4 Have the workers of evil no knowledge? they take my people for food, as they would take bread; they make no prayer to God.
For my people are foolish, they have no knowledge of me; they are evil-minded children, without sense, all of them: they are wise in evil-doing, but have no knowledge of doing good.
When evil-doers, even my haters, came on me to put an end to me, they were broken and put to shame.
When its branches are dry they will be broken off; the women will come and put fire to them: for it is a foolish people; for this cause he who made them will have no mercy on them, and he whose work they are will not have pity on them.
Let your wrath be let loose on the nations which have no knowledge of you, and on the families who give no worship to your name: for they have made a meal of Jacob, truly they have made a meal of him and put an end to him and made his fields a waste.
You foolish ones and blind: which is greater, the gold, or the Temple which makes the gold holy? And, Whoever takes an oath by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever takes an oath by the offering which is on it, he is responsible. You blind ones: which is greater, the offering, or the altar which makes the offering holy? He, then, who takes an oath by the altar, takes it by the altar and by all things on it. And he who takes an oath by the Temple, takes it by the Temple and by him whose house it is. And he who takes an oath by heaven, takes it by the seat of God, and by him who is seated on it. A curse is on you, scribes and Pharisees, false ones! for you make men give a tenth of all sorts of sweet-smelling plants, but you give no thought to the more important things of the law, righteousness, and mercy, and faith; but it is right for you to do these, and not to let the others be undone. You blind guides, who take out a fly from your drink, but make no trouble over a camel. A curse is on you, scribes and Pharisees, false ones! for you make clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of violent behaviour and uncontrolled desire. You blind Pharisee, first make clean the inside of the cup and of the plate, so that the outside may become equally clean. A curse is on you, scribes and Pharisees, false ones! for you are like the resting-places of the dead, which are made white, and seem beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men's bones and of all unclean things. Even so you seem to men to be full of righteousness, but inside you are all false and full of wrongdoing. A curse is on you, scribes and Pharisees, false ones! because you put up buildings for housing the dead bodies of the prophets, and make fair the last resting-places of good men, and say, If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in the blood of the prophets. So that you are witnesses against yourselves that you are the sons of those who put the prophets to death. Make full, then, the measure of your fathers. You snakes, offspring of snakes, how will you be kept from the punishment of hell? For this reason, I send you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: some of them you will put to death and put on the cross, and to some of them you will give blows in your Synagogues, driving them from town to town; So that on you may come all the blood of the upright on the earth, from the blood of upright Abel to the blood of Zachariah, son of Barachiah, whom you put to death between the Temple and the altar. Truly I say to you, All these things will come on this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, putting to death the prophets, and stoning those who are sent to her! Again and again would I have taken your children to myself as a bird takes her young ones under her wings, and you would not! See, your house is made waste. For I say to you, You will not see me from this time till you say, A blessing on him who comes in the name of the Lord.
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Commentary on Psalms 53 Keil & Delitzsch Commentary
Elohimic Variation of the Jahve - Psalms 14:1-7
Psalms 52:1-9 and Psalms 53:1-6, which are most closely related by occasion, contents, and expression, are separated by the insertion of Psalms 53:1-6, in which the individual character of Psalms 52:1-9, the description of moral corruption and the announcement of the divine curse, is generalized. Psalms 53:1-6 also belongs to this series according to its species of poetic composition; for the inscription runs: To the Precentor, after Machalath, a Maskı̂l of David . The formula על־מחלת recurs in Psalms 88:1 with the addition of לענּות . Since Ps 88 is the gloomiest of all the Psalms, and Psalms 53:1-6, although having a bright border, is still also a dark picture, the signification of מחלה , laxness (root חל , opp . מר ), sickness, sorrow, which is capable of being supported by Exodus 15:26, must be retained. על־מחלת signifies after a sad tone or manner ; whether it be that מחלת itself (with the ancient dialectic feminine termination, like נגינת , Psalms 61:1) is a name for such an elegiac kind of melody, or that it was thereby designed to indicate the initial word of some popular song. In the latter case מחלת is the construct form, the standard song beginning מחלת לב or some such way. The signification to be sweet (Aramaic) and melodious (Aethiopic), which the root חלי obtains in the dialects, is foreign to Hebrew. It is altogether inadmissible to combine מחלת with Arab. mahlt , ease, comfort (Germ. Gemächlichkeit , cf. mächlich , easily, slowly, with mählich , by degrees), as Hitzig does; since מחל , Rabbinic, to pardon, coincides more readily with מחה , Psalms 51:3, Psalms 51:11. So that we may regard machalath as equivalent to mesto , not piano or andante .
That the two texts, Psalms 14:1-7 and Psalms 53:1-6, are “vestiges of an original identity” (Hupfeld) is not established: Psalms 53:1-6 is a later variation of Psalms 14:1-7. The musical designation, common only to the earlier Psalms, at once dissuades one from coming down beyond the time of Jehoshaphat or Hezekiah. Moreover, we have here a manifest instance that even Psalms which are composed upon the model of, or are variations of Davidic Psalms, were without any hesitation inscribed לדוד .
