This difficult verse runs, literally, Thy people willingnesses (or, willing offerings) in the day of thy force in holy attire, from the womb of morning dew of thy youth.
The first clause is tolerably clear. The word rendered force means either “strength” or “an army;” and the noun willingnesses appears as a verb in Judges 5:9, to express the alacrity with which the northern clans mustered for battle. We may therefore translate: Thy people will be willing on thy muster-day.
As to the next two-words there is a variation in the text. Many MSS. read, by the slightest change of a Hebrew letter, “on the holy mountains” (this was also, according to one version, the reading of Symmachus and Jerome), and, adopting the reading, we have a picture of the people mustering for battle with alacrity on the mountains round Zion, under the eye of Jehovah Himself, and in obedience to the outstretched sceptre.
The second clause is not so clear. By themselves the words “from the womb of morning dew of thy youth,” would naturally be taken as a description of the vigour and freshness of the person addressed: “thine is the morning dew of youth.” With the image compare —
“The meek-eyed morn appears; mother of the dews.”
THOMSON.
(Comp. Job 38:28.)
But the parallelism directs us still to the gathering of the army, and the image of the dew was familiar to the language as an emblem at once of multitude (2 Samuel 17:11-12), of freshness and vigour (Psalms 133:3; Hosea 14:5), and was especially applied to Israel as a nation in immediate relation to Jehovah, coming and going among the nations at His command (Micah 5:7). Here there is the additional idea of brightness — the array of young warriors, in their bright attire, recalling the multitudinous glancing of the ground on a dewy morning: thy young warriors come to thee thick and bright as the morning dew.
Milton has the same figure for the innumerable hosts
of angel warriors: —
“An host
Innumerable as the stars of night
Or stars of morning, dewdrops, which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.”