Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Psalms 139:8
If I ascend up into heaven, thou [art] there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou [art there].
8. Cp. Amo 9:2 ff.; Jer 23:24.
If I should ascend up ] Another Aramaic word.
if I make my bed in hell ] Render, and if I should make Sheol my couch.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
If I ascend up into heaven – The word heaven here, in the original is in the plural number – heavens, – and includes all that there is above the earth – the highest worlds.
If I make my bed – Properly, If I strew or spread my couch. If I should seek that as the place where to lie down.
In hell – Hebrew, Sheol. See the notes at Isa 14:9, where the word is fully explained. The word here refers to the under-world – the abodes of the dead; and, in the apprehension of the psalmist, corresponds in depth with the word heaven in height. The two represent all worlds, above and below; and the idea is, that in neither direction, above or below, could he go where God would not be.
Thou art there – Or, more emphatically and impressively in the original, Thou! That is, the psalmist imagines himself in the highest heaven, or in the deepest abodes of the dead – and lo! God is there also! he has not gone from him! he is still in the presence of the same God!
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Psa 139:8
If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.
Gods presence in the under-world
We are told that the Jew had no knowledge of a heaven for the soul, that the only future he knew was that of a mysterious under-world where the spirits of the dead reposed. It is this under-world which the psalmist here designates by the word translated hell; it is the universal Old Testament name for the place of the dead. But, in the hands of this writer, the under-world becomes well-nigh as fair as the upper; it receives the very glory of heaven. What is the glory of heaven? Is it not the fact that to depart is to be with God? The heaven of Christianity is not beautiful to its votaries by reason of its pearly streets and golden gates; it is beautiful because it is conceived to be the home of God. Now, this is the thought which the psalmist makes his own. He, too, recognizes that the joy of heaven is the joy of being with God; but, to him, God is everywhere. To say that at death the soul does not ascend is not necessarily to say that it is banished from heaven. God is in the under as well as in the upper world; and the pure soul will find Him there as in all places. Death cannot rob a good man of his God; whither can he flee from His presence? That presence will follow him equally whether he ascend up into heaven or whether he make his bed in the unknown under-world. However unknown it may be, it is not outside of Him; and whatever is not outside of Him may be the heaven of the soul. Such is the thought of the psalmist, a thought which flashes a ray of glory around the Jewish vision of death and throws back its light on the Jewish doctrine of immortality. We see that the Judaic faith in God had enclosed within itself a hope of eternal life. The Jew did not, like the Greek, conjure up the images of a locality which the disembodied soul would inhabit after death; he had no figure in his imagination wherewith to body forth his conception of the dark vale. But he knew of a Presence that belonged alike to his own world and the under-world, the Being of the Eternal God; and, in that knowledge, death itself ceased to be a foreign land. It lost much of its strangeness. It held something which the earth held, and that the source of all that is in earth or heaven, the very life of the universe. (G. Matheson, D. D.)
Gods omnipresence
If you were called to take some such awful journey as Virgil and Dante have fabled in their poems when their heroes descended into the dread Avernus, you need not tremble, though it were said of you, as of them:–
Along the illuminated shade,
Darkening and lone, their way they made.
If, I say, you were bound to traverse the sepulchral vaults, and all the gloomy dungeons of Hades, yet you need not fear, for underneath are the everlasting arms. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 8. If I ascend] Thou art in heaven, in thy glory; in hell, in thy vindictive justice; and in all parts of earth, water, space, place, or vacuity, by thy omnipresence. Wherever I am, there art thou; and where I cannot be, thou art there. Thou fillest the heavens and the earth.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
If I make my bed in hell; if I should or could repose and hide myself in the grave, or in the lowest parts of the earth, which are at the farthest distance from heaven.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
If I ascend up into heaven, thou [art] there,…. No man hath ascended or can ascend to heaven of himself; it is an hyperbolical expression, as are those that follow; none but Christ has ascended to heaven by his own power, who descended from it; saints hope to go there at death, and, when they do, they find God there; that is his habitation, his throne is there, yea, that is his throne; here he keeps court and has his attendants, and here he will be seen and enjoyed by his people to all eternity;
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou [art there]; which, if understood of the place of the damned, is a place of torment, and a very unfit one to make a bed in, being a lake burning with fire and brimstone; and where the smoke of their torment ascends for ever, and they have no rest day nor night; their worm never dies, and their fire is not quenched; and even here God is: hell is not only naked before him, and all its inhabitants in his view; but he is here in his powerful presence, keeping the devils in chains of darkness; turning wicked men daily into it, pouring out his wrath upon them, placing and continuing an unpassable gulf between them and happy souls: though rather this is to be understood of the grave, in which sense the word is often used; and so Kimchi, Aben Ezra, and Arama, interpret it of the lowest parts of the earth, as opposed to heaven; the grave is a bed to the saints, where they lie down and rest, and sleep till the resurrection morn, Job 14:12; and here the Lord is watching over and keeping their dust, and will raise it up again at the last day. The Targum is,
“there is thy Word.”
