Chapter 10 Soul-prosperity: Reading Psalm 1 with Matthew Henry
George J. Brooke
1. Introduction
It is far too general to assert that ‘[s]ince the Reformation … the story of salvation has gradually turned from a message of socio-political liberation into one of inward personal piety’,1 but it is fair to say that Matthew Henry’s reading of Psalm 1 is characterized overall by his concern for that inward personal piety that takes priority over extravagant external shows of religious devotion or comments on the contemporary political scene. According to his diary, Henry began writing up his work on the Psalms on the 11 December 1708, working on Psalm 1 on 13 December. He finished work on the book of Psalms on 23 September 1709, but spent time revising his material from 28 September until 5 October that year. It is intriguing to note the dates and to observe how little of the political and military events of the time (such as union with Scotland, the successes of the Duke of Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession, and the ongoing enclosure of land, especially woodland), seem to impinge on his work.2 The absence of all that seems to be a further indication of the priority he did indeed give to personal piety, which for him was both the locus and the exemplification of the experience of redemption, and which in the central climax of his commentary on Psalm 1 he labels ‘soul-prosperity’.
2. Matthew Henry and Psalm 1
A. Text
There are two points to be mentioned concerning the text of the Psalms that Henry used in his commentary. A first point to note is that Henry uses the translation of the Psalms as provided in the Authorized King James Version, not those found in Coverdale’s rendering as preserved in some forms of the revised and reissued Anglican Book of Common Prayer of 1662. This can be seen clearly in the representation of Ps 1:2, for which the KJV reads, ‘and in his law doth he meditate day and night’, whereas Coverdale has ‘and in his law will he exercise himself day and night’. Henry’s commentary cites the psalm as: ‘and in his law doth he meditate day and night’.
At least one of the implications of this observation might be discernible in Henry’s closing introductory comment: ‘Those are not fit to put up good prayers who do not walk in good ways’.3 That sentence gives us a rare glimpse of the more particular thing that Henry was writing against. It had become customary by Henry’s time for the daily use of the Book of Common Prayer psalms in both public morning and evening prayer and in private devotion to be accompanied by set prayers. Susan Gillingham has drawn attention to one well-known edition of such psalm collects.4 For Psalm 1 the collect read:
O Holy Jesu, fountain of all blessing, the Word of the eternal Father, be pleased to sow the good seed of thy Word in our hearts, and water it with the dew of thy divinest Spirit; that while we exercise our selves in it day and night, we may be like trees planted by the water side, bringing forth in all times and seasons the fruits of a holy conversation; that we may never walk in the way of sinners, nor have fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but that when this life is ended, we may have our portion in the Congregation of the righteous, and may be able to stand upright in Judgment, through the supporting arm of thy mercy, O blessed Saviour and Redeemer Jesu.5
It seems that for Matthew Henry such liturgical use and reinforcement of the message of the psalm was better served by its study and appropriation for daily living through close attention to its details, discernible chiefly through close reading and interpretation. Nevertheless, Henry would no doubt have endorsed the sentiment of the collect, inasmuch as it promoted the improvement of manners and everyday behaviour, a concern he shared with Nicholas Stratford (1633–1707; Bishop of Chester 1689–1707) and Lawrence Fogg (1623–1718; Dean of Chester 1691–1718).6
A second point that derives from the first is that the King James Version was produced very deliberately without marginal glosses or comments of any kind in order so as not to promote any one sectarian reading or political use of the text.7 It is likely that that very absence of marginalia promoted the development of a refreshed commentary tradition in England, for which Brian Walton’s Polyglot and John Pearson’s Critici sacri were major tools and resources, amongst others.8 At the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, Matthew Henry is representative of this blossoming commentary tradition. Indeed, with regard to marginalia it is noteworthy that as a child he had longed to acquire a Bible with marginal notes, as can be seen from part of a letter he wrote to his father in 1671 at the age of nine:
Honoured Father, … All my sisters (Blessed be God) are in good health, and present their duty to yourself, and service to all their Aunts, and my two little sisters desire you if you think good to buy them each of them a Bible, and if you Please Let one have marginall notes for mee, and one of my little sisters shall have mine for such a one I desire. All the rest of the family is well and present their service to you…9
Henry was to produce far more than mere marginalia of his own.
