There is no help. — According to the current creed, misfortune implied wickedness, and the wicked were God-forsaken. David, too, had sent back Zadok with the Ark, which in the popular view meant sending away the power and the presence of God. Even Zadok seemed to share this feeling; and David’s words to him, “thou a seer” (2 Samuel 15:27), seem to contain something of a rebuke.
Selah. — This curious word must apparently remain for ever what it has been ever since the first translation of the Bible was made — the puzzle of ordinary readers, and the despair of scholars. One certain fact about it has been reached, and this the very obscurity of the term confirms. It has no ethical significance, as the Targum, followed by some other of the old versions and by St. Jerome, implies, for in that case it would long ago have yielded a satisfactory meaning. There are many obscure words in Hebrew, but their obscurity arises from the infrequency of their use; but selah occurs no less than seventy-one times in the compass of thirty-nine psalms, and three times in the ode of Habakkuk (Habakkuk 3:3; Habakkuk 3:9; Habakkuk 3:13). It is pretty certain that the sense “for ever,” which is the traditional interpretation of the Rabbinical schools, does not suit the majority of these places, and no other moral or spiritual rendering has ever been suggested; nor is it a poetical word, marking the end of a verse or the division into strophes, for it occurs sometimes in the very middle of a stanza, as in Psalms 20:3-4; Psalms 32:4-5; Psalms 52:3-4, and often at the end of a psalm (Psalms 46). There is only one conclusion, now universally admitted, that selah is a musical term, but in the hopeless perplexity and darkness that besets the whole subject of Hebrew music, its precise intention must be left unexplained. The conjecture that has the most probability on its side makes it a direction to play loud. The derivation from sâlah, “to raise,” is in favour of this view. The fact that in one place (Psalms 9:16) it is joined to higgaion, which is explained as a term having reference to the sound of stringed instruments, lends support to it, as also does the translation uniformly adopted in the Psalms by the LXX.: διάψαλμα — if, indeed, that word means interlude. It is curious that the interpretation next in favour to Ewald’s makes the meaning of selah exactly the opposite to his — piano instead of forte — deriving it from a word meaning “to be silent,” “to suspend.”