8 By such evil-doing shall they escape? — In wrath cast down the peoples, Elohim !
9 My fugitive life Thou hast told,
My tears are laid up in Thy bottle — Are they not in Thy book?
10 Then must mine enemies fall back in the day that I call ; This I know : that Elohim is for me.
11 Through Elohim do I praise the word, Through Jalive do I praise the word.
12 In Elohim do I trust without fearing : What can men do unto me ?
13 Binding upon me, Elohim, are Thy vows; I will pay thank-offerings unto Thee.
14 For Thou hast delivered my soul from death, Yea my feet from falling,
That I might walk before Elohim in the light of life.
To Ps 55, which is Psa 56:7 gives utterance to the wish: “Oh that I had wings like a dove,” etc., no Psalm could be more appropriately appended, according to the mode of arrangement adopted by the collector, than Psa 56:1-13, the musical inscription of which runs: To the Precentor, after “The silent dove among the far off,” by David, a Michtam. רחקים is a second genitive, cf. Isa 28:1, and either signifies distant men or longiqua, distant places, as in Psa 65:6, cf. נעימים, Psa 16:6. Just as in Psa 58:2, it is questionable whether the punctuation אלם has lighted upon the correct rendering. Hitzig is anxious to read אלם, “Dove of the people in the distance;” but אלם, people, in spite of Egli's commendation, is a word unheard of in Hebrew, and only conjectural in Phoenician. Olshausen's אלם more readily commends itself, “Dove of the distant terebinths.” As in other like inscriptions, על does not signify de (as Joh. Campensis renders it in his paraphrase of the Psalms [1532] and frequently): Praefecto musices, de columba muta quae procul avolaverat), but secundum; and the coincidence of the defining of the melody with the situation of the writer of the Psalm is explained by the consideration that the melody is chosen with reference to that situation. The lxx (cf. the Targum),
