Verse 15
15. Dried up like a potsherd The humidity of my body is burned out like a piece of pottery in a furnace. The metaphor is twofold the shrinking or drying by heat, and worthlessness, as a sherd or fragment of pottery. Isaiah 45:9; Lamentations 4:2.
My tongue cleaveth to my jaws מלקוהי , ( malkohah,) my jaws, from לקח , ( lakahh,) he received, applies to the jaws because they receive the food. The word is always elsewhere, except once, rendered prey. The Septuagint, “My tongue is glued to my throat,” and Vulgate, “faucibus,” are incorrect, as also the version of the liturgy, “gums.” This condition of the tongue, naturally so humid, involves great exhaustion and thirst, and prophetically points to the closing part of the sufferings on the cross when the Saviour cried, “I thirst.” John 19:28; Psalms 69:21. His soul agony reached its highest expression in the complaint, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” and when this had passed, and he returned to a consciousness of his physical suffering, the sensation which arose above all others was signified in the words, “I thirst.”
Thou hast brought me into the dust of death The word rendered “thou hast brought me,” means to arrange, dispose, place, as 2 Kings 4:38; Isaiah 26:2; Ezekiel 24:3; and the idea is, Thou hast laid me out for the grave. On “dust of death,” a poetical phrase for the decomposition of death, see Psalms 30:9
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