Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Psalms 14:3
They are all gone aside, they are [all] together become filthy: [there is] none that doeth good, no, not one.
3. The result of the investigation. All were turned aside from the path of right (Exo 32:8; Jdg 2:17): together had they become tainted, a word which in Arabic means to go bad or turn sour, but in Hebr. is used only in a moral sense, here and in Job 15:16.
Three verses follow here in the P.B.V. which are not in the Hebrew text, and are rightly omitted in the A.V. The first three verses of the Psalm are quoted by St Paul in Rom 3:10-12, in proof of the universal depravity of mankind. He supplements them by further quotations from Psa 5:9; Psa 140:3; Psa 10:7; Isa 59:7-8; Psa 36:1: and this cento of passages was at an early date interpolated in the LXX, from which it passed to the Vulgate, and thence to the P.B.V. The addition is found in the Vatican and Sinaitic MSS. (B and ), and other MSS. which represent the older unrevised text; but was rightly obelized by Origen, and has disappeared from the Alexandrian MS. (A) and the mass of later MSS.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
They are all gone aside – This verse states the result of the divine investigation referred to in the previous verse. The result, as seen by God himself, was, that all were seen to have gone aside, and to have become filthy. The word rendered gone aside means properly to go off, to turn aside or away, to depart; as, for example, to turn out of the right way or path, Exo 32:8. Then it means to turn away from God; to fall away from his worship; to apostatize, 1Sa 12:20; 2Ki 18:6; 2Ch 25:27. This is the idea here – that they had all apostatized from the living God. The word all in the circumstances makes the statement as universal as it can be made; and no term could be used more clearly affirming the doctrine of universal depravity.
They are all together become filthy – The word all here is supplied by the translators. It was not necessary, however, to introduce it in order that the idea of universal depravity might be expressed, for that is implied in the word rendered together, yachedav. That word properly conveys the idea that the same character or conduct pervaded all, or that the same thing might be expressed of all those referred to. They were united in this thing – that they bad become defiled or filthy. The word is used with reference to persons, as meaning that they are all in one place, Gen 13:6; Gen 22:6; or to events, as meaning that they occurred at one time, Psa 4:8. They were all as one. Compare 1Ch 10:6. The idea is that, in respect to the statement made, they were alike. What would describe one would describe all. The word rendered become filthy is, in the margin, rendered stinking. In Arabic the word means to become sharp, or sour as milk; and hence, the idea of becoming corrupt in a moral sense. Gesenius, Lexicon. The word is found only here, and in the parallel Psa 53:3, and in Job 15:16, in each of which places it is rendered filthy. It relates here to character, and means that their character was morally corrupt or defiled. The term is often used in that sense now.
There is none that doeth good, no, not one – Nothing could more clearly express the idea of universal depravity than this expression. It is not merely that no one could be found who did good, but the expression is repeated to give emphasis to the statement. This entire passage is quoted in Rom 3:10-12, in proof of the doctrine of universal depravity. See the note at that passage.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Psa 14:3
They are all gone aside.
Man falls lower and lower
The mind end heart having gone astray–having been turned aside like a deceitful bow,–nothing became easier than to sink into ever-deepening abysses of iniquity; the case is put also negatively, so as to fill up the measure of the great accusation, There is none that doeth good, no, not one. Man cannot stop in a morally negative condition. Again and again this solemn lesson has been forced upon us by the whole current of history, and yet an insidious temptation assails the heart with the thought that it is still possible to forsake religious convictions and professions, and yet to preserve a pure and noble life. The backslider and the truth seeker must never be regarded as one and the same person. God having been surrendered as the supreme thought of the mind and the supreme rule of conduct, a scene of infinite confusion presented itself: workers of iniquity carried on their evil service as if in darkness; their mouths were opened in cruelty upon any who feared and worshipped God; the counsel of the poor was treated with contempt, and the poor themselves were devoured rapaciously. Where reverence has been abandoned it has been impossible to sustain true and self-sacrificing philanthropy. In this case reverence has been formally given up, and so a great act of moral spoliation has been accomplished. (Joseph Parker, D. D.)
