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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Psalms 74:9 - 74:9
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The worst thing the poet has to complain of is that God has not acknowledged His people during this time of suffering as at other times. “Our signs” is the direct antithesis to “their sings” (Psa 74:4), hence they are not to be understood, after Psa 86:17, as signs which God works. The suffix demands, besides, something of a perpetual character; they are the instituted ordinances of divine worship by means of which God is pleased to stand in fellowship with His people, and which are now no longer to be seen because the enemies have set them aside. The complaint “there is not prophet any more” would seem strange in the period immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem, for Jeremiah's term of active service lasted beyond this. Moreover, a year before (in the tenth year of Zedekiah's reign) he had predicted that the Babylonian domination, and relatively the Exile, would last seventy years; besides, six years before the destruction Ezekiel appeared, who was in communication with those who remained behind in the land. The reference to Lam 2:9 (cf. Eze 7:26) does not satisfy one; for there it is assumed that there were prophets, a fact which is here denied. Only perhaps as a voice coming out of the Exile, the middle of which (cf. Hos 3:4; 2Ch 15:3, and besides Canticum trium puerorum, Psa 74:14 : καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν τῷ καιρῷ τούτῳ ἄρχων καὶ προφήτης καὶ ἡγούμενος) was truly thus devoid of signs or miracles, and devoid of the prophetic word of consolation, can Psa 74:9 be comprehended. The seventy years of Jeremiah were then still a riddle without any generally known solution (Dan. 9). If, however, synagogues are meant in Psa 74:8, Psa 74:9 now too accords with the like-sounding lament in the calamitous times of Antiochus (1 Macc. 4:46; 9:27; 14:41). In Psa 74:10 the poet turns to God Himself with the question “How long?” how long is this (apparently) endless blaspheming of the enemy to last? Why dost Thou draw back (viz., מִמֶּנִוּ, from us, not עָלֵינוּ, Psa 81:15) Thy hand and Thy right hand? The conjunction of synonyms “Thy hand and Thy right hand” is, as in Psa 44:4, Sirach 33:7, a fuller expression for God's omnipotent energy. This is now at rest; Psa 74:11 calls upon it to give help by an act of judgment. “Out of the midst of Thy bosom, destroy,” is a pregnant expression for, “drawing forth out of Thy bosom the hand that rests inactive there, do Thou destroy.” The Chethîb חוקך has perhaps the same meaning; for חֹוק, Arab. ḥawq, signifies, like חֵיק, Arab. ḥayq, the act of encompassing, then that which encompasses. Instead of מֵחֵֽיקְךָ (Exo 4:7) the expression is מִקֶּרֶב חיקך, because there, within the realm of the bosom, the punitive justice of God for a time as it were slumbers. On the כַלֵּה, which outwardly is without any object, cf. Psa 59:14.