PS 39 David relates the struggle which had been in his breast, ver. 1-3. He meditates on man's frailty and mortality, ver. 4-6. He prays for pardon, deliverance from trouble, and respite from death, ver. 7-13. To the chief musician, even to Jeduthun, A psalm of David. Title of the psalm. Jeduthun - One of the three chief masters of the sacred musick, 1 Chron. xvi, 41, 42.

1. I said - I fully resolved. Take heed - To order all my actions right, and particularly to govern my tongue.

2. Dumb - Two words put together, expressing the same thing, to aggravate or increase it. I held - I forbear to speak, what I justly might, lest I should break forth into some indecent expressions. Stirred - My silence did not assuage my grief, but increase it.

4. My end - Make me sensible of the shortness and uncertainly of life, and the near approach of death.

5. Before thee - If compared with thee, and with thy everlasting duration.

6. Vain shew - Hebrew. in a shadow or image; in an imaginary rather than a real life: in the pursuit of vain imaginations, in which there is nothing solid or satisfactory: man in and his life, and all his happiness in this world, are rather appearances and dreams, than truths and realities. Disquieted - Hebrew. They make a noise, bustling, or tumult, with unwearied industry seeking for riches, and troubling and vexing both themselves and others in the pursuit of them.

7. Mow Lord - Seeing this life and all its enjoyments are so vain and short. My hope - I will seek for happiness no where but in God.

10. Remove - Take off the judgment which thou hast inflicted upon me. I am - Help me before I am utterly lost.

11. Beauty - His comeliness and all his excellencies or felicities. Moth - As a moth consumeth a garment, to which God compares himself and his judgments, secretly and insensibly consuming a people, Isaiah li, 8.

12. A stranger - I am only in my journey or passage to my real home, which is in the other world.