‏ Psalms 132:1

Prayer for the House of God and the House of David

Psa 131:1-3 designedly precedes Psalms 132. The former has grown out of the memory of an utterance of David when he brought home the Ark, and the latter begins with the remembrance of David’s humbly zealous endeavour to obtain a settled and worthy abode for the God who sits enthroned above the Ark among His people. It is the only Psalm in which the sacred Ark is mentioned. The chronicler put Psa 132:8-10 into the mouth of Solomon at the dedication of the Temple (2Ch 6:41.). After a passage borrowed from Psa 130:2 which is attached by עתּה to Solomon’s Temple-dedication prayer, he appends further borrowed passages out of Psalms 132 with ועתּה. The variations in these verses of the Psalms, which are annexed by him with a free hand and from memory (Jahve Elohim for Jahve, לנוּחך for למנוּחתך, תּשׁוּעה for צדק, בּטּוב ישׂמחוּ for ירנּנוּ), just as much prove that he has altered the Psalm, and not reversely (as Hitzig persistently maintains), that the psalmist has borrowed from the Chronicles. It is even still distinctly to be seen how the memory of Isa 55:3 has influenced the close of 2Ch 6:42 in the chronicler, just as the memory of Isa 55:2 has perhaps also influenced the close of 2Ch 6:41.

The psalmist supplicates the divine favour for the anointed of Jahve for David’s sake. In this connection this anointed one is neither the high priest, nor Israel, which is never so named (vid., Hab 3:13), nor David himself, who “in all the necessities of his race and people stands before God,” as Hengstenberg asserts, in order to be able to assign this Son of degrees, as others, likewise to the post-exilic time of the new colony. Zerubbabel might more readily be understood (Baur), with whom, according to the closing prophecy of the Book of Haggai, a new period of the Davidic dominion is said to begin. But even Zerubbabel, the פּחת יהוּדה, could not be called משׁיח, for this he was not. The chronicler applies the Psalm in accordance with its contents. It is suited to the mouth of Solomon. The view that it was composed by Solomon himself when the Ark of the covenant was removed out of the tent-temple on Zion into the Temple-building (Amyraldus, De Wette, Tholuck, and others), is favoured by the relation of the circumstances, as they are narrated in 2Ch 5:5., to the desires of the Psalm, and a close kinship of the Psalm with Ps 72 in breadth, repetitions of words, and a laboured forward movement which is here and there a somewhat uncertain advance. At all events it belongs to a time in which the Davidic throne was still standing and the sacred Ark was not as yet irrecoverably lost. That which, according to 2 Sam. 6, 2Sa 7:1, David did for the glory of Jahve, and on the other hand is promised to him by Jahve, is here made by a post-Davidic poet into the foundation of a hopeful intercessory prayer for the kingship and priesthood of Zion and the church presided over by both.

The Psalm consists of four ten-line strophes. Only in connection with the first could any objection be raised, and the strophe be looked upon as only consisting of nine lines. But the other strophes decide the question of its measure; and the breaking up of the weighty Psa 132:1 into two lines follows the accentuation, which divides it into two parts and places את by itself as being את (according to Accentssystem, xviii. 2, with Mugrash). Each strophe is adorned once with the name of David; and moreover the step-like progress which comes back to what has been said, and takes up the thread and carries it forward, cannot fail to be recognised.
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