His foundation. — This abrupt commencement with a clause without a verb has led to the conjecture that a line has dropped away. But this is unnecessary if we neglect the accents, and take gates of Zion in apposition with His foundation:
His foundation on the holy hill
Loveth Jehovah, (even) Zion’s gates,
More than all Jacob’s dwellings.
Here His foundation is equivalent to that which He hath founded, and the gates are put by metonymy for the city itself. (Comp. Jeremiah 14:2.)
With regard to the plural, mountains, it is probably only poetical, though geographically it is correct to speak of Jerusalem as situated on hills. Dean Stanley speaks of “the multiplicity of the eminences” which the city “shares, though in a smaller compass, with Rome and Constantinople” (Sinai and Palestine, p. 177).