Psalms 76:4

"Glorious art thou, and excellent, more than mountains of prey.

The stouthearted are made a spoil, They have slept their sleep;

And none of the men of might have found their hands.

At thy rebuke, O God of Jacob,

Both chariot and horse are cast into a dead sleep."

"More than mountains of prey" (Psalms 76:4). There is some uncertainty of the meaning here. Delitzsch explained it as, "An appellation for haughty possessors of worldly power."[11]

"They have slept their sleep ... and none ... have found their hands" (Psalms 76:5). Briggs translated this verse this way:

"The stouthearted slept their last sleep,

And the men of war did not find spoil."[12]

The clause, "none have found their hands" in the New English Bible is rendered, "the men cannot lift a hand." The Septuagint (LXX) reads, "have found nothing in their hands." Rawlinson gave the meaning as, "They cannot even move a hand."[13] Such various attempts to give the meaning of an admittedly difficult verse should not concern us very much, because, what is being described here, according to Delitzsch, is, "A field of corpses, the effect of the omnipotent energy of the word of the God of Jacob."[14]

"Both chariot and horse ... into a dead sleep" (Psalms 76:6). Of course, no chariot ever went to sleep. The chariot here, by a figure of speech, refers to charioteer, just as the horse also includes the rider. Sudden death overcame the whole army.

"Cast into a deep sleep" (Psalms 76:6). "The sleep here is the sleep of death as distinguished from natural sleep."[15]

"One word from the sovereign lips of the God of Jacob, and all the noise of the camp is hushed, and we look upon a field of the dead, lying in awful stillness, dreamlessly sleeping their long slumber."[16]

A GLIMPSE OF THE ETERNAL JUDGMENT DAY

We have previously quoted from Lord Byron's poem, but here are a few more lines of it:

"And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide.

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail.

And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,

The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown."