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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
My soul, i.e. my person, as this word is every where used by a synecdoche of the part, and then the person by another synecdoche of the whole is put for the body. The soul is oft put for the body; either for the living body, as Psa_35:3 105:18, or for the carcass or dead body, as it is taken Lev_19:28 21:1 Num_5:2 6:6,9,11 9:10 19:11,13; and so it is interpreted in this very place, as it is produced, Act_2:29, &c.; Act_13:36,37.
In hell, i.e. in the grave or state of the dead, as appears,
1. From the Hebrew word scheol, which is very frequently so understood, as is undeniably evident from Gen_42:38 Num_16:30 Job_14:13 compared with Job_17:13 Psa_18:5 30:3 141:7 Ecc_9:10 Eze_32:21,27 Jon 2:2, and many other places.
2. From the following clause of this verse.
3. From Ac 2$ 13$, where it is so expounded and applied. Thine Holy One, i.e. me thy holy Son, whom thou hast sanctified and sent into the world: It is peculiar to Christ to be called the Holy One of God, Mar_1:24 Luk_4:34. To see corruption, or rottenness, i.e. to be corrupted or putrefied in the grave, as the bodies of others are. Seeing is oft put for perceiving by experience; in which sense men are said to see good, Psa_34:12, and to see death, or the grave, Psa_89:48 Luk_2:26 Joh_8:51, and to see sleep, Ecc_8:16. And the Hebrew word shochath, though sometimes by a metonymy it signifies the pit or place of corruption, yet properly and generally it signifies corruption or perdition, as Job_17:14 33:18,30 Psa 35:7 55:23 Jon_2:6, and is so rendered by the seventy Jewish interpreters, Psa_107:20 Pro_28:10 Jer_13:4 15:3 Lam_4:20 Eze_19:4 21:31. And so it must be understood here, although some of the Jews, to avoid the force of this argument, render it the pit. But in that sense it is not true; for whether it be meant of David, as they say, or of Christ, it is confessed that both of them did see the pit, i.e. were laid in the grave. And therefore it must necessarily be taken in the other sense now mentioned; and so it is properly and literally true in Christ alone, although it may in a lower and metaphorical sense be applied to David, who had a just and well-grounded confidence, that although God might bring him into great dangers and distresses, which are called the sorrows of death, and the pains of hell, Psa_116:3; yet God would not leave him to perish in or by them.