This is a pure Hebrew word, and written exactly as it is here. The translators of the Bible have thought proper to preserve, entire as they found it. We find it scattered up and down in the book of the Psalms no less than seventy times; sometimes several times in one Psalm, and in many of the Psalms not at all. It is three times also in this third chapter of Habakkuk, and no where else that I remember in all the Scripture.
It would furnish matter for a separate treatise to bring into one view all that hath been said upon this word Selah; and after all we should be still left to conjecture. Some ancient writers have considered it as a word of particular observation, as if Selah meant to tell the reader to pause, said consider what went before. But this opinion is liable to great objection; for in this case David and Habakkuk are the only writers that thus impress consideration on their Readers, and they that always, neither at what we should consider the most striking parts of their writings: and if this were indeed the sense of Selah, how comes it that not one of the Lord's servants have ever used?
Others, and that a great majority of writers on Scripture, have concluded that the word Selah had reference to the music in the temple-service, and was a note of the ancient psalmody, but which now and for a long time, hath lost its use. This opinion doth not seem more satisfactory than the former; for supposing this to be the case, it were unaccountable that the Holy Ghost should have uniformly watched the word so as to preserve it with equal care as the Scriptures themselves with which the word is connected.
One class more have concluded that the word Selah means an end, not unlike the Amen. And though there might seem an objection to this, in that the word is more frequently found in the middle part of the psalm or hymn, and not at the last verse, yet, say they, the sense of that part ends there. I humbly conceive that this explanation, though in part it may be right, yet is not wholly so. If the word Selah means the end, perhaps it may be found not to mean the end of the Psalm where it stands, but to a higher end, even pointing to him who is "the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth," and to whom the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the Psalms, all refer as the end. (Luke 24:44) He is the great end, no doubt, as well as the beginning, in his mediatorial character, of all the creation of God, the Amen, and the faithful witness of heaven. (Revelation 3:14) But here I leave the subject. I am persuaded the word Selah is important; and I am inclined to thin, like some other words preserved to us in the Psalms that it refers to Christ. If the reader wishes to look at these other words, let him turn to the word Musician.