gates, your heads, obtained a meaning essentially the same as that of the voice of the crier in Isa 40:3 : Prepare ye Jahve's way, make smooth in the desert a road for our God! In the New Testament consciousness, the second appearing takes the place of the first, the coming of the Lord of Glory to His church, which is His spiritual temple; and in this Psalm we are called upon to prepare Him a worthy reception. The interpretation of the second half of the Psalm of the entry of the Conqueror of death into Hades-an interpretation which has been started by the Gospel of Nicodemus (vid., Tischendorf's Evv. apocrypha p. 306f.) and still current in the Greek church, - and the patristic interpretation of it of the εἰς οὐρανοῦς ἀνάληψις τοῦ κυρίου, do as much violence to the rules of exegesis as to the parallelism of the facts of the Old and New Testaments.
Verses 1-6
Jahve, whose throne of grace is now set upon Zion, has not a limited dominion, like the heathen deities: His right to sovereignty embraces the earth and its fulness (Psa 50:12; Psa 89:12), i.e., everything that is to be found upon it and in it.[1]
For He, הוא, is the owner of the world, because its Creator. He has founded it upon seas, i.e., the ocean and its streams, נהרות, ῥέεθρα (Jon 2:4); for the waters existed before the dry land, and this has been cast up out of them at God's word, so that consequently the solid land, - which indeed also conceals in its interior a תּהום רבּה (Gen 7:11), - rising above the surface of the sea, has the waters, as it were, for its foundation (Psa 136:6), although it would more readily sink down into them than keep itself above them, if it were not in itself upheld by the creative power of God. Hereupon arises the question, who
- ↑ In 1Co 10:26, Paul founds on this verse (cf. Psa 50:12) the doctrine that a Christian (apart from a charitable regard for the weak) may eat whatever is sold in the shambles, without troubling himself to enquire whether it has been offered to idols or not. A Talmudic teacher, B. Berachoth 35a, infers from this passage the duty of prayer before meat: He who eats without giving thanks is like one who lays hands upon קדשׁי שׁמים (the sacred things of God); the right to eat is only obtained by prayer.
