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No attempt is here made to diminish the severity of the crisis. Often when a great agony is overpast, the sufferer himself forgets its intensity and is inclined to think that it might have been cured by less ostentatious menus than had been adopted for its pacification. We are seldom critically correct in the recollection of our sorrows. We either unduly magnify them, or we so far modify their intensity as to make any remedial measures look as simple and superficial as possible. David vividly remembered all his afflictive experience. He does not hesitate to speak of that experience in words which are metaphorical, if not romantic, without at all affecting the reality of the trouble through which he had. passed. He says, "the sorrows of death compassed" him. Some have interpreted this expression as birth pangs; others, again, have used the word cords. It has been thought that the figure of the hunter in the next verse, in which we read of the "snares of death," fixes the meaning there to be cords. In Samuel, David represents himself as submerged or overwhelmed by the progress or waves of the trouble which had been made to pass over him. Sometimes, indeed, we do not know what real trouble we have been in until we have been removed from it for some distance, and thus enabled that we may also recollect our greatest deliverances. There is no true piety in undervaluing the darkness and the horror through which the soul has passed. Instead of making light of the most tragical experiences of life, we should rather accumulate them, that we may see how wondrous has been the interposition of the Divine hand, and how adequate are the resources of heaven to all the necessities of this mortal condition. Even admitting the words to be metaphorical, they present a vivid picture of what human sorrow may be, — whatever may be rationally imagined may be actually undergone; as to David's consciousness, what is here stated was a matter of the sternest reality. It should be borne in mind, too, that trouble is a different thing to different men, even when it comes in the same guise and quantity. Much must depend upon temperament. Things animate suffer; things inanimate do not respond to the blow with which they are struck. The poetic temperament is the most suffering of all. According to the sensitiveness of the nature is the terribleness of the stroke which falls upon it.

(Joseph Parker, D. D.)

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KJV: The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid.

WEB: The cords of death surrounded me. The floods of ungodliness made me afraid.