Ps 3. — The character, conduct, and faith of the righteous and unrighteous are contrasted.
Ps 4. — The ' men-pleasers ' are described as hypocrites — outwardly, even extravagantly re- spectable and severe in their condemnation of sinners ; but actually consumed with lust, in their gratification of which they destroy the peace of family after family. May God reward them with dishonour in life and death, with penury and lonely old age.
Ps 5. — The goodness of God towards animals and men alike is without stint : man's is a grudging goodness.
Ps 6. — Happy is the man who prays.
Ps 7. — Let God, if needs be, chasten Israel, but not by giving them up to the nations.
Ps 8. — A more elaborate treatment of the theme of the first Psalm : the wickedness of a party of the Jews had consisted in immorality and the pro- fanation of the sacred precincts and the sacrifices by disregard of the laws of ritual cleanness. In yy 15-24 ^ specific account is given of the progress of the invader and of his reception.
Ps 9. — Righteousness in God and man : man's free-will, and God's goodness to the penitent. Through God's goodness Israel hopes not to be rejected for ever.
Ps 10. — Happy is the man whom God chastiseth : Israel shall praise Him for His goodness.
Ps 11. — The return of the Diaspora to Jerusalem.
Ps 12.— May God curse the slanderers, and pre- serve the quiet and peace-loving.
Ps 13. — God has preserved the righteous at a time when the ' sinners ' perished miserably. If God chastens the righteous, it is as a father his first-born. The life of the righteous and the de- struction of the sinners are for ever.
Ps 14. — Eternal life and joy await the pious; butSheol, darkness, and destruction are the lot of sinners, whose delight is in ' fleeting corruption.'
Ps I,'').— Similar to 13 and 14.
Ps 16. — I5ut for God's mercy and strength, even the righteous would slip down to the fate of the wicked. A prayer for prescrval ion from sin, from beautiful but beguiling women, and for strength to bear attliction with cheerfulness.
Ps 17. — Sinners who had set up a non-Davidic monarchy have been removed : a man of .alien race has laid waste the land of .ludah and carried men captive to the West. The psalm closes (vv.'-^"'') with a long description of the Messianic king, for whose advent the author prays.
Ps 18. — 'Again of the anointed of the Lord.'
3. Date. — Two things in particular stand out clearly in these Psalms: (1) the Jewish nation is divided sharply into two sects or parties, the ' righteous,' to whom the writer belongs, and the ' sinners,' or the party of his opponents ; (2) the nation has sufl'ered severely from the invasion of unnamed foreigners. More than one jieriod in Jewish history would satisfy these conditions, and certainly the period of the Maccabiean revolt (167 B.C. and following years) ; and in the pi'ofanation of the altar to which Ps 2 refers it is tempting at first to see an allusion to Antiochus Epiphanes' act in setting up on the altar the 'abomination of desolation' (1 Mac 1"). To this period, then, some scholars have assigned the Psalms. But the whole of the more specific allusions taken together, and most of them even taken separately, are far better satisfied by the circumstances of the middle of the 1st cent. B.C. — a period of bitter feud between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and of the invasion of Judah by the Romans under Pompey. It is to this period, therefore, that most recent scholars refer the Psalms. 'The (alien) nations (2- *• '^"•-^l^- "S'^) who attack Jerusalem, and by whom the Jewish captives are led away, and against whom the writer prays for deliverance, are the RomaiLS. Their commander, ' who is from the end of the earth, who smiteth mightily' (8'"), who is met by the Jewish princes and at first invited Jiy them to Jerusalem, but ultimately has to capture the fortresses and the walls of Jerusalem by force (8"'-'), by bringing battering-rams to play upon them (2'), who allows his soldiers profanely to trample upon the altar (2-), who carries his captives to the West (17'''), and whose end was a dishonoured death 'on the mountains of Egypt' (.330. 31) jg Pompey. For he, as a Roman, came from the West, and thither he led back to grace his triumph in Rome the Jewish prince Aristobulus ; he availed himself of the quarrels between the Jewish princes Hyrcanus and Aristobulus and their supporters to secure the Roman power in Judah ; he was at first approached and welcomed by both these princes, but in the end he was resolutely resisted by Aristobulus in Jerusalem, so that he was com- jielled to bring up battering-rams from Tyre where- with to breakdown the fortified wall of Jerusalem ; he shocked Jewish feeling by intruding into the Holy of Holies, and fifteen years after he had captured Jerusalem and profaned the Temple, he was slain beside Mons Cassius near Pelusium, his body being at first left unburied on the Egyptian shore, and then hastily and unceremoniously burned.
A considerable similarity of tone and temper and the possibility of satisfying all the specific allusions, more or less completely, by what is known independently of the condition of the Jews between about 80 and 40 B.C. and of the circum- stances of Pompey's treatment of them, and of his death, favour the commonly accepted view that these Psalms (possibly with the exception of Ps 18)