B. Overall Context10
Psalm 1 begins the Psalter. Not surprisingly, Matthew Henry is keen to offer some general comments that provide the overall context for the psalm in the book of Psalms. He suggests that it was probably Ezra who collected the psalms together.11 Undoubtedly this is Henry’s way of reflecting the common view that the five sections of Psalms imitate the structure of the Pentateuch and that the first psalm concerns the Torah.12 Indeed, it could well be that his understanding of the correspondence of the book of Psalms with the Pentateuch is already anticipated in his opening sentence: ‘concerning good and evil, setting before us life and death, the blessing and the curse’.13 The phraseology of Deuteronomy resonates through his comments from the beginning; furthermore he takes his reader back to Gen 2–3: ‘the struggle [between] … the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent’.14 The pentateuchal structure of the book of Psalms, together with the particular Torah terminology of Ps 1, almost certainly facilitated his use of the Torah-focused Ps 119, which he cites several times in his exposition of the psalm.15 But it is notable here that Henry’s commentary does not just make explicit cross-references to other scriptural and non-scriptural passages, it is full of allusions and echoes, creating in effect a holistic and therefore profoundly theological reading of the whole Bible as canon, that is, for him, as word of God.16
C. Structure
As part of his introductory comments, Henry lays out the structure of the psalm in his characteristically methodical fashion. For him at this stage it has three parts: the holiness and happiness17 of a godly man (vv. 1–3), the sinfulness and misery of a wicked man (vv. 4–5), and the ground and reason of both (v. 6). As he works with the psalm, however, he seems to disagree with his original perspective and concludes by including verse 6 with verses 4 and 5, so that the psalm has just two parts.
Henry then constructs his commentary around his understanding of the structure of the psalm, providing numbers with varied punctuation to demarcate the various sections. It is helpful to pay attention to this, as it demonstrates not just the list of points that Henry wanted to make, but also how he has grappled with the details of the Hebrew text.
Henry’s commentary on Ps 1 is structured as follows:
Introduction
Verses 1–3
I.A description of the godly man’s spirit and way (vv. 1–2).
1.A godly man renounces (v. 1).
(1.)He sees evil-doers round about him.
(2.)He shuns them wherever he sees them.
[1.]He does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly.
[2.]He stands not in the way of sinners.
[3.]He sits not in the seat of the scornful.
2.A godly man submits to the guidance of the word of God (v. 2).
(1.)The entire affection which a good man has for the law of God.
(2.)The intimate acquaintance which a good man keeps up.
II.An assurance given of the godly man’s happiness (v. 3).
1.He is blessed.
2.His blessedness by similitude.
(1.)Of his pious practice.
(2.)Of the promised blessing: like a tree.
[1.]Planted by the grace of God.
[2.]Placed by the means of grace: rivers of water.
[3.]His practices shall be fruit.
[4.]Preserved from blemish and decay.
[5.]Soul-Prosperity.18
Verses 4–6
I.The description of the ungodly given (v. 4).
II.The doom of the ungodly read (v. 5).
1.At trial as traitors convicted.
2.For ever shut out from the society of the blessed.
III.The reason rendered of this different state of the godly and the wicked (v. 6).
1.God must have all the glory of the prosperity of the righteous.
2.Sinners must bear all the blame of their own destruction.
Few modern commentators have gone into as much detail or improved upon Henry’s appreciation of the composition of the psalm from a structural perspective. And Henry’s oscillation between understanding the psalm as having either three principal parts (with the concluding verse 6 forming the third part and relating to the whole of the previous five verses) or as having just two parts is apparent in much subsequent exegetical discussion.
D. Supplementary Sources
Part of the appeal of Matthew Henry’s commentary, so it seems, is the way that it has its own voice and yet in a somewhat self-effacing manner. Henry himself was keen to acknowledge his sources and clearly he relied heavily upon some as well as sharing insights with many others. Perhaps not surprisingly he acknowledged and recommended in particular Matthew Poole’s Synopsis criticorum biblicorum of 1669–1676 (5 vols). Intriguingly, one of Matthew Poole’s subscribers and patrons had been John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester (1668–1672), a founding member of the Royal Society, who had married in 1656 the youngest sister of Oliver Cromwell. Poole was a Dissenter, resigning his living in 1662 and his Synopsis was intended as a summary of the larger Critici sacri (1660; 9 vols) whose chief editor had been John Pearson, who was Bishop of Chester from 1672 until 1686, the year before Henry moved to Chester. Poole’s work included the views of many commentators, including Jewish authorities and Roman Catholics; it is often described as having only a few references to Calvin and nothing from Luther.
