Psalms 42:4

This let me remember as I pour out my soul upon me,

How I was wont to pass on with the throng, leading them to the house of God,

With the voice of singing and thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.

He must needs give free course to his feelings, to the emotional part of his nature, as he thinks of the past. The renderings in me(A.V.) or within me(R.V.) miss the idiomatic force of the preposition which means upon me. The soul (as elsewhere the heart or the spirit) is distinguished from a man's whole -self," and regarded as acting upon it from without. See Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology, pp. 179 ff. Cp. Psalms 42:5; Psalms 42:11, Psalms 43:5; Psalms 131:2; Psalms 142:3; Lamentations 3:20; Job 30:16; Jeremiah 8:18.

How I was wont to pass on. The tense denotes that it was his customthus to conduct pilgrims to Jerusalem for the festivals. The joyousness of these processions was proverbial (Isaiah 30:29; cp. Psalms 35:10; Psalms 51:11).

But what is the connexion of thought? Is it that he indulges in the recollection of the past, as a luxury of grief, because "a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things"? Or is it not rather that the retrospect is the best antidote to the sneers of the heathen? The God, in Whose service he once found such delight, cannot really have deserted him. The verse will then form the natural transition to Psalms 42:5. Cp. Psalms 42:6, and Psalms 77:11.

Leading them. The word is found elsewhere only in Isaiah 38:15. It seems to denote the slow and stately march of a solemn procession, and may be rendered as in R.V. marg. went in procession with them, or, with a slight change of vowels, taken transitively.