Jordan, on the free uplands of Bashan, his spirit rises. He
makes a stand at Mahanaim, the place where his great ancestor, in
circumstances somewhat analogous to his own, had seen the vision of
"bright-harnessed angels" ranked in battle array for the defence of
himself and his own little band, and called the name of the place the
"two camps." Perhaps that old story helped to hearten him, as the
defection of Ahithophel from the conspiracy certainly would do. As the
time went on, too, it became increasingly obvious that the leaders of
the rebellion were "infirm of purpose," and that every day of respite
from actual fighting diminished their chances of success, as that
politic adviser saw so plainly. Whatever may have been the reason, it is
clear that by the time David had reached Mahanaim he had resolved not to
yield without a struggle. He girds on his sword once more with some of
the animation of early days, and the light of trustful valour blazes
again in his old eyes.




XV. THE SONGS OF THE FUGITIVE.


The psalms which probably belong to the period of Absalom's rebellion
correspond well with the impression of his spirit gathered from the
historical books. Confidence in God, submission to His will, are
strongly expressed in them, and we may almost discern a progress in the
former respect as the rebellion grows. They flame brighter and brighter
in the deepening darkness. From the lowest abyss the stars are seen most
clearly. He is far more buoyant when he is an exile once more in the
wilderness, and when the masks of plot and trickery are fallen, and the
danger stands clear before him. Like some good ship issuing from the
shelter of the pier heads, the first blow of the waves throws her over
on her side and makes her quiver like a living thing recoiling from a
terror, but she rises above the tossing surges and keeps her course. We
may allocate with a fair amount of likelihood the following psalms to
this period--iii.; iv.; xxv. (?); xxviii. (?); lviii. (?); lxi.; lxii.;
lxiii.; cix. (?); cxliii.

The first two of these form a pair; they are a morning and an evening
hymn. The little band are encamped on their road to Mahanaim, with no
roof but the stars, and no walls but the arm of God. In the former the
discrowned king sings, as he rises from his nightly bivouac. He pours
out first his plaint of the foes, who are described as "many," and as
saying that, "There is no help for him in God," words which fully
correspond to the formidable dimensions of the revolt, and to the belief
which actuated the conspirators, and had appeared as possible even to
himself, that his sin had turned away the aid of heaven from his cause.
To such utterances of malice and confident hatred he opposes the
conviction which had again filled his soul, that even in the midst of
real peril and the shock of battle Jehovah is his "shield." With bowed
and covered head he had fled from Jerusalem, but "Thou art the lifter up
of mine head." He was an exile from the tabernacle on Zion, and he had
sent back the ark to its rest; but though he has to cry to God from
beyond Jordan, He answers "from His holy hill." He and his men camped
amidst dangers, but one unslumbering Helper mounted guard over their
undefended slumbers. "I laid me down and slept" there among the echoes
of the hills. "I awaked, for Jehovah sustained me;" and another night
has passed without the sudden shout of the rebels breaking the silence,
or the gleam of their swords in the starlight. The experience of
protection thus far heartens him to front even the threatening circle of
his foes around him, whom it is his pain to think of as "the people" of
God, and yet as his foes. And then he betakes himself in renewed energy
of faith to his one weapon of prayer, and even before the battle sees
the victory, and the Divine power fracturing the jaws and breaking the
teeth of the wild beasts who hunt him. But his last thought is not of
retribution nor of fear; for himself he rises to the height of serene
trust, "Salvation is of the Lord;" and for his foes and for all the
nation that had risen against him his thoughts are worthy of a true
king, freed from all personal animosity, and his words are a prayer
conceived in the spirit of Him whose dying breath was intercession for
His rebellious subjects who crucified their King, "Thy blessing be upon
Thy people."

The fourth psalm is the companion evening hymn. Its former portion
(vers. 2-4) seems to be a remonstrance addressed as if to the leaders of
the revolt ("sons of men" being equivalent to "persons of rank and
dignity"). It is the expression in vivid form, most natural to such a
nature, of his painful feeling under their slanders; and also of his
hopes and desires for them, that calm thought in these still evening
hours which are falling on the world may lead them to purer service and
to reliance on God. So forgivingly, so lovingly does he think of them,
ere he lays himself down to rest, wishing that "on their beds," as on
his, the peace of meditative contemplation may rest, and the day of
war's alarms be shut in by holy "communion with their own hearts" and
with God.

