undesigned coincidence of phrase and thought, David in the Psalm (lix. 13) prays, "Let them know that God ruleth in Facob unto the ends of the earth;" just as in his conflict with Goliath he said, "The Lord will deliver thee into mine hand, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel."

I

How completely at last the respective portions of the godly and the ungodly are reversed! In 1 Sam. xxiv. 14, David says, "After whom is the king of Israel come out? after a dead dog?" But in the end it is Saul's seed, Mephibosheth, who uses the same abject term (2 Sam. ix. 8) to designate himself before David, then king of Israel: "What is thy servant, that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?" and again (2 Sam. xix. 28), “For all of my father's house were but dead men before my lord the king, yet didst thou set thy servant among them that did eat at thy table." Thus was fulfilled the sentence of David's Psalm (cix. 10): "Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread out of their desolate places;" i.e., amidst the ruins of their once richly supplied mansions.

Again, in PSALM XXXI. 8, David prays, "Thou hast not shut me up (D) into the hand of the enemy." When we turn to the independent history (I Sam. xxiii. 7, 11, 12), we find the same phrase attributed to David: "Will the men of Keilah shut me up and my men into the hand of Saul? And the Lord said, They will shut thee up" (7). The correspondence of language is remarkable: Saul had said, when David fled to Keilah, "God hath delivered him into mine hand; for he is shut in (the same Hebrew) by entering into a town that hath gates and bars." But Jehovah counselled David, "They will shut thee up;" i.e., deliver thee up. So by Jehovah's counsel David escaped from Keilah to a mountain in the wilderness of Ziph. Then truly he could say, in the language of the thirty-first Psalm, "Thou hast set my feet in a large room." However straitened the steps of the believer be now, there is awaiting him the heavenly Rehoboth (room) (Gen. xxvi. 22), the many mansions of the Father's house,

whereinto no enemy shall enter, and whence no friend shall depart.

It is remarkable that in 1 Sam. xxiii. 11, 12, "Will the men of Keilah deliver me up into Saul's hand?" the Hebrew for 'men' is Baali. Doubtless the Baalites are meant-i.e., the Canaanite portion alone of the people of Keilah; the latter are designated (ver. 5) the inhabitants of Keilah. To the votaries of Baal there, David's devotion to Jehovah, and the presence of the sacred ephod with his priest Abiathar, must have been most obnoxious. It is true, David, in spite of his men's protest of their weakness, had “gone down" (Keilah was in the Shephelah, or lower hills: mark the accuracy of the phrase, ver. 4, 6), and, under Jehovah's counsel and guidance, saved Keilah from the Philistine hosts who were robbing their threshing-floors of the corn for which the Judæan lowland was famed. But the Baalite faction, casting away all gratitude to their deliverer, would have shut him up into his persecutor's hand. Like the Antitype, David was betrayed by those whom he came to save. But Jehovah baffled this treachery, and Saul's presumptuous hope that Providence would minister to his gratuitous and murderous malice. How exact, yet how palpably undesigned, the coincidence of language and allusion, stamping the genuineness of both the Psalm and the history, in Ps. xxxi. 6, 8, 21: "I have hated them that regard lying vanities (as the Baalites: compare 2 Kings xvii. 15; Jonah ii. 8): but I trust in Jehovah. Thou hast not shut me up into the hand of the enemy. Blessed be Jehovah for He hath shown me His marvellous kindness in a strong city" (the very description of Keilah, which was so strong, that not merely a band, but "the armies of the Philistines," assailed it (1 Sam. xxiii. 3): now El-Khuweilifeh, consisting of two Tels, or strongholds, with a valley between). Another undesigned coincidence with David's phraseology in the history (2 Sam. iv. 9, “As Jehovah liveth, who hath redeemed my soul out of all adversity,") occurs in the fifth and seventh verses of the thirty-first Psalm, "Thou hast redeemed me-Thou hast known my soul in adversities."

