Psalms 58:9

Before your pots can feel the thorns,.... Which is soon done; for as dry thorns make a great blaze, so they give a quick heat; the pots soon feel them, or the water in them soon receives heat from them.

Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath. Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in (his) wrath.

Feel the thorns, i.e. the heat of the fire kindled by the thorns put under them for that purpose; before your pots can be thoroughly heated. Take them away, to wit, mine enemies; whose sudden destruction he describes under this similitude. As with a whirlwind, i.e. violently and irresistibly. Both living, and in his wrath, Heb. as living (i.e. alive, as he did Korah, Numbers 16, the particle as being here not a note of similitude, but of truth or asseveration as it is , and oft elsewhere, as hath been noted) as in (which preposition is frequently understood) wrath, i.e. as a man moved with great wrath destroys his enemy without mercy, and is ready to devour him alive, if it were possible; or, both that which is raw, (as the Hebrew word chai signifies, , to wit, the raw flesh, which is supposed to be put into the pot that it may be boiled,) and the burning fire. There is indeed great variety of construction and interpretation of these Hebrew words, which is not strange, especially considering the conciseness of the Hebrew language, and that this is a proverbial speech; nor is it of any great importance, because it is not in any great point of faith, and because the sense of it is agreed, the only difference being about the manner and ground of the phrase. The learned reader may see more upon this place in my Latin Synopsis.

Psalms 58:9 Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in [his] wrath.Ver. 9. Before your pots can feel the thorns, &c.] Of this text we may say, as one doth of another, it had been easy had not commentators made it so knotty. I am for that of Drusius, Tractum a semicrudis carnibus olla extractis priusquam ignis calorem senserint, It is a comparison taken from raw flesh, taken out of the pot before it hath felt the full force of the fire (Proverb, clas. 2, l. 2. Proverbs 30:16). Both living, and in his wrath] i.e. When they are most vigorous and vivacious, to see to, his wrath shall sweep them away.

(9) Before.—The figure in this difficult verse is generally intelligible, though the text as it stands resists all attempts to translate it. As in the preceding images, it must convey the idea of abortive effort and sudden ruin, and, as has generally been understood, some experience of eastern travel undoubtedly supplied the figure which accident or a copyist’s error has rendered so obscure. The Hebrew literally runs, Before (shall) understand your pots a bramble as (or so) living as (or so) heat sweeps them off. The ancient versions mostly render thorns instead of pots, and make the simile to lie in the destruction of the bush before growing to maturity. The English versions have undoubtedly caught the figure more correctly. But it is doubtful if the Hebrew word rendered feel could be used of inanimate objects, and even if a kettle might be said to feel the fire, we should hardly speak of its feeling the fuel. Some change in the text must be made. A very slight change in one letter gives excellent sense to the first clause. Before thorns (taking the word âtad which in Judges 9:14-15 is translated bramble collectively) make your pots ready. But the second clause remains very difficult. Even if (with Grätz) we read charôl (Job 30:7; Proverbs 24:31, “nettles”) for charôn, and render thorny bush, the words as living still offer a puzzle. And even if with the Prayer Book we might render raw instead of living, yet burning heat could not stand for cooked meat. Apparently the poet intends to compare the sudden overthrow of the wicked before their arms could succeed, to the disappearance of the fuel before it had time to heat the cooking-pot; and it is quite possible that he compressed all this into a condensed expression, which we must expand: “As, before the brambles make the pots ready, they are consumed, so He will whirl them (i.e., the wicked) away alive, as the fierce heat consumes the thorns.” Hebrew poetry is always more satisfactory with metaphor than with simile, and here, as often, seems to falter between the two, and so becomes obscure.

Verse 9. Before your pots can feel the thorns] Ye shall be destroyed with a sudden destruction. From the time that the fire of God's wrath is kindled about you, it will be but as a moment before ye be entirely consumed by it: so very short will be the time, that it may be likened to the heat of the first blaze of dry thorns under a pot, that has not as yet been able to penetrate the metal, and warm what is contained in it. A whirlwind] Or the suffocating simoon that destroys life in an instant, without previous warning: so, without pining sickness-while ye are living-lively and active, the whirlwind of God's wrath shall sweep you away.

9. The general sense of the verse is clear, though the second line is extremely obscure and possibly corrupt. The first line certainly means, Before your pots can feel the thorns (possibly a proverbial expression), and the verb in the second line means, He shall sweep them (or, it) away with a whirlwind. It is another figure for the swift destruction of the wicked and their schemes, taken from the experience of travel in the desert. The travellers have lighted a fire of dry thorns or brambles under their cooking pots. It blazes up rapidly, but even so, before the pots are heated and the meat in them cooked, a sudden whirlwind sweeps away the fire and undoes their work. The fire represents the malicious will of the evildoers, the pots with the meat the plans which they are devising: but let them work never so rapidly, the whirlwind of divine judgement will annihilate their schemes. The crux of the verse is in the words rendered in A.V. both living and in his wrath. They have been supposed to refer to the thorns, the green and the burning alike: or to the flesh in the pot, the raw flesh and the sodden alike: or to the flesh and the fire, the raw flesh and hot embers alike: but all these interpretations break down on the fact that chβrτn, though not a rare word, always means the burning wrath of God. It seems necessary either to omit the word k’mτ, ‘as,’ before chβrτn, or to read b’inτ, ‘in,’ instead of it (αξε for λξε). We may then render, Like raw flesh (= perhaps, while the flesh is yet raw), shall Wrath sweep them away with a whirlwind; or, shall He sweep them away with a whirlwind in wrath. The pronoun for them is in the singular, and may mean each one of the wicked, or perhaps rather it, the whole scheme. For a figure from cooking cp. Hosea 7:4 ff.: for the thorn fires Isaiah 33:12; Ecclesiastes 7:6; and for the whirlwind of divine wrath see Psalms 50:3, “it shall be very tempestuous round about him”; Job 27:21.

Before your pots can feel the thorns - The word “thorns” here - אטד 'âṭâd - refers to what is called “Christ’s thorn,” the southern buckthorn.

9. Thorns—The atad, or southern buckthorn, (the Rhamnus paliurus of Linnaeus,) noted, like the retem or broom shrub of the desert for its crackling flame and hot fire, and much used as fuel. See Ecclesiastes 7:6.