Introduction
No title or author is given to this psalm in the Hebrew text, but the Septuagint assigns it to David, and adds, Of the sons of Jonadab, and the first that were taken captive. From this it is evident that a Jewish tradition existed in the third century before Christ (the date of the Greek Version) to the effect that this psalm was sung “by the sons of Jonadab (the Rechabites) and the first (Assyrian) captives,” as befitting the calamities of the nation at that time. See 2 Kings 17:0. We know that Jonadab was the stern reformer and preserver of his tribe, causing them to adhere to the worship of God with an ascetic severity of self-denial in the dissolute ages of the decline and fall of the kingdom of Israel, and that the Rechabites served in the temple at Jerusalem before and after the captivity, though they chiefly had their dwellings among the northern tribes until after the Assyrian invasion referred to. See 1 Kings 10:15; Jeremiah 35:0. The Greek title, therefore, is not improbably correct. The arguments that Jeremiah was the author are not satisfactory. The spirit and strain are strongly those of David’s sorrowing muse, and it is only natural to suppose he might, in his later years, repeat himself, as he does here, in those parts where his circumstances and mental sufferings are strikingly similar to those which he had, in earlier life. celebrated in song. The psalm is in perfect harmony, both in style, spirit, and circumstantial surroundings, with Psalms 69, 70; and though the elegiac strain would suit well enough the sorrowful spirit of Jeremiah, and its fragmentary, loose, and excerptive form coincide with the limited poetic genius of that prophet, yet there is no sufficient reason to wrest it from the author and occasion of the two preceding psalms.
The general matter may be grouped as follows: the first thirteen verses are a prayer against David’s enemies, interspersed with tender retrospections of God’s care of him from his earliest being, and urged by various arguments. From Psalms 71:14 to the end the prevailing strain is that of hope, praise, and vows of thanksgiving, with a confident outlook of triumph, which closes the song.
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