e present
case that desire, which David represents as the longing of his life, was
a desire for mere bodily presence in a material temple. Indeed, the very
language seems to forbid such an interpretation. Surely the desire for
an abode in the house of the Lord--which was his one wish, which he
longed to have continuous throughout all the days of his life, which was
to surround him with a privacy of protection in trouble, and to be as
the munitions of rocks about him--was something else than a morbid
desire for an impossible seclusion in the tabernacle,--a desire fitter
for some sickly mediaeval monarch who buried his foolish head and faint
heart in a monastery than for God's Anointed. We have seen an earlier
germ of the same desire in the twenty-third psalm, the words of which
are referred to here; and the interpretation of the one is the
interpretation of the other. The psalmist breathes his longing for the
Divine fellowship, which shall be at once vision, and guidance, and
hidden life in distress, and stability, and victory, and shall break
into music of perpetual praise.

[J] "The fourth verse in its present form _must_ have been written after
the temple was built."--"The Psalms chronologically arranged," p.
68--following Ewald, in whose imperious criticism that same naked "must
have been," works wonders.

If, then, we are not obliged by the words in question to adopt the
later date, there is much in the psalm which strikingly corresponds with
the earlier, and throws beautiful illustration on the psalmist's mood at
this period. One such allusion we venture to suppose in the words (ver.
2),

"When the wicked came against me to devour my flesh,
My enemies and my foes,--they stumbled and fell;"

which have been usually taken as a mere general expression, without any
allusion to a specific event. But there was one incident in David's life
which had been forced upon his remembrance by his recent peril at
Gath--his duel with Goliath, which exactly meets the very peculiar
language here. The psalm employs the same word as the narrative, which
tells how the Philistine "arose, and came, and drew near to David." The
braggart boast, "I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air and the
beasts of the fields," is echoed in the singular phrase of the psalm;
and the emphatic, rapid picture, "they stumbled and fell," is at once a
reminiscence of the hour when the stone crashed through the thick
forehead, "and he fell upo