Page:04.BCOT.KD.PoeticalBooks.vol.4.Writings.djvu/868

 as speaking after the manner of the prophets. Psa 58:1-11 and 94 are similar, but more especially Isa 3:13-15. Asaph the seer beholds how God, reproving, correcting, and threatening, appears against the chiefs of the congregation of His people, who have perverted the splendour of majesty which He has put upon them into tyranny. It is perfectly characteristic of Asaph (Ps 50; Psa 75:1-10; Ps 81) to plunge himself into the contemplation of the divine judgment, and to introduce God as speaking. There is nothing to militate against the Psalm being written by Asaph, David's contemporary, except the determination not to allow to the לאסף of the inscription its most natural sense. Hupfeld, understanding “angels” by the elohim, as Bleek has done before him, inscribes the Psalm: “God's judgment upon unjust judges in heaven and upon earth.” But the angels as such are nowhere called elohim in the Old Testament, although they might be so called; and their being judged here on account of unjust judging, Hupfeld himself says, is “an obscure point that is still to be cleared up.” An interpretation which, like this, abandons the usage of the language in order to bring into existence a riddle that it cannot solve, condemns itself. At the same time the assertion of Hupfeld (of Knobel, Graf, and others), that in Exo 21:5; Exo 22:7., Ex 27,<, אלהים denotes God Himself, and not directly the authorities of the nation as being His earthly representatives, finds its most forcible refutation in the so-called and mortal elohim of this Psalm (cf. also Psa 45:7; Psa 58:2). By reference to this Psalm Jesus proves to the Jews (Joh 10:34-36) that when He calls Himself the Son of God, He does not blaspheme God, by an argumentatio a minori ad majus. If the Law, so He argues, calls even those gods who are officially invested with this name by a declaration of the divine will promulgated in time (and the Scripture cannot surely, as in general, so also in this instance, be made invalid), then it cannot surely be blasphemy if He calls Himself the Son of God, whom not merely a divine utterance in this present time has called to this or to that worldly office after the image of God, but who with His whole life is ministering to the accomplishment