Page:04.BCOT.KD.PoeticalBooks.vol.4.Writings.djvu/147

back upon a sleepless, tearful night. It consists of three strophes. In the middle one, which is a third longer than the other two, the poet, by means of a calmer outpouring of his heart, struggles on from the cry of distress in the first strophe to the believing confidence of the last. The hostility of men seems to him as a punishment of divine wrath, and consequently (but this is not so clearly expressed as in Ps 38, which is its counterpart) as the result of his sin; and this persecution, which to him has God's wrath behind it and sin as the sting of its bitterness, makes him sorrowful and sick even unto death. Because the Psalm contains no confession of sin, one might be inclined to think that the church has wrongly reckoned it as the first of the seven (probably selected with reference to the seven days of the week) Psalmi paenitentiales (Psa 6:1, Psa 32:1, Psa 38:1, Psa 51:1, Psa 102:1, Psa 130:1, Psa 143:1). A. H. Francke in his Introductio in Psalterium says, it is rather Psalmus precatorius hominis gravissimi tentati a paenitente probe distinguendi. But this is a mistake. The man who is tempted is distinguished from a penitent man by this, that the feeling of wrath is with the one perfectly groundless and with the other well-grounded. Job was one who was tempted thus. Our psalmist, however, is a penitent, who accordingly seeks that the punitive chastisement of God, as the just God, may for him be changed into the loving chastisement of God, as the merciful One.
We recognise here the language of penitently believing prayer, which has been coined by David. Compare Psa 6:2 with Psa 38:2; Psa 6:3 with Psa 41:5; Psa 6:5 with Psa 109:26; Psa 6:6 with Psa 30:10; Psa 6:7 with Psa 69:4; Psa 6:8 with Psa 31:10; Psa 6:10 with Psa 35:4, Psa 35:26. The language of Heman's Psalm is perceptibly different, comp. Psa 6:6 with Psa 88:11-13; Psa 6:8 with Psa 88:10. And the corresponding strains in Jeremiah (comp. Psa 6:2, Psa 38:2 with Jer 10:24; Psa 6:3 and Psa 6:5 with Jer 17:14; Psa 6:7 with Jer 45:3) are echoes, which to us prove that the Psalm belongs to an earlier age, not that it was composed by the prophet (Hitzig). It is at once probable, from the almost anthological relationship in which Jeremiah stands to the earlier literature, that in the present instance also he is the reproducer. And this idea is confirmed by the fact that in Jer 10:25,