The days of his youth thou hast shortened:
Thou hast covered him with shame! Selah.”
A sarcastic “Selah,” or “so it is!”—if Eben Ezra’s definition of Selah be correct.
Then follow four verses by a more timid plaintiff, who, almost in the words of Job (e.g., x. 20), reminds Jahveh of the shortness of life, and the impossibility of any return from the grave, and asks how long he intends to wait before fulfilling his promises. He also supplies Koheleth with a text by the pessimistic exclamation, “For what vanity hast thou created all the children of men”!
After this writer has sounded his “Selah,” another rather more bitterly reminds Jahveh, in three verses, that not only his chosen people are in disgrace, but his own enemies are triumphant.
(These two are much like the writer of Psalms xliv. 9–26, who almost repeats the points made by the above three remonstrants, and asks Jahveh, “Why sleepest thou?”)
Finally a Jahvist doxology, fainter than any appended to the other four books, completes this strange eighty-ninth psalm:
“Praised be Jahveh for evermore!
Amen, and Amen!”
Great is Diana of the Ephesians! Or is this the half-sardonic submission of Job under the whirlwind-answer, which extorted from him no tribute except a virtual admission that when the ethical debate became a question of which could wield the loudest whirlwinds, he surrendered!