Page:04.BCOT.KD.PoeticalBooks.vol.4.Writings.djvu/742

we found in Psa 68:11 represented under a figure, viz., Thy creatures dwelt therein. In other respects the two Psalms are as different as day and night. Psalms 69 is not a martial and triumphal Psalm, but a Psalm of affliction which does not brighten until near the close; and it is not the church that is the speaker here, as in the preceding Psalm, but an individual. This individual, according to the inscription, is David; and if David, it is not the ideal righteous man (Hengstenberg), but David the righteous, and that when he was unjustly persecuted by Saul. The description of suffering harmonizes in many points with the Psalms belonging to the time of Saul, even the estrangement of his nearest adherents, Psa 69:9; Psa 31:12 (cf. Psa 27:10); the fasting till he is thoroughly enfeebled, Psa 69:11; Psa 109:24; the curse upon his foes, in which respect Ps 35; Ps 69, and Ps 109 form a fearful gradation; and the inspiriting call to the saints who are his companions in suffering, Psa 69:33; Psa 22:27; Ps 31:25. Were there no doubt about Ps 40 being Davidic, then the Davidic origin of Ps 69 would at the same time be firmly established; but instead of their inscriptions לדוד being mutually confirmatory, they tend, on the contrary, to shake our confidence. These two Psalms are closely related as twin-Psalms: in both the poet describes his suffering as a sinking into a miry pit; in both we meet with the same depreciation of ceremonial sacrifice; the same method of denoting a great multitude, “more than the hairs of my head,” Psa 69:5; Psa 40:13; and the same prospect of the faith of the saints being strengthened, Psa 69:33, Psa 69:7; Psa 40:17, Psa 40:4.
But whilst in Ps 40 it is more the style and in general the outward form than the contents that militate against its Davidic authorship, in Ps 69 it is not so much in form as in subject-matter that we find much that does not accord with David's authorship. For this reason Clericus and Vogel (in his dissertation Inscriptiones Psalmorum serius demum additas videri, 1767) have long ago doubted the correctness of the לדוד; and Hitzig has more fully supported the conjecture previously advanced by Seiler, von Bengel, and others, that Psalms 69, as also Ps 40, is by Jeremiah. The following points favour this view: (1) The martyrdom which the author endured in his zeal for the house of God, in his self-mortification, and in this consuming of himself with the scorn and