Matthew Poole Commentary - Psalms 74:5 - 74:5

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Matthew Poole Commentary - Psalms 74:5 - 74:5


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So the meaning is this, The temple was so noble a structure, that it was a great honour to any man to be employed in the meanest part of the work, though it were but in cutting down the trees of Lebanon. And this translation may seem to be favoured by the opposition in the next verse, But now, &c. But others understand the words thus translated in another sense, that every one of the enemies got renown accordingly as they showed most barbarous rage in destroying the thick wood work (which in the next verse is called the carved work) of the temple. But this seems not to suit well with the opposition between this work and that of the next verse, which is ushered in by but now. The words therefore may be (and in part are by some) rendered thus, It is known, (or manifest, Heb. It will be known; it will be published to all posterity, as matter of astonishment and admiration,) that, as one lifteth up his axe (Heb. axes, the plural number for the singular, as it is elsewhere)



upon thick trees, to cut them down. This is the first part of the similitude, called the protasis; then follows the latter part of it, called the apodosis, in the next verse. (Heb. and; which is sometimes put for a note of similitude, as in that passage of the Lord’s prayer, Mat_6:10, as it is in heaven; and oft in the book of the Proverbs) now (for though this Psalm was composed after the thing was done, yet he speaks of it as if it were now in doing, as the manner of the sacred writers frequently is, that it may be more livelily represented to men’s minds) they break down the carved works, &c. The meaning is, they neither regard the sacredness of the place, nor the exquisite curiosity and art of the work, but cut it down as indifferently and rashly as men cut down the thick and entangled boughs of the trees of the forest.