In the LORD put I my trust: how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?
Psalms 11:1-7.-The Psalmist's reply, at representing the persecuted saints, to temporizing friends' counsel to seek safely by flight (Psalms 11:1); the sad facts on which they rest their counsel, the foundations destroyed, the cause of the good seeming hopeless, that of the bad triumphant (Psalms 11:2-3); faith answers, The Lord reigns, and will vindicate the just, and punish the wicked (Psalms 11:4-7).
How say ye to my soul, Flee. "How" expresses wondering disapproval of such a counsel, seeing that however desperate things may look outwardly for the godly, so long as they have "the Lord" Yahweh to "trust" in, there is no cause for despair and flight. In the Lord I put my trust: how then can ye give me such an unbelieving counsel?
To my soul - such a counsel pierced into his inmost being. The flight counseled is not a mere change of place, but a ceasing to stand in defense of the truth-a spiritual yielding to the enemy, as if the cause of God were past recovery. David, so far as the act is concerned, did flee during the persecutions of Saul and Absalom; but he did not flee from his spiritual position of believing confidence in the Lord, in the face of an unbelieving world.
As a bird to your mountain? - (Lamentations 3:52.) Birds escape the dangers to which they are exposed in the open plains, by fleeing to the wooded mountains. In Palestine the mountains ("your mountain") abound in caves (1 Samuel 13:6) a natural hiding-place. So Matthew 24:16. That the address to the Psalmist, and his reply, do not refer to him individually, but as representative of all the godly, appears from the transition from the singular to the plural-How say ye my soul (sing), Flee ye? (so the Khethibh х nuwduw (H5110)], for which the Qeri', in order to avoid the difficulty, substituted the singular х nuwdiy (H5110)]. Moreover "to your mountain," not "to thy mountain," confirms the Kethibh.) The same wish to substitute an easier reading led the Chaldaic, Syraic, Septuagint, and Vulgate to get rid of the plural your, by reading "Flee to THE mountain AS a bird" х har (H2022) kªmow (H3644) tsipowr (H6833), for harªkem (H2022) tsipowr (H6833)]. Compare Lot's escape from Sodom (Genesis 19:17), "Escape for thy life-escape to the mountain."