There is none that doeth good, no, not one.
Man fallen and depraved
I. The inborn depravity of our nature.
1. What saith the Scripture?
2. The records of human experience are to the same effect. See the moral misery of the world. Look at the evidence of our inborn depravity in the manifold outbreakings of wickedness in every age and circumstance of life. Notice also the corruption and infirmity which is found remaining even in good men. We cannot read the sins of Abraham, and David, and Peter, and Moses without many painful and humiliating thoughts. Who can stand if they fell?
II. In what does this original depravity of our nature chiefly consist?
1. In the depravation of our intellectual faculties. The mind of our race has become blinded. Civilisation gives no Divine knowledge.
2. In the perversion and rebellion of the will. By the will we understand the commanding faculty of the soul by which it chooses or rejects anything that may be offered to it.
3. In our disordered and alienated affections. Such a threefold cord against God and holiness we might well fear could not be broken. But thanks be to God, there is one who can break it. Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. (D. Moore, M. A.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 3. They are all gone aside] They will not walk in the straight path. They seek crooked ways; and they have departed from truth, and the God of truth.
They are all together become filthy] neelachu. They are become sour and rancid; a metaphor taken from milk that has fermented and turned sour, rancid, and worthless.
There is none that doeth good, no, not one.] This is not only the state of heathen Babylon! but the state of the whole inhabitants of the earth, till the grace of God changes their heart. By nature, and from nature, by practice, every man is sinful and corrupt. He feels no good; he is disposed to no good; he does no good. And even God himself, who cannot be deceived, cannot find a single exception to this! Lord, what is man?
The Vulgate, the Roman copy of the Septuagint, the AEthiopic, and the Arabic, add those six verses here which are quoted by St. Paul, Ro 3:13-18. See the notes on those passages, and see the observations at the end of this Psalm. See Clarke on Ps 14:7.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
Gone aside, to wit, from God, whom they should have sought, Psa 14:2, and from the rule which he hath given them, and by which they sometimes professed and seemed to govern themselves. Or, are grown sour, as this word signifies, Hos 4:18. And so this is a metaphor from corrupted drinks, as the next is taken from rotten meat.
Filthy, Heb. stinking i.e. loathsome and abominable to God, and to all wise and sober men.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
3. filthyliterally,”spoiled,” or, “soured,” “corrupted”(Job 15:16; Rom 3:12).
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
They are all gone aside,…. As bankrupts, having run out their whole stock, and into debt, and have nothing to pay, nor make composition with, and are obliged to abscond, as Adam, Ge 3:8. The words in Ps 53:3 are, “everyone of them is gone back”; from God; have revolted from him, and turned their backs upon him, and have gone back from his commandment, despised his law, and cast away his word. The Apostle Paul interprets it, “they are all gone out of the way”; out of God’s way, into their own way; out of the path of truth, righteousness, and holiness, into the way of sin, error, darkness, and death; and with this agrees the interpretation of Aben Ezra, who adds, “out of the right way”; and of Kimchi and Ben Melech, whose gloss is, “out of the good way”; which is God’s way, or the way of his commandments;
they are [all] together become filthy, or “stinking” a, like putrid and corrupt flesh; see Ps 38:5; and so “unprofitable”, useless, and good for nothing, as the apostle renders it, Ro 3:12. Mankind are universally filthy and unclean; they are all of them defiled with sin, both in soul and body, in all the faculties of their souls and members of their bodies; and they are originally and naturally so; nor can anything cleanse them from their pollution but the blood of Christ;
[there is] none that doeth good, no, not one: this is repeated partly to asseverate more strongly the depravity of mankind, and partly to express the universality of it; that there is no exception to it in any that descend from Adam by ordinary generation. Here follows in the Septuagint version, according to the Vatican copy, all those passages quoted by the apostle, Ro 3:13; which have been generally supposed to have been taken from different parts of Scripture; so the Syriac scholiast says, in some ancient Greek copies are found eight more verses, and these are they, “Their throat”, c.
