spite of the unsuitable grammatical connection, retained, just as יחדּו and כּלּם, without regard to the suffixes, signify “together” and “all together” (Böttcher). Certainly the poet delights in difficulties of style, of which quite sufficient remain to him without adding this to the list. It is also not clear whether Psa 49:20 is intended to be taken as a relative clause intimately attached to אבותיו, or as an independent clause. The latter is admissible, and therefore to be preferred: there are the proud rich men together with their fathers buried in darkness for ever, without ever again seeing the light of a life which is not a mere shadowy life.
The didactic discourse now closes with the same proverb as the first part, Psa 49:13. But instead of בּל־ילין the expression here used is ולא יבין, which is co-ordinate with בּיקר as a second attributive definition of the subject (Ew. §351, b): a man in glory and who has no understanding, viz., does not distinguish between that which is perishable and that which is imperishable, between time and eternity. The proverb is here more precisely expressed. The gloomy prospect of the future does not belong to the rich man as such, but to the worldly and carnally minded rich man. (In the Hebrew, v.1 is the designation 'To the leader:...'; from then on v.1-8 in English translation corresponds to v.2-9 in the Hebrew)
Psalm 50
Divine Discourse concerning the True Sacrifice and Worship
With the preceding Psalm the series of the Korahitic Elohim-Psalms of the primary collection (Psa 1:1) closes. There are, reckoning Psa 42:1-11 and Psa 43:1-5 as one Psalm, seven of them (Psa 42:1). They form the principal group of the Korahitic Psalms, to which the third book furnishes a supplement, bearing in part an Elohimic (Psa 84:1-12) and in part a Jehovic impress (Psa 85:1-13; Ps 87:1-88:18). The Asaphic Psalms, on the contrary, belong exclusively to the Elohimic style of Psalms, but do not, however, all stand together: the principal group of them is to be found in the third book (Psa 73:1), and the primary collection contains only one of them, viz., Ps 50, which is here placed immediately after Ps 49 on account of several points of mutual relationship, and more especially because the prominent
