Commentary on Psalms Volume 3 John Calvin
JOHN CALVIN
me, that I might fall: 390 but Jehovah helped me. 14. God is my strength and song, and he hath saved me.
10. All nations compassed me In these verses he relates the wonderful deliverance which he had received, that all might know that it was not of human but divine origin. Once and again he declares, that he was compassed not by a few persons, but by a vast multitude. The people, being all inflamed with anger and fury against him, compassed him so that there were no means for his escape, and he could procure help from no quarter but from heaven. Some consider his complaint, that all nations were adverse to him, as referring to the neighboring nations, by whom we know David was surrounded with danger. His meaning, in my opinion, is, that the whole world was adverse to him; because he places God's help alone in opposition to the deadly and furious hatred both of his own countrymen and of the neighboring nations towards him, so that there was not a spot upon the earth where he could be safe. There was, it is true, no army, collected from several nations, besieging him; still he had no peaceable retreat except among the haunts of wild beasts, from which also he was driven by terror. And in proportion to the number of persons he encountered were the snares laid to entrap him. It is, therefore, not wonderful that he said he was compassed by all nations. Besides, this elliptical mode of speaking is more forcible than if he had merely said that he trusted in God, by reason of which he had become victorious. By publicly mentioning the name of God alone, he maintains that no other means of deliverance were within his reach, and that but for his interposition he must have perished. It appears to me preferable to translate the particle,כיki, affirmatively. 391 "Besieged as I am on all sides by the world, yet if the power of God help me, that will be more than adequate for the extermination of all mine enemies." Their obstinate and implacable hatred is pointed out by him in the repetition of the phrase compassed about, and their outrageous fury is set forth in comparing them to bees, which, though not possessed of much strength, are very fierce, and when in their insensate fury they attack a person, they occasion no little fear. He shortly adds, they are quenched as a fire of thorns, which at first
Hammond reads, "Thou hast thrust sore at me to ruin or filling." "The full import of",לנפלsays he, "is best expressed gerundially, ad cadendum, to falling, not only to express their desire who thus pressed and thrust at him, that he might fall, for that is supposed in the violence of their impulsion, expressed by repetition of the verbדחיתני ,דחהthou hast by thrusting thrust me, but to signify the event or success of it, that I was falling, or ready to fall. Του πεσεῖν, say the LXX. in the infinitive mood gerundially, and so the Chaldee and the Syriac; and so the Jewish Arab, 'It is a long while that thou hast driven or thrust me to falling.' And this expresses the greatness and seasonableness of the deliverance, that when he was falling, God helped him."
"I takeכיto be an affirmative adverb, surely, and not a conjunction." — Lowth.