a “faetnerunt, putruerunt”, Pagninus “aut putruerunt”, Vatabulus; “putidi vel foetidi”, Junius & Tremellius, Piscator, Gejerus, Michaelis.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
The third tristich bewails the condition in which He finds humanity. The universality of corruption is expressed in as strong terms as possible. they all (lit., the totality); with one another (lit., in its or their unions, i.e., universi ); not a single one who might form an exception. (probably not 3 praet. but partic., which passes at once into the finite verb) signifies to depart, viz., from the ways of God, therefore to fall away ( ). , as in Job 15:16, denotes the moral corruptness as a becoming sour, putrefaction, and suppuration. Instead of , the lxx translates (as though it were , which is the more familiar form of expression). Paul quotes the first three verses of this Psalm (Rom 3:10-12) in order to show how the assertion, that Jews and heathen all are included under sin, is in accordance with the teaching of Scripture. What the psalmist says, applies primarily to Israel, his immediate neighbours, but at the same time to the heathen, as is self-evident. What is lamented is neither the pseudo-Israelitish corruption in particular, nor that of the heathen, but the universal corruption of man which prevails not less in Israel than in the heathen world. The citations of the apostle which follow his quotation of the Psalm, from to were early incorporated in the Psalm in the of the lxx. They appear as an integral part of it in the Cod. Alex., in the Greco-Latin Psalterium Vernonense , and in the Syriac Psalterium Mediolanense . They are also found in Apollinaris’ paraphrase of the Psalms as a later interpolation; the Cod. Vat. has them in the margin; and the words have found admittance in the translation, which is more Rabbinical than Old Hebrew, even in a Hebrew codex (Kennicott 649). Origen rightly excluded this apostolic Mosaic work of Old Testament testimonies from his text of the Psalm; and the true representation of the matter is to be found in Jerome, in the preface to the xvi. book of his commentary on Isaiah.
(Note: Cf. Plschke’s Monograph on the Milanese Psalterium Syriacum, 1835, p. 28-39.)
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
Every one of them has gone aside. Some translate the word סר, sar, which is here used, to stink, (282) as if the reading were, Every one of them emits an offensive odour, that it may correspond in meaning with the verb in the next clause, which in Hebrew signifies to become putrid or rotten. But there is no necessity for explaining the two words in the same way, as if the same thing were repeated twice. The interpretation is more appropriate, which supposes that men are here condemned as guilty of a detestable revolt, inasmuch as they are estranged from God, or have departed far from him; and that afterwards there is pointed out the disgusting corruption or putrescence of their whole life, as if nothing could proceed from apostates but what smells rank of rottenness and infection. The Hebrew word סר, sar, is almost universally taken in this sense. In the 53 Psalm, the word סג , sag, is used, which signifies the same thing. In short, David declares that all men are so carried away by their capricious lusts, that nothing is to be found either of purity or integrity in their whole life. This, therefore, is defection so complete, that it extinguishes all godliness. Besides, David here not only censures a portion of the people, but pronounces them all to be equally involved in the same condemnation. This was, indeed, a prodigy well fitted to excite abhorrence, that all the children of Abraham, whom God had chosen to be his peculiar people, were so corrupt from the least to the greatest.
