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history is also untenable. That unhappy event, together with others, belongs to the category of well-merited judgments, which came upon king and people in the reign of Jehoram; nor does the Psalm sound like a retrospective glance at the time of Jehoram from the standpoint of the time of Joash: the defeat of which it complains, is one that is now only just experienced.
Thus we seem consequently driven back to the time of David; and the question arises, whether the Psalm does not admit, with Psa 60:1-12, with which it forms a twin couple, of being understood as the offspring of a similar situation, viz., of the events which resulted from the Syro-Ammonitish war. The fact that a conflict with the foes of the kingdom in the south, viz., with the Edomites, was also mixed up with the wars with the Ammonites and their Syrian allies at that period, becomes evident from Psa 60:1. when compared with 2Sa 8:13, where the words ἐπάταξε τὴν Ἰδουμαίαν (lxx) have fallen out. Whilst David was contending with the Syrians, the Edomites came down upon the country that was denuded of troops. And from 1Ki 11:15 it is very evident that they then caused great bloodshed; for, according to that passage, Joab buried the slain and took fearful revenge upon the Edomites: he marched, after having slain them in the Valley of Salt, into Idumaea and there smote every male. Perhaps, with Hengstenberg, Keil, and others, the Psalm is to be explained from the position of Israel before this overthrow of the Edomites. The fact that in Psa 44:12 the nation complains of a dispersion among the heathen may be understood by means of a deduction from Amo 1:6, according to which the Edomites had carried on a traffic in captive Israelites. And the lofty self-consciousness, which finds expression in the Psalm, is after all best explained by the times of David; for these and the early part of the times of Solomon are the only period in the history of Israel when the nation as a whole could boast of being free and pure of all foreign influence in its worship. In the kindred Psa 60:1-12; 80 (also Ps 89), ), it is true this self-consciousness does not attain the same lofty expression in this respect Ps 40 stands perfectly alone: it is like the national mirroring of the Book of Job, and by reason of this takes a unique position in the range of Old Testament literature side