g to such traits as tortured limbs
and burning thirst, pierced hands and parted garments, has driven some
critics to the hypothesis that we have here a psalm of the exile
describing either actual sufferings inflicted on some unknown confessor
in Babylon, or in figurative language the calamities of Israel there.
But the Davidic origin is confirmed by many obvious points of
resemblance with the psalms which are indisputably his, and especially
with those of the Sauline period, while the difficulty of finding
historical facts answering to the emphatic language is evaded, not met,
by either assuming that such facts existed in some life which has left
no trace, or by forcing a metaphorical sense on words which sound
wonderfully like the sad language of a real sufferer. Of course, if we
believe that prediction is an absurdity, any difficulty will be lighter
than the acknowledgment that we have prediction here. But, unless we
have a foregone conclusion of that sort to blind us, we shall see in
this psalm a clear example of the prophecy of a suffering Messiah. In
most of the other psalms where David speaks of his sorrows we have only
a typical foreshadowing of Christ. But in this, and in such others as
lxix. and cix. (if these are David's), we have type changing into
prophecy, and the person of the psalmist fading away before the image
which, by occasion of his own griefs, rose vast, and solemn, and distant
before his prophet gaze,--the image of One who should be perfectly all
which he was in partial measure, the anointed of God, the utterer of His
name to His brethren, the King of Israel,--and whose path to His
dominion should be thickly strewn with solitary sorrow, and reproach,
and agony, to whose far more exceeding weight of woe all his affliction
was light as a feather, and transitory as a moment. And when the
psalmist had learned that lesson, besides all the others of trust and
patience which his wanderings taught him, his schooling was nearly over,
he was almost ready for a new discipline; and the slowly-evolving
revelation of God's purposes, which by his sorrows had unfolded more
distinctly than before "the sufferings of the Messiah," was ripening for
the unveiling, in his Kinghood, of "the glory that should follow."

IX.--THE KING.

We have now to turn and see the sudden change of fortune which lifted
the exile to a throne. The heavy cloud which had brooded so long over
the doomed king broke in lightning crash