The second portion turns to himself and his followers, among whom we may
suppose some faint hearts were beginning to despond; and to them, as to
the very enemy, David would fain be the bringer of a better mind. "Many
say, Who will show us good?" He will turn them from their vain search
round the horizon on a level with their own eyes for the appearance of
succour. They must look upwards, not round about. They must turn their
question, which only expects a negative answer, into a prayer, fashioned
like that triple priestly benediction of old (Numbers vi. 24-26). His
own experience bursts forth irrepressible. He had prayed in his hour of
penitence, "Make me to hear joy and gladness" (Psa. li.); and the prayer
had been answered, if not before, yet now when peril had brought him
nearer to God, and trust had drawn God nearer to him. In his calamity,
as is ever the case with devout souls, his joy increased, as Greek fire
burns more brightly under water. Therefore this pauper sovereign,
discrowned and fed by the charity of the Gileadite pastoral chief,
sings, "Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that
their corn and wine increased." And how tranquilly the psalm closes, and
seems to lull itself to rest, "In peace I will at once lie down and
sleep, for Thou, O Jehovah, only makest me dwell safely." The growing
security which experience of God's care should ever bring, is
beautifully marked by the variation on the similar phrase in the
previous psalm. There he gratefully recorded that he had laid himself
down and slept; here he promises himself that he will lie down "in
peace;" and not only so, but that at once on his lying down he will
sleep--kept awake by no anxieties, by no bitter thoughts, but, homeless
and in danger as he is, will close his eyes, like a tired child, without
a care or a fear, and forthwith sleep, with the pressure and the
protection of his Father's arm about him.

This psalm sounds again the glad trustful strain which has slumbered in
his harp-strings ever since the happy old days of his early trials, and
is re-awakened as the rude blast of calamity sweeps through them once
more.

The sixty-third psalm is by the superscription referred to the time when
David was "in the wilderness of Judah," which has led many readers to
think of his long stay there during Saul's persecution. But the psalm
certainly belongs to the period of his reign, as is obvious from its
words, "_The king_ shall rejoice in God." It must therefore belong to
his brief sojourn in the same wilderness on his flight to Mahanaim,
when, as we read in 2 Sam., "The people were weary and hungry and
thirsty in the wilderness." There is a beautiful progress of thought in
it, which is very obvious if we notice the triple occurrence of the
words "my soul," and their various connections--"my soul thirsteth," "my
soul is satisfied," "my soul followeth hard after Thee;" or, in other
words, the psalm is a transcript of the passage of a believing soul from
longing through fruition to firm trust, in which it is sustained by the
right hand of God.

The first of these emotions, which is so natural to the fugitive in his
sorrows, is expressed with singular poetic beauty in language borrowed
from the ashen grey monotony of the waterless land in which he was. One
of our most accurate and least imaginative travellers describes it thus:
"There were no signs of vegetation, with the exception of a few reeds
and rushes, and here and there a tamarisk." This lonely land, cracked
with drought, as if gaping with chapped lips for the rain that comes
not, is the image of his painful yearning for the Fountain of living
waters. As his men plodded along over the burning marl, fainting for
thirst and finding nothing in the dry torrent beds, so he longed for the
refreshment of that gracious presence. Then he remembers how in happier
days he had had the same desires, and they had been satisfied in the
tabernacle. Probably the words should read, "Thus in the sanctuary have
I gazed upon Thee, to see Thy power and Thy glory." In the desert and in
the sanctuary his longing had been the same, but then he had been able
to behold the symbol which bore the name, "the glory,"--and now he
wanders far from it. How beautifully this regretful sense of absence
from and pining after the ark is illustrated by those inimitably
pathetic words of the fugitive's answer to the priests who desired to
share his exile. "And the king said unto Zadok, Carry back the ark of
God into the city. If I find favour in the eyes of the Lord, He will
bring me again, and show me both it and His habitation."

The fulfilment is cotemporaneous with the desire. The swiftness of the
answer is beautifully indicated in the quick turn with which the psalm
passes from plaintive longing to exuberant rapture of fruition. In the
one breath "my soul thirsteth;" in the next, "my soul is satisfied"--as
when in tropical lands the rain comes, and in a day or two what had been
baked earth is rich meadow, and the dry torrent-beds, where the white
stones glistered in the sunshine, foam with rushing waters and are edged
with budding willows. The fulness of satisfaction when God fills the
soul is vividly expressed in the familiar image of the feast of "marrow
and fatness," on which he banquets even while hungry in the desert. The
abundant delights of fellowship with God make him insensible to external
privations, are drink for him thirsty, food for his hunger, a home in
his wanderings, a source of joy and music in the midst of much that is
depressing: "My mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips." The little
camp had to keep keen look-out for nightly attacks; and it is a slight
link of connection, very natural under the circumstances, between the
psalms of this period, that they all have some references to the
perilous hours of darkness. We have found him laying himself down to
sleep in peace; here he wakes, not to guard from hostile surprises, but
in the silence there below the stars to think of God and feel again the
fulness of His all-sufficiency. Happy thoughts, not fears, hold his eyes
waking. "I remember Thee upon my bed."

