THE SADDEST PSALM IN THE PSALTER

469

Longsuffering, and plenteous in lovingkindness and truth. O turn unto me, and have mercy upon me;

Give thy strength unto thy servant,

And save the son of thine handmaid. Shew me a token for good;

That they who hate me may see it and be ashamed, Because thou, O Lord, hast helped me and comforted me.

§ 23. The eighty-eighth Psalm.-Unless the true close of the following Psalm (lxxxviii) be lost, it is the saddest in the Psalter. Prayer brings comfort. Therefore the petitions of the Psalmists end in hope. But the eighty-eighth Psalm is an exception to the rule; it concludes as it had begun in lamentation and gloom.

O Lord my God, I have cried for help by day,
And by night my cry is before thee.
Let my prayer come before thee;

Incline thine ear unto my cry.

For my soul is full of troubles,

And my life draweth nigh unto Sheol.

I am counted with them that go down into the pit;
I am as a man that hath no strength.

I am likened unto the dead,

Like the slain that lie in the grave,
Whom thou rememberest no more:
And they are cut off from thy hand.

Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit,
In darkness, in the deeps.

Thou hast poured forth thy wrath upon me,

And thou hast let all thy waves pass over me.

Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me;
Thou hast made me an abomination unto them:
I am shut up, and I cannot come forth.
Mine eye wasteth away by reason of affliction:
Lord, I have called daily upon thee,

I have stretched out my hands unto thee.

Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead,
Shall the shades arise and praise thee?

Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave,
Or thy faithfulness in Abaddon?

Shall thy wonders be known in the dark,

And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?

But unto thee have I cried, O Lord;

And in the morning doth my prayer come before thee. Lord, why castest thou off my soul,

Why hidest thou thy face from me?

I am afflicted and ready to die;

I suffer thy terrors; I am benumbed.
Thy fierce wrath goeth over me;
Thy terrors have destroyed me.
They surround me like water all the day;

They compass me about together.

Thou hast put far from me lover and friend;

Mine acquaintance hast thou withheld from me.

Abaddon (literally, destruction) is a poetical synonym for Sheol, the land of the shades. The Psalmist means to say: Is God going to secure the continuance of his praise and to preserve his fidelity to Israel by the miracle of a resurrection of the dead? If all Israel upon earth is to die and be cut off entirely, what resource will there be but to awaken the dead? But to the Psalmist this is a reductio ad absurdum. The hope of immortality in our sense of the word had not yet dawned. The dwellers in Sheol feel neither joy nor sorrow. The shades have forgotten God. From Sheol can come forth no praise. But now, as we read these mournful words, the hope is resurgent and strong within our souls: God's lovingkindness shall be declared beyond the grave. He will show wonders to the dead.

§ 24. The ninetieth Psalm: Domine, refugium.'-We now pass from the second to the third collection, out of which, however, there will be only six Psalms to include in our present group. Of these the first (xc) has for some not clearly ascertainable reasons received the heading, 'A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.' But it must have been written many centuries after Moses, when the community of Israel was fully formed, and when its religious consciousness had been trained and matured by many ages of prophetic teaching and historic experience. One of the many gloomy moments in the long Persian period may be its date. The prayer for deliverance, which is the culmination of the Psalm,

MAN PASSES: GOD ABIDES

471

is prefaced by an impressive reflection upon the successive generations of man as they journey in rapid and ceaseless movement from the birth to the grave. The Psalmist is still somewhat oppressed by the phantom or nightmare of the divine wrath; he had not sufficiently realized the doctrine of God's unity so as to see that, God's justice and God's mercy being one and the same, 'wrath' and 'anger' are terms essentially inapplicable to the divine being. But the brevity of life and the lessons which that brevity teaches remain the same as of old. We too may pray like the Psalmist: 'So teach us to number our days, that we may get us an heart of wisdom.'

Lord, thou hast been our refuge

In all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

Or the earth and the world were born,

Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man back to dust:

And sayest, Return, ye children of men.'

For a thousand years in thy sight

Are but as yesterday as it passeth away,

And as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they become as

a sleep;

They are like grass which groweth up.

In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up,

In the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger,

And by thy wrath are we troubled.

Thou hast set our iniquities before thee,

Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days pass away in thy wrath;
We spend our years as a sigh.

The days of our years are threescore years,

Or if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
Yet is their pride but labour and vanity,
For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Who knoweth the power of thine anger,
Or thy wrath as the fear of thee befitteth?
So teach us to number our days,

That we may get us an heart of wisdom.

Return, O Lord, how long?

And let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy;

That we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us,

And the years wherein we have seen evil.

Let thy work appear unto thy servants,

And thy glory unto their children.

And let the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us: And prosper thou the work of our hands;

Yea, prosper thou our handiwork.

The opening verses of this Psalm suggested the famous hymn, 'O God, our help in ages past,' which I will here quote in full. O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home!

Beneath the shadow of thy throne

Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is thine arm alone,
And our defence is sure.

Before the hills in order stood,
Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting thou art God,
To endless years the same.

A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;

Short as the watch that ends the night

Before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come;

Be thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.

I wish this beautiful hymn were sung in our synagogues.

THE WORLD'S FUNERAL HYMN

473

It is well worth while to quote the probably accurate explanation of this Psalm by Professor Wellhausen: From the conclusion it is clear that the community is speaking. Because heavy misfortune has been long weighing it down, and God does not manifest his countenance or his hand, the people feel that his wrath rests upon them. But the fortunes of men in general are blended with the lot that history has assigned to the community. And the wrath of God which his people feel is not a mere transient and extraordinary misfortune affecting Israel alone; it is the abiding and inevitable misery of human life. This conveys the impression that God's relation to Israel is neither more nor less close than his relation to men in general. The specific Israelitish way of looking at things is lost in the universal, but comes up again at the close. These inconsistencies make it difficult to point out a logical connexion of ideas. In several places we can do no more than indicate the psychological association of ideas, the pathology of the writer's mind. But this does not diminish the deep impression which the Psalm makes.'

I will also quote the comments of the 'Four Friends,' whose edition of the Psalter contains many helpful thoughts. This has been called the funeral hymn of the world. The troubles of the times in which the Psalmist's life had been cast made him realize to the full the great truth of the frailty of man and the transitoriness of all that is human. This truth has a far different significance to the spiritual and to the worldly man. To the worldly man it brings either despair or recklessness; a folding of the hands in fatalistic indifference, or the spirit of "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." To the spiritual man it is the counterpart of the higher truth of the eternity of God; the lesson it teaches him is not despair but resignation; not fatalism or frivolity but faith and earnestness. The criterion of man's greatness is not his power of resistance to God, but his power to co-operate with God's work and to bring his own will into harmony with the will of God. The highest prayer which man can offer to God is Thy will be done,' and it is only when the union between the human and the divine will is complete that the work of man can gain a blessing for itself and exert a lasting influence on the world.'

§ 25. The ninety-fourth Psalm.-In the following Psalm (xciv) it is very difficult to say whether the Psalmist seeks to be delivered from external or internal foes, or whether both classes of enemies are alluded to. In the last supposition the transitions would be very abrupt; yet there are some passages which must certainly refer to internal or native oppressors, while there