Psalms 56:8 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Thou tellest my wanderings “Thou art perfectly acquainted, I am sure, how often I have been forced to flee, like a vagabond, from place to place; which hath cost me many a tear. Good Lord, preserve a kind remembrance of them, and let them not perish as things thou nothing regardest.” Bishop Patrick. “David's whole life, from his victory over Goliath till the death of Saul, was almost entirely spent in wandering from place to place. He was now an exile at Gath; he comforts himself, however, in the consideration that God was with him, whithersoever he fled; and that he beheld, as no unconcerned spectator, the distresses of his unhappy situation. He therefore adds, Put thou my tears into thy bottle; which seems to intimate that the custom of putting tears into the ampullæ, or urnæ lacrymales, so well known among the Romans, was more anciently in use among the eastern nations, and particularly among the Hebrews. These urns were of different materials, some of glass, some of earth, and were placed on the sepulchres of the deceased, as a memorial of the distress and affection of their surviving friends and relations. It will be difficult to account for this expression of the psalmist but upon this supposition. If this be allowed when the psalmist prays, Put my tears into thy bottle, the meaning will be, ‘Let my distress, and the tears I have shed in consequence of it, be ever before thee; let them excite thy kind remembrance of me, and plead with thee to grant the relief I stand in need of.' The allusion is pertinent and expressive:” see Chandler and Calmet. Are they not in thy book But why do I pray God to do that which I am well assured he is of himself inclined to do, and hath already done? Thus the psalmist signifies “the confidence which he placed in the kind regard of God toward him, as though he took an account of every tear he shed, and would, in due time, remember and comfort him. The continual care and providence which God exercises over his people, is frequently represented by his keeping a book, or register, in which he records their conception, Psalms 139:15; their birth, Psalms 87:6; their actions, Malachi 3:16; and what shall happen to them, Jeremiah 22:30; Daniel 12:1.” Dodd.