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
The future form , customary in the Aramaic, may be derived just as well from ( ), by means of the same mode of assimilation as in = , as from ( ), which latter is certainly only insecurely established by Dan 6:24, (cf. , Ezr 4:22; , Dan 5:2), since the Nun, as in , Dan 4:3, can also be a compensation for the resolved doubling (vid., Bernstein in the Lexicon Chrestom. Kirschianae, and Levy s.v. ). with the simple future is followed by cohortatives (vid., on Psa 73:16) with the equivalent among them: et si stratum facerem ( mihi ) infernum (accusative of the object as in Isa 58:5), etc. In other passages the wings of the sun (Mal 4:2) and of the wind (Psa 18:11) are mentioned, here we have the wings of the morning’s dawn. Pennae aurorae , Eugubinus observes (1548), est velocissimus aurorae per omnem mundum decursus . It is therefore to be rendered: If I should lift wings ( as in Eze 10:16, and frequently) such as the dawn of the morning has, i.e., could I fly with the swiftness with which the dawn of the morning spreads itself over the eastern sky, towards the extreme west and alight there. Heaven and Hades, as being that which is superterrestrial and subterrestrial, and the east and west are set over against one another. is the extreme end of the sea (of the Mediterranean with the “isles of the Gentiles”). In Psa 139:10 follows the apodosis: nowhere is the hand of God, which governs everything, to be escaped, for dextera Dei ubique est . (not , Eze 13:15), “therefore I spake,” also has the value of a hypothetical protasis: quodsi dixerim . and belongs together: merae tenebrae ( vid: Psa 39:6.); but is obscure. The signification secured to it of conterere, contundere , in Gen 3:15; Job 9:17, which is followed by the lxx (Vulgate) , is inappropriate to darkness. The signification inhiare , which may be deduced as possible from , suits relatively better, yet not thoroughly well (why should it not have been ?). The signification obvelare , however, which one expects to find, and after which the Targum, Symmachus, Jerome, Saadia, and others render it, seems only to be guessed at from the connection, since has not this signification in any other instance, and in favour of it we cannot appeal either to – whence , which belongs together with , , and – or to , the root of which is ( ), or to , whence , which does not signify to cover, veil, but according to Arab. df , to fold, fold together, to double. We must therefore either assign to the signification operiat me without being able to prove it, or we must put a verb of this signification in its place, viz., (Ewald) or (Bttcher), which latter is the more commendable here, where darkness ( , synon. , ) is the subject: and if I should say, let nothing but darkness cover me, and as night (the predicate placed first, as in Amo 4:13) let the light become about me, i.e., let the light become night that shall surround and cover me ( , poetic for , like in 2 Sam. 22) – the darkness would spread abroad no obscurity (Psa 105:28) that should extend beyond ( ) Thy piercing eye and remove me from Thee. In the word , too, the Hiphil signification is not lost: the night would give out light from itself, as if it were the day; for the distinction of day and night has no conditioning influence upon God, who is above and superior to all created things ( der Uebercreatrliche), who is light in Himself. The two are correlative, as e.g., in 1Ki 22:4. (with a superfluous Jod ) is an old word, but (cf. Aramaic ) is a later one.
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
(8) If I make my bed in hell.Literally, If I make Shel my bed. (For the thought see Amo. 9:2, and comp. Pro. 15:11; Job. 26:6.)
This conviction that the underworld was not exempt from the vigilance and even from the visitation of Jehovah makes an advance in thought from Psa. 6:5 (where see Note), &c, where death is viewed as cutting off the Hebrew altogether from his relation to the Theocracy.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
8. Heaven Hebrew, heavens. The celestial heights, however far.
Hell Hebrew, sheol, the lowest depths, the under world. The ideas of power and of omnipresence are continued. Amo 9:2
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Psa 139:8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou [art] there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou [art there].
Ver. 8. If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there ] That is thy proper place; and there Aristotle, in his Book of the World, ad Alexandrum affirmeth that God is only essentialiter et actu. This was to proclaim himself an arrant atheist; for God filleth all places, and is comprehended of no place, being totally present wheresoever present; for we must not conceive that God is commensurable by the place, as if he were partly here and partly elsewhere; but everywhere, all present.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
hell = Sheol. See App-35.
behold. Figure of speech Asterismos. App-6.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
hell
Heb. “Sheol,” (See Scofield “Hab 2:5”).
Fuente: Scofield Reference Bible Notes
I ascend: Eze 28:12-17, Amo 9:2-4, Oba 1:4
in hell: Job 26:6, Job 34:21, Job 34:22, Pro 15:11, Jon 2:2
Reciprocal: Exo 20:18 – they removed Job 17:13 – I have made Psa 16:10 – my Jer 51:53 – mount Eze 32:25 – set her
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
David gave hypothetical examples of where he might go to hide from God in these verses (cf. Rom 8:38-39). Psa 139:8 is another merism (cf. Psa 139:2-3) that expresses everywhere between heaven and hell. Even if he could travel as fast as the speed of light, he could not escape God (Psa 139:9). Even there God’s hand would lead him. Psa 139:10 pictures God gently leading and guiding David. This thought changes the fearful earlier image of God pursuing the psalmist.