It is from Poole’s Synopsis and other works that Henry became familiar with some aspects of Jewish interpretation. For example, there was a debate amongst the medieval commentators concerning whether 
(‘meditate’) should be understood as silent consideration of the meaning of the text or spoken recitation.19 Whatever the case for Henry, he decides, as might be anticipated, that the meditation referred to in Ps 1 is essentially an inward matter (‘the inner man’; ‘to discourse with ourselves’; ‘a close application of mind, a fixedness of thought’; ‘in our hearts’).20
Some of Henry’s cross-references might be deemed to be derived from a curriculum that then entered regular discourse amongst the better educated. Thus for the interpretation of Ps 1 alongside the Bible, there are proverbial quotations from Juvenal and Cicero. The citation from Juvenal’s Satires 2.83 is used to support Henry’s argument that the ungodly continually increase in their ungodliness. This is an excellent way of reading the first verse of the psalm, taking the three types of wicked (the ungodly, the sinners, and the scornful), as intensifications of ungodliness; ‘Nemo repente fit turpissimus—None reach the height of vice at once’.21 The subsequent quotation from Cicero is likely to be dependent upon what he learnt from his father who was his principal tutor in Classics.22 As he says in the same letter to his father already cited: ‘ever[y] day since you went, I have done my lesson, a side of Latine, two Latine verses and two verses in grac. Test. [the Greek New Testament]. I hope I have done well, and so I will continue till you come’.23
Some of the scriptural cross-references are likely to have derived from his wide reading and were not so much the insights of one expert, but rather were common literary tropes. So it is that in an earlier generation, in arguing for the place of Scripture in people’s lives, Robert Boyle (1627–1691) had composed his lengthy book on Considerations Touching the Style of the Scriptures.24 In the closing arguments of the book, Boyle tries to sum up the advantages of paying attention to Scripture as the word of God, namely the state of blessedness that results. Boyle introduces Ps 1:2 to show that the blessed man has:
… his chaphatz in the Law of the Lord, and in his Law will he Meditate day and night (Psalm 1.2). For the Word other Translations render Voluntas & Studium, our’s Englishes Delight, and indeed the Hebrew 
will bear both Senses, and seems there Emphatically to signifie a Study replenished with so much Delight to the Devout and Intelligent Prosecutors of it, that like the Hallelujahs of the Blessed ’tis at once a Duty and a Pleasure, an Exercise and a Recompence of Piety. And indeed, if God’s Blessing upon the Devout Christian’s Study of that Book do (according to the Psalmists Prayer) open his Eyes to discern the 
Niplaot, Hidden Wonders (Psalm 119.38) contained in it, He should, in Imitation of him that in the same Psalm sayes of his God, I rejoice at thy Word, as one that findeth great spoil (Psalm 119.162) be as Satisfy’d as Navigators that Discover Unknown Countreys.25
It is intriguing to see Ps 1 and Ps 119 interwoven in an argument about the value of studying Scripture and delighting in so doing.26 A generation later, in his comments on Ps 1, Henry was similarly able to interweave his remarks with references to Ps 119 as he constructed an argument about the blessedness of meditating on the law day and night because it was God’s word. In 1663, Robert Boyle had been writing against several in the educated classes who after the Restoration dared to question the authority of the Bible. A generation later, despite the reigns of William and Mary, and with Mary’s sister Anne as queen from 1702, there were similar intellectual diatribes against the Bible’s status as the sole means of divine revelation. At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury in particular was known for his philosophical musings about the Bible’s inhumanity.27 Henry faced a slightly different social scene from that of Robert Boyle, but the value of Scripture as the word of God and as the principal way to ‘soul-prosperity’ still had to be asserted forcefully.
It is quite likely that Henry made some deliberate choices in his thinking about the psalm. Rather than dwelling upon any royal association that the psalm might have been understood to have through its juxtaposition with Ps 2 with its overt royal coronation theme, Henry reads it as a psalm for everyman.28 It is not that Henry was anti-royalist. When James II had visited Chester in September 1687, together with others, Henry had presented an address ‘of thanks to the king for the fact that they were now living in peace and liberty under his protection’.29 Rather, it is likely that the majority of his congregation were townsfolk of the lower middle classes and so his natural inclination was to address them. Thus he does not talk about human kings, an interpretation of the psalm that could be implied by some of the illuminated manuscripts of the Psalms which open with depictions of David sitting amongst trees by streams of water (Ps 1:3).30 Nor does he even talk about divine kingship as Ps 2 might encourage, not just for the opening psalms but also for the whole book of Psalms.31 In this respect, it is interesting to note that Christ does not get a mention until the topic of the judgement of the ungodly arises in verse 5.32 Here Henry’s use of descriptive court language might well reflect his knowledge of legal practice, not just from his own training at Gray’s Inn, but also in Chester as a judicial centre.