The fruition heartens for renewed exercise of confidence, in which
David feels himself upheld by God, and foresees his enemies' defeat and
his own triumph. "My soul cleaveth after Thee"--a remarkable phrase, in
which the two metaphors of tenacious adherence and eager following are
mingled to express the two "phases of faith," which are really one--of
union with and quest after God, the possession which pursues, the
pursuit which possesses Him who is at once grasped and felt after by the
finite creature whose straitest narrowness is not too narrow to be
blessed by some indwelling of God, but whose widest expansion of
capacity and desire can but contain a fragment of His fulness. From such
elevation of high communion he looks down and onward into the dim
future, his enemies sunken, like Korah and his rebels, into the gaping
earth, or scattered in fight, and the jackals that were snuffing
hungrily about his camp in the wilderness gorging themselves on corpses,
while he himself, once more "king," shall rejoice in God, and with his
faithful companions, whose lips and hearts were true to God and His
anointed, shall glory in the deliverance that by the arbitrament of
victory has flung back the slanders of the rebels in their teeth, and
choked them with their own lies.

Our space forbids more than a brief reference to psalm lxii., which
seems also to belong to this time. It has several points of contact with
those already considered, _e.g._, the phrase, "sons of men," in the
sense of "nobles" (ver. 9); "my soul," as equivalent to "myself," and
yet as a kind of quasi-separate personality which he can study and
exhort; the significant use of the term "people," and the double
exhortations to his own devout followers and to the arrogant enemy. The
whole tone is that of patient resignation, which we have found
characterising David now. The first words are the key-note of the whole,
"Truly unto God my soul is silence"--is all one great stillness of
submissive waiting upon Him. It was in the very crisis of his fate, in
the suspense of the uncertain issue of the rebellion, that these words,
the very sound of which has calmed many a heart since, welled to his
lips. The expression of unwavering faith and unbroken peace is much
heightened by the frequent recurrence of the word which is variously
translated "truly," "surely," and "only." It carries the force of
confident affirmation, like the "verily" of the New Testament, and is
here most significantly prefixed to the assertions of his patient
resignation (ver. 1); of God's defence (ver. 2); of the enemies'
whispered counsels (ver. 4); to his exhortation of his soul to the
resignation which it already exercises (ver. 5); and to the triumphant
reiteration of God's all-sufficient protection. How beautifully, too,
does that reiteration--almost verbal repetition--of the opening words
strengthen the impression of his habitual trust. His soul in its silence
murmurs to itself, as it were, the blessed thoughts over and over again.
Their echoes haunt his spirit "lingering and wandering on, as loth to
die;" and if for a moment the vision of his enemies disturbs their flow,
one indignant question flung at them suffices, "How long will ye rush
upon a man? (how long) will ye all of you thrust him down as (if he
were) a bowing wall, a tottering fence?" and with a rapid glance at
their plots and bitter words, he comes back again to his calm gaze on
God. Lovingly he accumulates happy names for Him, which, in their
imagery, as well as in their repetition, remind us of the former songs
of the fugitive. "My rock," in whom I hide; "He is my salvation," which
is even more than "from Him cometh my salvation;" my "fortress," my
"glory," "the rock of my strength," "my refuge." So many phases of his
need and of God's sufficiency thus gathered together, tell how familiar
to the thoughts and real to the experience of the aged fugitive was his
security in Jehovah. The thirty years since last he had wandered there
have confirmed the faith of his earlier songs; and though the ruddy
locks of the young chieftain are silvered with grey now, and sins and
sorrows have saddened him, yet he can take up again with deeper meaning
the tones of his old praise, and let the experience of age seal with its
"verily" the hopes of youth. Exhortations to his people to unite
themselves with him in his faith, and assurances that God is a refuge
for them too, with solemn warnings to the rebels, close this psalm of
glad submission. It is remarkable for the absence of all petitions. He
needs nothing beyond what he has. As the companion psalm says, his soul
"is satisfied." Communion with God has its moments of restful
blessedness, when desire is stilled, and expires in peaceful fruition.

