low and black as ever, they
are touched with light. "He will send from heaven and save me." But even
while this happy certainty dawns upon him, the contending fears, which
ever lurk hard by faith, reassert their power, and burst in, breaking
the flow of the sentence, which by its harsh construction indicates the
sudden irruption of disturbing thoughts. "He that would swallow me up
reproaches (me)." With this two-worded cry of pain--prolonged by the
very unusual occurrence, in the middle of a verse, of the "Selah," which
is probably a musical direction for the accompaniment--a billow of
terror breaks over his soul; but its force is soon spent, and the hope,
above which for a moment it had rolled, rises from the broken spray like
some pillared light round which the surges dash in vain. "God shall send
forth His mercy and His truth"--those two white-robed messengers who
draw nigh to all who call on Him. Then follows in broken words, the true
rendering of which is matter of considerable doubt, a renewed picture of
his danger:

(4) (With) my soul--among lions will I lie down.
Devourers are the sons of men;
Their teeth a spear and arrows,
And their tongue a sharp sword

The psalmist seems to have broken off the construction, and instead of
finishing the sentence as he began it, to have substituted the first
person for the third, which ought to have followed "my soul." This
fragmentary construction expresses agitation of spirit. It may be a
question whether the "lions" in the first clause are to be regarded as a
description of his enemies, who are next spoken of without metaphor as
sons of men who devour (or who "breathe out fire"), and whose words are
cutting and wounding as spear and sword. The analogy of the other psalms
of this period favours such an understanding of the words. But, on the
other hand, the reference preferred by Delitzsch and others gives great
beauty. According to that interpretation, the fugitive among the savage
cliffs prepares himself for his nightly slumbers in calm confidence, and
lays himself down there in the cave, while the wild beasts, whose haunt
it may have been, prowl without, feeling himself safer among them than
among the more ferocious "sons of men," whose hatred has a sharper tooth
than even theirs. And then this portion of the psalm closes with the
refrain, "Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let Thy glory be
above all the earth." A prayer that God would show