Overall, Henry was not concerned with being original but with deploying his profound knowledge of Scripture, the Classics, and multitudes of other sources so as to make his points plainly and clearly, as he had mapped them out in many expositions and sermons.
E. The Place of the Individual
It is also worth noting that the psalm opens with a single man, an individual. This has proved problematic for modern western translators who have looked for something inclusive. The NRSV offers ‘Happy are those who do not …’ (Ps 1:1). Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford has voiced the need for the individual focus to be retained, since by implication it also contains an individual admonition; she suggests translating the phrase: ‘Content is the one who does not … but the Torah is that one’s delight and on the Torah muses day and night … One who does so will be like a tree planted’.33 Matthew Henry had no such foibles of political correctness concerning gender, and his individualism is plainly evident in his reading of the psalm.
But we should be careful before accusing Matthew Henry of a naïve Protestant preference for the individual. It is noteworthy that in the psalm the third person singular is used to describe the godly man, whereas the third person plural is used for the stereotypes of the wicked. Henry plays this language game too throughout his exposition, but does it with provocative pronominal shifts. So, in describing the individual godly man his process of application is to move nimbly to identify that man’s characteristics with the ‘we’ he addresses, himself and his reader or readers. The ungodly remain undifferentiated and plural throughout. Such care with language, based on living intimately with the text of Scripture from early childhood, is a reflection of a strategy that lies with the psalmist himself.
Nevertheless, there is also a sense that the call for the individual to appropriate the message of the psalm is part and parcel of his Presbyterian outlook. That is not much concerned with original sin or with predestination, but is reflected in a sense of urgency, that the ‘general assembly of the church of the first-born’ (‘a congregation of the righteous, of all the saints’) will be seen, as he says, referring to 2 Thessalonians, ‘shortly’.34 It is, however, individual morality and virtue that are at stake, as they were a couple of generations later in 1781 for Robert Burns (1759–1796):
The man, in life wherever plac’d
Hath happiness in store,
Who walks not in the wicked’s way,
Nor learns their guilty lore!
Nor from the seat of scornful pride
Casts forth his eyes abroad,
But with humility and awe
Still walks before his God.
That man shall flourish like the trees,
Which by the streamlets grow;
The fruitful top is spread on high,
And firm the root below.
But he whose blossom buds in guilt
Shall to the ground be cast,
And, like the rootless stubble, tost
Before the sweeping blast.
For why? that God the good adore,
Hath giv’n them peace and rest,
But hath decreed that wicked men
Shall ne’er be truly blest.35
3. Overall Exegetical Insights
In this brief description of reading Psalm 1 with Matthew Henry, it is noteworthy that several details remain striking, even for modern commentators on the Psalms. I rehearse just five items, some already mentioned. First, there is the Torah-structured character of the Psalter and the Torah-centered focus of the psalm itself; Henry engages with both aspects entirely positively using Paul to help him see the law as holy and just and good. Second, there is the differentiation between the singular godly person and the plural ungodly. Third, there is the striking triad of the types of ungodliness in Ps 1:1, which Henry reads as a matter of intensification. Fourth, there is the place of ‘prosperity’ in the very centre of the psalm; Henry represents this climactically in his structural understanding of the whole, and in his alliterative style as the fifth and final P-word—but more than that, he then pushes the word to make it work all the more for his individualistic and pious reading (perhaps even a mis-reading) of the psalm, by prefixing soul to it for a hyphenated ‘soul-prosperity’. Fifth, it has been long noted that the psalmist does not refer explicitly to the righteous in the psalm until the end of verse 5 and in verse 6; Henry is remarkably sensitive to this and likewise refrains from referring to the righteous until his discussion of those verses.
Henry read the psalm as addressed to the everyday person; he urged its inward heartfelt application so that their lives might be such as to lead to immortal joy and honour. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Chester was the most significant port in the North-West of England and the major route for traffic to Ireland. By then it had already had a racecourse for nearly two hundred years, and was a long-established centre with courts and a gaol. It is easy to see that it was not problems with kings, queens, or earls, or even with the established church that filled his pastoral concerns, but the crowds of people filling the streets and drinking houses of Chester, those held in the prison at Chester Castle, or those in his own flock who might be wavering in their commitment. In such circumstances he felt an urgent and sincere need to preach and proclaim ‘soul-prosperity’.