The other psalms of this period must be left unnoticed. The same general
tone pervades them all. In many particulars they closely resemble those
of the Sauline period. But the resemblance fails very significantly at
one point. The emphatic assertion of his innocence is gone for ever.
Pardoned indeed he is, cleansed, conscious of God's favour, and able to
rejoice in it; but carrying to the end the remembrance of his sore fall,
and feeling it all the more penitently, the more he is sure of God's
forgiveness. Let us remember that there are sins which, once done, leave
their traces on memory and conscience, painting indelible forms on the
walls of our "chambers of imagery," and transmitting results which
remission and sanctifying do not, on earth at least, wholly obliterate.
Let David's youthful prayer be ours, "Keep back Thy servant from
presumptuous sins: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from
much transgression."

It does not fall within the scope of this volume to deal with the
suppression of Absalom's revolt, nor with the ten years of rule that
remained to David after his restoration. The psalter does not appear to
contain psalms which throw light upon the somewhat clouded closing
years of his reign. One psalm, indeed, there is attributed to him, which
is, at any rate, the work of an old man--a sweet song into which mellow
wisdom has condensed its final lessons--and a snatch of it may stand
instead of any summing-up of the life by us:

  "Trust in the Lord, and do good;
   Dwell in the land, and enjoy security;
   Delight thyself also in the Lord,
   And He shall give thee the desires of thy heart.
   Commit thy way unto the Lord.

   Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him.

   I have been young and now am old,
   Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken.

   I have seen the wicked in great power,
   And spreading himself like a green tree....
   Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not."

May we not apply the next words to the psalmist himself, and hear him
calling us to look on him as he lies on his dying bed--disturbed though
it were by ignoble intrigues of hungry heirs--after so many storms
nearing the port; after so many vicissitudes, close to the unchanging
home; after so many struggles, resting quietly on the breast of God:
"Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright, for the end of that man
is peace?" Into this opal calmness, as of the liquid light of sunset,
all the flaming splendours of the hot day have melted. The music of his
songs die away into "peace;" as when some master holds our ears captive
with tones so faint that we scarce can tell sound from silence, until
the jar of common noises, which that low sweetness had deadened, rushes
in.

One strain of a higher mood is preserved for us in the historical books
that prophesy of the true King, whom his own failures and sins, no less
than his consecration and victories, had taught him to expect. The dying
eyes see on the horizon of the far-off future the form of Him who is to
be a just and perfect ruler; before the brightness of whose presence,
and the refreshing of whose influence, verdure and beauty shall clothe
the world. As the shades gather, that radiant glory to come brightens.
He departs in peace, having seen the salvation from afar. It was fitting
that this fullest of his prophecies should be the last of his strains,
as if the rapture which thrilled the trembling strings had snapped them
in twain.

And then, for earth, the richest voice which God ever tuned for His
praise was hushed, and the harp of Jesse's son hangs untouched above his
grave. But for him death was God's last, best answer to his prayer, "O
Lord, open Thou my lips;" and as that cold but most loving hand
unclothes him from the weakness of flesh, and leads him in among the
choirs of heaven, we can almost hear again his former thanksgiving
breaking from his immortal lips, "Thou hast put a new song into my
mouth," whose melodies, unsaddened by plaintive minors of penitence and
pain, are yet nobler and sweeter than the psalms which he sang here, and
left to be the solace and treasure of all generations!




INDEX.


PSALM                                                             PAGE

   iii.                                                            246

    iv.                                                            248

   vii.                                                            110

  viii.                                                             28

    xi.                                                            138

  xiii.                                                            138

    xv.                                                            177

  xvii.                                                            138

 xviii.                                                    153 and 157

   xix.                                                             24

    xx.                                                            203

  xxii.                                                            141

 xxiii.                                                             37

  xxiv.                                                            177

   xxv.                                                            138

 xxvii.                                                             89

  xxix.                                                             31

  xxxi.                                                            132

 xxxii.                                                            227

 xxxiv.                                                             86

  xxxv.                                                            139

xxxvii.                                                            259

 xxxix.                                                            236

   xli.                                                            234

    li.                                                            209

   lii.                                                             72

   liv.                                                            100

    lv.                                                            240

   lvi.                                                             77

  lvii.                                                            119

   lix.                                                             63

    lx.                                                            201

  lxii.                                                            255

 lxiii.                                                            250

  lxiv.                                                            138

lxviii.                                                            208

    cx.                                                            189

cxliii.                                                            128




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