Psalm 109:10

Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(10) Be continually vagabonds.—“Wander and wander about” would better reproduce the original.

Desolate places.—Rather, ruins. They are imagined creeping out of the ruins of their homes to beg. But there was a different reading, followed by the LXX. and Vulg., “let them be driven out of their homes.” This reading involves but a slight literal change. Comp.,

“Worse evil yet I pray for on my spouse;

Let him still live, through strange towns roam in want,

Exiled, suspected, cowering, with no home.”

SENECA: Med., i. 19.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

109:6-20 The Lord Jesus may speak here as a Judge, denouncing sentence on some of his enemies, to warn others. When men reject the salvation of Christ, even their prayers are numbered among their sins. See what hurries some to shameful deaths, and brings the families and estates of others to ruin; makes them and theirs despicable and hateful, and brings poverty, shame, and misery upon their posterity: it is sin, that mischievous, destructive thing. And what will be the effect of the sentence, Go, ye cursed, upon the bodies and souls of the wicked! How it will affect the senses of the body, and the powers of the soul, with pain, anguish, horror, and despair! Think on these things, sinners, tremble and repent.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg - Let them continually wander about with no home - no fixed habitation. Let them be compelled to ask their daily food at the hand of charity. Here we enter on a part of the psalm which is more difficult to be reconciled with a proper feeling than the portions which have been considered. It is, indeed, a frequent consequence of crime that the children of those who are punished "are" vagabonds and beggars, but this is not a necessary consequence; and there "seems" here, therefore, to be a mixture of personal feeling, or a feeling of revenge. This runs through the remaining portion of the imprecatory part of the psalm. I confess that it is difficult to explain this without admitting that the expressions are a record only of what actually occurred in the mind of a man, truly pious, but not perfect - a man who thus, to illustrate the workings of the mind even when the general character was holy, was allowed to record his own feelings, though wrong, just as he would record the conduct of another, or his own conduct, though wrong, as a simple matter of fact - a record of what actually was felt. The "record" may be exactly correct; the sentiment recorded may have been wholly incapable of vindication. See the General Introduction, Section 6 (6).

Let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places - In places uninhabited by man; in barren regions; in deserts: let them be compelled to live on the scanty food which they may pick up there - the roots, or the wild fruits, which will simply keep them alive. See the notes at Job 30:4.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

9, 10. Let his family share the punishment, his children be as wandering beggars to prowl in their desolate homes, a greedy and relentless creditor grasp his substance, his labor, or the fruit of it, enure to strangers and not his heirs, and his unprotected, fatherless children fall in want, so that his posterity shall utterly fail.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Vagabonds; having no certain place of abode; which is a grievous curse in itself, Genesis 4:12,14 Isa 16:2.

And beg: this increaseth their misery.

Desolate places; into which they are fled for fear and shame, as not daring to show their faces amongst men.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg,.... Wander from place to place, begging their bread: this is denied of the children of good men in David's time, Psalm 37:25 yet was threatened to the children of Eli, 1 Samuel 2:36 and was very likely literally true of the children of Judas; and was certainly the case of multitudes of the children of the Jews, the posterity of them that crucified Christ, at the time of their destruction by the Romans; when great numbers were dispersed, and wandered about in various countries, as vagabonds, begging their bread from door to door; which is reckoned (a) by them a great affliction, and very distressing.

Let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places; either describing, as Kimchi thinks, the miserable cottages, forlorn and desolate houses, in which they lived, and from whence they went out to everyone that passed by, to ask relief of them; or it may be rendered,

because of their desolate places (b); or, "after them"; so the Targum, "after their desolation was made"; when their grand house was left desolate, their temple, as our Lord said it should, and was, Matthew 23:38, and all their other houses in Jerusalem and in Judea; then were they obliged to seek their bread of others elsewhere, and by begging. The Syriac version wants this verse.

(a) Mifchar Hapeninim apud Buxtorf. Florileg. Heb. p. 262, 263. (b) So De Dieu, Gejerus, and some in Michaelis.

Geneva Study Bible

Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

10. let them seek &c.] And seek (their bread) far from their ruined home. Let the wicked man’s home become a ruin, and his children have to get their living away from it. The LXX however points to the reading, and let them be driven out of their ruined home.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 10. - Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg. If it be just that the sins of the fathers be visited upon the children, the psalmist may be regarded as justified in this wish. Still, it is not one that a Christian will readily echo. Let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. Professor Cheyne corrects דָרְשׁוּ into לֺגּדְשׁוּ, and translates, "Let them be driven from their desolate houses." Psalm 109:10

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The writer now turns to one among the many, and in the angry zealous fervour of despised love calls down God's judgment upon him. To call down a higher power, more particularly for punishment, upon any one is expressed by על (הפקיד) פּקד, Jeremiah 15:3; Leviticus 26:16. The tormentor of innocence shall find a superior executor who will bring him before the tribunal (which is expressed in Latin by legis actio per manus injectionem). The judgment scene in Psalm 109:6, Psalm 109:7 shows that this is what is intended in Psalm 109:6: At the right hand is the place of the accuser, who in this instance will not rest before the damnatus es has been pronounced. He is called שׂטן, which is not to be understood here after 1 Samuel 29:4; 2 Samuel 19:22, but after Zechariah 3:1; 1 Chronicles 21:1, if not directly of Satan, still of a superhuman (cf. Numbers 22:22) being which opposes him, by appearing before God as his κατήγωρ; for according to Psalm 109:7 the שׂטן is to be thought of as accuser, and according to Psalm 109:7 God as Judge. רשׁע has the sense of reus, and יצא refers to the publication of the sentence. Psalm 109:7 wishes that his prayer, viz., that by which he would wish to avert the divine sentence of condemnation, may become לחטאה, not: a missing of the mark, i.e., ineffectual (Thenius), but, according to the usual signification of the word: a sin, viz., because it proceeds from despair, not from true penitence. In Psalm 109:8 the incorrigible one is wished an untimely death (מעטּים as in one other instance, only, Ecclesiastes 5:1) and the loss of his office. The lxx renders: τὴν ἐπισκοπὴν αὐτοῦ λάβοι ἕτερος. פּקדּה really signifies the office of overseer, oversight, office, and the one individual must have held a prominent position among the enemies of the psalmist. Having died off from this position before his time, he shall leave behind him a family deeply reduced in circumstances, whose former dwelling - place-he was therefore wealthy - becomes "ruins." His children wander up and down far from these ruins (מן as e.g., in Judges 5:11; Job 28:4) and beg (דּרשׁ, like προσαιτεῖν ἐπαιτεῖν, Sir. 40:28 equals לחם בּקּשׁ, Psalm 37:25). Instead of ודרשׁוּ the reading ודרשׁוּ is also found. A Poel is now and then formed from the strong verbs also,

(Note: In connection with the strong verb it frequently represents the Piel which does not occur, as with דּרשׁ, לשׁן, שׁפט, or even represents the Piel which, as in the case of שׁרשׁ, is already made use of in another signification (Piel, to root out; Poel, to take root).)

in the inflexion of which the Cholem is sometimes shortened to Kametz chatuph; vid., the forms of לשׁן, to slander, in Psalm 101:5, תּאר, to sketch, mark out in outline, Isaiah 44:13, cf. also Job 20:26 (תּאכלהוּ) and Isaiah 62:9 (according to the reading מאספיו). To read the Kametz in these instances as ā, and to regard these forms as resolved Piels, is, in connection with the absence of the Metheg, contrary to the meaning of the pointing; on purpose to guard against this way of reading it, correct codices have ודרשׁוּ (cf. Psalm 69:19), which Baer has adopted.