Psalms 8:2

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,.... Not literally such, though the Jewish writers (e) generally so understand it; as do some Christian interpreters, who explain it of the wonderful

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

Babes and sucklings; either, 1. Properly such; for there is much of God’ s glory seen in infants, in their conception and strange progress from small and contemptible beginnings, in their preservation and nourishment in the dark cell of the womb, in their bringing forth and bringing up, in providing breasts and milk for them, and keeping them from innumerable dangers, from which they are utterly unable to keep themselves. But this, though it sets forth God’ s praise, yet how it stills the enemy and avenger seems not clear. Or rather, 2. Metaphorically so called, babes not so much in age and years, as in disposition and condition; weak, and foolish, and contemptible, and harmless persons, who are very frequently called babes or children, as , &c. For such are very unfit to grapple with an enemy; and therefore when such persons conquer the most powerful and malicious enemies, it must needs exceedingly confound and silence them, and mightily advance the glory of God; as indeed it did, when such mean and obscure persons as the apostles, and ministers, and disciples of Christ were, did maintain and propagate the gospel in spite of all the wit, and power, and rage of their enemies. See ,27-29. And of such babes as these Christ himself expounds this place, ; of which more, God willing, upon that place. Hast thou ordained strength; or, thou hast founded (or confirmed, or established, or firmly settled, or fitted, or perfected, as it is rendered by the LXX. and vulgar Latin here, and by St. Matthew, , i.e. perfectly or firmly settled) strength; by which he seems to understand either, 1. The celebration or praise of his strength or power, by comparing this with ; where it is rendered praise. So it is only a metonymy of the adjunct, which is most frequent in Scripture and all authors. And so the word strength seems to be taken 96:7. Or, 2. A strong and mighty kingdom; the abstract being put for the concrete, than which nothing is more frequent; even the kingdom of Christ, or his gospel, which is oft called the arm or power of God, as ,24. And this kingdom being an everlasting, and invincible, and all conquering kingdom, , it is no wonder it is here called strength. And this gospel or kingdom is here said to be founded or established, not by the hands or valiant actions of men of might, as other kingdoms are; but merely by the mouths of babes, &c., i.e. by the words and discourses of Christ’ s apostles and disciples; which is justly observed and celebrated here as a wonderful work of God. That thou mightest still, i.e. silence, and confound, and conquer, either by convincing and converting them, or by destroying them. The enemy; the enemies of God and of his people, the devil, the head of them, whose kingdom and power is abolished by this means, and all men who fight under his banner against God and Christ and his members.

Psalms 8:2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.Ver. 2. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings] For whom God hath filled two bottles of milk against they come into the world; and in whose birth sustenance, and wonderful protection (for Puerilitas est periculorum pelagus), but especially in their holy and religious education, much of God’ s providence, power, and goodness is clearly seen and set forth to the conviction of the vilest atheists. So that, besides the earth and the heavens, we have very infants preachers of God’ s praises, and more effectual orators than ever were Isocrates, Demosthenes, Pericles, &c.; so our Saviour understands it, Matthew 21:9, where the children sang hosanna when the Pharisees were silent. It is sometimes seen, that Ipsa Deo blandos fundant cunabula flores. John Baptist sprang in the womb for joy of Jesus. Jerome writeth of Paula, that noble matron, that she rejoiced in nothing more than this, That she heard her niece Paula sing Hallelujah in her cradle, In cunis balbutienti lingua Halleluiah cantare (Hier.). Bellarmine tells us, out of Theodoret, that the children of Samosatena, playing with at tennis in the midst of the market, did solemnly cast it into the fire, because it had but touched the foot of the ass whereon Lucius the heretical bishop rode. The children of Merindal so posed and answered one another, in matters of religion, before the persecuting bishop of Cavaillon, that a religious man that stood by said unto the bishop, I must needs confess that I have often been at the disputation of the doctors in Sorbon, but yet I never learned so much as I have done by hearing these young children (Acts and Mon. fol. 865). When Mr Blecter, the bishop’ s chaplain, told Mr Wiseheart, the Scotch martyr, that he had a devil in him, and the spirit of error; a child that stood by answered him, saying, A devil cannot speak such words as yonder man speaketh. At the burning of John Laurence at Colchester, as he was sitting in the fire (for stand he could not, he had been so hardly used in the prison), the young children came about the fire, and cried, Lord, strengthen thy servant, and keep thy promise. Here was strength out of the mouths of little ones, taught early to speak the language of Canaan. Sed vae, vae parentibus illis (saith Polanus on the text), But woe, woe to those parents who make their children (whom God would have to be witnesses of his majesty) witnesses of their impiety, pride, and vanity. That thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger] i.e. Silence atheists and persecutors.

