The Lord shall send the rod— It is plain, that by making but two periods of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th verses of the psalm, which is confessed on all hands to be prophetical of the Messiah's reign, the Jews have so far murdered the sense of it, that no version has been able to translate it without some needless and unwarrantable superlatives; whereas, had they divided it into three verses, and placed the full stops where they ought to be, the sense would have been clear, easy, and exactly agreeable to the prophesy contained in it. But perhaps this is what they carefully avoided. The reason of it will appear by what follows. And as no version has as yet rectified it, we shall take the liberty to subjoin the literal translation of those three verses, according to their and our punctuation, that the reader may the which ought to be preferred.
According to the Massoretic.
Psalms 110:2. The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Zion: Be thou ruler in the midst of thine enemies.
3. Thy free-will people in the days of thy power, in the beauty of holiness; from the womb of the morning is the dew of thy birth.
According to our Punctuation.
Psalms 110:2. The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Zion.
3. Rule thou, in the midst of thine enemies, thy free-will people, in the day of thy power, in the beauty of holiness. 4. From the womb of the morning is the dew of thy birth.
In the first of these the reader will see that the placing the full point after enemies strikes off the next words, thy free-will people, from being either the accusative of the verb רדה redeh, rule thou, going before, or from having any connexion with what comes after. So that the words stand so ungrammatically there by themselves, that to make sense of the verse, most versions have been forced to make it the nominative of a verb, which they have substituted to it of their own. Thus one of our versions—that in the Liturgy of the church of England,—words it thus, "In the day of thy power shall the people offer free-will offerings;" where the words shall offer are added to make up the sense; and the other words are inverted by placing the words in the day of thy power before them, contrary to the Hebrew. That in our Bible is still wider from the original, though it substitutes less, as the reader may see by comparing it with ours here, which is exactly literal and plain. According, therefore, to this pointing, the verses in question may be fairly commented as follows; Psalms 110:2. The Lord shall send the rod, or sceptre of thy power out of Sion; i.e. out of the tribe of Judah; Psalms 110:3. Rule thou over thy free-will people,—for none but such are fit to be Christ's subjects. In the midst of thine enemies, Jews and heathens, or, in a spiritual sense, the world, the flesh, and the devil. In the day of thy power, that is, when all power shall be given him, both in heaven and earth, Matthew 28:18. In the beauties of holiness; which is the peculiar characteristic of Christ's reign, and of his religion. Univ. Hist. vol. 3: p. 223.