But it might be asked, how David makes no exception, how he declares that not a righteous person remains, not even one, when, nevertheless, he informs us, a little after, that the poor and afflicted put their trust in God? Again, it might be asked, if all were wicked, who was that Israel whose future redemption he celebrates in the end of the psalm? Nay, as he himself was one of the body of that people, why does he not at least except himself? I answer: It is against the carnal and degenerate body of the Israelitish nation that he here inveighs, and the small number constituting the seed which God had set apart for himself is not included among them. This is the reason why Paul, in his Epistle to the Rom 3:10, extends this sentence to all mankind. David, it is true, deplores the disordered and desolate state of matters under the reign of Saul. At the same time, however, he doubtless makes a comparison between the children of God and all who have not been regenerated by the Spirit, but are carried away according to the inclinations of their flesh. (283) Some give a different explanation, maintaining that Paul, by quoting the testimony of David, did not understand him as meaning that men are naturally depraved and corrupt; and that the truth which David intended to teach is, that the rulers and the more distinguished of the people were wicked, and that, therefore, it was not surprising to behold unrighteousness and wickedness prevailing so generally in the world. This answer is far from being satisfactory. The subject which Paul there reasons upon is not, what is the character of the greater part of men, but what is the character of all who are led and governed by their own corrupt nature. It is, therefore, to be observed, that when David places himself and the small remnant of the godly on one side, and puts on the other the body of the people, in general, this implies that there is a manifest difference between the children of God who are created anew by his Spirit, and all the posterity of Adam, in whom corruption and depravity exercise dominion. Whence it follows, that all of us, when we are born, bring with us from our mother’s womb this folly and filthiness manifested in the whole life, which David here describes, and that we continue such until God make us new creatures by his mysterious grace.
(282) Hammond admits that the word סר, sar, means to go aside, or to decline, and that it is commonly applied to a way or path, declining from the right way, or going in a wrong way. But he thinks that the idea here is different, that it is taken from wine when it grows dead or sour, just as the word is used in this sense in Hos 4:18, סר סבאם, sar sobim, “Their drink is gone aside, or grown sour.” He considers this view corroborated from the clause which immediately follows, נאלחו, ne-elachu, they are become putrid, which is derived from אלה, alach, to be rotten or putrified, referring properly to flesh which has become putrid. “Thus,” says he, “the proportion is well kept between drink and meat, the one growing dead or sour, as the other putrifies and stinks, and then is good for nothing, but is thrown away.”
(283) David speaks of all mankind, with the exception of the “people of God,” and “the generation of the righteous,” spoken of in verses 4, 5 who are opposed to the rest of the human race.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(3) Filthy.Better, corrupt or putrid. Comp. the Roman satirists description of his age:
Nothing is left, nothing for future times
To add to the full catalogue of crimes.
The baffled sons must feel the same desires
And act the same mad follies as their sires.
Vice has attained its zenith.JUVENAL: Sat. i.
Between Psa. 14:3-4 the Alexandrian MS. of the LXX., followed by the Vulg. and the English Prayer-book version, and the Arabic, insert from Rom. 3:13-18, the passage beginning, Their throat is an open sepulchre. The fact of these verses, which are really a cento from various psalms and Isaiah, following immediately on the quotation of Psa. 14:2-3, led the copyist to this insertion. (See Note in New Testament Commentary to Rom. 3:13.)
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
Psa 14:3. They are all gone aside, &c. St. Paul, having cited this verse, Rom 3:10; Rom 3:31 subjoins three others, which are translated in the liturgy version of the church of England, but are not to be found in the modern Hebrew. In order to support the integrity of the Hebrew text, it has been supposed that the apostle, in his quotation, has cited from unconnected places, and different parts of scripture, and that the three verses which are to be met with in the Vatican copy of the LXX were inserted, or rather interpolated, by some Christian, to make it agree with Romans 3. But to this it may be replied, that no instance can be given of the apostle’s quoting the Old Testament in so vague a manner. It must, indeed, be acknowledged, that these three verses are not to be found in the Alexandrian copies of the LXX. But perhaps those were taken from a Hebrew copy too, wherein the passage was omitted. The Vulgate, the Ethiopic, and some Arabic copies, as Grotius observes, read the passage in question; and it is likewise observable, that the quotations in the New Testament seem to have been taken from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew; the very words in the Septuagint being made use of by the apostles, and particularly in this passage. This consideration must certainly give no small sanction to that version; and, of consequence, affords us a strong probability, that the verses inserted Romans 3 were originally in the Hebrew text. See Dr. Hammond, and Pilkington’s Remarks. Mr. Green observes upon this Psalm in general, that it differs so much at present from the 53rd, that learned men are more inclined to impute the variations in the latter to the design of the writer, than to the carelessness of transcribers: but I am persuaded, says he, that upon a collation of the manuscripts that we have, modern as they are, the very reverse will be found to be true.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Psa 14:3 They are all gone aside, they are [all] together become filthy: [there is] none that doeth good, no, not one.
