Psalms 72:5 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

They shall fear thee, &c. Most commentators consider the psalmist as suddenly turning his speech to Solomon here, and signifying that his wisdom and righteous administration of his government should redound to his everlasting honour, so that all posterity should continually esteem and revere him as the wisest and best of princes. They acknowledge, however, that in this he was a type of Christ, and that the words ultimately, and in their most sublime sense, are to be explained of him. But as fear or reverence is frequently put for strict and proper divine worship, (as Isaiah 29:13, compared with Matthew 15:9, and frequently elsewhere,) which certainly was not due to Solomon, and could not be paid to him without idolatry; and as the psalmist never elsewhere, in any part of the Psalm, speaks of Solomon in the second person, but always in the third; many others consider him as addressing God in these words, to whom he had spoken before in the second person, Psalms 72:1-2, as it is here. Thus Mr. Samuel Clark: “They shall worship and serve thee, O God, so that, with peace, true religion shall flourish.” “The sense is,” says Poole, “This shall be another blessed fruit of his righteous government, that, together with peace, true religion shall be established, and that throughout all generations, as it here follows. Which was begun in Solomon's days, and continued, though not without much interruption, in the time of his successors, the kings of Judah, and afterward, until the coming of Christ, in and by whom this prediction and promise was,” in part, and shall, in the end, be “most fully accomplished.” And Henry interprets the words to the same purpose. As long as the sun and moon endure Hebrew, With the sun, and before the moon, that is, while they continue in the heavens; or, as others expound it, Both day and night, as the twelve tribes are said to serve God, Acts 26:7.