Romans 11:9-10

“ And David saith, Let their table be made a snare and a trap and a stumbling-block, and [so] a just recompense unto them! Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see; and bow down their back alway! ”

Paul ascribes this psalm to David, according to the title and Jewish tradition; he does not meddle with criticism. Is this title erroneous, as is alleged by our modern savants? They allege Romans 11:33-36, which close the psalm, and in which we have mention made of the liberated captives who shall rebuild and possess the cities of Judah, expressions which naturally apply to the time of the captivity. But, on the other hand, the author speaks “of that zeal for the house of God which eats him up;” which supposes the existence of the temple. Nay more, the adversaries who oppress him are expressly designated as members of God's people: they are “his brethren, his mother's children” (Romans 11:8); they shall be blotted out of the book of life” (Romans 11:28); their name was therefore inscribed in it; they are not the Chaldeans. Finally, what is stronger: those enemies, his fellow-countrymen, enjoy perfect external well-being; while they give the Psalmist, the object of their hatred, gall to drink, they themselves sit at table and sing as they drink strong drink (Romans 11:22; Romans 11:11-12); a singular description of the state of the Jews in captivity! It must therefore be held that the last verses of the psalm (Romans 11:33-36) were, like the last and perfectly similar verses of Psalms 51 (Romans 11:18-19), added to the hymn later, when the exiled people applied it to their national sufferings. The original description is that of the righteous Israelite suffering for the cause of God; and his adversaries, to whom the curses contained in the two verses quoted by Paul refer, are all the enemies of this just one within the theocracy itself, from Saul persecuting David down to the Jewish enemies of Jesus Christ and His Church.

The table is, in the Psalmist's sense, the emblem of the material pleasures in which the ungodly live. Their life of gross enjoyments is to become to them what the snares of all sorts with which men catch them are to the lower animals. It is difficult to avoid thinking that the apostle is here applying this figure in a spiritual sense; for the punishment which he has in view is of a spiritual nature; it is, moral hardening. The cause of such a judgment must therefore be something else than simple worldly enjoyment; it is, as we have seen, the proud confidence of Israel in their ceremonial works. The table is therefore, in Paul's sense, the emblem of presumptuous security founded on their fidelity to acts of worship, whether the reference be to the table of showbread as a symbol of the Levitical worship in general, or to the sacrificial feasts. These works, on which they reckoned to save them, are precisely what is ruining them.

The Psalmist expresses the idea of ruin only by two terms: those of snare and net (in the LXX. παγίς, net, and σκάνδαλον, stumbling-block). Paul adds a third, θήρα, strictly prey, and hence: every means of catching prey. This third term is taken from Psalms 35:8 (in the LXX), where it is used as a parallel to παγίς, net, in a passage every way similar to that of Psalms 69. By this accumulation of almost synonymous terms, Paul means forcibly to express the idea that it will be impossible for them to escape, because no kind of snare will be wanting; first the net (παγίς), then the weapons of the chase (θήρα), and finally the trap which causes the prey to fall into the pit (σκάνδαλον).

The Hebrew and the LXX., as we have said, contain only two of these terms, the first and the third. Instead of the second, the LXX. read another regimen: εἰς ἀνταπόδοσιν, for a recompense. Whence comes this expression? They have evidently meant thereby to render the word lischelomim, for those who are in security, which in the Hebrew text is put between the words snare and stumbling-block. Only to render it as they have done, they must have read leschilloumim (probably after another reading). This substantive is derived from the verb schalam, to be complete, whence in the Pïel: to recompense. It therefore signifies recompense; hence this εἰς ἀνταπόδοσιν, for a recompense, in the LXX. Paul borrows from them this expression; but he puts it at the end as a sort of conclusion: “and so in just retribution.” In Romans 11:10 the apostle continues to apply to the present judgment of Israel (hardening) the expressions of the Psalmist. The reference is to the darkening of the understanding which follows on the insensibility of the heart (Romans 11:9), to such a degree that the Gentiles, with their natural good sense, understand the gospel better than those Jews who have been instructed and cultivated by divine revelation.

The last words: bow down their reins, are an invocation; they refer to the state of slavish fear in which the Jews shall be held as long as this judgment of hardening which keeps them outside of the gospel shall last. They are slaves to their laws, to their Rabbins, and even to their God (Romans 8:15). We must beware of thinking, as Meyer does, that this chastisement is their punishment for the rejection of the Messiah. It is, on the contrary, that rejection which is in the apostle's eyes the realization of the doom of hardening previously pronounced upon them. As St. John shows, John 12:37 et seq., the Jews would not have rejected Jesus if their eyes had not been already blinded and their ears stopped. It could only be under the weight of one of those judgments which visit man with a spirit of torpor, that any could fail to discern the raying forth of the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ, as the apostle declares, 2 Corinthians 4:4. In this passage he ascribes the act of blinding to the god of this world, who has cast a veil over the spirit of his subjects. This means, as is seen in the book of Job, that God proves or punishes by leaving Satan to act, and it may be by the spirit of torpor mentioned in Romans 11:8, as with that spirit of lying whom the Lord sent to seduce Ahab in the vision of the prophet Micaiah, 1 Kings 22:10 et seq. However this may be, the rejection of Jesus by the Jews was the effect, not the cause of the hardening. The cause

Paul has clearly enough said, Romans 9:31-33 was the obstinacy of their self-righteousness.