Ver. 3. They are all gone aside, &c. ] This is God’s own report of the matter, fully answering to that before given in by David, Psa 14:1 . Good men have the mind of Christ, 1Co 2:16 , and do fully concur with him in judgment and affection. David was a man after God’s own heart; and the heart of Paul is the heart of Christ, saith Chrysostom. But why, then, doth not David except himself out of this universitas declinantium, community of stragglers that are gone aside? and why doth St Paul argue from this text that all, both Jews and Gentiles, are stark naught? Rom 3:10-12 . I answer, because by nature there is never a better of us; but , as the Greek proverb hath it. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” saith the whole Church, Isa 53:6 Homo est inversus decalogus, we naturally all stand across to all goodness. The word here rendered gone aside signifieth to give back sturdily, as a stubborn heifer, that refuseth to receive the yoke.
They are altogether become filthy
There is none that doeth good
1. Quoad fontem, they did not out of the good treasure of their hearts bring forth those good things; they were strangers to the life of God, to the new nature.
2. Quoad finem, they brought forth fruit to themselves, Hos 10:1 , they had not good aims in their good actions. Now, Bonum non sit nisi ex integra causa; malum ex quolibet defectu, say the schools.
No, not one
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
all = the whole mass. Compare “No, not one”, Rom 3:10-12.
filthy = corrupt.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
all gone: Psa 119:176, Ecc 7:29, Isa 53:6, Isa 59:7, Isa 59:8, Isa 59:13-15, Jer 2:13, Rom 3:10-12, Rom 3:23, Eph 2:3, 2Pe 2:13-15
filthy: Heb. stinking, Psa 38:5, Job 15:16, Isa 64:6, Eze 36:25, 2Co 7:1
there: Psa 14:1, Exo 8:31, Exo 12:30, Deu 1:35, Job 14:4, Rom 3:10, 1Co 6:5
Reciprocal: Gen 5:3 – in his 1Ch 19:6 – odious Job 15:14 – is man Psa 53:3 – Every Psa 101:3 – them Pro 2:13 – leave Pro 21:8 – way Ecc 7:10 – wisely Jer 5:1 – if there Zep 1:6 – and those Mat 7:13 – for Mar 7:21 – out Rom 3:12 – They are Phi 3:9 – not
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Psa 14:3. They are all gone aside From God and the rule he hath given them to walk by, from truth into error, and from duty into sin; from the paths of wisdom and righteousness. They are altogether become filthy, loathsome, and abominable before God.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
14:3 They are {c} all gone aside, they are [all] together become filthy: [there is] none that doeth good, no, not one.
(c) David here makes comparisons between the faithful and the reprobate, but Paul speaks the same of all men naturally, Rom 3:10.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
All human beings have turned aside from the wise way of fearing the Lord (cf. Gen 6:5-6; Gen 11:1-9). The result is that they have become corrupt (Heb. alah, lit. sour, like milk) morally. Not one solitary individual does good in the sight of God on his own initiative and in his own strength (cf. Rom 3:23). It is for this reason that no one can be acceptable to God on the merit of his own works. All need the goodness (righteousness) that only God can provide for us.