But he who believed in judicial astrology was not likely to have freed himself from that other still accredited form of superstitious belief which leads mankind, without so much as the aspects of the heavens to guide them, to fancy they can see into futurity. He had not divined, as we have now come to know, that even the oldest portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the shape in which they have reached us, date from no more remote an age than that which followed the Babylonian Captivity; that we have the work of two different writers under the name of Isaiah, the second of whom lived during or after the reign of Cyrus; and that the Apocalyptic Book of Daniel was written long after the personages there darkly shadowed forth had lived and died, and the events referred to had come and gone.
The narratives of the Pentateuch appear to have been accepted as properly historical by our editor. He did not, any more than the commentators who came after him almost to our own day, see them as mythical tales about individuals who lived, if they lived at all, and events that occurred, if they ever did occur, thousands—tens of thousands of years before any account of them could possibly have assumed the shape of legend, much less have been committed to writing. He has little, however, to say on the five books ascribed to Moses, and those of the quasi-historical complexion that follow them. Still his note on the words put into the mouth of Balaam, which tell of a star to come out of Jacob and a sceptre to arise out of Israel, is important. The prediction, as he interprets it, applies immediately to King David, though it has a farther prospective reference to Christ, with whose advent, as we know, it has long been all but exclusively connected. Our editor, however, was not helped by his superior knowledge of the stars to surmise that the writing was of a date long posterior to the reputed days of Balaam, the soothsayer of Mesopotamia, and Balak, king of Moab; that the predictions put into the mouth of the seer were all made after the events they pretend to foretell, and that King David had lived and died long before a word of the text was written; neither did he see that the writer who had King David in his eye could not have been thinking of an anointed king or captain who was only to appear some six or seven hundred years after Israel’s second sovereign had been gathered to his fathers.
Villanovanus is much more copious when he comes to the Psalms. The words in the second of our collection of these sacred lyrics, so much made of in dogmatic lore, Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.... Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee—he explains thus: ‘On the day when David had escaped from his enemy (Saul) he said, This day do I begin to live; at length I am king.’
The words in the fifth verse of that fine Psalm, the eighth, For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with honour and glory, he also refers immediately to King David, who, in times of persecution, abased himself; but, subsequently victorious, was crowned at last.
The passages, In Jehovah I put my trust, and How say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your mountain, of Psalm xi., he refers to the time when David in fear of Saul escaped from the land of Judah.
The comment on the sixteenth verse of Psalm xxii., They pierced my hands and my feet, is again applied to David, when, flying from his enemies, and scrambling like a four-footed beast over rugged and thorny places, his hands and feet were lacerated—fugiente David per abrupta, instar quadrupedis, manus ejus et pedes lacerabantur.
Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire—Psalm xl. 6, signifies, says our commentator, that David, when a fugitive in the wilderness, offered no sacrifices.
In the verse, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever, Psalm xlv. 6, the word God, says our exponent, refers to Solomon, who, like Moses and Cyrus, is here styled Divus—God.
They gave me gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar as drink, of Psalm xlix. 22, says Villanovanus, is a passage referring to Nabal’s refusal and churlishness when David asked him for meat and drink.
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool, Psalm cx. 1. ‘This refers to David and Solomon, types alike of Christ, when David, having set his son on the throne beside him, addressed him as My Lord, and styled him a priest after the order of Melchizedek.’