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49. Psalm 49

¹ Hear this, all you peoples;
   listen, all who live in this world,
² both low and high,
   rich and poor alike:
³ My mouth will speak words of wisdom;
   the meditation of my heart will give you understanding.
⁴ I will turn my ear to a proverb;
   with the harp I will expound my riddle:

    ⁵ Why should I fear when evil days come,
   when wicked deceivers surround me—
⁶ those who trust in their wealth
   and boast of their great riches?
⁷ No one can redeem the life of another
   or give to God a ransom for them—
⁸ the ransom for a life is costly,
   no payment is ever enough—
⁹ so that they should live on forever
   and not see decay.
¹⁰ For all can see that the wise die,
   that the foolish and the senseless also perish,
   leaving their wealth to others.
¹¹ Their tombs will remain their houses Septuagint and Syriac; Hebrew In their thoughts their houses will remain forever,
   their dwellings for endless generations,
   though they had Or generations, / for they have named lands after themselves.

¹² People, despite their wealth, do not endure;
they are like the beasts that perish.

    ¹³ This is the fate of those who trust in themselves,
   and of their followers, who approve their sayings. The Hebrew has Selah (a word of uncertain meaning) here and at the end of verse 15.
¹⁴ They are like sheep and are destined to die;
   death will be their shepherd
   (but the upright will prevail over them in the morning).
Their forms will decay in the grave,
   far from their princely mansions.
¹⁵ But God will redeem me from the realm of the dead;
   he will surely take me to himself.
¹⁶ Do not be overawed when others grow rich,
   when the splendor of their houses increases;
¹⁷ for they will take nothing with them when they die,
   their splendor will not descend with them.
¹⁸ Though while they live they count themselves blessed—
   and people praise you when you prosper—
¹⁹ they will join those who have gone before them,
   who will never again see the light of life.

²⁰ People who have wealth but lack understanding
are like the beasts that perish.

16 Be not thou afraid The Psalmist repeats, in the form of an exhortation, the same sentiment which he had formerly expressed, that the children of God have no reason to dread the wealth and power of their enemies, or to envy their evanescent prosperity; and as the best preservative against despondency, he would have them to direct their eyes habitually to the end of life. The effect of such a contemplation will be at once to check any impatience we might be apt to feel under our short-lived miseries, and to raise our minds in holy contempt above the boasted but delusory grandeur of the wicked. That this may not impose upon our minds, the prophet recalls us to the consideration of the subject of death — that event which is immediately at hand, and which no sooner arrives than it strips them of their false glory, and consigns them to the tomb. So much is implied in the words, He shall not carry away all these things when he dieth ²³²²³² “Heb. ‘take of all;’ that is, ought of all that he hath. ‘For we brought nothing into the world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out.’” — Ainsworth. Be their lives ever so illustrious in the eyes of their fellow-creatures, this glory is necessarily bounded by the present world. The same truth is further asserted in the succeeding clause of the verse, His glory shall not descend after him Infatuated men may strain every nerve, as if in defiance of the very laws of nature, to perpetuate their glory after death, but they never can escape the corruption and nakedness of the tomb; for, in the language of the poet Juvenal, -

“Mots sola fatetur Quantula sint hominum corpuscula,” —

“It is death which forces us to confess how worthless the bodies of men are.”