(2) Babes and sucklings.—Better, young children and sucklings. A regular phrase to describe children from one to three years old (1 Samuel 15:3; 1 Samuel 22:19). The yonek, or suckling, denotes an earlier stage of the nursing period (which, with Hebrew mothers, sometimes extended over three years, 2Ma 7:27, and on Talmudic authority could not be less than two years) than the ôlel, which is applied to children able to play about on the streets (Jeremiah 9:21; Lamentations 4:4). (See Dr. Ginsburg on Eastern Manners and Customs: Bible Educator, i. 29.) Ordained strength . . .—At the first glance, the LXX. translation, as quoted in Matthew 21:16 (see Note, New Testament Commentary), “Thou hast perfected praise,” seems to be correct, from a comparison with Psalms 29:1, where strength translates the same Hebrew word, and plainly means homage. This expresses, doubtless, part of the thought of the poet, that in a child’s simple and innocent wonder lies the truest worship; that God accomplishes the greatest things and reveals His glory by means of the weakest instruments—a thought which was seized upon by our Lord to condemn the want of spirituality in the scribes and Pharisees. But the context, speaking the language of war, seems to demand the primitive meaning, stronghold or defence. The truth which the Bible proclaims of the innate divinity of man, his essential likeness to God, is the principal subject of the poet; and in the princely heart of innocence of an unspoilt child he sees, as Wordsworth saw, its confirmation. “Trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home.” Such a proof is strong even against the noisy clamour of apostate men, who rebel against the Divine government, and lay upon God the blame of their aberration from His order. “His merry babbling mouth provides a defence of the Creator against all the calumnies of the foe” (Ewald). Others think rather of the faculty of speech, and the wonder and glory of it. The avenger.—Properly, him who avenges himself.

Verse 2. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings] We have seen how our Lord applied this passage to the Jewish children, who, seeing his miracles, cried out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" Matthew 21:16. And we have seen how the enemy and the avenger-the chief priests and the scribes-were offended because of these things; and as the Psalm wholly concerns Jesus Christ, it is most probable that in this act of the Jewish children the prophecy had its primary fulfilment; and was left to the Jews as a witness and a sign of the Messiah, which they should have acknowledged when our Lord directed their attention to it. There is also a very obvious sense in which the mouths of babes and sucklings show forth the praises of God; viz., the means by which they derive their first nourishment. In order to extract the milk from the breasts of their mothers, they are obliged to empty their own mouths entirely of air, that the eternal air, pressing on the breast, may force the milk through its proper canals into the mouth of the child, where there is no resistance, the child having extracted all air from its own mouth which in this case resembles a perfectly exhausted receiver on the plate of an airpump; and the action of sucking is performed on the same principle that the receiver is exhausted by the working of the airpump. Of this curious pneumatic action the child is capable the moment it breathes; and, its strength considered, performs it as perfectly the first hour as it does in any other period of its childhood or infancy. What does all this argue? Why instinct. And pray what is instinct? You cannot tell. But here is an operation by which the pure Boylean vacuum is made; and this by an infant without any previous teaching! Do you suppose that this is an easy operation, and that it requires little skill? You are mistaken. You have done this yourself while an infant, under the sole guidance of God. Can you do it now? You are startled! Shall I tell you what appears to you a secret? There is not one in ten thousand adults, who have had their first nourishment from the breasts of their mothers who can perform the same operation again! And those who have had occasion to practise it have found great difficulty to learn that art which, in the first moment of their birth, they performed to perfection! Here is the finger of God; and here, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, he has ordained such a strength of evidence and argument in favour of his being, his providence, and his goodness, as is sufficient to still and confound every infidel and atheist in the universe, all the enemies of righteousness, and all the vindicators of desperate and hopeless causes and systems.

2. Render: Out of the mouth of children and sucklings hast thou founded strength, Because of thine adversaries, To quell the enemy and the avenger. Instead of founded strength, we might render, founded a stronghold, established a defence: but the more general sense is preferable. The LXX gives a free version, ‘Thou hast perfected praise,’ and in this form the words are quoted in Matthew 21:16. The general sense is plain. Jehovah has ordained that even the feeblest representatives of humanity should be His champions to confound and silence those who oppose His kingdom and deny His goodness and providential government. The mystery of man, of a being made in the image of God to know God, is greater than the mystery of the heavens, with all their immensity and majesty, as truly as the spiritual and eternal is greater than the material and temporal. Man therefore, even in the weakness of childhood, is a witness of the existence and character of God. But how is the testimony uttered? The words must not be prosaically defined and limited. The inarticulate, unspoken testimony to its Creator borne by the mere existence of the infant with its wonderful instincts and capacities for development; the powers of reason and thought and speech; the exercise of these powers in the praise of God with the simple faith of childhood; all are included. Nor is it mere poetic fancy to say that “Trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God, who is our home,” and that “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” This truth was illustrated in the Hosannas of the children who welcomed the Lord on His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, while the chief priests and scribes hardened their hearts in contemptuous hostility, (Matthew 21:15 ff.); but it has a wider scope than that particular instance. The interpretation of ‘children and sucklings’ as ‘weak and humble believers’ (Matthew 11:25), does not take account of the context. It may be a justifiable application of the words, but there is no hint that they are used figuratively, and it is of man as man that the Psalmist speaks here not less than in Psalms 8:4 ff. Nor again must the words be understood in a general sense as the equivalent of 1 Corinthians 1:26 ff., though a part of the truth they contain illustrates the principle of divine economy there asserted. ‘Thine adversaries’ … ‘the enemy and avenger’ must not be limited to the enemies of the nation by a reference to Psalms 44:5; Psalms 44:16. These no doubt are among the enemies of Jehovah; but all within the nation who oppose God’s purposes or question His Providence, the ‘wicked,’ the ‘scorners,’ (Psalms 1:1) the ‘fools’ (Psalms 14:1) are equally included. The ‘avenger’ in particular is one who usurps, in his own selfish interests, a judicial function which belongs to God alone (Deuteronomy 32:35; Nahum 1:2).

Out of the mouth - This passage is quoted by the Saviour in Matthew 21:16, to vindicate the conduct of the children in the temple crying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” against the objections of the

2. Out of the mouth of babes—The Hebrew denotes a child in general, whether infant proper, or, more commonly, one that can “ask bread,” (Lamentations 4:4,) or play in the street, (Jeremiah 6:11;