2 Chronicles 14:11 - Exposition

Nothing with thee ; Hebrew, אֵין־עִמְּךָ . In the passage of very similar tenor ( 1 Samuel 14:6 ) the exact rendering is more easily fixed, "It is nothing to the Lord," i.e. it makes no difference to the Lord, "to save by many or by few." Probably the correcter rendering of our present Hebrew text would be, "It makes no difference with thee to help those whose strength is great or whose strength is nothing (between the much even to the none of strength)." Keil and Bertheau would translate "There is none beside thee." For another instance of the preposition גֵּין followed by ל , see Genesis 1:6 ; and comp. 2 Chronicles 1:13 . The prayer must be counted a model prayer to an omnipotent Deliverer. It consists of opening invocation and the instancing of what postulates the crowning Divine attribute as the broad foundation for argument; of invocation repeated, warmed to closer clinging by the appropriating "oar;" attended by the defining, though very universal petition, Help us ; and followed by the argument of the unbending fidelity of trusting dependence, For we rest on thee, and in thy Name we go against this multitude ; and, lastly, of invocation renewed or still determinedly sustained, pressed home by the clenching challenge of relationship and its correlative responsibility and presumable holy pride. The antithesis marked in these two last clauses will not escape notice—one made all the bolder, with the marginal reading of "mortal mall" for the emphatic (a poetical, universal kind of) word here employed ( אֱגוֹשׁ ) for man.