1. Michael Northcott, ‘Pensions and Climate Create a Dual Timebomb’, Church Times (25 April 2014): 12–14 (14).
2. Christopher Hill has implied that Henry’s comments on the Jubilee in Leviticus 25 (‘never was any people so secured in their liberty and property [those glories of a people] as Israel was’ [Henry on Lev 25:8–22]) reflected the changing circumstances at the start of the eighteenth century as more and more people lost their land to the aristocracy; Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 166.
3. Henry on Ps 1.
4. Susan Gillingham, A Journey of Two Psalms: The Reception of Psalms 1 and 2 in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 143. Gillingham’s detailed study does not include any comments on Matthew Henry’s interpretation of Psalm 1.
5. From The Psalter of David; with Titles and Collects According to the Matter of each Psalm, 12th ed. (London: J.L., 1702); cited in Gillingham, Journey of Two Psalms, 143.
6. From 1698 to 1701, Henry attended the monthly lectures at St Peter’s Church, Chester, arranged by the Society for the Improvement of Manners of which he, Bishop Stratford, and Dean Fogg were keen founding supporters of the Chester branch. Because of arguments over whether Dissenters should be included, to keep the peace the Dean apologetically encouraged Henry to set up an independent group. In 1701 the lecture series was continued at Matthew Henry’s chapel. See J.B. Williams, The Life of Matthew Henry (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974; first published 1828), 193–98.
7. For recent challenging comments on the significance of marginalia in Bibles, and the lack thereof in the KJV, see Yvonne Sherwood, Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–17.
8. Brian Walton, Biblia Sacra polyglotta, complectentia textus originales, Hebraicum, cum Pentateucho Samaritano, Chaldaicum, Graecum; versionumque antiquarum, Samaritanae, Graecae LXXII Interp., Chaldaicae, Syriacae, Arabicae, Aethiopicae, Persicae, Vulg. Lat. Quicquid comparari poterat, 6 vols. (London: Roycroft, 1655–1657); John Pearson, Critici sacri: sive doctissimorum vivorum in SS. Biblia annotationes et tractatus (London: Cornelius Bee, 1660). Walton was Bishop of Chester 1660–1661, though he visited the diocese only briefly during that period, and John Pearson was Bishop of Chester 1673–1686.
9. Letter from Matthew Henry to Philip Henry (1671), printed in Allan M. Harman, Matthew Henry: His Life and Influence (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2012), 40.
10. The full text of Matthew Henry’s commentary on the Psalms is readily available on several websites, including, e.g.: ccel.org; studylight.org; blueletterbible.org; apostolic-churches.net.
11. Henry on Ps 1.
12. On the competition between the so-called ‘Moses Psalter’ and the ‘David Psalter’, see the comments of David M. Howard, Jr., ‘The Proto-MT Psalter, the King, and Psalms 1 and 2: A Response to Klaus Seybold’, in Jewish and Christian Approaches to the Psalms: Conflict and Convergence, ed. Susan Gillingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 182–89 (185–86). Howard argues against those who prioritize the reading of the Psalms as Torah-Wisdom that there is nevertheless a strong place for idealized or qualified kingship. One wonders whether Matthew Henry was aware that the book of Psalms gave priority to Torah over kingship.
13. Henry on Ps 1.
14. Henry on Ps 1.
15. E.g., on Ps 1:1 he writes: ‘1. A godly man, that he may avoid the evil, utterly renounces the companionship of evil-doers, and will not be led by them (v. 1): He walks not in the council of the ungodly, etc. This part of his character is put first, because those that will keep the commandments of their God must say to evil-doers, Depart from us (Ps. 119:115), and departing from evil is that in which wisdom begins’ (Henry on Ps 1:1–3).
16. On the Psalms as a whole, Henry writes: ‘We have now before us one of the choicest and most excellent parts of all the Old Testament; nay, so much is there in it of Christ and his gospel, as well as of God and his law, that it had been called the abstract, or summary, of both Testaments’ (Henry on Psalms).
17. Note the alliteration, which many readers of Matthew Henry comment on.
18. Note again the five-point alliteration here: planted, placed, practices, preserved, prosperity. The alliteration in this instance builds upon that of the KJV translators.
