Psalms 42 - Introduction

Book II.

XLII.

It is needless to waste argument on what is seen by every reader at a glance, that Psalms 42, 43 form in reality one poem. In style, in subject, in tone, they might have been recognised as from one time and pen, even if they had been separated in the collection instead of following one on the other, and even if the refrain had not marked them as parts of one composition. (For expressions and feelings interlacing, as it were, the text together, comp. Psalms 42:9; Psalms 42:2; Psalms 42:4, with 43:2, 4, 4, respectively.) The poems thus united into one are seen to have three equal stanzas. All three stanzas express the complaint of a sufferer sinking under the weight of his misfortunes; the refrain in contrast expresses a sentiment of religious resignation, of unalterable confidence in Divine protection and favour. We can even realise the very situation of the sufferer. We find him not only far from Jerusalem, and longing anxiously for return thither, but actually on the frontier, near the banks of the Jordan, not far from the sources of the river, on the great caravan route between Syria and the far east, on the slopes of Hermon. We seem to see him strain his eyes from these stranger heights to catch the last look of his own native hills, and from the tone of his regrets — regrets inspired not by worldly or even patriotic considerations, but by the forcible separation from the choral service of the Temple, we conjecture him to have been a priest or a Levite.

Title. (See title, Psalms 4, 32) “For the sons of Korah.” This is a title of Psalms 42, 44-49, 84, 85, 87, 88.

We see from 1 Chronicles 6:16, that the Korahites were, when that history was written, professional musicians. Kuenen, in History of Religion, p. 204, has pointed out that in the older documents the singers and porters are mentioned separately from the Levites (Ezra 7:7; Ezra 7:24; Ezra 10:23; Nehemiah 7:1), and it is only in those of a later date that we find them included in that tribe, when “the conviction had become established, that it was necessary that every one who was admitted in any capacity whatever into the service of the Temple should be a descendant of Levi;” the pedigrees which trace this descent cannot be relied on, and therefore we regard these “sons of Korah” (in one passage a still vaguer appellation, “children of the Korahites,” 2 Chronicles 20:19), not as lineally descendants from the Korah of Numbers 16:1, but as one of the then divisions of the body of musicians who were, according to the idea above noticed, treated as Levitical.