1 My heart seethes [with] goodly speech: I speak my work (poem) to a king: My tongue is the pen of a swift scribe.
2 Thou art fair beyond the sons of men; Grace is poured on thy lips: Therefore God has blessed thee for ever. 3 Gird thy sword on thy thigh, O hero, Thy splendour and thy majesty. 4 [And [in] thy majesty] press forward, ride on, For the help of truth, and meekness-righteousness: And thy right hand shall teach thee awe-striking deeds. 5 Thine arrows are keen-- The peoples fall under thee-- Into the heart of the enemies of the king. 6 Thy throne, O God, is for ever and aye: 7 A sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of thy kingdom. Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest iniquity: Therefore God, thy God, has anointed thee With the oil of gladness above thy fellows. 8 Myrrh and aloes [and] cassia [are] all thy robes; Out of palaces of ivory, stringed instruments make thee glad. 9 Kings' daughters are among thy favourites: The consort stands at thy right hand in Ophir gold.
10 Hearken, O daughter, and behold, and incline thine ear; And forget thy people, and thy father's house; 11 So shall the king desire thy beauty: For he is thy lord; and bow thou down to him. 12 And the daughter of Tyre [shall come] with a gift; The richest among the peoples shall seek thy favour. 13 All glorious is the king's daughter in the inner palace: Of cloth of gold is her garment. 14 In embroidered robes is she led to the king: Maidens behind her, her friends, are brought to thee. 15 They are brought with gladness and exultation: They enter into the palace of the king.
16 Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children: Thou wilt make them princes in all the earth. 17 I will commemorate thy name through generation after generation: Therefore shall the peoples praise thee for ever and aye.
This is an epithalamion or ode on a king's marriage. The usual bewildering variety of conjectures as to his identity meets us in commentaries. The older opinion points to Solomon's marriage to an Egyptian princess, to which it is objected that he was not a warrior king, as the monarch of the psalm is. Hitzig regards "daughter of Tyre," in ver. 12, as a vocative, and therefore looks for a king who married a Tyrian woman. He is obliged to go to the northern kingdom to find one, and pitches on Ahab, because Jezebel was the daughter of "a king of the Zidonians," and Ahab had an "ivory house" (1 Kings xxii. 39). It is hard to believe that that wedded pair of evil memory are the originals of the lovely portraits in the psalm, or that a psalmist would recognise the kingdom of Israel as divinely established and to be eternally upheld. Besides, the construction of ver. 12, on which this theory pivots, is doubtful, and the daughter of Tyre there mentioned is more probably one of the bringers of gifts to the bride. The attributes of the king and the promises for his descendants cannot be extended, without incongruity, beyond the Davidic line. Hence Delitzsch has selected Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat, principally because his wife, Athaliah, was of Tyrian descent, being Jezebel's daughter, and partly because his father had been a trader, which accounts for the allusions to gold of Ophir and ivory. These are slender grounds of identification, to say nothing of the miserable contrast which Jehoram's reign--a dreary record of apostasy and defeat, culminating in a tragic death and a dishonoured grave (2 Chron. xxi.)--would present to the psalm. Some commentators have thought of the marriage of a Persian king, mainly because the peculiar word for _consort_ in ver. 9 is employed for Persian queens (Neh. ii. 6), and also because the Tyrians were tributary to Persia, and because the sons of the king are to be "called princes in all lands," which reminds us of Persian satraps. Ewald finally fixed on Jeroboam II. of Israel. Cheyne ("Orig. of Psalt.") finds the king of the psalm in Ptolemy Philadelphus, the inspirer, as was believed, of the LXX. translation, whom Josephus and Philo extol. Its author puts this identification only as "tentative." Notwithstanding his anticipatory protest against making Philadelphus' moral character an objection, he feels that it is an objection; for he urges that its darker shades had not yet disclosed themselves, and confesses that "a haze of illusion encompassed our poet," who "overrated this Ptolemy, from taking too external a view of the Messianic promise, and being flattered by a Hellenic king's partiality for his people" (_u.s._, 172). Philadelphus afterwards married his sister. His hands were red with blood. Was a Jewish psalmist likely to take "up the singing robes of a court poet" (_u.s._) in honour of a Ptolemy, or to transfer the promises to the Davidic line to, and to speak of God as the God of, a foreign king? Or how, if he did, came his song to find and keep a place in the Psalter? All these conjectures show the hopelessness of identifying the person intended addressed in the psalm. It is said that a knowledge of the historical allusions in the Psalter is indispensable to enjoying it. They would often be helpful if they could be settled, but that is no reason for elevating conjecture to the place of knowledge.