19. See the delightful presentation of the various views of Saadia, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Qimḥi by Adele Berlin, ‘Medieval Answers to Modern Questions: Medieval Jewish Interpreters of the Psalms’, in Gillingham, Jewish and Christian Approaches to the Psalms, 49–52. Rashi argued that every use of the word 
means ‘in the heart/mind’ (i.e., silently); Ibn Ezra argued that 
can mean either in the heart silently (as in Ps 49:4) or with the mouth aloud (as in Ps 35:28); Qimḥi took 
to mean ‘to utter aloud’ because study is implied, but that day and night should not be taken literally otherwise there was no time for work and sleep. The word is also a key catchword link between Pss 1 and 2.
20. Henry on Ps 1:1–3.
21. Henry on Ps 1:1–3:
See by what steps men arrive at the height of impiety. Nemo repente fit turpissimus—None reach the height of vice at once. They are ungodly first, casting off the fear of God and living in the neglect of their duty to him: but they rest not there. When the services of religion are laid aside, they come to be sinners, that is, they break out into open rebellion against God and engage in the service of sin and Satan. Omissions make way for commissions, and by these the heart is so hardened that at length they come to be scorners, that is, they openly defy all that is sacred, scoff at religion, and make a jest of sin. Thus is the way of iniquity down-hill; the bad grow worse, sinners themselves become tempters to others and advocates for Baal. The word which we translate ungodly signifies such as are unsettled, aim at no certain end and walk by no certain rule, but are at the command of every lust and at the beck of every temptation. The word for sinners signifies such as are determined for the practice of sin and set it up as their trade. The scornful are those that set their mouths against the heavens. These the good man sees with a sad heart; they are a constant vexation to his righteous soul.
A reflection of the same saying is to be found in the 1619 play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, A King and No King, Act V, Scene 4 (‘there’s a method in man’s wickedness—it grows up by degrees’).
22. On Ps 1:3, Henry writes: ‘He shall be like a tree, fruitful and flourishing. This is the effect, (1.) Of his pious practice; he meditates in the law of God, turns that in succum et sanguinem—into juice and blood, and that makes him like a tree. The more we converse with the word of God the better furnished we are for every good word and work’ (Henry on Ps 1:1–3). The Latin is from Cicero’s Letter to Atticus 4.18.2.
23. Letter from Matthew Henry to Philip Henry (1671), printed in Harman, Matthew Henry, 40.
24. Robert Boyle, Considerations Touching the Style of the Scriptures Extracted from several parts of a Discourse (concerning divers Particulars belonging to the Bible) Written divers Years once to a Friend (London: Henry Herringman, 1663). Boyle uses a wide range of scriptural cross-references in his interpretations and comments.
25. Boyle, Considerations, 252. In most instances Boyle seems to be translating the Hebrew for himself, as only for Psalm 119:162 is there a verbatim quotation from the KJV.
26. The lack of belief in the Bible as the word of God in the third quarter of the seventeenth century is commented on by Christopher Hill (The English Bible, 424).
27. Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper], Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London: n.p., 1711). See further the discussion of Shaftesbury’s attitude as a matter of how different classes approached the Bible in Sherwood, Biblical Blaspheming, 89–91. Sherwood cites at length from the 1964 edition of Shaftesbury’s work by John M. Robertson (New York: Bobbs-Merrill), 84–85. The 1790 edition of Shaftesbury’s work (Basil: J.L. Tourniesen and J.L. Legrand, 1790) is available online.
28. For comments on how Henry VIII had annotated his own copy of the Psalms as self-referential (especially Ps 1), see Gillingham, Journey of Two Psalms, 141–42.
29. Harman, Matthew Henry, 81.
30. See, e.g., Rothschild MS 24 (ca. 1470) now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; referred to by John Sawyer, ‘The Psalms in Judaism and Christianity: A Reception History Perspective’, in Gillingham, Jewish and Christian Approaches to the Psalms, 137–38 (figure 14).
31. As is argued, e.g., by J. Clinton McCann Jr., ‘The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections’, in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 641–1280 (664–65).
32. It is worth noting that a doctrine of original sin plays little or no part in Henry’s theology; it is for ungodliness, acting as free agents, that the wicked face judgement.
33. Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford, ‘On Translating the Poetry of the Psalms’, in Gillingham, Jewish and Christian Approaches to the Psalms, 190–208 (201).
34. Henry on Ps 1:4–6.
35. Robert Burns, ‘The First Psalm’, in The Works of Robert Burns, ed. James Currie (Philadelphia: J. Crissy and J. Grigg, 1829), 44.