Page:04.BCOT.KD.PoeticalBooks.vol.4.Writings.djvu/469

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wings ! 9 They become drunk with the fatness of Thy house,

And Thou givest them to drink of the river of Thy

10 For with Thee is the fountain of life, [pleasures. And in Thy light do we see light.

11 Lengthen out Thy mercy to those who know Thee,

And Thy righteousness to those who are upright in heart.

12 Let not the foot of pride overtake me,

And let not the hand of the wicked scare me away.

13 Behold, there have the workers of evil fallen, They are thrust down and are not able to rise.


The preceding Psalm, in the hope of speedy deliverance, put into the lips of the friends of the new kingship, who were now compelled to keep in the background, the words: “Jahve, be magnified, who hath pleasure in the well-being of His servant.” David there calls himself the servant of Jahve, and in the inscription to Psa 36:1-12 he bears the very same name: To the Precentor, by the servant of Jahve, by David. The textus receptus accents למנצח with a conjunctive Illuj; Ben-Naphtali accents it less ambiguously with a disjunctive Legarme (vid., Psalter, ii. 462), since David is not himself the מנצח. Psa 12:1-8; Psa 14:1-7 (Psa 53:1-6), Psa 36:1-12, Ps 37, form a group. In These Psalms David complains of the moral corruption of his generation. They are all merely reflections of the character of the time, not of particular occurrences. In common with Psa 12:1-8, the Psalm before us has a prophetic colouring; and, in common with Ps 37, allusions to the primeval history of the Book of Genesis. The strophe schema is 4. 5. 5. 6. 6.

Verses 1-4

Psa 36:1-4 (Hebrew_Bible_36:1-4) At the outset the poet discovers to us the wickedness of the children of the world, which has its roots in alienation from God. Supposing it were admissible to render Psa 36:2 : “A divine word concerning the evil-doing of the ungodly is in the inward parts of my heart” (נאם with a genitive of the object, like משּׂא, which is compared by Hofmann), then the difficulty of this word, so much complained of, might find the desired relief in some much more easy way than by means of the conjecture proposed by Diestel, נעם (נעם), “Pleasant is transgression to the evil-doer,” etc. But the genitive after נאם (which in Psa 110:1; [[Bible_(King_James)/Numbers|Num 24: