Introduction
To the chief Musician. A Psalm of David.
The title of this psalm assigns its authorship to David, although certain Chaldaic word-forms have led many to give it a later date. The whole, however, so well accords with the depth, originality, and pathos of David, that it seems safer to follow the internal and circumstantial evidence, and account for the dialectic peculiarities on the hypothesis that Northern Palestine might already have felt the effect, on language, of contact with their Aramean neighbours, or say, with Hengstenberg, that, “penetrated by the loftiness of his subject, the psalmist shuns also in the form what is of common and daily use.” The superscription also assigns it to the precentor, which argues against its postexilic date.
It is a review of an eventful life by a mind deeply versed in the knowledge of God and the experience of his grace. The beauty and majesty of the poetry are not in excess of the profound sensibility of gratitude and dependence, and the conceptions of God and his tender care have nothing to surpass them in holy writ. The production stands in a group of Davidic psalms placed at the end of the last collection of the Psalter for reasons that do not appear, except that their doctrine and spirit are well adapted to the wants of the exiles in their struggles to reconstruct the nation. The inscription of the Codex Alexandrinus, “of or by Zachariah,” and by a later hand “in the dispersion,” may indicate that that prophet, according to tradition, added this to the compilation of the fifth book of the psalms (as in the preceding psalm, which see) for the special use and comfort of the returned exiles.
Psalms 139:1-12 are a confession of the omniscience of God realized in the experience of the author; Psalms 139:13-18 of his creative wisdom and most minute care of the author’s developing life; Psalms 139:19-22 a solemn renunciation of the society and ways of wicked men in heart and action; Psalms 139:23-24 a prayer to be searched by this all-seeing God, and to be led by him in the ancient way.
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