A righteous sceptre is thy royal sceptre:
Thou lovest right and hatest evil;
Therefore, O God, hath thy God anointed thee
With oil of joy above thy fellow-kings.”
When these verses were written—and verse 11, where after Adonai the Vulgate has Elohim, “He is thy Lord God, worship thou him”—the rigid Jewish monotheism did not exist; and the apostrophe might have continued without special notice had not the psalm been included in the Jewish hymnology and thus given the solemnity and consecration ascribed by Jahvism to its canonical Book of Psalms. But ultimately it made a tremendous and even revolutionary impression; and that the verses were interpreted as bestowing the divine name on Solomon, by those most jealous of that name, is proved, I think, by the following considerations:
1. Isaiah, in his vision quoted above (Is. ix.) combines the phraseology of Ps. xlv. with that of Ps. lxxii. (which bears Solomon’s name as its author), and ascribes to a new-born child the title “God-hero.”
2. The recently discovered original of a fragment of Ecclesiasticus includes the passage about Solomon in xlvii., and it is said in verse 18: “Thou (Solomon) wast called by the glorious name which is called over Israel.” This seems to be a plain reference to the ascriptions in Ps. xlv., where alone the divine name is applied to any individual mortal. Ecclesiasticus was compiled early in the second century before our era, and on the basis of much earlier compilations, as its prologue states.
3. In the “Wisdom of Solomon” the monarch is represented as a mortal who by the divine gift of supernatural Wisdom had gained immortality; he had become privy to the mysteries of God, was his Beloved, his Son. This was written about the first year of our era.
4. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews translates the Psalm xlv. as it is translated above, interpreting the words of deification as meant for the Firstborn of God at his ancient appearance on earth (i. 6), and applicable to his reappearance as Christ; arguing from such language of deification the superiority of the Son of God over the angels, who were never so addressed.
A court poet addresses a princely bridegroom as Elohim, as a god—as it were, an Apollo. Had more songs of like antiquity by poets of his race been preserved, no doubt other instances of such rhapsody might be found, but it happens that this is the only instance in Hebrew literature where an individual man is clearly addressed as God (for Exod. vii. 1 and 1 Sam. xxviii. 13 are not really exceptions). As in the Psalm that is the only instance in which an individual man is, in the Old Testament, addressed as God, so is its application in the Epistle to the Hebrews the only indisputable instance in which an individual is addressed as God in the New Testament.