I said in the cutting off of my days... — The words have been very differently interpreted — (1) “in the quietness,” and so in the even tenor of a healthy life. As a fact, however, the complaint did not, and could not, come in the “quiet” of his life, but after it had passed away; (2) “in the dividing point,” scil., the “half-way house of life.” Hezekiah was thirty-nine, but the word might rightly be used of the years between thirty-five and forty, which were the moieties of the seventy and eighty years of the psalmist (Psalms 90:10). We are reminded of Dante’s “Nel mezza del cammin di nostra vita” (Inf. i. 1).
The gates of the grave. — The image is what we should call Dantesque. Sheol, the Hades of the Hebrews, is, as in the Assyrian representations of the unseen world, and as in the Inferno of Dante (iii. 11, vii. 2, x. 22), a great city, and, therefore, it has its gates, which again become, as with other cities, the symbol of its power. So we have “gates of death” in Job 38:17; Psalms 9:18; Psalms 107:18.
The residue... — The words assume a normal duration, say of seventy years, on which the sufferer, who had, as he thought, done nothing to deserve punishment, might have legitimately counted.