Psalms 72 - Introduction

LXXII.

At the first glance this psalm looks like one that would readily yield up not only its meaning, but its purpose and authorship. Odes in honour of royalty generally tell their own tale, and here we certainly have a prayer for a king, the son of a king, who is to be at once glorious and good, renowned and just, in whose reign peace is to “lie like a line of light from verge to verge,” plenty is to crown the year with happiness, and the empire is to be as wide abroad as the government is righteous and beneficent at home. But, making every allowance for poetical exaggeration, it is impossible to find any monarch of Israel whose reign the poem exactly describes. The name of Solomon is naturally the first to suggest itself, as it did to those who prefixed the inscription. Undoubtedly the memory of his imperial greatness inspired the song. The psalmist looks for deliverance not to the sword, but to a wise and understanding heart. He prays that the king may be animated by the spirit which dictated Solomon’s choice to discern between good and evil; and he perceives that the only solid foundation for national prosperity is a just administration. Internal justice, external power and prosperity, would go hand in hand. All this might have been breathed as a prayer at Solomon’s succession; but the tone (Psalms 72:12) is hardly such as we should expect at the close of David’s reign. These verses read rather like the hope of one who had seen the nation sunk in distress, and who hailed the advent of a young prince as bearing promise of restoration and renewal of power and glory. Josiah has been suggested by Ewald, as meeting these conditions; a foreign prince, Ptolemy Philadelphus, by Hitzig and Reuss. But the view which regards the psalm as Messianic, i.e., descriptive of the peace and plenty and power anticipated under a prince as yet unborn and unknown, who was to come of David’s line to restore the ancient glory of the theocracy, best suits its general tone. The verse is easy and graceful, with a regular parallelism, but an uncertain division of stanzas.

Title. — According to usage, this inscription can mean only of Solomon, denoting authorship. (See Introduction.)