Psalm 119:19 I am a stranger in the earth: hide not your commandments from me. The Jews never seem to lose sight of the fact that they were descendants of pilgrim forefathers. In the most brilliant periods of their history they still regard the life of the moving patriarchs as a type of their own. The confession of Abraham as he stood asking from the children of Heth a place for his dead, that "he was a stranger and a sojourner," finds an echo in the prayer of David as he consecrates the treasures that had been offered for the building of the temple. "We are strangers and sojourners as all our fathers were." The same characteristic view of life is heard again in the prayer of Hezekiah, when he compares his life to a shepherd's tent. Peter, who was a true type of his race, exhorts as "strangers and pilgrims abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." The same refrain surges back from the Epistle to the Hebrews, "We have here no continuing city." Now large numbers of men feel themselves aliens because they have no stake in the soil and land is unequally distributed. But this was not the ease with the twelve tribes to whom Canaan was apportioned by lot. Attachment to the soil became a passion of unrivalled fervour, even in those who had not been schooled into a lover-like devotion to the fatherland by years spent in bondage in an alien land, and yet in spite of this Jewish feeling the rational temper seems to have been ever haunted with a sense of the forlorn loneliness of life. (T. G. Selby.) Parallel Verses KJV: I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.WEB: I am a stranger on the earth. Don't hide your commandments from me. |
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