uring the four years in which Absalom's
conspiracy was being hatched. It seems, from the forty-first, that the
pain and sorrow of his heart had brought on some serious illness, which
his enemies had used for their own purposes, and embittered by
hypocritical condolences and ill-concealed glee. The sensitive
nature of the psalmist winces under their heartless desertion of him,
and pours out its plaint in this pathetic lament. He begins with a
blessing on those who "consider the afflicted"--having reference,
perhaps, to the few who were faithful to him in his languishing
sickness. He passes thence to his own case, and, after humble confession
of his sin,--almost in the words of the fifty-first psalm,--he tells how
his sickbed had been surrounded by very different visitors. His disease
drew no pity, but only fierce impatience that he lingered in life so
long. "Mine enemies speak evil of me--when will he die, and his name
have perished?" One of them, in especial, who must have been a man in
high position to gain access to the sick chamber, has been conspicuous
by his lying words of condolence: "If he come to see me he speaketh
vanity." The sight of the sick king touched no chord of affection, but
only increased the traitor's animosity--"his heart gathereth evil to
itself"--and then, having watched his pale face for wished-for
unfavourable symptoms, the false friend hurries from the bedside to talk
of his hopeless illness--"he goeth abroad, he telleth it." The tidings
spread, and are stealthily passed from one conspirator to another. "All
that hate me whisper together against me." They exaggerate the gravity
of his condition, and are glad because, making the wish the father to
the thought, they believe him dying. "A thing of Belial" (_i.e._, a
destructive disease), "say they, is poured out upon him, and now that he
lieth, he shall rise up no more." And, sharpest pang of all, that among
these traitors, and probably the same person as he whose heartless
presence in the sick chamber was so hard to bear, should be Ahithophel,
whose counsel had been like an oracle from God. Even he, "the man of my
friendship, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread"--he, like an
ignoble, vicious mule--"has lifted high his heel" against the sick lion.

We should be disposed to refer the thirty-ninth psalm also to this
period. It, too, is the meditation of one in sickness, which he knows to
be a Divine judgment for his sin. There is little trac