EXPOSITION
IT is remarkable that neither the first nor the second psalm has any title. Titles are so much the rule in the first and second books of the Psalter, that, when they are absent, their absence requires to be accounted for. As thirty-eight out of the forty-one psalms in this section are distinctly assigned to David, we must suppose that the compiler did not view this psalm as his. Perhaps he did not know the author. Perhaps, if he was himself the author, he shrank from giving himself the prominence which could not but have attached to him if his name had, in a certain sense, headed the collection. Reticence would have specially become Solomon, if he was the author.
Commentators have generally recognized that this psalm is introductory and prefatory. Jerome says that many called it "the Preface of the Holy Ghost." Some of the Fathers did not even regard it as a psalm at all, but as a mere preface, and so reckoned the second psalm as the first (in many manuscripts of the New Testament, the reading is "first psalm" instead of "second psalm" in Acts 13:33). The composition is, as Hengstenberg observes, "a short compendium of tile main subject of the Psalms, viz. that God has appointed salvatlon to the righteous, perdition to the wicked; this is the great truth with which the sacred bards grapple amid all the painful experiences of life which apparently indicate the reverse."
The psalm divides naturally into two nearly equal portions. In Psalms 1:1-3 the character and condition of the righteous are described, and their reward is promised them. In Psalms 1:4-6 the condition of the wicked is considered, and their ultimate destruction predicted.