The Ziphites imitated the treacherous men of Keilah. Reporting David's hiding himself in the hill of Hachilah, they said, "O king, come down, and our part shall be to shut him up" (the same Hebrew again as Ps. xxxi. 8). But God reversed Saul's and their plot. Instead of David's being shut up into Saul's hand, it was Saul that was shut up into David's hand, first at Engedi, when David cut off his skirt, when he might have taken his persecutor's life, and Saul confessed, "Jehovah had shut me up (the same Hebrew again) into thine hand, and thou killedst me not " (1 Sam. xxiv. 18); again at Hachilah, where Saul lay sleeping, and Abishai said to David, "God hath shut up (the same Hebrew) thine enemy into thine hand this day" (1 Sam. xxvi. 8, margin). THE FIFTY-FOURth PSALM commemorates this deliverance from the treachery of the Ziphites. "Strangers," saith David (ver. 3), “are risen up against me: they have not set God before them." The Ziphites, who ought by ties of tribe and country to have been David's friends, acted as hostile strangers. But God was on his side. So the antitype Messiah was betrayed by His kinsmen the Jews to the heathen Romans. As God shut Him not up in the grave permanently, but raised Him up from the dead on the ground of His faultless righteousness, so will God regard all who are identified by faith with Christ, as objects of salvation, and will raise them up together with Him.

LECTURE III.

CXLIV

PSALMS XVII., XVIII., LII., LXXII., CVIII., CXLIV.

POETRY has been in most countries the earliest form of

composition, as being the easiest to retain in the memory; and compositions were in ancient ages more diffused by oral recitation than by reading, as books were scarce, and in many places unknown. It is remarkable, on the other hand, that in Israel, the oldest of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Pentateuch, have less of the poetical element than the later; so entirely has the Divine Author guarded against the suspicion of mythical admixtures, such as abound in the earliest heathen lays of all other nations. Accordingly the Epos, as having its proper sphere in a mythical heroic age, is not found in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The whole period before David furnishes but one Psalm to the Psalter, namely, that of Moses, the ninetieth Psalm : though it is probable, as we purpose hereafter to show, that the ninety-first also is the composition of Israel's leader out of Egypt. The "Book of the Wars of the Lord" (Num. xxi. 14, 17, 27), and the "Book of Jasher" (i.e., the Upright), or the Worthies of Israel (" Jeshurun," Deut. xxxii. 15; compare 1 Sam. xviii. 7; 2 Sam. i. 18), were of a secular character. David's spiritual songs gained such a hold upon the heart of the nation, that worldly lays thenceforth became in low esteem. (Compare Isa. v. 12; Amos vi. 5.) Germs of sacred song, however, existed from the beginning of the nation's history; for instance, the song of Israel at the Red Sea

(Exod. xv.), the priestly benediction (Num. vi. 22-26), Moses' chant at the moving and resting of the ark (Num. x. 35, 36), Deborah's song (Judges v.), and Hannah's (1 Sam. ii.). These prepared the way for the full outburst of psalmody subsequently, and are in part appropriated in some of the Psalms in the Psalter.

The religious awakening of the nation under Samuel and the schools of the prophets, in which music and sacred song held a prominent place (1 Sam. x. 5—11; xix. 19—24), were the immediate precursors of the golden age of psalmody under King David. Combining creative genius, as a poet, with a special gift of inspiration as a prophet, he produced the majority of the Psalms, about eighty out of the whole hundred and fifty. On his Psalms, the other psalmists (excepting, of course, Moses) mainly lean.

One element in David's chequered life especially adapted him for his work. Tried sorely himself, he could experimentally sympathise with the afflicted. It has been well said, "Where would David's Psalms have been, if he had not been persecuted?" Representing in his own person the righteous principle assailed by the ungodly, he teaches believers of all subsequent times how to cast themselves on God, in strong confidence of the final triumph of righteousness over wrong. Merging his individual feelings in those of the general communion of saints, whose mouthpiece under the Spirit he is, he alludes to personal details only in such a way as to apply them to the whole Church; so that his poems are liturgical, rather than lyrical-the utterances designed by God for the Church, rather than the delineation of mere private sensibilities.

Still coincidences do occur in the Psalms, marking David's individuality, and, by their palpable undesignedness, identifying the. David of the Psalms with the David of the history. Thus, following up the persecutions which he endured from Saul, and which suggested so many of his Psalms, take THE FIFTY-SECOND PSALM. The title tells us what the occasion was which immediately suggested its composition.

It is