Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch Old Testament Commentary

8 Then the earth swayed and trembled, The foundations of the heavens shook And swayed to and fro, because He was wroth. 9 Smoke ascended in His nose, And fire out of His mouth devoured, Red-hot coals burned out of Him. 10 And He bowed the heavens and came down, And cloudy darkness under His feet. Jehovah came down from heaven to save His servant, as He had formerly come down upon Sinai to conclude His covenant with Israel in the midst of terrible natural phenomena, which proclaimed the wrath of the Almighty. The theophany under which David depicts the deliverance he had experienced, had its type in the miraculous phenomenon which accompanied the descent of God upon Sinai, and which suggested, as in the song of Deborah (Jdg 5:4-5), the idea of a terrible storm. It is true that the deliverance of David was not actually attended by any such extraordinary natural phenomena; but the saving hand of God from heaven was so obviously manifested, that the deliverance experienced by him could be poetically described as a miraculous interposition on the part of God. When the Lord rises up from His heavenly temple to come down upon the earth to judgment, the whole world trembles at the fierceness of His wrath. Not only does the earth tremble, but the foundations of the heavens shake: the whole universe is moved. In the psalm we have "the foundations of the hills" instead of "the foundations of the heavens," - a weaker expression, signifying the earth to its deepest foundations. The Hithpael יתגּעשׁ, lit., to sway itself, expresses the idea of continuous swaying to and fro. לו חרה כּי, "for it (sc., wrath) burned to him," it flamed up like a fire; cf. Deu 32:22; Deu 29:19. "Smoke," the forerunner of fire, "ascended in His nose." The figurative idea is that of snorting or violent breathing, which indicates the rising of wrath. Smoke is followed by fire, which devours out of the mouth, i.e., bursts forth devouring or consuming all that opposes it. The expression is strengthened still further by the parallel: "red-hot coals come out of Him," i.e., the flame of red-hot coals pours out of Him as out of a glowing furnace (cf. Gen 15:17). This description is based entirely upon Exo 19:18, where the Lord comes down upon Sinai in smoke and fire. We are not to picture to ourselves flashes of lightning; for all these phenomena are merely the forerunners of the appearance of God in the clouds, which is described in Sa2 22:10, "He bowed the heavens" to come down. ערפל, which is frequently connected with ענן, signifies cloudy darkness, or dark clouds. The substratum of this description is the fact that in a severe storm the heavens seem to sink down upon the earth with their dark clouds. The Lord draws near riding upon black thunder-clouds, "that the wicked may not behold His serene countenance, but only the terrible signs of His fierce wrath and punishment" (J. H. Michaelis).