Beside the critical problem, all that remains here for the exegesis is merely the discussion of anything peculiar in the deviations in the form of the text.
The well-grounded asyndeton השׁהיתוּ התעיבוּ is here dismissed; and the expression is rendered more bombastic by the use of עול instead of עלילה . עול (the masculine to עולה ), pravitas , is the accusative of the object (cf. Ezekiel 16:52) to both verbs, which give it a twofold superlative attributive notion. Moreover, here השׁחיתו is accented with Mugrash in our printed texts instead of Tarcha . One Mugrash after another is contrary to all rule.
In both recensions of the Psalm the name of God occurs seven times. In Psalms 14:1-7 it reads three times Elohim and four times Jahve ; in the Psalm before us it is all seven times Elohim , which in this instance is a proper name of equal dignity with the name Jahve . Since the mingling of the two names in Psalms 14:1-7 is perfectly intentional, inasmuch as Elohim in Psalms 53:1, Psalms 53:2 describes God as a Being most highly exalted and to be reverentially acknowledged, and in Psalms 52:5 as the Being who is present among men in the righteous generation and who is mighty in their weakness, it becomes clear that David himself cannot be the author of this levelling change, which is carried out more rigidly than the Elohimic character of the Psalm really demands.
Instead of הכּל , the totality, we have כּלּו , which denotes each individual of the whole, to which the suffix, that has almost vanished (Psalms 29:9) from the genius of the language, refers. And instead of סר , the more elegant סג , without any distinction in the meaning.
Here in the first line the word כּל־ , which, as in Psalms 5:6; Psalms 6:9, is in its right place, is wanting. In Psalms 14:1-7 there then follow, instead of two tristichs, two distichs, which are perhaps each mutilated by the loss of a line. The writer who has retouched the Psalm has restored the tristichic symmetry that had been lost sight of, but he has adopted rather violent means: inasmuch as he has fused down the two distichs into a single tristich, which is as closely as possible adapted to the sound of their letters.
The last two lines of this tristich are in letters so similar to the two distichs of Psalms 14:1-7, that they look like an attempt at the restoration of some faded manuscript. Nevertheless, such a close following of the sound of the letters of the original, and such a changing of the same by means of an interchange of letters, is also to be found elsewhere (more especially in Jeremiah, and e.g., also in the relation of the Second Epistle of Peter to Jude). And the two lines sound so complete in themselves and full of life, that this way of accounting for their origin takes too low an estimate of them. A later poet, perhaps belonging to the time of Jehoshaphat or Hezekiah, has here adapted the Davidic Psalm to some terrible catastrophe that has just taken place, and given a special character to the universal announcement of judgment. The addition of לא־היה פּחד (supply אשׁר = אשׁר שׁם , Psalms 84:4) is meant to imply that fear of judgment had seized upon the enemies of the people of God, when no fear, i.e., no outward ground for fear, existed; it was therefore חרדּת אלהים (1 Samuel 14:15), a God-wrought panic. Such as the case with the host of the confederates in the days of Jehoshaphat (2 Chronicles 20:22-24); such also with the army of Sennacherib before Jerusalem (Isaiah 37:36). כּי gives the proof in support of this fright from the working of the divine power. The words are addressed to the people of God: Elohim hath scattered the bones (so that unburied they lie like dirt upon the plain a prey to wild beasts, Psalms 141:7; Ezekiel 6:5) of thy besieger , i.e., of him who had encamped against thee. חנך .eeht tsniaga instead of חנך = חנה עליך .
(Note: So it has been explained by Menachem; whereas Dunash wrongly takes the ך of חנך as part of the root, overlooking the fact that with the suffix it ought rather to have been חנך instead of חנך . It is true that within the province of the verb âch does occur as a pausal masculine suffix instead of écha , with the preterite (Deuteronomy 6:17; Isaiah 30:19; Isaiah 55:5, and even out of pause in Jeremiah 23:37), and with the infinitive (Deuteronomy 28:24; Ezekiel 28:15), but only in the passage before us with the participle. Attached to the participle this masculine suffix closely approximates to the Aramaic; with proper substantives there are no examples of it found in Hebrew. Simson ha-Nakdan, in his חבור הקונים (a MS in Leipzig University Library, fol. 29 b ), correctly observes that forms like שׁמך , עמּך , are not biblical Hebrew, but Aramaic, and are only found in the language of the Talmud, formed by a mingling of the Hebrew and Aramaic.)
By the might of his God, who has overthrown them, the enemies of His people, Israel has put them to shame, i.e., brought to nought in a way most shameful to them, the project of those who were so sure of victory, who imagined they could devour Israel as easily and comfortably as bread. It is clear that in this connection even Psalms 53:5 receives a reference to the foreign foes of Israel originally alien to the Psalm, so that consequently Micah 3:3 is no longer a parallel passage, but passages like Numbers 14:9, our bread are they (the inhabitants of Canaan); and Jeremiah 30:16, all they that devour thee shall be devoured .
The two texts now again coincide. Instead of ישׁוּעת , we here have ישׁעות ; the expression is strengthened, the plural signifies entire, full, and final salvation.